geek.teacher

If you could have seen me this morning, you could have tasted my excitement.  It hung heavy in the air.

Today I completed my first Educational activity using a Web 2.0 tool.  My class made a map of our community using Google Maps.

But first, some background: I teach a class that we in the school district call “Intensive Learning Support.”  General characteristics of my students include:

 

• Very low academic levels, but too high to be in life skills
• Extremely immature, they mostly socialize on a level similar to young Elementary students, and many of them are also small for their age
• Wide variety of disabilities.  In recent year’s I’ve seen students with autism, mental retardation, specific learning disabilites, and other health impairments.
• Mostly adorable, eager to please, and very fun to be around.  

 

When I say low academic levels, we’re talking some frustrate on the pre-primer level in reading when I first get them in sixth grade.

After the conference last week, I couldn’t keep my brain from moving.  It would have melted if I tried.  So I started to work with it.  All day Saturday, I plotted and planned.  I thought about the kinds of things other sixth graders do.  Social Studies in sixth grade teaches Geography.  Easy fit.  What kinds of projects do they do?  They make maps of their neighborhoods on paper with coloring pencils.  How can we do that better?

Community mapping.  I figured out the ins and outs of My Maps.  I saw the possibilities.  I started to design a step by step set of directions.  My first one sucked, but the kids put up with it anyway.  I came up with some criteria.  I figured out how I would teach them.  Then I put my plan into action.

Day 1: Monday

I showed the kids GMaps on the projector.  We talked about uses for Maps.  I talked with them about how you can add your own stuff in.  I put in my address, and bam threw it in there.  My kids love it any time they get a peek into my private life.  Then I talked about finding stuff nearby.  I told them I really like the movie theater I can walk to, so I did a search for it and boom added it in.  Every step of the way I’m asking them to read the directions to me.  I’m not just doing it, they’re helping me do it.  Do they know GMaps can give directions?  Of course they don’t.  Minds are blown.  Guess what, kids?  You’re going to do this, too!  They practically cheer.

Day 2: Tuesday

Time to get to work.  I delete my stuff from the map, because this map will show their community, and I don’t live there.  To teach them how to add stuff in, they’ll start by adding in all the schools.  Again, they step by step me through the deal of adding in our school and the high school.  Now, who wants to add in one of the schools?  They all do!  Good thing we have eleventy-hundred schools (approximately) so there’s enough for everyone.  I pick some of the more savvy ones first, the ones who pay attention, and we get through it with some light prompting.  the others watch as we go through the same steps over and over.  By the time I get to the end, everybody’s added one school, and they need less help as we go through them.  Rock on, students who have a harder time understanding, you did better than the first couple kids.

Day 3: Wednesday

Want to find your way around town?  Let’s get some directions!  Every kid comes up, clicks on a school, then types in the address for our school.  Again, they get more confident as we move through, and everybody knows we need to click To Here.  I make sure it’s cool to use the computer lab and send an e-mail to invite an administrator to come see my kids work magic.*

Day 4: Thursday

They’re ready.  While my assistant gets homework and stuff collected, I run down the hall to the computer lab to log them all in to my google account and get them set up and ready to rock.  Permission from parents to use addresses: received.  All signs are go.

The mission:

• Type in address, save to map, assign an icon (Point A)
• Type in the name of a favorite store or restaurant, save to map, assign an icon (point B)
• Get directions from Point A to Point B

The breakdown: Kids need some help with making sure they typed correctly, and some of them asked for confirmation on things they already knew to do, but then, those kids always do that.  When a kid didn’t know the next step, half the time another kid helped them out and I didn’t need to intervene.  When they get directions, I show them Command+P to print, they go whoa and then run to show everybody else who’s ready to print.  If they finish early, they get to go to a url I set up with notlong and learn about states.

The final tally:

• 10 students
• 14 schools
• 10 home address
• 10 stores and restaurants
• 10 printed copies of directions from A to B
• 1 map with all of their information on it so pretty I could cry:

Mission accomplished.

During my prep I turned one of the bulletin boards in the hallway into a showcase for the project.  When they came back from related arts, the kids were juiced.  They all stopped to look at it, and they pointed to places they had put on the map.

Victory.  So, so sweet.  That sense I had?  That missing something in my development as a teacher?  This is it.

Welcome to the future, Mr. Callahan.  Try to keep up.

*He didn’t show.  Or write to say he couldn’t make it.

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