A lot of teachers would be uncomfortable with some of these avenues, but for me I truly believe that it has made my teaching more effective, (Research would seem to agree, Link 1, Link 2.) and it is the only way I know how to be. Many times I would see something on Facebook that I could discuss with the students during class the next day to build those connections, or a student would see something I posted about myself or Isaac and then we could use that to build a connection in class. I try to tell myself each year that I am not going to get as close to the students, but I can’t do it. I love teaching and I love it because of the students I get to meet. They change me for the better and hopefully the opposite is true. When the days are tough and I need a break from teaching, the kids are what get me up in the morning and keep me going. If I didn’t have a strong relationship with the students, I wouldn’t enjoy my job nearly as much. I wouldn’t know how to teach any other way.

On Scrubs Dr. Cox says he teaches through fear, but I can’t do that. I have too much fun being a goof with kids and interacting with them. Each day I am not sure what is going to happen in class, but it usually results in us laughing and having a good time. I’ve always believed that I can get more out of the students if they like me and want to work in class for me, if not for physics. Some people yell to manage their classes, but I like to use my relationship with the kids to manage the classroom.

Anyway, the point is that I formed some pretty strong relationships my students this year. I wouldn’t say it was with every student, but on the whole I felt closer to my students this year than any year in the past. One of my big fears in teaching had been that as I got older, I’m 29 now, I would start to lose touch with the students. I have actually found now that the opposite is true. This year I have found that more students have talked to me in an advice type sense than any other year. So, while my relationship with students is different than it was when I started teaching, I find that I am enjoying the new role I am in.

So, now the end of the year comes and I have to say good-bye to these wonderful young people. I do not know why this is so hard for me each year. Part of my says I only see these kids for 44 minutes a day for 180 days this shouldn’t be this hard. But, even knowing that, I feel a void when they leave. The truth of the matter is I see a lot of these kids more than that. Some come in for help, some come by to hang out, and some I just see other times. I love how things go for the first 9 months of the year, but the last week or so is just really depressing. I often refer to it as Post-Prom Depression. It is a rough week because the kids are stressed out and cranky because they are going through a bunch of emotions with high school ending and their teachers piling on projects. I have to battle with them to stay on task because they have senioritis yet I have to be the responsible one. At the same time I just want to hang out with them because they are going to be gone soon. This really makes closure tough to come by.

I try to do somethings to get closure. I give them a little speech with a couple of simple pieces of advice. Then I teach them how to tie a neck-tie. This year I started a new tradition by doing something that my high school calculus teacher Mrs. Courtney O’Berry did that was very memorable for me: I read them Oh The Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss. This was received well and I liked it.

Anyway, I am not really sure what I wanted out of this post. Mostly I just felt like I needed to get some thoughts off of my mind. I love teaching and interacting with students and I would never conduct myself in any other way than fully committed to building relationships with students. This year in particular I have grown particularly close to two students and they have helped me grow as a teacher and as a parent. They may never know they affect they have had on me just like I will never know the effect I have had on many students. I recently read a quote, The true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit. I don’t really like quoting other people, but this really sums up what I believe in a very elegant statement. I guess the hardest part is never knowing if the things I do on a daily basis have a positive lasting impact.

I will go one step further and say a lot of the adult users of Twitter are people who don’t have Facebook pages and if they did they would probably use Twitter a lot less. Also, I think teens don’t use Twitter as much because cell phones are treated like a cancer in high schools. If we tried to embrace this technology rather than shun it, we might fine that we can make good things happen.

That begs the question, why do I use Twitter.

I started using Twitter just because I wanted to see what it was all about. I think social networking it great, I recently read a nice blog post about how it can build good community efforts, and I think social networking on-line has improved my off-line relationship. Specifically with my students and in other areas of my life too.

I started using Twitter at about the same time I started using Facebook mobile to read status updates and to update my own. (I love status updates because I love to know what people are doing, I don’t know why, I just like the information of what is happening — It can lead to good conversations later on.) So, at the time I started using Twitter I didn’t really see the need.

Then I discovered that I could link Twitter and Facebook. Not only did this give me a good use of Twitter, but it also allowed to me save a text message because Facebook sends you an annoying verification text when you update your status. Once I made that transition I started to use Twitter a little more, but didn’t see the greater purpose.

I went to the Illinois Computer Educators conference recently and everyone there was Twitter this and Twitter that and one of hot applications there was Tweetdeck. I downloaded this and my whole vision of Twitter changed. Now I could have several different Twitter searches open at once and also see the hot or trending topics at a given moment in time. This allowed to truly get a feel for the pulse of the Internet.

Now, I have started to use the Selective Twitter Status on Facebook so I can post tweets that aren’t always status updates. This means I can interact in Twitter a lot more frequently and I can use it post links to interesting articles to my Twitter followers (who mostly my Facebook friends too, but not all) without having them in my status updates. This is really going to enhance my use of both tools.

I don’t know exactly where this whole social networking world is headed, but I am excited!

Twitter Project — Questionnaire 2 (After the 1st Weekend)

Twitter Project — Letter (E-Mail) to Parents

Purpose: To determine if Twitter can be a useful tool in a high school physics classroom.

Hypothesis: Twitter will not be a useful tool in a high school physics classroom. (Note: For those of you who have not enetered the world of academic reasearch yet, this hypothesis may seeem odd. If this is your educated guess, why would you even bother? This is what is referred to as a null hypothesis. You assume that the change in the variables will have no effect and then you measure you data from that.)

Useful: These are some of the data that will be examined to determine usefulness:

• Forgetting About the Homework
• Homework Completion
• Class Relationships
• Reduced Frustration or Anxiety About Homework

Anticipated Procedure: Students will voluntarily sign up for Twitter accounts and follow the appropriate class account. Mr. Kupfer will send out a daily homework tweet after 4:30 each day. Students will be able to read this tweet and respond if necessary. Other tweets may be sent out each day as necessary. These other tweets might be interesting links to articles about class topics or information about class projects.

Rationale: Twitter is one of the fastest growing applications on the Internet. Many educational technology folks are discussing how to use Twitter in the classroom and we are joining the masses. In many cases, Twitter is a much more useful tool for information dissemination because people can check Twitter a lot more easily that there e-mail or a website. Twitter can be used to distribute information in a variety of fashions and in a variety of the fields.

Twitter Project — Questionnaire 1 (Before the project is announced)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8

When I watch a video like this (I have seen similar one before) I feel extremely overwhelmed. The amount of knowledge and information out there is so huge. I find myself constantly saying that the combined knowledge of the world is at our fingertips and we just need to start taking advantage of it. Look at the growth of Facebook, and that was primarily with college students. Also, Facebook was free and televisions weren’t but those number are still huge.Now, I wonder if Twitter is going to beat that to be biggest fastest.

That there are more texts sent each day then people in the world, Holy Cow! Adults often just mock the younger generation and their texting, but to ignore the phenomenon is just ignorant. The Technology Tailor on WGN Radio, Alex Goldstein (or something like that) constantly mocksFacebook and Twitter and says he has no need for them, but it is getting to a point where you don’t have a choice. The world is communicating in these ways, and people who shun the technological change will be like people who rejected TV for radio until that battle was over.

I love knowledge and information, but I think we need to figure out how to handle all of it and what exactly it is that we need to teach kids. The fact that a weeks worth of newspaper is equivalent to a lifetime of knowledge for a previous generation (I don’t remember which century) is staggering. And schools now are trying to teach all of it to kids by the time they are 18. Information that used to be taught to seniors is now taught to freshmen and they are often not ready to hear it and don’t retain it.

Fundamentally I often think we need to take a step back and evaluate what we are teaching and train students to be learners independent of what they learn. I have often thought to myself that my true goal is to make myself obsolete. I have not accomplished this yet, but it would be a glorious day if we could equip all students with the skills to fight for those jobs that aren’t even thought of yet.

That in and of itself is a powerful idea and I am going to mention that the reason they have to learn whatever area of physics  hasn’t been invented yet so they better pay attention.

On a side note, I would like to define web 2.0. Web 2.0 technologies are technologies that utilize two-way information. For example, a blog is a web 2.0 technology. I can make a post about a topic, and someone else can post back. I wiki is a web 2.0 tool. We can all work together to create a document. It is not a new kind of internet, but a new way of thinking about the internet as explained by wikipedia:

The term first became notable after the O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but rather to changes in the ways software developers and end-users utilize the Web. According to Tim O’Reilly:

Web 1.0 was either me posting information or me reading information. (One way communication.) Web 3.0 looks like it will be people’s attempt to make money off of web 2.0 technologies (like Facebook and Twitter.)

The first three session I went to were all about web applications and free websites to use in your classroom. Overall I found the information to be overwhelming. There are so many awesome tools out there that I don’t even know how I would have time to test them all out and remember to use them. A problem I often have is that I find a really cool program, but then forget about it later when it would perhaps be helpful.

One was called the Free Software Circus. This presentation first highlighted some new sites I hadn’t heard of and the several free and open source programs (FOSS) I had heard of. The man giving the presenation, Dr. Philip Lacey, said something very interesting that I will use again. He said that it takes at least 25 instances for a teacher to become comfortable enough with a program to realistically teach with it. Here is a link to the circus, it really does have a nice list of products/site.

SoftwareCircus ?(Phil Lacey’s Ed Tech Arena)? via kwout

The other session I went too focused on this idea too. The presenter there gave us approx 7 sites to view all of which were free web tools. One exampe is the program I used above, kwout, to cut that image off of another website and paste it to my blog. The imagine is a link and it is also hotmapped with other links if they are in the picture.

The conference was good and I am glad I went. I think I may try to present next year on something involving Moodle, but I am not sure yet.  The conference really has got me thinking about how we need to change the way we educate to take into account the technolgies we have available. I was just telling my students today that they live in a golden age of information where the collective knowledge of the world is at their fingertips and they need to take advantage of it. As educators, I am pretty sure we are not taking advantage of it, and we need to figure out how to change what we do adapt to the world before it passes us by.

I am traditionally not very talented at grading in a timely fashion. Between coaching, planning, and family, it gets pushed to a later time. I know I need to do grade to help the students learn, but it is very time consuming and the kids don’t seem to appreciate ite it. Anyway, I am trying to turn that around this quarter and I going to try and grade in a more timely fashion.