I don’t spend all that much time looking at theory… I like to find something and use it… figure it out, fine tune it later…
In my science classes I have my kids do a daily journal. The warm-up notebook was an idea I came up with last year for several reasons. The main problem I was addressing was with my administrators. I get so excited as kids walk in the room with questions and comments I love to touch base right away and often dive right in to the days gameplan. The problem from the administrations point of view was that I was very inconsistent in taking role right at the beginning of class. To solve this I started the warm-up notebook. They take 3-5 minutes for their daily entry. They find the question on the board and write it, along with the date. They then write several complete sentences, sometime a table or a drawing or a graph etc. When I feel I’ve given enough time to adequately answer the question without wasting time, we discuss it as a class. Some of these discussions have lasted the entire period. What a great day! At times the warm-up discussion relates to new material we will be learning. We can use it as review, as we move along to new content. We can use it to get organized to begin a lab, or to make some connections before we embark on day two or three of some labs, we use it to brainstorm ideas for upcoming projects, or sometimes to just discuss current events in our subject area. Among the greatest advantages of this practice is to get the students to become better writers. It does not matter what subject you teach, part of the job is to make students better writers.
So this is where the exciting web 2.0 part comes in… a couple times per month or maybe weekly we have the kids start a warm-up wiki. The kids will each post their warm-ups for that week into the wiki. Then require them to spend an equal amount of time reading each other’s wikis and commenting, correcting, editing, etc. Then we can really start using 2.0 for some stuff we couldn’t do before, and definitely using the technology in a new, efficient, productive way. I can have each student get a profile and keeping track of “grades” for the project will be easy by just looking at their stats in terms of entries, edits, and comments. I’m really excited to start trying this!!!
Watch at your own risk, a little bit of rough language but some great right wing conspiracy!
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Jasper, I have also used the warm up questions (I call them "Brainstorming Question of the Day") in this way, mainly to get the students settled down and get into the right frame of mind quickly. It also provides a great way to find out preconceptions they have about the topic at hand. I love the idea of a Warm up Wiki, maybe they could make entries at the beginning and at the end of each topic...
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I couldn't watch the video you posted at the bottom (not sure if it's because I'm at a place where they block videos, so could just be my connection...)