The Joy of Integrative- Interdisciplinary Collaboration

The Joy of Integrative- Interdisciplinary Collaboration

One of my best moments in teaching has been the opportunity to collaborate with other teachers-professionals. For the last several years, I have been collaborating with Jeff, the other vertex of this triangle. Working with Jeff I have come to appreciate how our different perspectives of learning and the learners have enriched the learning experiences of our students and met their learning styles. While I appreciate this collaboration with Jeff, the addition of Sean to this team has enhanced the collaboration and broadened the scope of our impact. Two of the benefits of this collaboration that has won my admiration are the “Dictionary Project” and the soon to begin “ The HILT Institute in Numbers and Words”.

Students, especially ELLs, have difficulty in using academic language. By working to create their own dictionary saturated with pictures and images that connect with their life experiences and  comprehension, the students, I have noticed, are becoming more comfortable using appropriate terminologies to convey their understanding of mathematics. This has enabled our students to engage more challenging task and the much dreaded “word problems”. This was very conspicuous when we completed the unit on "Business Math". Rather than teaching my students to solve percent problems by  exposing them to the "three kinds of percent problems" I provided situations where knowledge of percents and understanding word problems were important. The students met the challenge: they solved the problems with ease and articulated their results using the relevant academic language. I was amazed.

The “HILT Institute in Numbers and Words” is an interdisciplinary collaborative project that the students will work on. The students will collect demographic and other data about the HILT Institute. The data will be tabulated and displayed using graphs and plots. The graphs will be made both by hand and using technology. Additionally students will write about the information collected. They will write about the countries of origin of the students at the HILT Institute, the Institute, Career & Technical Education classes and their progress in learning English  To accomplish this we will have the social studies teacher also involved.

Though, yet anecdotal, we are beginning to see positive trends in how our collaboration has impacted student learning. Our students are engaged. They work with joy. The students ask for more work. They are proud of themselves and above all they find school to be fun, engaging and awakening. What more can one ask for?

What is the web? Part 2

Demystifying the World Wide Web and the Internet is definitely one of the core goals for student learning this year in the Intro to IT class.  Students are now using the web every day in their daily lives, but to many of them the following ideas are not apparent:

1. Computers can be connected to each other using either wired or wireless (through the air like a radio) connection to share information (data).
2. We say the computers are networked when they are thus connected and call all the computers connected together a network.
3. The Internet is a global network of networks, allowing computers all over the world to share data with each other.
4. The World Wide Web (or simply "the Web") is a collection of programs and data sharing rules that run on top of the Internet.

There are so many new and unfamiliar notions here that "demystifying the Web" is a year long goal.

Today I plan to have students learn how to use their Google Docs accounts to upload and link a TurtleArt file from a document.   The activity they will be completing is here.  Uploading and downloading are two very important concepts.  To make sense of what is happening, they need to become comfortable with the notion that they have a computer in front of them (the "local" computer) and they can transfer documents and other data to their Google Docs accounts, which are located "out there" somewhere on the Internet.

Using Scratch to Promote English Acquisition

Our students are having a great time with Scratch! Jeff has written about the wonderful benefits of Scratch from his perspective. I would like to briefly describe how I think using Scratch helps students acquire essential skills in composition, literary analysis, and critical thinking.

The stories our students are using to work with Scratch are from the True Stories series. These accounts are modified news stories designed to be accessible to beginning language learners. They are brief humorous accounts of unusual situations.

For example, one story is about a Norwegian man from the countryside. He grew weary of rural life and moved to the big city of Oslo. After dumping his belongings in a new apartment, he went for a long walk through the grey streets. But when the poor man decided to return to his new home, he couldn't find it! He looked and looked. It took him three weeks to locate his flat.

There are so many essential language skills that can be achieved by using Scratch in combination with such stories.

By using Scratch, students will be able to:

• Write in the third person. When writers use Scratch, they need to create lines for characters as if they were composing a play.

• Summarize. Students have to select the most important parts of each story. They have to think critically to prioritize which events and characters to include.

• Understand plot development. Every story, no matter how simple, has an introduction, complications, climax, and resolution.

• Apply vocabulary and grammar from language arts to a new context. Creating in Scratch recycles language forms they learned in English class. Multiple applications of new words and structures promotes retention.

• Collaborate with a partner while using academic vocabulary. Literary terms such as setting, characters, and events naturally bubble up in students' discussions as they draw storyboards, write lines, and prioritize which story elements to include in their Scratch projects.

I am sure there are other great ways to use Scratch to accelerate language learning. I am looking forward to hearing how other teachers are using Scratch!

Telling a Story with Scratch: Part I

Sean and I are working with the students on a new Scratch project in which we are pairing students with approximately the same reading level, and assigning them the following tasks:

1. read a story together
2. create a story board from the story
3. create a dialog from the story
4. use the story board and dialog to animate the story in Scratch

The programming goals for this project include:

1. sequencing program instructions
2. event handling ("when green flag clicked", "when I receive [message]")
3. setting initial state of values changed by the program
4. changing state of object values (location, size, color)
5. message passing to control program flow

New vocabulary students will need to use Scratch:

•  motion
•  looks
• control
• set x to
• change x by
• costume
• switch to costume ...
• show
• hide
• wait __ seconds
• when green flag clicked
• broadcast [message]
• when I receive [message]
• scripts
• sprite

The following mathematical concepts are implicitly involved in all Scratch programs:

• positive and negative numbers
• location in a Cartesian coordinate system
• adding positive and negative numbers
• estimating distances in a coordinate plane

In years past I've taken a much more structured approach when using Scratch with students.   This year we are letting the English language learning goals drive the process, and using Scratch as a supporting technology, albeit one with a wealth of learning in itself. 

What is "the web"?

It is a great time to both look back on how far we have come this year, as well as look ahead to where we want to be in June.  Most of the students in our first year ELL class (which in Arlington Public Schools we call HILT-A) did not know how to keyboard when we started the school year in September.  I decided that since keyboarding is still such an essential part of the human-computer interface, we should start with that.  We spent about a month and a half on basic keyboarding.

Since then, we have worked on:

• setting up gmail accounts and using email
• using the Google Docs word processor to write English assignments
• creating an one-line illustrated dictionary
• introducing programming with Scratch
• integrating mathematics skills and enhancing programming using TurtleArt

Most students in the class have the skills they need now to begin creating and maintaining their digital portfolios.  The challenge now is to clearly communicate the following terms / concepts:

• web page
• web browser
• web address (URL)
• link
• publish to the web
• web site

Creating digital portfolios, which are in effect, web sites, and linking from the home page to all the artifacts that each student creates will give them the opportunity to learn these concepts in a hands-on way.

Our Dictionary

Beginning in September 2011, our cohort began to build an online collaborative illustrated dictionary for thirteen level one English language learners.  The dictionary serves a basic need of our students: they need a way to learn and retain new words.  In addition, the online dictionary is an ideal avenue for interdisciplinary collaboration among the teachers.  We assign words from six different subjects and also include words that students come across in their daily lives or in their independent reading.

Each dictionary entry consists of a vocabulary word, its part of a speech, a short definition, synonyms, an example sentence from the student’s own life, a visual, and a caption.  Students use online dictionaries, paper dictionaries, and textbooks to write definitions.  They also write original sentences based on their own experience.  In my language arts class, students then present their words to their classmates.  They know they will need to understand and defend their choices to their peers and teachers.

The beauty of the collaborative online dictionary is that it allows students and teachers to accomplish so many things while working on an authentic and useful learning tool.  For the students, they not only learn essential new vocabulary by creating entries, they also use their work as a daily resource.  Because the dictionary is cloud-based, once an entry is created, it is immediately accessible to all teachers and students with any device connected to the internet.

We continue to add words every day. I haven't counted, but the dictionary must be over 400 entries by now!