Thanks for sharing on my blog about study guides. Your professor had an interesting approach to getting students to take notes. I could see how focus on developing the notes would assist students in understanding the material. You mention you are using foldable notes. I spent some time at the beginning of class showing how students take notes on the front of a page and then fold to cover what they wrote. Then they wrote questions related to the notes on the blank side showing. This way they could go back and quiz themselves. When in doubt just open the fold and see the notes. Is this the same method? Like to hear how your approach works.

I also have another challenge (which is a good challenge) but we have a 1 to 1 computer program for students. So students tend to use their computer to either type notes (which means they can print them out and do what i was talking about). But many of them just use the ppt I provide and type in the note section.

Anyway thats again for sharing look forward to hearing more of your ideas.

You know Kate, the truth is that there's just nothing like building trusting relationships to keep them coming back for more. Sometimes it feels like I'm bashing my head into brick walls trying to get them to learn some science, but in the end I figure that at least if they're coming to school, they haven't closed their lives to education. Perhaps in time, some of them will remember an interest that we kindled, but in the meantime at least their away from their gangs and off the streets among adults showing interest in their welfare.

My greatest success has been since getting a Promethean ActivBoard (interactive whiteboard) in my classroom. I can engage even the hardest of the hard to reach with this technology. The challenge, of course, is designing the learning space for those interactions to build understanding of science content. While there are a lot of resources out there for IWB and science, many are just new clothes on old pedagogy. This is what builds my fascination in game theory, as essentially every kid I work with accesses games in a regular manner. Perhaps...

I think part of it is that the interactive component draws upon their fear of looking stupid in front of peers, so they end up paying more attention to what leads up to the assessment pieces. Having said that, I'm suddenly wondering if it's such a good idea to move past that to acquire assessment data through the use of hand-held input devices. With these, students can answer open-ended questions by texting their responses to the board, where the software puts the responses up on the board with codes for the individual response units. While I know who responded with what, the class only sees all the responses without their identifying information. My sudden concern is that this could return us to the place where students zoned out because they weren't doing anything that could make them look stupid in front of peers. With this, while I know who might not have responded or who blew off the question with a valueless response, other students don't know who did what. Wow, it's amazing how these collaborative reflections can be so eye-opening.

What you said about the likeness of our students is certainly true. For the first time, this year we're getting students who should have been tested for EBD prior to their expulsions. They send them to us as a holding area while awaiting testing, since their home schools are pretty much done with them. The trouble with that is after they are determined to have EBD, they end up staying with us--we're not a least restrictive environment, to be sure. The EBD determination usually results in reversing their expulsion, but they stay because there really isn't anyone else stepping up to take them back into the general ed population. None of my colleagues nor I (all 4 of us) are certified for special ed, and I believe these students deserve better than that.

I see all the work ahead to move my curriculum into the gaming-type environment, and while I really want to do that, time doesn't allow that commitment right now. I started brainstorming about ways to do this for my ecology class yesterday, and I lost a good half day before realizing I can't do a sufficient job with this at the same time I'm teaching it. It's going to require a good deal more concentration to put it together well. Thanks to you, Chris, and others, the path to it looks clearer and clearer without blazing ahead on my own. Thanks!