Rocket Summer

I am a huge nerd. As a kid, I got turned onto model rocketry by my fifth grade teacher, Miss Hanson. As with a lot of my interests, I surged ahead, devouring everything I could on the subject, building countless rocket kits and losing every single one to trees and wind. I even went so far as getting fellow nerds together for a “rocket club.” We met in my parents’ basement. My mom made us sloppy joes.

Then, like so many things, I cast away my childish interests only to have them come back to me as incredibly useful in my teaching career. As an end-of-the-year project, our fifth grade students are building easy-to-assemble rocket kits; a half-hour and a coat of paint and they are ready to go. What is more interesting is the project our sixth grade students are engaged in. The sixth graders’ rockets are made from scratch. They consist of a sheet of construction paper, a file folder, a paper clip, and a drinking straw. Total cost: $.12, not including the disposable rocket engines. As fun as building rockets from scratch can be, launching them can prove to be interesting; things like poor build quality and strange fin shapes can make for unpredictable (but exciting) launches.

I got the idea from the topic of a previous post: Sylvia’s Super Awesome Mini Maker Show

The subject of rockets could not happen at a better time. A wealth of YouTube videos capture amazing launches from home builders, and the news is full of Space X’s new rocket that may be replacing the space shuttle.

Here a few ways to get started on rocketry; it makes a great summer school activity.

First, make sure you have a launcher, launch pad, and engines. You can choose to buy rocket bulk-packs for your students (great for beginners), or have them choose from a list of rockets (more advanced students), or build them from scratch like I did (at your own risk).

There are lots of good places to buy your stuff, but I go with a website called eHobbies. They have lots of experience working with teachers and youth groups and work with several manufacturers. I bought rockets, engines, and launching equipment made by Quest Aerospace. They even have starter kits put together for teachers who want to start a rocketry program.

If it seems intimidating, don’t worry. It’s not brain surgery, only rocket science.

Thingdom Takes Over My Classroom

I was first introduced to the idea of genetics when I was a high school freshman in biology class. I found the idea of recessive and dominant traits fascinating. It was also reassuring that the things that made me weird (being able to roll my tongue, my hitchhikers’ thumb, being the only blue-eyed child in my family) were not really my fault. They were my grandmother’s fault.

Now, I find Mendel Squares fascinating; my students, not so much. However, they are of an age where things like hair color, eye color, and all those inherited traits are becoming more interesting to them. Most of my students are also farm kids and so the breeding of animals is something talked about, even if the logic behind it is unclear.

Enter a great game that I was only able to touch upon in an earlier post: Thingdom. A game created by The Science Museum in London, Thingdom was created to teach children about genetics in a very approachable and fairly age-appropriate way.

The game is simple enough. You create a small, multi-colored blob-shaped creature called a ‘thing’ and then slowly raise it up like a virtual pet; feeding it, petting it, and making it dance. The real fun happens at around 5 minutes when the little bugger screams out: “I WANT TO MATE!” With cute little hearts all around.

After the giggling has passed, the science starts. You are challenged to breed your ‘thing’ with other things in order to get a desired trait from the babies, such as stripes, blue color, or size. Children are shown how recessive and dominant traits combine to increase the chances of traits. Students are not allowed to proceed until they have completed such tasks as breeding a thing to have large size, fuzzy fur, or spots. This explains to students in a fun, age-appropriate way how children inherit traits from their parents. It also helps explain such questions as how human meddling created both the Great Dane and the Chihuahua.

The Case for a “Farm Truck” Computer

I wrote in a previous article about a project in which my students and I got a bunch of old, donated desktops, took them apart and rebuilt them into ‘frankencomputers’ running various forms of Linux, my favorite being Puppy Linux because it’s easy to install on even the oldest computers.

Recently, though, the pile of old computer parts that I had been building in one of the back rooms came the attention of the custodians and I was forced to clean house. Needless to say, my mess has been relocated, at least partly, to my classroom. Then, about two weeks ago, during our classroom spring cleaning, I ordered my students to set up one of the computers permanently on a lark. It was dubbed the ‘farm truck computer’ by my students.

Taking the farm truck computer for a spin

For those not in a rural district, most homes have two trucks: the ‘new truck,’ or the truck that you take into town and use on vacation to tow your boat; and the ‘farm truck’ or the beat up old truck that used to be the new truck. The farm truck is the one that you don’t bother washing, usually because soap would only wash off the protective layer of dust holding the all the rust together. To give you an idea of what one of these trucks is worth, my father once bought a load of hay for his hobby farm and the farmer threw in a farm truck to sweeten the deal. But every country kid knows that the farm truck is also a lot of fun, you don’t have to be nice to it, you can drive it through snow banks, grind the gears to your heart’s content, straight pipe the exhaust and grind the gears right down. If you happen to kill this truck, no one would miss it.

So it was true with our computer, a ten-year-old Dell running an OS off a CD. No one would miss it. It was a simple machine meant to tool around on. But you know what? It’s been great! The machine does only a few things, but it does them well; it gets on the internet, runs Flash (which is more than I can say for my iPad), and gives a place in my room for students to take their AR tests or look up their spelling words. But, it’s also so boring and slow that they can’t use it for anything fun. The cost of this incredibly useful little machine? $0. Every piece of its hardware was donated (as I am sure any computer repair shop would be happy to do) and the total cost of the software was $.10 for the CD the OS runs on. If it breaks down (which is unlikely) it costs the school absolutely nothing, and no one, except maybe me, would miss it.

Tools to Teach Shakespeare, Methinks

So, if you are like me, you were forced to read Shakespeare in high school. Not that there is anything wrong with that; I am a big fan of The Bard, but so many people find his work hard to approach because of the language. Once you get past the poetry to the meat of the story, you realize that most of his stories are the root of every story that has been told since. Have a revenge story? Hamlet.  Have a story about power leading to corruption? I give you Julius Caesar or Macbeth. Want to tell a story about crazy, self-destructive teenagers? Romeo and Juliet. The first romantic comedy? A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Shakespeare is so at the root of our culture that to not have at least a passing familiarity with is work is a crime against civilized society.

So here I have a few resources to tie into Shakespeare. The first is from Cliff’s Notes, whose products (for better or worse) have helped countless people approach Shakespeare’s works.  They have produced a series of short films that sum up the works very nicely with a big helping of much needed humor.

For those of you on the other end of the spectrum, who think that the greatest writer in the English language is deserving of more respect and analysis: Wolfram Alpha, the fact-engine and source of limitless statistical data, has included the works of Shakespeare in its databases, and now gives such information as the average sentence length in Hamlet being 80.08 characters, or that Hermia speaks 1818 words to Lysander’s 1399.

Finally, here’s a collection of Shakespeare resources from Weekly Reader. Don’t miss the Macbeth rap.

Down With PowerPoint!

During the short week leading up to Easter I decided to assign a lesson that tied into the recent Weekly Reader topic of the Titanic. I assigned each of my students to create a creative report on a disaster in history. With a rather ghoulish gusto, my students were reading up on the Great Peshtigo Fire (still the deadliest fire in history and only a few hours from us!), the 1918 Spanish influenza outbreak, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and the Dust Bowl.

And in typical fashion, my initial hopes were dashed when nearly each one decided to represent all that they had learned as a PowerPoint presentation. ARRG!

I like PowerPoint, but I think it is the diorama of our era, telling very little and only used because it is so easy to churn out. The biggest complaint I get from the higher grades is that, if given the choice, students always pick the easy way out and go for the PowerPoint. So I decided that enough was enough. No more PowerPoint. I pointed my students in the direction of this great site that had over 150 ideas for book reports. Before long. students were making board games (chutes and ladders in the triangle fire) news reports (on the San Francisco earthquake) and stop motion movies (on the dust bowl).  A rap video was also made to describe Spanish influenza complete with a beat provided by Avairy Roc.  Which led to this exchange:

“Mr. Briggs, what rhymes with pneumonia?”

“Hmm…Ammonia. Can you work ammonia in?”

“Sure! If you don’t want pneumonia, wash surfaces with ammonia!”

Technology can make life easier, but just because it allows production to happen at a faster rate does not mean it can increase understanding or encourage creativity.  Sometimes it’s working within the rules that forces you to make the best of a bad situation and increase creativity.

Stretching Triangles

The educational world is full of great, seemingly boring software. These are usually applications that are not the prettiest or the most feature-rich but have tremendous staying power and appeal. A great example of this is Oregon Trail. Not the flashiest program, but I still use the original Apple II version of it in my classroom, and it is still as fun as it was when I was a kid.

This week, to round off a math unit on geometry, we used a program called Geometer’s Sketchpad. Sketchpad is a seemingly boring piece of software that nonetheless has nearly unlimited potential. The program resembles a drawing program that allows you to make points, rays, and lines on a plane, program them, and measure them. Simple, right? Well, after getting a crash course from a coworker, I  now think it’s amazing. It does for geometry what Excel does for graphs and Word does for writing papers. It takes all the work out of measuring and drawing objects in geometry and lets you play with shapes and constructions, testing out concepts like area and formulas. Pretty soon my students were drawing dozens of triangles, stretching them out as far as they could go, but the sum of their angles never changed. The only way that you can do this in a standard classroom would be to cut out about a million triangles out of construction paper, measure their angles, and add them as a class. This program frees up so much time teaching the basics and expanding on advanced concepts. Before long, my kids were programming pool games to show the angles in bank-shots and programming the hands of a clock. It also makes a great primer for computer drafting using Alice or Sketchup.

It does have a learning curve. I recommend you check out the website’s expansive resource center, full of lesson plans, or find any one of the great instructional workbooks on the program.

Instagrok for Better Searching

Found a great site floating around the blogs today. It’s called instagrok, and it can help your students narrow down their web searches. File it under “things I wish I had in school.”

Let’s say your students want to do a report on Einstein. If they do what my students do, they type “who is Einstein” into Google, pick out Wikipedia, and go from there. But all of those searches are horribly broad, covering EVERYTHING about the keyword.  Instagrok puts the search results into a movable graphic organizer, breaking down subjects related to your search and listing the associated sites along the side.

If you are inclined to sign up for their deluxe service, you can “pin” the articles you want into a document of all of your collected and annotated notes.

This could be a great resource for research projects, allowing students to really think about their subject and narrow down what it is that they want to know.

That’s Entertainment

A few weeks ago I introduced my students to the world of video editing through Windows Movie Maker. Not the best, I know, but it’s free of price and strings and (provided that you convert all the video) pretty easy to use.

This week we made several entertaining videos. These met with mixed results. I would not call this lesson a failure exactly. But I definitely should have given my students more parameters in making it. A few started with very clear ideas, such as making a video of Hatchet by Gary Paulson. Another group parodied Twilight. A few had good ideas that fell short very quickly, such as the monster movie that resulted in more prop-building than actual filming, and a group that wanted to make The Jeremy Lin Story only to get frustrated with details when they couldn’t make convincing jerseys.

On a side note, it makes me a little proud that in a town that is 99.9% Norwegian, my students still felt that the only hurdle to making a film about their favorite ball player was the lack of jerseys.

Then there were the short and sweet films—the ones with a clear idea and low production value. For example, one group made a movie consisting of K-3rd grade students telling knock-knock jokes. They had enough time left over to make a ‘documentary’ on Japanese candy. Another group made a great short lesson on how to play a simple 3-chord ditty on the ukulele.

Would I do something different next time? Probably the usual teacher-solutions of controlling the size and members of groups, and making the movie a contract/project: In order to get their grade, they would have to make the product that they promised to make, much like a real producer demands results. Their final assessment using these skills is to make a documentary that ties in with their environmental science essays. It’s a project where every student has to make a movie—no freeloading.

But in the meantime, I sit back and enjoy a chuckle on behalf of my students:

Saved By the Cloud

Ok, so most of the time, when I rely on anything electronic it ends up betraying me somehow. Nearly every gadget I own has turned on me to the point that when we go shopping, my wife refuses to allow me to pick the actual box we are taking home because my luck is so bad. I think most of my experience in technology can be traced to having it fail and being forced to fix it.

But for once, this is not one of those stories. For once, my horrible bad luck with all things gadget-y has turned. For the last few weeks, sixth grade has split its math classes into two groups: a standard math group and an advanced math group. For most schools, this is normal. But in our small school, it is unmarked territory. We have had to learn to make it work as we go. For the most part, it has gone great. The kids are picking up the concepts better than ever and everyone is challenged. As for the logistics, Scott (the other sixth grade teacher) and I shared an Excel document on Dropbox to keep track of grades so that we can coordinate and eventually feed them into our school’s online gradebook.

Let me repeat that: we are sharing a document.

I bet most of you who have done this already know what happened.

At some point, Scott (I choose to blame him; it just saves time) or I had the file open, then the other teacher opened it at the same time. One person saved the file over the other. The result: I lost two weeks of grading (Scott lost nothing, which makes it even more convenient for me to blame him). If this were a shared drive on our network, or a file on a disk drive, we would have been out of luck. But Scott, bless his heart, is a Dropbox user, and our Excel file was shared via Dropbox. In fewer than five minutes I was able to ‘restore’ my old grades and paste them into the new file without a single grade lost. With our third quarter ending this week, I was saved from certain doom. Seriously, if only for the ability to automatically track versions of your files and backing them up: START PUTTING YOUR FILES ON THE CLOUD NOW!

Easy Peasy Weebly

Kids these days. In my day, if you wanted to make a website, it meant playing around with HTML code and staring at a screen until your eyes bled. Oh, things got better; pretty soon we could play around in programs like Dreamweaver or FrontPage. Let me tell you, teaching kids to use FrontPage is about as fun as a root canal. Lots of hard work agonizing about the placement of tables and the resulting web pages still look like something produced around 1991.

How are students supposed to put their work on the web without the technological barriers that come with laying out a web page? How do we make this easier so we can skip the code and the tables and make web publishing more accessible?

Weebly.

Weebly is a great web hosting site, similar to offerings from WordPress, Tumblr or Blogger (none of which are really appropriate for school students), but focused more on the look and feel of an actual page than creating a running blog for advanced users. Weebly uses a drag and drop interface. Drag web items into the page and that is where they will be. No coding or tweaking needed. It is easy enough for a 3^rd grader or a grandmother and that is exactly the point: to get people on the web and make web creation easy enough for anyone. Think of it as the internet from Playskool. I don’t mean to be demeaning; it’s just that easy to use!

This makes for a great project for students who want to report on something, allowing them to show the world what they have learned. It might not make the best whole-class activity since it does require an account and an email, so a permission slip from mom and dad will be necessary.

I also want to point out that there is more to Weebly than the fact that it’s a free, easy-to-use website service. Weebly has also jumped on the quickly-crowded, all-inclusive educational website bandwagon with a full-featured suite of education-only web services which include teacher websites, grad eBooks and other goodies. I will look in on that part of Weebly later. In the meantime it pays ot give the regular site a look if you don’t know the first thing about starting a website or know a student who could use one.