All Classes: Higher Purpose of Doodling

Interested to hear what folks might think about this video.

How might you experiment with this sort of thinking?

How might you take your own doodles to the next level of being purposeful?

Humanities: Continued w Extreme by Design

Today we started with Roots 8 Quiz.

Then we watched the rest of Extreme by Design.

This was followed by an explanation of the Habits of Mind assessment due next Thursday:

Using your Google Drive, create folders to collect evidence of  your strengths and weakness for each of the 16 habits of mind.

What evidence might you include?
 Screenshots of blog posts, calendars, tweets, FB statuses, etc.
Photos and art
Interviews with friends and family and neighbors
Video footage
Scripts and dialogues
Written explanations

Look in the Humanities OUT folder for an example of how to organize it and what sorts of evidence to collect.

HOMEWORK

Blog: 3+ posts
Req'd: Post your thinking on Extreme by Design.  What do you think about the ideas being shared here? What do you think about this work?  What if Mt. Blue Campus students did this sort of work?

Habits of Mind Assessment (Strengths & Weaknesses)
Due: Thursday, Jan 22

Roots: Quiz & Product 8
Due TODAY

Missing Work: Get It In!
Due: ASAP!

Humanities: Habits of Mind, Howe & Howe & Extreme by Design

We are just hammering you with big thinking right now and here comes some more . . .

We'll start with an opt-in MUGS activity to help you with "your/you're" before your quiz on Wednesday.  If you'd like to participate, work with Mr. Ryder on one side of the room.  You may choose to use this time to blog instead, if you feel like you don't need any help understanding the differences between your and you're.

From there, we will do a sorting activity based on the learning styles quizzes you took the other day. You will be up.  You will be moving.  It will be most fantastic.

That takes us to watching a couple of videos that tie in directly to all the work we've been doing with design thinking, habits of mind, and learning styles.

One is this episode of SplitScreen with Shannon Moss featuring the Howe Brothers from Howe & Howe.


The other is a preview of a design thinking documentary we'll be watching in chunks this week, Extreme by Design. 

You can see even more a preview here and more of the documentary here.


We'll be using a variety of strategies to help capture our thinking about these videos and how they tie into the work we've been doing with Habits of Mind.

HOMEWORK
MUGS Quiz  NEXT CLASS!
Habits of Mind Assessment next Thursday and Friday!
Roots Quiz Thursday!

Get your missing work IN!!!!  Revisions!

Humanities: Knockout & Habits of Mind & Blogging

Today we'll start with an activity to help with vocab, in particular, Roots 8. Knock out.  Roots style. Boom.

From there we will consider the work we have done for the past couple of days and figure out which of the Habits of Mind we've been practicing.  Yup, we've been focused on metacognition, but which of the others as well?

Then we'll briefly review the article we read on metacognition from BrainFacts.org and we will blog.  We'll look at "What If" 2014 over in the right side bar, as well as the other tools under "blogging prompts & rubric" and you will be set up to do your own list on your blog.

That will lead to the survey on learning styles from Edutopia that we didn't take yesterday. Take screen shots. Posts your results.


HOMEWORK

Blog: 3+ posts
Req'd Post: Create your own list of "What If's" for 2014.  Look at Mr Ryder's example in the right sidebar.  He's posted his huge list. 
Due: Friday, Jan 11

Study: Roots 8 (& 6, 7)
Quiz: Thursday, Jan 16
Complete: Word Map or Product for Roots 8 

Practice: MUGS your/you're
Quiz: No Red Ink, Wed Jan 15 

Submit: Missing closing arguments & story corps/photo essays;  self assessments
Put in Humanities IN folder on Google Drive

What We Did: Humanities Jan 8th

Pics of our work with metacognition and paired think alouds on Wednesday, Jan 8th.

Reading and thinking solo

Think alouding and annotating in pairs

Metacognition paint chips

Filling out a LNGview reflection form after going through the process

Humanities: LNGview, Metacognition, No Red Ink & More

Metacognition & LNG View

We're going to follow a process to practice our metacognition

1. Read this article from BrainFacts.org on metacognition.

Important: Only read up to this moment here

(Of course, you can always go back and read more later.)

2.  Use our paint chip to determine your level of understanding of the article.  Record that.

3.  Read it again.

4.  Use the paint chip to determine your level of understanding of the article after the second reading.  Record that.

5. Work with a partner and think aloud through the article.  This should leads to lots of talking through and lots of scribbling on the paper copies provided.

6. Use the paint chip to determine your level of understanding after the thinkalouding.

7. Complete the LNGview form (it will be in your inbox) and be sure to include the levels of understanding you had at each step.

No Red Ink
Common Mistakes: Your/You're #1 is in the assignment section.  After LNGview go there and tackle that assignment.  It serves as a pre-assessment for the upcoming quiz.

• Your = possessive 

Four months ago, I borrowed your copy of Miley Cyrus' latest album and never gave it back.  Sorry.

• You're = contraction of "You are"

You're a tremendous friend for only texting me 47 times to bring that Miley Cyrus album back.  Seriously.

Edutopia: Learning Styles Quiz

After No Red Ink, complete this survey and be certain to record your results by taking screenshots.

Talking about the results would make a really great blog post.  Actually, everything you do in class today could make a great blog post.  Take pictures of your thinkaloud notes and put them up on your blog (make sure to flip them if you use your laptop to take the pics).


HOMEWORK

Blog: 3+ posts
Req'd Post: Create your own list of "What If's" for 2014.  Look at Mr Ryder's example in the right sidebar.  He's posted his huge list. 
Due: Friday, Jan 11

Study: Roots 8 (& 6, 7)
Quiz: Thursday, Jan 16
Complete: Word Map or Product for Roots 8 

Practice: MUGS your/you're
Quiz: No Red Ink, Wed Jan 15 

Submit: Missing closing arguments & story corps/photo essays;  self assessments
Put in Humanities IN folder on Google Drive

Humanities: Habits of Mind & Metacognition

Today we dove into "Thinking About Your Thinking: Metacognition," one of the most important habits of mind to be successful in school.

We'll started with a pre-assessment of Roots #8.  These scores will be recorded and when we take the quiz next Thursday, after we do all sorts of activities and thinking around these terms, the goal is that your scores improve.  And if you've already mastered them without that thinking & learning?  AWESOME. You need not stress about the quiz.

This was followed by a self-assessment of our Habits of Mind.  We did this by hand.  Hopefully lots of people took pics of their thinking and posted them to their blogs.

Mr. Dunbar introduced metacognition through the metacognition paint chip rubric.

My thinking is crystal clear; 

My thinking is a little hazy; 

My thinking is cloudy; 

My thinking is in a fog 

We used that thinking as we did a think aloud activity around Lucille Clifton's "miss rosie"

Notice the big Q's getting asked; all student markup except first stanza & "self mirror"

HOMEWORK

Blog: 3+ posts
Req'd Post: Create your own list of "What If's" for 2014.  Look at Mr Ryder's example in the right sidebar.  He's posted his huge list.
Due: Friday, Jan 11

Study: Roots 8 (& 6, 7)
Quiz: Thursday, Jan 16
Complete: Word Map or Product for Roots 8 

Submit: Missing closing arguments & story corps/photo essays;  self assessments
Put in Humanities IN folder on Google Drive

Humanities: miss rosie think aloud

Humanities: Habits of Mind Work Continues

Thursday, you have two options.

1) Completing the missing work  that demonstrates your understanding of the Of Mice & Men/Poverty Culture unit.

Or

2) Create a short film, play or comic strip that demonstrates your understanding of four of the sixteen habits of mind and where they have appeared in our work thus far this year.

This extends from the work we did on Tuesday and Wednesday, paraphrasing the Habits of Mind, identifying those we think most critical to understanding, and then doing some work around our strengths and weaknesses.

All of this is so we can best identify ways of developing our habits of mind moving forward and so Mr. Dunbar & I can develop a system of tracking and reporting your growth.

Here's some pics of the work we did.

HOMEWORK

Blog: 3+ Posts 
Req'd Post of the Week:  What do you think of these habits of mind?  Why do they seem important?  How well developed are these habits for you?
Due: Friday, December 20

Study & Complete Roots 7: Product & Quiz
Due: Thursday, December 19 TODAY!!!!

Projects & Arguments, Self Assessments & Reflections
Due: ASAP

Humanities: Introducing the Habits of Mind

I know they were in your guidelines and expectations at the beginning of the year, along side academic initiative.

Perhaps we should have done this before now, but here we are going to dive into the Habits of Mind.  What they mean and how we can develop them.

We started class today with an improv game called "World's Worst."  We've played it before, but I had forgotten.  We started with breakfast cereals and worked up to scenes of the world's worst students.

Then we went to BlueLab and did some brainstorming with post-it notes and big ol' tables.  We identified qualities that make up:

• good students
• good leaders
• good employees
• good problem solvers

We noticed that these four groups of people share very similar positive qualities.

From there, we handed out an explanation of the 16 Habits of Mind from Costa & Kallick.

From Mindwerx.com

Each of those habits was printed on a different sheet of paper.  We sorted our qualities of effective leaders, problem solvers, students and employees on to the different habits based only on what we could figure out from the sheets.  No teaching has happened yet, so this is a scary place to be.

We took some time to check our work after this sort.

And then we reflected by adding "I Noticed/I Wonder/I Think/I Want" statements to a white board using post-its. (This way we can do some prioritizing on Tuesday.)

HOMEWORK

Blog: 3+ Posts 
Req'd Post of the Week:  What do you think of these habits of mind?  Why do they seem important?  How well developed are these habits for you?
Due: Friday, December 20

Study & Complete Roots 7: Product & Quiz
Due: Thursday, December 19

Projects & Arguments, Self Assessments & Reflections
Due: ASAP