Fake iPhone Text

I got this one from my Twitter feed last week and thought it was intriguing. Using this website, http://www.fakeiphonetext.com, people can create, well, fake iPhone texts.

What I learned from trying this a few times is that you have to put the name and a colon before the actual text, otherwise it won't work. I'm currently reading Going Bovine by Libba Bray (@libbabray), so I borrowed a conversation from Chapter Fifteen (p. 120) to try it out.

When you hit "Create," what pops out looks like this:

Rather realistic. Each fake iPhone text is given its own URL, so it can be accessed again later. The link above is the the webpage that holds the image.

Imagine creating a conversation between a stomach and the intestinal tract, or between two of the conspirators of the Boston Tea Party (before or after), or even between two characters of a novel, one of whom didn't appear in the scene in question.

All of our 8th graders read The Pearl by John Steinbeck. I could see creating a text message conversation between the head pearl buyer and one of his subordinates, giving instructions about how to proceed with Kino. Or a conversation between Cameron and Janna (now we're back to Going Bovine) after their incident in the hallway at the beginning of the book.

I could see having individual students posting their text conversations on Edmodo, which would hopefully start a conversation about their books.

Bray, Libba. Going Bovine. New York: Delacorte Press, 2009. Steinbeck, John. The Pearl. New York: Penguin, 1973.

Wiki Anyone?

I just started a wiki for my class and I'm excited about it. There were a couple of reasons I decided to create a wiki:

• I love doing book talks, and I love that my students are reading. I think my students should have a forum to list/discuss/berate the books they've read, too.
• Students can look at the readings of their peers. So instead of a student coming to me and saying "Hey, Miss, what is Y reading?" (I got this question on Friday), the student instead goes to the wiki, clicks on the class period for the friend, and checks him/herself.
• Students can also see the thoughts of their peers. Each student, when finished with a reading, gets to rate the book with stars (the same scale used on Goodreads).
• A better way to keep track of what any given student is reading at any given time. I've tried making spreadsheets and keeping a written list of what each student is reading for the sake of continuity. Of finishing what you start or having a good reason to abandon.
• Create a community of readers. On Friday, they realized that the wiki is theirs. It's their space to reflect on their reading, and share it with others who are also inflicted with the curse that is my class. But they see that they're all in it together and that they're all reading. It may be different books and at different levels, but they're all reading and they're all sharing with each other.
• I realized that it's really hard to house everything in one website. I love Edmodo, don't get me wrong, but for this kind of tracking, Edmodo won't do it. By the same token, there are aspects of Edmodo that cannot be replicated in the wiki. So I'm resigned to have two websites and link them together. Next year, I think I'll make sure the usernames and passwords are the same for both.
• There is a teacher in Indiana that I'd like to collaborate with (we're teaching the same grade now and she says it's a must). Her technology situation is a little sketchy, so I wanted to come up with something that could be managed on whatever computer time they have.

So a whole host of reasons. What's great is that I introduced this on Friday, after their Edmodo assignment, and many of my students were concerned that they didn't complete their entries before shutdown time. I chuckled and assured them that we'd come back to this, and that we'd be updating the pages until the end of the semester. Then they'll be able to look back at what they've done and say, "Man, I accomplished something this semester." 

The frontpage of my students' wiki!

Edmodo as a Back Channel

I posted about my thoughts on using Edmodo as a back channel so students could view their thinking on reading strategies during common reading time (namely read-alouds, as SSR is made up of student-selected material).

On Friday, my first two classes met up with @chadsansing's classes and had a fantastic discussion about what authors should write for individual students, and what should be written so adults could better understand individual students. We were having pretty interesting conversations in the classroom based on what was posted there, so thank you Chad.

But I only do this with my morning classes. 5th hour was scheduled for book check-out in the library at the beginning of the hour, which left me about 20 minutes in 4th that I had to play with. I figured I'd go ahead and try the back channel activity and see what came of it.

I set up a video camera in the back of the classroom. This always raises student anxiety (or turns on the show-off switch) because they think they're being filmed. I promised them that the video camera was trained on the screen so I could review the conversation later, and I wasn't lying. Next time, though, I think I want to film on an SD card rather than a mini-DV. I can't get the video onto my computer without installing the software, and I don't want to do that. Anyway...

I prefaced the activity by saying that its purpose was for me to learn about how this activity could work and how we could use it to help us see what's in our head while reading. I also talked to them about failure--namely, I almost expected to fail the first time because I've never done anything like this before and I'm going to use that to figure out how I can make it better the next time.
So the kids went into the activity with the knowledge that it was mostly for me to learn from. Showing them my process for introducing new activities I think is incredibly important. If they see what and how I think about approaching the creation of an activity, they may buy in more than a class that gets dropped into an activity with no explanation of its purpose.

I thought about what Ca, E. Federspiel, and Mr. Teacher Person (ha! I know who you are) had to say and took those comments into consideration when presenting this activity. I chose to use Sandra Cisneros collection of vignettes, The House on Mango Street. The stories are short enough that they don't have to listen for long, and each of them (with the obvious exception of the kid that said "I'm bored" and who refuses to read at all) was able to come up with something to say, even if they were pinging off something someone else said.

I was very impressed with their willingness to participate. I did consider the fact that initially, they will probably use each other to come up with thoughts, and hopefully, in time, we'll be able to move away from that and to original thought.  The responses show the varying levels of students in the class, from those who make connections to books that they're reading, to those that only re-posted a reworded version of someone else's thoughts.

But for a first time, amazing. Future incarnations of this activity will involve specific strategy instruction, e.g. comments on how authors use details, making connections, questioning and inference, predictions, etc. The passages I'll use will differ depending on the strategy, but I think it's going to foster the kind of conversation I want the kids to have about how authors write and how we comprehend.

Thinking on Other Ways to Utilize Edmodo

During our professional development today, I posted a few tweets with the hashtag #learningcube. My thinking was along the lines of "I want to be able to refer back to this later when I'm writing my blog post on this workshop." So I'm sitting here 2 1/2 hours later thinking about the iPad and the tweet by @zemote who said that the iPad + Edmodo is going to be super-cool. Also crossing my mind was the fact that @chadsansing uses iPod Touch technology when our kids chat on Fridays. Finally, in this blender of thought, I think of the #edchat backchannel and the #ncte backchannel and how webinars have conversation happening in a sidebar during the presentation. All of this is swirling around in my head and somehow my read alouds get caught up in the swirl and what I end up with is this:

I want to use Edmodo as a backchannel for mini-lessons and read alouds. I don't quite have 1:1 except in my 2nd hour class, but two students running on the same username isn't a big deal.

I was thinking specifically about read alouds, and helping students monitor their thoughts while they're reading, or initially, being read to. They would be able to see this both on the screen in front of them and on the big screen at the front of the room. After the read aloud, we'll look at the channel together and debrief about how they're making meaning, what kinds of questioning and predictions they're coming up with and how they can use these strategies in their independent reading.

I also happen to have a SMARTboard and a second projector. During mini-lessons, to foster engagement, students could take polls, ask questions and make comments that would be projected onto the SMARTboard and discussed during the presentation, much like what is done during webinars.

For the moment, though, I think I'm going to start with read alouds.

Thoughts before implementation?

I Must Be Doing Something Right

The last grading period this semester my students participated in book groups. They used Edmodo to converse with students in other classes and completed imaginative response projects as a way to respond to their reading. In my morning classes, many of the students finished their novels well before the end of the grading period. Because they're writing me book notes, and it is a reading class after all, they were/are still required to read during full-class SSR.

Of the 15 students in my first period class, 8 are reading books I've either started during a read-aloud, or books that they've seen me read over the course of the semester. Two of those eight students asked me specifically for a book they saw me read that they found interesting. One of the kids saw one of my reader response projects and asked me to explain. I told him to read the book to figure out what it meant, and he did.

All of this is to say there is power in reading aloud to middle school students. There is power in doing book talks with reluctant readers. There is power in completing and displaying the projects you ask students to complete. There is power in modeling silent reading and entertaining the questions they ask about your book. They're NOT always stalling. And teachers shouldn't listen to instructional leaders who say that middle school students shouldn't be read to.

Some of the books I've read this semester that students picked up:

• Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie by David Lubar
• Looking for Alaska by John Green
• Unwind by Neal Shusterman
• The Schwa Was Here by Neal Shusterman
• Tears of a Tiger by Sharon Draper
• The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
• ttyl by Lauren Myracle
• Full Tilt by Neal Shusterman
• Twisted by Laurie Halse Anderson

Why I Love Twitter (short post)

When I began as a Twitter, my updates were protected, and I only followed people who I already knew (and they were all from either HS or the NMLA conference). A couple of weeks ago, I unlocked my tweets, posted something about #ncte, which I wanted to attend but didn't, and my online professional development opened up 100 fold. I feel like I have a network of teachers that I'm following and are following me, all determined to share as much as they can on edtech, strategies, and the art of teaching.

The experience of participating in Twitter has broadened the world of my students as well. Through Edmodo, we are currently connecting with a class of students with @chadsansing in another part of the country. Funny how many of my students had to look at a map before they realized that their new peers are farther away from where we are than my hometown.

Educators, if you haven't tapped into this resource, you need to, and Mom, I'll set you up when I get home later this month.