Silence…

The school where I am working this year is a Quaker school.  According to The Quaker Information Center,  "Quakers are members of the Religious Society of Friends, a faith that emerged as a new Christian denomination in England during a period of religious turmoil in the mid-1600's and is practiced today in a variety of forms around the world."

Slowly, I'm learning about Quakers and their faith.  Quakers have a weekly meeting for worship, but is unlike any other meeting for worship I have been a part of because Friends gather in silence.  Every Tuesday, we have a meeting for worship.  It just so happens that our first day of school was on a Tuesday, so very quickly I had to figure out how to manage the silence.  Thankfully I have a co-teacher who attended Quaker schools as a child and is in her second year at the school, so she took the lead.  Turns out - I was the only one who was anxious about the silence - 20 MINUTES of silence I might add.  The students were comfortable in silence - after all, for most of them, they have been doing this since PK.  Me? I glanced at my watch almost every 2 minutes until it ended.  

Now 2 1/2 months into school, I'm much more comfortable with silence. In fact, I can now sit in silence, without glancing at my watch, for almost 11 minutes.  Progress!  

My thoughts on silence have evolved based on my experiences at this Friends school.  For 19 years of teaching I previously imposed silence on my students in moments of complete frustration.  You can imagine the scene - students are milling about, chatting about everything and anything.  They are off task, too loud and the room feels chaotic.  "All right! That's it!  Go back to your desks, put your heads down and NO TALKING!"  Silence as punishment for the kids. I think this is pretty common in classrooms; it certainly was in mine.

However, now, I don't see silence as a punishment, but more of a privilege.  We start each morning with a moment of silence.  It lasts for about a minute, but the energy in the morning is altered because of that silence.  It's a signal that we are starting our day and that serious learning is about to take place.  Actually, in the beginning of the school year, our silence only took place in the morning and once a week at our meeting for worship.  Recently, however, I realized that we can have a moment of silence at any time - DOH!  I'm not sure why it took me so long to figure this out, but it's made a huge difference in my teaching practice.  Now, we have a moment of silence as part of transition from one task to the next. For instance, if we moving from math to read aloud, when the students gather on the carpet, I might ask for a moment of silence.  The students quiet, become still, and at the end are more ready for what's to come.  

In the book, A Quaker Book of Wisdom, Robert Lawrence Smith states: "For Quakers, wisdom begins in silence. Quakers believe that only when we have silenced our voices and our souls can we hear the 'still small voice', that dwells within each of us - the voice of God that speaks to us and that we express to others through our deeds. Only by listening in stillness for that voice and letting it guide our actions can we truly let our lives speak." 

I may not be listening for an inner voice just yet, but I'm certainly centering myself and making my mind ready for the next task.  And - it works.  It turns out that the silence is calming.  Not only am I forever changed by silence, but so is my teaching practice.    

Sharing Personal Narratives through iMovie

10/2013

My class is so lucky to have 1-1 iPads.  Too bad the students aren't in the hands of a teacher who is proficient at integrating them into our daily classroom life!  It's true - I have a lot to learn.  BUT I am motivated and I'm always looking for ways to improve.

I'm committed to trying to find new ways to use the iPads.  My first strategy was to implement Tech Tuesdays.  Students are invited to come in during lunch recess on Tuesday for app discovery.  Together we explore and learn about the apps already loaded on their iPads.  We can explore and learn together.  The best part, however,  is that they become digital leaders in the class! It's a win-win!

On our first Tech Tuesday I asked the small handful of students who arrived to explore iMovie.  We were just about to finish publishing our personal narratives using Google Docs. The kids really wanted to share their stories with each other using QR Codes. I decided to add in the  iMovie presentation.  Using iMovie allows the students to show the documentation of all their work that went into the final draft of their narrative.  

Here's how I went about the project.

Step 1: Document their work 

The students took pictures of the work they did in their reading journal, their drafts, etc. to share their process.

Step 2: Record voice

Thankfully the noise canceling headphones made this a much easier task.  This was harder than it was supposed to be for some kids.  I had to work with them on not feeling the need to hold the iPad and their narrative in their hands as they read aloud.  Once they felt comfortable leaving the iPad on a flat surface and not looking at while they read, the process got a lot easier.

Step 3: Edit photos

One thing we had to manage was the "Ken Burns Effect". It is possible to turn this effect off on a laptop/desktop computer, but on the iPad you can't turn it off. So, you have to manage it for each picture.   It took us some time to figure this out. The apple website was incredibly helpful.  

Step 4: Insert titles on photos

This is was a cool step. The students were able to put a title on each picture noting what part of the process was being shown.  So, they labeled pictures with "pre-writing" or "draft" or "revising".  

Step 5: Upload to school's YouTube site

This was new to me and took many trips to the school tech team. Now that I have done it once, the next time will be a LOT easier.

Sample iMovie Narrative

Step 6: Share URL's on class webpage

For this I just copied and pasted the YouTube Url onto our class webpage. This allows all the students and parents to each other's iMovie presentations.

Step 7: Print QR codes for students to display on bulletin board.

Athough I think the kids could do this on the iPads, I ran out of time for completing this, so I just did this task myself. I used the website QRstuff.com. Super easy but it did take a little time.

The kids did an amazing job and took the task seriously.  The number one blessing for this project was the delivery of noise-cancelling headphones for each child.  The headphones have a microphone which really helps manage the noise level with all the kids working at the same time.  

Things I have learned for next time:

1) After the students take pictures, go back into "Photos" and edit BEFORE inserting them into iMovie.  This was particularly important when a picture needed to be rotated.

2) It was easier for the students to record their whole paper in one sitting.  Some students broke up their recording into parts but most found that challenging.

3) Make sure the students don't have their last names anywhere in the story to protect privacy when published on YouTube.

Next steps:

1) organize their photos into albums so that they don't' have to spend so much time scrolling to find what they need.

This is a pretty easy process on the iPad and so necessary if they kids are taking lots of pictures. I think it will save considerable amounts of time when they are trying to sort through all the pictures they have taken with their iPad.

Although I found this project valuable, I am now thinking of different ways to make their thinking and writing process visible. I'm reading a book called Making Thinking Visible (Ritchhart, Church, Morrison) as part of Professional Learning Community at my new school.   On page 39, the authors state, "Documentation of students' thinking serves another important purpose in that it provides a stage from which both teachers and students may observe the learning process, make note of the strategies being used, and comment on the developing understanding.   ….documentation demystifies the learning process both for the individual as well as the group, building great metacognitive awareness in the process."  

Documenting their writing process is a good step. But truly, to make the thinking visible, the students need to share what they did and how it helped them move through the writing process.  If we did this process again, I would have the students record what they were doing and why for each piece of documentation.  After sharing their process, they could add on a reading of their narrative.