(Note: the Photo Journal Project referenced herein is in its first test-run through our classes. We will share the formal guidelines soon, after the projects are completed and trouble-shot, probably around a week from now.)

Today in Desktop Publishing, I introduced the Photo Journal Project and added a twist: along with actually completing the project itself, the 27 students in the DTP class would have to design a website that could realistically house all of the projects from both their class and my 4th period-- a total of around 60. And since each student will ultimately turn in at least 17 photos and 17 write-ups of those photos--well, the math on that is going to get unwieldy kind of quickly. 

The students divided up into groups of three or four--project teams--and were tasked with the following: 

• Design a website layout that will archive the 60 projects
• Explain the design and functionality of the site--what goes where, and why you put it there
• Build the skeleton of the site, or draw it out, so others can understand your vision
• Do a screencap presentation via Camtasia on my computer, where you formally make a proposal of what you plan to do.

After they make these presentations, probably by the end of class Monday, I'm going to send the videos to Cheryl and her classes in California--letting them vote on which they like best and who had the most compelling presentation. After they make their recommendations, I'll decide who "wins the bid" and actually gets to build out the site for really real.  

The only restriction I placed on them was that it had to be possible for them to do--if they proposed something, and they got chosen to build the Real Site, they had better be able to actually make their site do what they promised. 

After they got over their initial shock, they settled in to work, and they worked hard.  I walked around and asked/answered questions and did other "project manager" types of things, like making sure they remembered the site had to hold both photos and text.  The discussions they were having were real web-design types of conversations: making recommendations; offering rationales for their decisions; researching new methods of actually creating through design the visions they saw in their minds. 

I am stoked here for several reasons. The project gets to have a permanent online home. The people who build the site get to add a huge plus to their online portfolios and digital footprints-- I'll link to the finished site here in a few weeks and tweet it out.  And I'm the most excited that all of the kids are getting to do real-world web design, taking a major project from a few notes on a piece of paper all the way to a massive finished site. I can't wait to see what they propose, and I can't wait to show you all what comes of it. 

In Junior English, my 33 students are in the middle of at least four major projects, plus all of the small-form threads that bind them together. They are working on an etymology project, eventually alongside Cheryl's students in California; this week, they made short videos on words that contained the root "tele." They are working on their BWP/20% project. They are reading Looking For Alaska and writing reading journals in a pretty dedicated way. Today, they started a photo essay project which requires them to take a single picture every hour for 24 hours (other than sleeping) and use those to narrate their typical day. 

Add to that all of the video clips on brain science/learning we're watching and analyzing, journals we're writing, and discussions we're having, and it gets to be a lot. For them and for me. 

I touched on this in an earlier post, but many times in my class, I know it feels like we're zooming from one big project to another, without a lot of connection. It even feels like that to me sometimes.

But I love watching the web we're weaving come together. I love watching student after student get hooked into what we're about in this class. Even when I feel incredibly scattered, and the students are in 3 different classrooms with colleagues who can monitor them, plus in the computer lab next door and in my room reading and recording and creating, I have to keep the endpoint in mind.

For a class that's driving at purely student-centered, there isn't really an Endpoint With A Capital E.  There are things I want to talk about with them, with respect to the book. I want them to be able to read closely and analytically, and I want them to find something they love and pursue it and share that passion with everyone around them.  The endpoint is I want you to know how to learn, both personally and academically. 

I just have to remind myself sometimes that the road to that place isn't straight. It's twisted, it's bumpy, and it's chaotic. And even on the days when I feel like I'm juggling about five balls more than my skill level allows, I am still convinced it's worth it. 

In Public Speaking over the past couple days, we've been writing and presenting/recording our own versions of the vlogbrothers' 17 Rants in 4 Minutes. Students partnered up and presented on things that annoyed them. We discussed the importance of universality-- that these things shouldn't just annoy THEM, they should elicit feelings of "YEAH! That Annoys Me Too!!" in their audience.

And a couple of really cool things happened. Because of a glitch the first day of this project, I had the students record themselves ranting instead of presenting live. As I watched them back, I realized something: these recorded speeches were everything that their previous Live Speeches To Class were not. Their previous speeches were nervous, wooden, and kind of dull, but the videos of the rants? They were funny. They were passionate. They elicited emotion from the audience. They connected. 

Then, today, I got a few groups to present their speeches/rants live in front of the class audience, followed by showing the videos that they recorded yesterday. The assignment was then to compare the two--the presenters compared how it felt to present live versus presenting in a small group on video, and the rest of the class compared how engaged they felt by each.  While many of the presentations to the whole class were quite good, they weren't nearly as silly or the kids as confident as the ones we watched on video. 

In doing so, we confirmed a couple ideas we've sort of known all along. First, students present better when they're talking about something that they are actually, real-world invested in, even if that something is "the dust in the bottom of their Goldfish bag" or "those kids that stand in the middle of the hall and socialize and block everyone else from getting to class."  This is true whether we're talking about a little rant in September or a massive end-of-semester research project.  

And second, it's much harder to connect to a big audience than it is to a small group of your close friends. Big audiences come with far more variables-- you don't know what everyone will find funny, you're more nervous to start with, and it's a lot easier to tune someone out as a member of an audience of 30 than it is when you're part of an audience of 3. 

Where we're headed with this, I'm not quite sure.  My guess is that we'll talk about what we learned about engaging an audience through these rants, and then how to apply these lessons to all of our speeches (and hopefully all our assignments in other classes). 

I just had a girl in my web publishing class shriek with glee because she had successfully changed the HTML in her website to make the colors on her page uniform. 

I told her (and all of them) that what she had just experienced was 95% of learning to code (or learning anything else, for that matter).  You have to break it apart, look inside, figure out which pieces do what, and fiddle with it (in this case, the code) until you make it do what you want. 

Happy moments. 

Their assignment was to find a website that they liked, mimic the layout as closely as they could while using a free webhosting service, and then start embedding their own content. You can look at all of their (infant) sites at this MentorMob list: bit.ly/dtpcopycat

I love panorama pictures. These are (almost all of) my 33 junior English kids, hard at work at reading + reading journals for Looking For Alaska. 

Reading journals include three sections: what you noticed (i.e. looking for patterns); what you liked; and what you wondered. This has worked very well as a frame for reading. 

The kids decided they wanted to read most/all of the text before they did any serious analysis tasks-- and we're working on #flipclass skills (journaling, talking to each other in an academic kind of way, using evidence, taking quality notes, etc.) anyway. I will write more about our #flipclass bootcamp later. Kudos to Karl for the idea and Cheryl for the assistance in execution. 

I'm actually kind of digging the idea of sitting down on Fridays and blogging about my week in class. Maybe this will turn into some type of rhythm, and I'll be able to publish more than just 3 posts a year. :-)

The more I teach, the more I discover that older students are more my teaching wheelhouse. This year, I'm teaching Junior English, plus Public Speaking (great for introverts like me!) and Desktop Publishing, which is a class that was originally intended to teach things like "making a calendar in MS Publisher," and I have evolved to teach web design, infographic creation, blogging, and digital footprint. (These will show up in the other two classes as well.)

And I am having a blast. 

Part of what is exhausting for me, though (and I am exhausted for sure) is the Launching of a Thousand Ships that has to happen over the first couple weeks of school.  Class structures have to be built into place, and that takes awhile, especially if there are bad habits that need to be corrected. 

Then there are the projects. Cheryl and I have a couple major ones that we're doing with the kids: they are working on the second iteration of the Blank White Page Project (directions here), and soon enough, we're going to get them to build an web-based etymology network of roots and words that use those roots. And that's on top of all the other stuff they're working on--learning how to do close readings, how to find patterns, how to get along with each other, how to like books... 

Here's the thing, though. The first couple weeks have felt like I've christened and sent off a thousand ships, but none of them have actually arrived anywhere yet. In fact, very few of them are out of the harbor. And it's going to become increasingly difficult over the coming weeks to capture and maintain the attention of 90 students if they don't start seeing more than what must seem to them to be a very excited leader and a million unfinished long-term projects. 

So next week, the goal is to launch the etymology project on Monday or (more likely) Tuesday, and then settle into some sort of rhythm-- writing into the class in some way, discussing, working on a large-scale activity for around an hour, then closing out with some kind of reading task/reading time. The BWP will slot into that middle time nicely for one day per week, plus maybe a little squeezed in on a different day.  

Hopefully, that will allow students to see real forward momentum and not just a leader that sends off a thousand ships while saying, "I have a map!! I promise I do!"

This post started on Friday with my frustration on not having a working classroom community already. I know, for many of you, having 33 students in a class no big thing-- in fact, for people like Crystal, that would be a godsend. But for me, it’s the biggest class I’ve ever taught.

It’s 4th period, the end of the day, and there are just a lot of kids in a small-ish space. It was the first week, we were all exhausted, the AC was broken at the school on Friday, and the class felt like it was fracturing into a million pieces. These are honors-level kids, so they have more patience than a lot of HS Ss would, but they still have their issues. They are still 16 and impatient. They are still very interested in grades and not so interested in learning anything, and they still equate “I learned a lot” with “I was very entertained by my teacher’s lecture and he gave me an A.”  

Confession for the day: I struggle with making a space for whole-group discussions in my class that aren’t centered on me.

I know that’s weird, because I talk about community and relationships all the time... but as I learn more about myself and start to do things in my classes more intentionally and less haphazardly, I am finding that my strength is building 1-to-1 relationships between teacher and student, primarily through individualized commentary on essays and other classwork.  And if the only sustainable, solid relationships in the class are between me and individual students, that's still a very teacher-centered classroom--because if I'm not there or I'm not on my game that day, class falls apart. 

So now, the next step is trying to build a whole class culture where students can talk to each other as humans, and not just to me. I want a class that will run like clockwork whether I'm there or not--I don't want it to be predicated on me as the center point. My challenge is teaching them to facilitate discussions that I don’t need to be a part of, because we can’t really do a good English flipclass without both threads in place: true student-centered classrooms demand that the kids have good relationships with the teacher, certainly; but they also have to be able to talk to each other.  

Thankfully, as with seemingly everything in our collaborative partnership, Cheryl has far less practice in 1-to-1, individualized instruction, but is a grandmaster at leading whole class conversations. People who know us from the #flipclass chat will notice that we divide the moderation responsibilities up according to our strengths: she asks the questions and monitors the big picture/conversation arc; I spend my time interacting with individuals directly and bringing them into the conversation. 

But the point is that building a classroom culture in a room with that many kids is really difficult for me. They are still stuck in a mindset of figuring out what the teacher wants and giving it to him and getting an A is what it’s all about. But they won’t even talk to each other. We’ve tried class discussions this first week, and they have robustly failed. Class discussions so far have been pockets of Ss talking to each other and, when we’ve come together as a class, a few kids trying to get participation points slash one-up each other. There’s a lot of work to do to get them to talk TO each other instead of AT each other. 

Conversation skills aren’t about showing off. They’re about being able to look another person in the eyes and hear what they’re saying, to be able to know them well enough to have a pretty good idea what they’re not saying, and be able to build a collaborative mountaintop of ideas in that interplay. 

So here I am, at the end of the first week, scared as always that it’s not going to get there. I know it will eventually, and that it’s only one week, but we only have 85-ish more days together-- the classroom community is a sacred place to me, and the fear that we won’t get to that good place drives me every semester to find the key to unlock it. It’s a rare and beautiful thing when it happens; for me, it can never happen enough.