Culturgrams - States Edition

Culturgrams - States Edition was a pretty big disappointment. I should have evaluated it more closely before i took a class in to the lab to use it. It has no pictures, no slide show, and very little sound. The readability, in terms of grammar level for ESL, is unnecessarily high: Virginia became a state in... Kentucky obtained statehood... Statehood was given to Ohio... California entered the union... This made the simple question of what year did your state become a state a difficult obstacle

Probably not written by an educator who actually tried using it with students. Little educational software is. Bob suggested it was an after-thought add-on to the more successful world Culturgrams. It is especially disappointing because adding multi-media to it, and bringing the readability down or making it adjustable would be relatively cheap, given what is available for licensing on the Internet.

One fun thing about it was trying to get students to write down the sounds that their state bird makes. It drove them crazy.

Making a good site based on the same idea would be a great wiki project for high school students.

DTAC

Went to a DTAC meeting last week. District Technology Advisory Committee. It has always struggled to justify it's name, but it has a lot of very smart and innovative people on it.

We used Google Docs to generate the agenda and notes as the meeting proceded. That was cool.

For the most part, tho, i felt like a hillbilly visiting New York. There were demonstrations of several technologies that would be really great to have in the classroom. A nice portable bluetooth graphic sketch pad. Unfortunately my little school is struggling to meet copy machine costs and i kept thinking about that. I am not sure how many of the technologies are interesting bells & whistles and how much i could actually use more effectively than a class set of spiral notebooks. Most teachers are concerned with keeping students' attention and engagement. Wellstone is a little different that way. There is certainly no question of student engagement. But i'm not certain a cordless mouse will help teach L0 reading.

One thing for certain, i would almost kill for one of those smartboards. It would fit very neatly with a strategy i have used for years of generating a class written book from wordless or well known stories. Someday.

Netrekker Thing #12

Netrekker or however you spell it, turned out to be somewhat helpful this past week. I have been focusing on effectively teaching reading to L1 students using content area readings.

It is extraordinarily difficult to teach reading at this level, especially in the content areas of science and social studies, because there just isnt much out there for high school students that is not targeted for an interest level of first or second grade children.

In the L1 classes i am teaching map reading skills right now and i found that i could search nettrekker even in this relatively esoteric skill area and was able to find a couple of pages written at the 3rd grade level. I found that i could write them down and simplify the grammar faster than i could create readings from scratch, which is what i have done in the past.

Even so it took about an hour to rewrite one page. And i suppose it breaks enough copyright laws to put me in jail. And it doesnt really help the L0 students in the class who dont understand the concept of reading. But it still seems an improvement.

Culturgrams

We looked at Culturgrams through Minneapolis' subscription. I used Culturgrams, especially the books, a lot in middle school. The web pages may be useful for lower proficiency high school ESL students for a project related to the Mississippi River and states surrounding the river. The multimedia capacities of the site may make it more accessible to students learning to read English.

Delicious Thing #23

Delicious www.del.icio.us did not work very well. I thought it would be important because there were many scheduling conflicts with the Mac lab. Students frequently went between the Mac lab and the PC lab Wellstone has upstairs, which do not share networks or communicate in any way. And some students have Internet at home and work there.

Delicious on Macs is quite easy because when a user registers they can drag and drop Delicious buttons to the bookmark bar. These can capture the address and add any site the user is looking at, as a bookmark to their Delicious account in one click.

The Windows & Internet Explorer implementation in the PC lab is too old to do anything that sophisticated without run a program installation that requires an administrator password.

I would be curious to know if there are other better sites.