but it’s only four days until my book launch party day! I’m done with everything! I’ve finished writing, correcting edits, fixing margins, deciding on photos, researching categories. Now it’s time to let amazon work it’s magic. They get to do whatever it is that they do . Then I go public on Wednesday July 22nd and become (fingers crossed) and number 1 best selling author! I CANNOT wait.
A curiosity table. That’s what I call it. Whenever my students have a free minute (which rarely happens), I encourage them to investigate the materials on the curiosity table in our classroom.
Today I added something new—an Atmospheric Mat . 
It was a gift from my good friends at Educational Innovations. This unusual and uniquely shaped article elicited intense curiosity from my students. They wanted to know what it was, how to make it work, what you could use it for, and what was the science behind it. “Figure it out,” I told them.
As I watched them explore and experiment, I realized this mat was much more than something to elicit my students’ curiosity. It was a way to teach them what scientists do.
Students first keyed in on the fact that the texture of the surface mattered. They decided to try to lift a desk. The surfaces of our desks are very smooth; we use them as whiteboards. They could lift the desk a little, but not very far.
Deciding that it was because of the smoothness of the surface (as opposed to the weight of the desk), they decided to try something a bit rougher. Success. A rougher surface seemed to work better. The fact that the second object was lighter was not obvious to them.
Next, they decided to try the hallway floor, given that it is concrete and supposedly rougher. Obviously, they were not trying to lift the floor, but rather to see how hard they needed to pull on the mat before it came loose. The floors in our hallway are sealed, which makes them relatively smooth. This meant that the floor in the hallway did not give much more information about how the Atmospheric Mat worked.
To get back into the room from the hallway, students needed open the door. Why not see whether the Atmospheric Mat had the ability to open the door? This trial was followed by hoots and yells as the door opened.
This prompted a huge influx of questioning. Students tested the mat on the wall. They tested it on the board. They tested on their iPads (which did not work, because the iPads are too small). Would they reach a point where the surface was too rough?
Each test gave additional data which led to additional questions about how and why the Atmospheric Mat works. They even tried using it upside down, expecting that it would behave like a suction cup.
As you can see, this is an incredible tool to study forces and atmospheric pressure… and more. At some point, I’ll bring up the fact that there are no “sucking” forces in science. We’ll figure out together that the roughness of the surface isn’t what makes it hard to pull off an object. That’s it’s atmospheric pressure. But for now, the Atmospheric Mat is a tool that I’m going to continue using to ignite my students’ curiosity. I’m going to let my students explore it for as long as they want. Their exploration won’t be driven by me; their curiosity will be what drives them.
At the end of the day, when it was time to stack our chairs, one of my students asked me if she could use the Atmospheric Mat to lift her chair onto the top of the pile. “Give it a try,” I said. She was delighted when it worked and worked very well.
“Hey, Mrs. Foote,” she said after the chairs were stacked, “I feel like a scientist today.”
“You are!” I told her. And it was all due to the Atmosphere Mat that I put on the curiosity table.
Anyone who knows me at all knows that my most precious resource is not my money. It is my time. Given time I can make more money. But I cannot make more time.
That’s why it’s critically important that things are streamlined for me as a teacher. I want to spend my time focusing on kids – on their strengths and on their areas that need work. I don’t want to spend my time trying to figure out how to take attendance or how to put in grades or how to make assignments available to them. I want to spend my time working with kids.
At my current school, my technology situation is doable; it would be great if it were streamlined. I have one 
program I use for grades. I have a learning management system that’s completely separate from my grade program. I have a class website using a third system. When I post an assignment, I have to post it on my class website, upload the document in two separate places on a daily basis. There’s my learning management system. It’s great and I love it! But it’s one more thing for me to do. I have to make sure I upload the assignments and any resources as well as any links. I seem to spend more time posting assignments than I spend reviewing them.
This summer I went to the ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) conference in Denver. And I searched for gold. And I searched and I searched and I search. And I actually found it a few times.
I’m a sucker for tee shirts. Especially cool ones with cool sayings. I was walking around the exhibition hall and I noticed a tee shirt that said, “This is what awesome looks like.” I had to have it. Of course to get the shirt I was going to have to listen to what they had to say. But I’d do it! Anything to get my hands on one of those tee shirts. But there was another treat. If you got caught wearing the tee shirt, you could randomly select a gift card. If I’m a sucker for tee shirts, I’m an even bigger one for gifts cards! Especially Amazon gift cards!
I walked into the booth, just to get the shirt. I was skeptical but I listened attentively to their demo. I wasn’t sure that I was the right demographic, thinking that they needed more district level people. I am a classroom teacher. What I heard absolutely blew me away. One place where I could have my grade book, my learning management system, my class calendar, the class website. All. In. One. Place. I began to imagine the time savings that it would give me. I started thinking about the ease of use for students and their parents. I was so excited I could hardly stand it.
That’s what eChalk ( www.echalk.com ) is about. It’s the one-stop shop for everything that you need for your class. Want to post homework? Use eChalk. Need to put something on your class calendar? Use eChalk. Grades? eChalk. Tests, quizzes? eChalk. Have a place to host PLC discussions? eChalk.
I’ve often said if you want to give me a gift, give me the gift of time. eChalk does that and more. It’s hard to believe that it can do all this but it can. I’m eager to give it a try. And I will let you know how it goes.
In the meantime, if you want to know what awesome looks like, take a look at eChalk. They do.
Want to strike fear, disgust and dismay into the heart of any middle school students? Tell them that in class today they are going to “do a worksheet” or that you have a packet for them. Eyes will roll, groans will erupt, and kids will shut down. According to students, worksheets are boring busywork that teachers assign when they have something else they want to do. They are useless time wasters.
Except when they aren’t. Because sometimes they’re not. Practice is important. It’s not reasonable to expect that a student who has been exposed to an idea only once can sudden apply that idea appropriately in a problem based setting. It’s not always feasible to have concept application be problem based, although it would be nice if it was feasible. Sometimes I need my kids to practice. Not practice in a drill-and-kill kind of way, but practice in a simulation, word-problem, answer the question kind of way. Practice is a – dare I say it? – worksheet kind of way.
But to call it a worksheet is a kiss of death. So I began to reflect. Part of this is my National Board Certification mindset, part of it is my natural geekiness for data and rationale, part of it is my how-can-I -get-the-kids-to-eat-their-vegetables mindset. Why do I need them to complete this practice/application? What will they get out of it? If I can justify to myself that it is a valuable use of time (which, by the way, is my most valuable resource), I’ll assign it. If not, it gets discarded.
I needed to find a way to spin the work – to but a label on it other than worksheet. The label needed todescribe why the assignment was made and what I wanted to achieve. I tried changing “homework” to “home fun” for a year. It did not work for me. I was not eager to repeat that mistake and I knew I wouldn’t. Changing homework to home fun only changed the label and not the content. The stuff was the same. The difference was what I called it. (It reminded me of Andrew Clement’s book Frindle. Nick starts called a pen a frindle, and his friends do too. It’s still a pen, it just has a different name.)
I decided to call it a “Learning Opportunity” or LO for short. That’s what it is. It is an opportunity for a student to learn. The emphasis is on the LEARNING, not on the working or the keeping busy. It’s all about learning.
It’s working really well for me. Students don’t fight LOs. They don’t roll their eyes. They don’t moan and complain. They get right down to work because, after all, they have been given an opportunity to LEARN.
The Unintentional Geek 