Week of September 15-19, 2014
Cores 1 & 3 learned the word "plausible" this week. Core 2 didn't do that word yet, because they've been reading The Outsiders for homework and writing reflections, and we had a discussion instead of vocabulary. C2 finished The Outsiders by Friday and are now ready to begin the assessment project, the five-page beginning of the sequel to The Outsiders. Core 1 & 3 are reading the book in class.

For three days, all classes had the computer cart, and they jumped into some big learning: they researched topics about culture in 1965, saving notes and sources in a Google Doc. They roughed out storyboards for a video created in WeVideo, a free online movie-maker app through Google. They learned to find and save pictures to use in their projects and started the video in WeVideo, which will teach them how to use the app.

On day one, there were a few yelps of fear and outright screams of fright, but, by day three, everyone was working at their own pace and had reached some level of comfort with searching, saving, and video creation. I kept reminding them that what they were doing is indeed very difficult, but that the best way to learn is hands-on and through their own mistakes. As some picked up faster than others, I encouraged them to help students around them, because they are able to help each other very well--and there's only one of me! They will use all of these skills during the year and will be old pros by June. (The two first pictures above are core 2 working on research.)

We ended on Friday without the cart (all brains, including mine, were feeling a little bruised after three intense days of work learning three tough skills), and I handed out packets that contained a copy of the first page of four websites and a worksheet to evaluate them. I explained that the average reader on the Internet decides within two seconds to keep reading a page or click away. The exercise was to determine what about the website made them decide immediately if it looked genuine and worthwhile or not. I know students want to find good information in one click, save it, and be done. Deciding if the information is true or good isn't something they WANT to do.

I asked them to get into groups of three and in ten minutes go through the sites using the criteria on the worksheet to decide which was the one fake site. The sites were www.flightradar24.com (in the post-9/11 world, do we really show all the airplane flights in the world as they happen?), mulletpassions.com (a dating site based on having a mullet), alexchiu.com (a site selling that products that are too good to be true), and dhmo.org (a site warning of the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide). The last site was the fake one, because dihydrogen monoxide is water. Alex Chiu's products may be a scam, but it's a real site that will be glad to take your money. We had very interesting and informative discussions about what was behind their decisions. (I don't like mentioning SOLs, but evaluating websites for information is part of the writing SOL in March.)

ECO: We focused on angry customers this week. If the students get their employment certificates and find a job, they will definitely encounter unhappy or angry customers. We watched a training video on how to deal with the customers, then role-played being the Walmart employee and being the angry customer using complaints from the Walmart complaint site. We also watched a video someone had captured at a GameStop of an annoyed customer confronting the manager. The manager then escalated the situation through a series of bad choices. The students identified how and why the situation went downhill.

Encore: We continued Honus and Me using discussion and a graphic organizer for cause and effect. The bottom picture is Encore's working in partners to complete the graphic organizer.

REMINDER: SCHOOL PICTURES ON SEPTEMBER 23.