Engage Me!

At our school, learning is student-centered, but this video still challenged me.

The Play's the Thing

Apparently the play is the thing this week. The English department has been here by storm, sometimes two classes to a room, to watch scenes from Hamlet. There was a celebratory air to the room (and not too much fresh air) when two classes met together in F format to watch the play in preparation for analysing it carefully after the Thanksgiving break.

Classes end Friday for the week, and then they resume November 27. Judging by the constant traffic down here, I think the quote I heard yesterday that this is "the busiest week of the term" is probably true.

Internet Services

If you have not yet read The World is Flat, by Thomas L. Friedman, you may be surprised by this NY Times article describing how, in addition to business services, the Internet is now providing personal services, like math tutoring. The article also describes a service provider whom you can ask to do personal tasks, like making reservations, buying gifts, and so forth. A $50 fee/month gets you 49 tasks. Sign me up.

Academy Building Classroom - Testing

While we wait for small items to be completed in the experimental classroom, the technology is undergoing rigorous testing. The teachers' requirements for the room are:

1. 1. to enhance Harkness teaching by not dominating the room,

2. to be easy to use, and

3. to allow the teacher to use technology without "breaking the Harkness circle," which means to get up from the table and shift the focus from the student conversation onto the teacher.

The technology in the room includes a projector and screen with an AV rack with DVD/VCR, cable tuner, document camera, VGA and various video and audio connectors. The entire system is managed through a Crestron controller. This configuration allows the teacher to sit at the table with the students and navigate among the various sources through a web page.

The picture above shows the web page used to control the devices on a TabletPC. Through it I am able to turn on and manage what I want to present. The picture depicts the "remote" for a DVD/VCR and a movie is being displayed through the projector to the screen. Note - no ugly cables with which to contend!

Document Camera

Today in my Junior Studies class (which meets in the experimental classroom) I fired up the document camera and moved through a book of old Exeter photos. The students have been reading meditations and essays from and about Exonians of the past, and they are about to move further back in Exeter time in their upcoming assignments. The old photographs allowed them to see Exeter with a different perspective than their own 2007 view. The images were a big hit with the kids, as was the document camera, which resulted in a few spontaneous outbursts of "sweet!".

Audacity is Awesome

I have a language teacher who came to me with a question: isn't there some technology that can help one of my students practice listening to, imitating, and perfecting his second language? This particular student just needed additional reinforcement to hear the differences between his speech and that of a native speaker.

I set the student up with a microphone/headset and helped him learn how to use Audacity (great shareware program if you don't know about it) such that he can listen to snippets of a dialogue, then mute the native speaker's voice and add his own on a separate soundtrack. Then he can compare the two, either by listening to them one at a time or simultaneously. In addition to the auditory reinforcement, Audacity provides a spectrogram of the audio, kind of a voiceprint waveform of the speech sound, which is another cue from which the student can learn.

Through a little practice time, I showed the student that the more closely his spectrogram matches that of the native speaker, the more "correct" his speech is going to be. As a fledgling linguist, I learned how to "read" a spectogram and could identify vowels, consonants, fricatives, and so on by sight, rather than by sound. Audacity has many great features that let you stretch out or slow down the audio, and its visual representation, to help kids who may be more visual than auditory learners improve language acquisition.

At the end of a 15-minute session (much of which was spent just figuring out our approach), the teacher told the student he could already hear a difference in his pronunciation! Such a small investment of time and equipment made such a great difference. The student's face beamed with the encouragement from the teacher and we sent him on his way, headset in hand. Pretty exciting.

Academy Building Experimental Classroom Update

It is so exciting to see that the technology in the Academy Building experimental classroom is finally in place and tested. The wiring for the projection screen was completed today and whiteboards are on order. Although room construction was completed in early September, supporting the start of school redirected ITS resources, delaying the project a bit.

To get a sense of our excitement, take a look at the before and (almost) after pictures.

Before picture:

The work in progress:

The next steps will be to introduce the room to the disciplines located in the building: classics, history, mathematics and religion. Department chairs will determine how the room will be scheduled. A few faculty members have discovered this room, which is located on the lower level. Pictures of the finished room will be posted when available.

In Full Swing

Well, fall is upon us, school is in full swing, and teachers have reserved the lab and classroom for 18 classes so far this week. Uses ranged from classes writing in our computer lab to teachers presenting various pieces of art for student critique. Some teachers used discussion boards and others played with a wiki for the first time.

In the evenings, proctoring has resumed. Through the creative time-management skills of our 30 student workers who juggle class, athletics, homework, social lives, and proctoring, the labs remain open for student use until 10 pm.

Faculty Workshops

This is a post from our blogging workshop! In this workshop we defined blogs and wikis, created a few blogs and wikis, and played with them individually and as a group. Here's what else happened that day.

We began school this year with a faculty workshop centering on technology. The morning included a presentation by Dr. Barbara Ganley of Middlebury College. Dr. Ganley, who grew up on the Exeter campus as the child of a teacher, shared her experience of returning to Exeter to speak to the faculty and chronicled it on her own blog.

After the talk, we broke into small groups and attended one of about a dozen workshops taught by our own faculty. It was pretty amazing to hear from our colleagues who have taken the plunge into integrating some sort of technology into the Harkness classroom. There's no formula for that exploration that we can follow from other schools. Our teachers are inventing it daily for the Harkness student and teacher. Presentations covered topics from blogs to podcasts, tablets to YouTube, movie-making to Google Earth.

Some teachers have (some might say wisely) just dipped a toe into the waters, taking one small step at a time. Others have plunged in splashingly. Both styles are great and each has risks. Technology issues often manifest themselves at the least convenient moments, and no teacher that I know wants to look foolish in front of a class of students, especially when one may already feel that the students are ahead of the teachers in this area. Having a Plan B when you work with technology for class or homework is a very good idea. So is harnessing the knowledge and lack of fear the kids already have by letting them run the show. That is very "Harkness," very student-led, which we embrace wholeheartedly around here. Technology need be no exception.

Last term I watched a teacher (who is a self-proclaimed tech newbie) let her students use whatever technology they wished to do their final presentations. There were moments when we weren't sure how we would accomplish some of the students' goals, but we persevered and the young ladies and men came in with interesting, varied approaches--all of them as rich as or richer than an oral presentation without a video component. I was excited, but not surprised, by the variety of tools and technologies the students chose. Some felt most comfortable with an outline in PowerPoint. Others fluently integrated videos into their talks. Still others adeptly moved from DVD to computer to text. All were rich examples of the wisdom of our students.

Very Cool Imaging/Social Software

Imagine what we could do with this in classes!

Academy Building Work Begins

Once again our Facilities department is going to make some magic and transform an old space in the basement of one of our classroom buildings on a very tight deadline. Then our ITS department swarm in and lay the technological foundation that will make this new technology-equipped learning and teaching space a functioning entity.

Magic or not, it is still amazing to see a new space be born out of an old one. I am one of those people who can look at plans and understand the way a space will flow, but I can never envision it in 3D until I actually stand in it. Then, with awe, the 2D plan connects to my 3D visual and it comes together (this is why I'm a teacher/tech support person and not an architect).

I'm looking forward to seeing this technology-equipped learning space and also to the additional technology-enhanced classrooms that will also be completed this summer and early fall on campus. Teachers and students will benefit from having additional distributed support in the academy building. It's very exciting to move even these few steps forward with integrating technology appropriately into the Harkness classroom. Since our manner of teaching and learning is pretty unique at Exeter, it's inspiring to see our teachers invent new ways of learning and teaching that are both engaging technology in a contemporary sense and yet remaining faithful to the Harkness tradition.

Pictures to come soon...

Last Week of School

Ah, another year comes to a close. This week has been busy in the experimental classroom and lab of Phillips Hall. Religion and Contemporary Society students, under the direction of Kathy Brownback, have used the lab several times this week to present their final projects. Students brought in PowerPoint presentations, Internet reference materials, DVDs and video clips from YouTube on everything from The Simpsons and South Park to The Passion of the Christ and The Life of Brian. One student discussed the religious context of the movie Field of Dreams and showed relevant clips. It was interesting to hear the students' interpretations of religious references in contemporary media. But what I found most astounding as I was sitting among the students was the realization that just one year ago--before YouTube--viewing these clips in class would have been an arduous task that would have involved taping, clipping, and retaping these scenes, winding and rewinding tape. Now, they're one click away from anywhere with an Internet connection. The video really enhanced the discussion and I can't imagine how the students would have made their presentations without them.

Speaking of videos, in the classroom this week film-making instructor Brad Seymour's students presented their completed films. How exciting for the students to see the videos they've been working on all term on the big screen! We just should have had a red carpet and some paparazzi for opening night.

The lab has also been hopping with kids writing and printing final papers, so much so that we had to guard the door to have them not interrupt constantly the classes that were using the rooms. The students are feeling the loss of the open lab in this building but we also realize that the renovation plans will be better developed by our experiences bringing classes to the lab for some of the periods of the day. We hope to put a print station down the hall this summer to alleviate that problem for students who just need to print a paper.

And speaking of summer, trainers, committees, conference personnel and summer school faculty are already lining up to use these spaces over the summer. It doesn't look like there will be any idle time, even though the regular session ends tomorrow--just a short break to get the air conditioning going, which is great because it was a muggy, mosquito-y 85 degrees down there by end of day today.

iBT AP Exams

Hooray! We completed the iBT Chinese and Japanese AP exams--unscathed. Wow, what a lot of preparatory work, but thanks to our amazing tech staff, our students had a successful experience.

It was stressful to have the students file in and wait for the test to progress. Just at the very beginning of the exam, we had a power blip that caused the lights to go out momentarily. I thought for sure we were done for, but, again, our great tech folks had supplied UPS power strips and none of the computers hiccupped.

It was hot in the lab with 14 students and 3 adults laboring through the test, but we made it. We are looking forward to hearing the scores for the exams and to having the air conditioning completed. Both should be refreshing.

Teacher Comments

Johnny Griffith: Experimental classroom is nice and neat, and the equipment works very well. Easy to operate. The sound in the classroom is absolutely terrific. The class was watching portions of Macbeth, and we all felt we could hear individual rain drops and horse hooves as they fell. A great experience.

Charlie Terry: Wonderful space; great balance/blend of a Harkness setting and a spacious and convenient room. Plenty of room, but cozy space as well.

Kayoko Tazawa: It is great that multiple students can record their speech at the same time. We can be very efficient.

Christine Robinson: The big screen is like having the "Little Theater" back - i.e., it's close by and provides great viewing & with the table right there, we can move directly to discussion when/if that's part of the class. Thumbs up!

Michelle Dionne: The students seemed to me less stressed about writing on a computer (vs. in-class booklets). Comparing the writing to the in-class work done in Winter term (not on computers), I'd say the students wrote more and the papers are more organized, and certainly easier to read.

Becky Moore: I have tried the computer lab twice. Once I had 330s write English translations of poems in languages that they lived in at home or studied here at school. They saved these to LionsDen and then came into the lab and sent them to the computer. I was logged onto that was attached to the big tv screen. Vi was there the whole time to be sure all technology worked. We sat around the big table and faced the screen where we looked at various translations and I moused changes on my computer that the students were making. I could have had one of them running the mouse and another time I might. I wanted the screen to have the option of hanging vertically instead of horizontally so that we could see more of the text at once. I also was quite aware of the attention that we were all paying to the screen rather than to each other's faces -- a structure that I still wonder about in this arrangement.

For a second class I reserved fat block, assigned re-reading the 40 pages of TRANSLATIONS that the 330s had done so far, and then had them write on the computers for the full fat block. They had open books, notes, electronic data bases for o.e.d. and the Bible, as well as spell and grammar check. They had to think for 15 minutes before they could start writing and then wrote a p.s. in the last five minutes as well as printed out their pieces -- automatically double sided on the lab printer. I was pleased to see the level of specific writing that cited text well and posed questions and explored them. Several students commented that they had never done an in-class and that they found it hard while others said they had done some before and liked the intensity of focus.

This Week Down Under

Things are hopping down under the Elting Room. I've started calling the basement "Down Under," a much nicer term, and more Continental moniker for a Languages building, if you ask me. This week we saw visits from:

• Our principal, who showed snippets of hobbits for his Lewis/Tolkien course
• Christine Robinson, whose students viewed and discussed Kandahar
• Johnny Griffith, who held a writing workshop in the lab and watched Macbeth in the classroom (see Teacher Comments post for more about this)
• Eimer Page's class--they conversed about a film
• Temple Jordan's class practiced writing, speaking, and recording in Japanese
• Becky Moore's English writing students did some Internet research and then wrote
• Mario Alvarez and his French and Spanish classes watched digital Internet video and DVDs

The teachers tell me there is significant value in having a Harkness table at the ready so they can quickly move from activity to discussion without losing precious class time, something I was grateful for in my Phelps Science classroom.

In addition, the lab functions as a work and writing space for students all throughout the day and into the evening until 10 pm. My only regret is that I regularly have to kick students out who are working during their free periods if a class has signed up. For some students, who call this their primary workplace, that has been difficult and goes against the grain of my educator's cloth, since we teach them to find and stick with a place where they can be productive. Perhaps we'll eventually have sufficient space for both classes and students who (wisely) choose to use their frees to get some work done. Of course, there are also a few who are watching YouTube episodes of Lost to relax for a few minutes!

Symbolism

Evelyn Christoph's French class returned today for more experimentation with projection and the TabletPC. As part of the class on poetry, she brought up a picture of a painting to discuss its symbology. Immediately, the students responded by asking "can we just draw on it?" and they got up to the whiteboard and identified with markers the symbols it contained. Then they went back to the poem and used the same technique to locate its symbols. Evelyn described this great teaching moment as a fortunate accident of using the projector to bring richer meaning to the classroom discussion and to provide for greater involvement from the students.

Students Too

Today a student came to see me to ask if she could use the big screen to show a PowerPoint she had created for her English class. After a bit of technical difficulty we finally got it to play. Creative interpretation of literature, creative use of PowerPoint, and a little creative tech support.

This Week in Phillips Hall

• French classes watching French TV news over the Internet on the big screen.
• English classes viewing Shakespeare videos.
• AP Exam preparation and practice.
• Peer-editing of grammar and vocabulary on the projector.
• Japanese class recording audio and comparing it to native speaker audio.
• Spanish class Internet research on vocabulary and current events.

The Beats

The Beats class watches Kerouac et al. on the new plasma screen.

Japanese and Chinese AP Exams

Teachers and students prepare for the first-ever Internet-based AP exams in Chinese and Japanese.

Tablet PC Pilot Group

The TabletPC pilot group meets in the experimental classroom for their weekly meeting. The Academy is testing out a few mobile computing devices to see how well they integrate with the Harkness classroom. Here are some of the pilot participants, all on wireless connection, taking notes on their Tablets.

Instructional Technology Moments

Evelyn Christoph, technology committee representative for the Modern Languages department, has been testing out the "experimental" classroom this week with her French classes. The experiment involves trying out some new equipment now, since Phillips Hall is slated for a major renovation in Summer of 2009. It doesn't seem so, but that date is just around the corner and we need to get teacher/student input now to help inform choices of design and technology for the renovation.

This term, teachers will have access to plasma displays, projectors, TabletPCs, document cameras, and various room control systems.

Evelyn had what I described as an "Instructional Technology Moment" when she projected a drawing of a figure on the whiteboard and invited her students to come to the board and label the figure. The class came alive!

Open for Business!

We have recovered from the floods of last summer in the basement of Phillips Hall and have just opened a new lab and experimental classroom space. It is a very popular location for students, teachers, and classes. Here instructor Becky Moore holds a writing workshop with her English students.