Teacher Blogs for Summer Reading

Recently, someone suggested during a Twitter chat that we should be spending time reading teacher blogs over the summer, instead of just focusing on books.  I agreed, and I thought it might help if we started talking about blogs we like.  So, here's a list of some blogs that I've either read or discovered and would like to read more often.

Here are some lists and awards for teacher blogs:

Edublog Awards - http://edublogawards.com/2012awards/best-teacher-blog-of-2012/

Scholastic's Top 20 Teacher Blogs - http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/top-20-teacher-blogs

We Are Teachers Blog Awards - http://www.weareteachers.com/community/blogs/weareteachersblog/blog-wat/2013/01/30/best-teacher-blogger-awards-2012

Edudemic - 50 Best Teacher Blogs - http://www.edudemic.com/2011/12/teacher-blogs/

Planbookedu.com - 10 Great Teacher Blogs - http://blog.planbookedu.com/blog/archives/10-great-teacher-blogs

Bachelor of Education dot org - Top 30 Teacher Blogs - http://www.bachelor-of-education.org/top-30-blogs-for-teachers-2012/

Teacher Certification Degrees Dot Com - Top 50 Elementary Teacher Blogs - http://www.teachercertificationdegrees.com/top-blogs/elementary-teacher/


Here are some links to individual blogs.  This is a big mix of "famous" faces, and not-so-famous faces, but I think that all of these are worth a read:

Edweek - Teacher Blogs - http://www.edweek.org/tm/section/blogs/

Edutopia - Blogs - http://www.edutopia.org/blogs

Larry Ferlazzo's Blog - http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/

Angela Maier's Blog - http://www.angelamaiers.com/blog

Nicholas Provenzano's Blog - http://www.thenerdyteacher.com/

George Couros's Blog - http://georgecouros.ca/blog/archives/tag/george-couros

Will Richardon's Blog - http://willrichardson.com/

Nerdy Book Club - http://nerdybookclub.wordpress.com/

Donalyn Miller's Blog - http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/book_whisperer/

Chris Lehman's Blog - http://christopherlehman.wordpress.com/

Sir Ken Robinson's Blog - http://sirkenrobinson.com/?page_id=11

Gary Stager's Blog - http://stager.tv/blog/

Shannon Miller's blog - http://vanmeterlibraryvoice.blogspot.com/

Troy Hicks's blog - http://hickstro.org/

Sara Mulhern Gross's Blog - http://thereadingzone.wordpress.com/

John Schu's blog - http://mrschureads.blogspot.com/

Colby Sharp's blog - http://sharpread.wordpress.com/author/colbysharp/

Judy Arzt's blog - http://judyarztblog.blogspot.com/

Paul Oh's blog - http://dcomposing.com/

Tom Whitby's blog - http://tomwhitby.wordpress.com/

Maria Selke's blog - http://www.mariaselke.com/

Maureen Devlin's blog - http://teachwellnow.blogspot.com/

Bernice Homel's blog - http://booksinthemiddle.wordpress.com/

Franki Sibberson's blog - http://www.readingyear.blogspot.com/

Teach Mentor Texts blog - http://www.teachmentortexts.com/#axzz2Vg5t5NDW

Mindi Rench's Blog - http://nextbestbook.blogspot.com/

Wesley Fryer's blog - http://www.speedofcreativity.org/


I'd love to hear more recommendations.  I can't pretend that I read all of these blogs regularly - many of these I discovered for the first time today.  But I'm hoping to spend some time this summer reading as many of these as I can, and looking for more.

Transitioning to Google Apps for Education

So, my district has made the decision to switch to Google Apps for Education.  I'm excited about the switch, and I've actually already moved to this platform, so I wanted to talk about this a little.  We're not exactly blazing trails here - there are lots of districts who have already been using GAFE for years, including some close to us in Chicagoland - but I think that lots of teachers still don't have this tool, or have it and don't use it, or don't like it, or don't trust it.  

I have to say at the outset that I started using Gmail several years ago, back when accounts were offered by invitation only.  I heard about the phantom browsing of email data, and how Google would use information from our email to decide what adwords to place on our pages.  I made my peace with that.  This is standard practice with so many sites now that it's almost unnoticeable.  In fact, I've started to appreciate this kind of data collection with sites like Amazon.  I don't always buy the books that Amazon suggests, but I often find copies of these books and learn a great deal from these recommendations.  That never bothered me as much as I thought it would.  And I've rarely had issues with my e-mail account.  It just works.  

From gmail, I began using Google Docs a few years ago.  I enjoyed the simultaneous editing feature, and I really pushed hard for teachers at my school to start using this, even though it wasn't officially sanctioned, for less important work.  I started using Drive only a few months ago, mostly because I had files in too many places and needed somewhere where I could put everything, or at least everything teaching-related.  

Now, my e-mail and calendar data has been migrated to a new Google account managed by my district.  I have uploaded most of my files on my school laptop to my new Google Drive.  And I have tried to focus most of my work on Google Apps.  I try to create new files in Docs instead of Word, and I try to share files with co-workers as much as possible.  

So far, with about three weeks experience using GAFE, here are the things I like:

• Using the Chrome browser with a Google Apps account feels like I'm finally using the right set of tools for the right job.  They work well together.  Prior to this, I switched back and forth a lot between Safari and Firefox, depending on what I was doing, because sometimes one worked better than the other.  Chrome just seems to work for everything now.  
• I LOVE the document sharing feature.  I LOVE the simultaneous collaboration.  We have already noticed a big difference with tasks like note-taking during meetings or creating a plan together.  For the most part, this has allowed more people to be involved in large-group tasks.  It has also allowed us to jigsaw (or "divide and conquer") larger tasks into smaller pieces without having to re-assemble from the pieces later.  
• Docs lacks some features, but it's simple and easy to follow.  There aren't five or six different ways to change your page layout, there's only really one way.  
• Chrome Apps and the "connect more apps" feature - which are really two different things but are related.  I've added a lot of tools that I don't quite understand yet, but I've been playing around a lot with Voice Comments, some different calculator features, templates, and lots of other tools.  
• It's kind of silly, but I like the huge amount of fonts available in Docs.  Some of the names are odd (like not in a good way, such as "covered by your grace" - can't tell if it's trying to be ironic or actually making fun of religious zealots), but I like the variety and most of the cheeky names they have.  
• It's a little overwhelming at first, but there are so many different ways to customize Gmail, and so many different tools, that it's like discovering the Internet over again.  

And, so far, here are the things that I don't like:

• Random or arbitrary limits on storage, seemingly set only to extract more money from users.  While I know that it will be (or already is?) something that can be modified, why are we given 25 gigabytes for mail but only 5 gigabytes for Drive?  
• Some files don't work with Drive.  The most noticeable file type right now is Keynote presentations.  I started using Keynote a lot this year, and encouraged my students to do so too. Now, I have 40-50 Keynote presentations that need to be converted to PowerPoint so that they can be shown in Google Slides.  
• I use a lot of short video, and I would love to be able to upload these files to Drive.  But they take up a lot of space, aren't playable/streamable through our filter at school, and would take a long time to download from Drive even if I chose to upload them all and then download them to play them at school.  
• Sometimes it seems like Google can be fickle about services they provide.  Rumors swirl about Google Groups disappearing, for example.  Some services are just not offered to GAFE users (like Blogger, for instance). 

I'm sure I'll think of more to say about this as the summer progresses.  I'm going to be helping some fellow teachers learn this new platform this summer, and that will help me think about what I like and don't like.  I'd also like to do a bunch more research on what I can use this for.  I have a couple of Chrome apps that I want to try out for creating animations.  I'm still shaky with Forms, but I've used it a few times to great effect.  And the whole world of Google+ seems really cool - though I'm not sure about all of what it does, and I still feel like I don't know how to navigate through it.  

Summer Reading programs?

At my school, we provide each grade level of students a list of books and ask them to choose and read one book from the list.  Our summer reading list looks like this for 2013:

All the Lovely Bad Ones by Mary Downing Hahn
Tears of a Tiger by Sharon Draper
Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine
Legend by Marie Lu
Greetings from Nowhere by Barbara O'Connor
Shug by Jenny Han

This is for incoming 7th graders.  We typically announce the list to students in the last few weeks of school, and we visit classes to promote the books and encourage students to read over the summer.  (I did a survey about this a few years back, and I found that other than the obvious factors - like access to the books - the single biggest predictor of whether a kid read over the summer or not was if a teacher encouraged him/her to do so.  These talks make a big difference.)

We put a lot of thought into this over the years, and I think that our students benefit from the narrow list of choices that (hopefully) includes at least one reasonably appropriate book for them. We try to diversify the list so that virtually every reading niche can be filled.  For example, Shug is kind of a "girl" book.  It's a realistic fiction novel about a young woman who is in love with her (male) neighbor and former best friend, and who deals with the awkward realization that he might not like her in that way, but still want to be her friend.  Legend is either a "nerd" book or a "boy" book, depending on how you spin it.  It has a lot of sci-fi action (and some romance - don't tell the boys).  We also try to level the books appropriately.  All the Lovely Bad Ones is a 670 Lexile or about a 5th grade reading level.  It's also less than 200 pages long.  Legend is slightly higher-level in terms of text complexity, but the subject is more difficult to comprehend and requires more abstract thinking (dystopian future).  It's also 330 pages.  Mockingbird is deceptively simple: it's told from the perspective of a girl with spectrum disorder, and requires a lot of careful, inferential reading to understand events through her distorted filter.  It can be a difficult (but rewarding) read.

My son's district sends a list of state award nominations and asks students to choose and read a book from these lists.  There are many more choices, but it would be more difficult for teachers to keep up with such a long list, and almost as difficult to connect these books to some kind of classroom learning once summer is over.  I think that would be less useful for us.  Our area high school has a single title that is "required" summer reading for incoming freshmen.  This allows for a series of assignments or classroom activities connected to this book, and I'm sure that the high school knows and teaches the book very well, when everyone is asked to read the same thing.  But it also reduces the opportunity to differentiate (or let students self-differentiate), and it allows for less engagement and "buy-in," since the students are all being forced to read the same thing without regard to interest.  (And what if they've already read the book?)

So, I think the program should reflect the purpose.  Our ostensible purpose is to have kids continue reading over the summer to reduce losses in fluency and/or reading comprehension.  Over the years, most of the reading teachers in the building have developed other ways to employ the summer reading, from "book talks" to the class, to creating products about these books, to mini "book groups" around the selected summer reading book, to "book trailers."  I typically prefer to use summer reading books to dive right into teaching effective collaboration and discussion, group work procedures at the beginning of the year, and as a way to informally assess interest and reading level early in the year, before much of the initial testing data is available.

Finally, I also have to admit that I really enjoy "shopping" for summer reading titles, and I've been known to make wild suggestions to throw out the whole list and start over.  We experiment a lot, and we often pull titles from the Rebecca Caudill list for our summer reading.  Most of the titles on our list came from the Caudill nominations at some point or other, a list that I am again trying to read in its entirety.  I am getting ready to discuss the books with 6th graders tomorrow - let's hope it goes well!  

Prodigy review

I heard about LEGEND, Lu's first book in this series, through Twitter, and I checked for it in my library.  It was checked out.  To me, that's a good sign.  That means that someone wanted to read it.  And my library is not always a hotbed of zealous readers.

I checked again in a few weeks, and it was still out.  It took me quite a while to get my hands on a copy of LEGEND, and I was pretty excited about finally getting a chance to read it.  The original didn't disappoint.  Lu's first book focused on two intriguing characters, Day and June, as they moved through a dark, complicated, and interesting world. I enjoyed it a lot, and I recently convinced the other teachers at my school to add LEGEND to our summer reading list.  (I hope our kids like it as much as I did!)

Enter PRODIGY.  I borrowed it from a co-worker and plowed through it in four days, despite a busy schedule.  I was concerned about the typical "sophomore slump" that we sometimes see in a series like this.  For example, I was not entirely pleased with CATCHING FIRE, the follow-up to HUNGER GAMES.  I wholeheartedly enjoyed CHAMBER OF SECRETS, the second Harry Potter book, but I struggled with the second movie.  It often seems like the second book in a series like this tries too hard to reproduce the successful elements of the first, instead of trying to tell its own story.

In PRODIGY, June and Day have escaped LA together and are limping into Las Vegas, now a major military outpost.  They meet up with the Patriots leader, Razor, and quickly decide to join the Patriots (since they have no other choice and Day is desperately in need of medical attention).  June is sent on  a mission to infiltrate the Elector's inner circle and help bring about his assassination, and Day will be sent to pull the trigger.  Things start to get complicated from there, and there are enough turns and twists to make this plot interesting without getting ridiculous.

There are a lot of things that I like about this book that have to do with the plot near the end.  I don't want to spoil anything, but I have to say that I enjoyed the airplane ride near the end, and I enjoyed some of the late twists.  I also think that the bulk of the surprises were well-planned and convincing.  The right kind of surprise, in my mind, is one that sneaks up on you, but doesn't come out of nowhere.  Where the ground has been prepared with prior details.  (Speaking of Harry Potter, the most obnoxious example of this kind of BAD surprise comes at the end of the GOBLET OF FIRE, where Harry faces Voldemort in a duel and survives because of priori incantatem, a completely new and bizarre product of having two wands face each other that have the same kind of core.  Such a frustratingly fake and convenient solution to the problem of saving Harry.)  All of the surprises in this book were well-planned and convincing.

I also have to say that I liked that the book finished in under 400 pages.  That's getting more and more rare in fantasy/sci fi.  (DIVERGENT is 576, GONE is 592, I AM NUMBER FOUR is 448, CITY OF BONES is 512, BEAUTIFUL CREATURES is 592, and so on.)  Readers of these genres like dense, complex stories full of description, twists and turns, and that sort of thing, but I think we also like to be able to finish a book in a reasonable amount of time, so that we don't forget the beginning or have to return the book to the library.  (Those of us who still do paper, physical books also don't like lugging 800-page tomes around en masse.)

PRODIGY isn't perfect.  I felt like the last chapter was a little hollow and melodramatic, a little too much.  I like that it's shorter than many books of its type, but there are some places where more would be better.  June's mission with the Elector seems to go quickly, and could have perhaps been drawn out more.  That section of the book doesn't seem to be too detailed at all, really, including Day's work with the Patriots without June.

But it's pretty close to an ideal sci-fi YA read.  I think it's easily as good as DIVERGENT and INSURGENT, and Lu has a good feel for balancing action and suspense.  Her characters are cool, with video-game-ish abilities, without feeling ridiculous or implausible.  And the conflict is so palpable that it makes the whole book engaging and feverish.  (My pet theory on this is the importance of a really evil antagonist.  A powerful, evil bad guy really makes a novel.  If the bad guy isn't scary, it's hard to convey a sense of conflict in a novel like this.)

So, if you haven't already, check out PRODIGY.  And LEGEND.  And watch for the third book - it will probably be worth reading, too.

Video about mini-books

I created and shared a video using Vimeo (and my old iPhone, and iMovie) of me reading a mini-book my daughter and I made.


Mr Stinkypants Goes Shopping Mini-Book from Ben Kuhlman on Vimeo.


I hope to explain the mechanics of making these things, then having kids make one for a writing workshop project that will help establish a playful, creative atmosphere.  I hope to do more things like this, but this seems like a good way to re-lauch the workshop right before Spring Break.

More about Middle-School Guided Reading

I was able to observe another middle-school (7th grade) teacher using the Guided Reading structure, and we talked a little bit about methods that are effective for this age group.  

I should point out at this point that I don't want to pretend to be the best at using Guided Reading.  There are things about the strategy that I don't like, and that I struggle with.  It takes a significant amount of prep time to start, for example.  If it weren't so effective, and if the kids didn't enjoy the change so much, I might not use it at all.  But those are powerful motivators for teachers.  I also struggle with re-using old curriculum.  I like to try new things, sometimes to a fault, and I sometimes abandon old ideas (like old stations) merely because I think I have a better idea.  So, I end up experimenting a lot, instead of using "tried-and-true" stations.  

I'm thinking through the last part of the year, now that we're in "testing mode."  I think that Guided Reading is a nice, engaging strategy for the "home stretch," and there are a lot of fun things kids can do as part of this that are still effective and yield results.  But I also really want to push more writing.  I haven't done enough Writing Workshop this year, and I'm hoping to play around with ways to combine the two.  

So, as I dig through my professional resources (I found a book by Katie Wood Ray that I'm going to look through for new perspectives on workshop), and I refine some of the things that I've already done, I'm looking at how to make the most of Guided Reading.  

The teacher that I observed didn't do traditional "rotations."  Instead of a "you go here at this time" rotation, as I've seen in elementary school, or the "get your materials and return to your seat to work on this at this time" structure that I usually use, she establishes the stations and then allows kids to work on the various stations at their own pace.  The only timed and structured station, really, is the teacher station.  There is a fixed group of kids ("fixed" as in set by the teacher, according to a specific purpose) who meet with the teacher for a reasonable chunk of time (15-20 minutes or so), then are dismissed to continue working on stations.  

There are positives and negatives to this way of doing things:

POSITIVE - 

• Kids have more flexibility to follow their interests and work at their own pace.  (More choice) 
• Less troublesome if kids are absent or pulled out for something
• Less set-up time for rotations and stations (don't have to create a huge, detailed chart and keep posted)
• Can create an incentive to finish early through engaging "early finishers" activities, like games or "free time" activities

NEGATIVE - 

• Need to monitor stations and "sharing" to avoid crowding or "I was there first!" disputes
• Less immediate accountability for off-task or misbehaving kids who might not want to do all of the stations 
• Less control over personality clashes and kids who might work better away from each other

Most of the negatives involve management issues.  It's much easier to lose control in this kind of an environment, so a teacher who attempts this approach will have to feel comfortable trusting his/her kids with this kind of freedom.  It allows choice, but it also might allow conflict over popular choices.  It would also take some teaching and some control over conflict resolution.  During the observation I was doing, for example, some kids were watching videos on a portable DVD player.  There just wasn't enough room for everyone to watch at the same time.  Similarly, there was an iPod with a song and some headphones that kids were supposed to listen to (and summarize).  There just weren't enough headphones for everyone to do this at once.  It helps when all the stations are reasonably "cool," of course.  But I can still see that it takes teaching - or some fabulous students, though I think some teaching would have to be involved - to get kids to understand this kind of procedure.  

I like this format, and I like the kind of feedback it provides me about the stations and about the students.  I think that kids enjoy having a say in what goes into the stations, and I really think it might be fun to invite kids to contribute to a "music" station, for example, since I know so little about contemporary music (though I'm trying).  

I'll be thinking about this over the next few weeks, and I'll try to post some more about how I'm melding (love the Star Trek reference) Writing Workshop and Guided Reading.  

Teaching argument presentation

I tried posting some of my argument presentation here, but I was unable to add an attachment - though it's not hard to add a link to a Livebinder:

Teaching Argument Writing - My Livebinder

There's a bunch of stuff there, including the rubric, the assignment sheet, a sample of Crime and Puzzlement, and the slides.

The presentation was very well-attended, and I was a little worried at the beginning that some people would be disappointed.  But no one walked out (that I saw).

Last year, I included WAY too many things in the "blurb" for the program, and I never had a chance to talk about everything that I mentioned.  For example, last year I mentioned Big 6 research strategies in the blurb and never really talked about it.  I had at least one person express disappointment.

This year, I think I was boring.  More so than last year.  Last year, I think I was rushing so fast that people had to pay attention or take a chance of getting motion sickness.

Anyway, I think this went well enough that I'm planning to try again next year, and maybe step up to a larger conference - maybe a state conference (like the IRC?).  Not sure where I'm headed from here.  But I think it was fun, and I think that people benefited from the conversation.  And I think I did a decent job showing respect for the experience and contributions of the audience.  We say that we should demonstrate our "good teaching" when we present to other teachers, but we should also show that we understand the difference between the needs of our students and the needs of an audience of adult professionals.

I enjoyed hearing from the audience members, and I think my next goal is to involve the audience without asking too much.