Reflection

As I reflect back on this project, there are two main things that come to mind.  First, that I am really proud of all the students and their hard work but secondly, I think the project was too big.  I think that the next time I work on a project like this that I will scale down the size and content.  While the finished product is wonderful, the process got a little too stressful at times, not only for the kids–but for me!  🙂

I would like to have had more time to work with the students on their writing skills.  Some of them were able to go back and revise their work quickly and accurately based on my corrections and suggestions, others just didn’t have that skill and I would have really liked to have helped them more–maybe even partnered with a Language Arts class, not just for the editing of the finished product, but for partner work on revising drafts of the different sections.

I certainly had grandiose ideas and maybe if our class time was more than the 36 minutes a day that we have we would have been able to fit everything in.  I just don’t know.  I had also planned to add games to test knowledge of what our visitors read on the webpages which never even started due to time (and exhaustion) and another part of the project that only one of the students was able to get to was to create facebook pages for the composers.  I think both of these are projects that can be done in another class and we can take our time and really work on the creation process as well as the final product.

I couldn’t be happier with the work the students have done.  They have accomplished something that not all students will have the opportunity to do as well as something that will be on display for years to come.  There are still a few things that need to be polished but for now, we are all just stepping back and enjoying the view.  I hope to continue to do similar projects in the future.

Student Editors

I was so sidetracked about the plagiarism issue that I forgot to mention that Friday was also the day that the AIG LA class did the editing work on our site.  It went FANTASTICALLY!!!!!!!

As luck would have it, four of my own students were in the class, so since they had the authorization to get into the site and edit it they made themselves available for changes and as the other students found mistakes they went to them to get the changes immediately into the site.

The class worked in teams of two and checked spelling, grammar, structure, clarity and all that jazz.  Then they also went through and checked links and references to make sure everything was correct.  They worked really hard and all of the pages except one are done and checked!

One of the pages, unfortunately, is going to have to be mostly redone.  I have taken over a section and some of the students have taken over others so we can get everything ready for the deadline on Thursday.  On Thursday, we have our piano recitals and after the students play I will have logged into all of the computers in my room so they can show their parents the completed work of the WLMS Music History Website.

Plagiarism :(

Well, we have some plagiarism on our site.  I cannot begin to express my disappointment in this discovery.  Both instances were on the same page and to make matters worse, one of the plagiarized pieces of information was from Wikipedia–a site they are not even allowed to use for reference.

Usually I would penalize this with a grade of zero, however, the first instance was just discovered and in my haste to get things graded (did I mention that this project was way to big for one teacher?) I did not take enough care in my grading to notice the stolen section and that grade is from the previous nine weeks.  The second already has a zero because the work was not turned in so I have no grades to penalize.

I did have a long and serious talk with both of the students today.  For one, this is not the first time the student has done this.  I tried to impress upon them that in high school it was severely punished, but most importantly that, in college, plagiarism was an offense that could get them expelled.  I asked them to be mature enough to go home and initiate a conversation with their parents about this incident and state that they would never do it again.

Cool News

We have a reporter from our local newspaper coming to class on Monday to interview the students about their experience with the webpage project.  The kids are very excited and are all planning to “look good” that day in case she takes some pictures.  I couldn’t help but laugh.  Guess I’ll “look good” too.

HELP!!!

As this project nears its end I am realizing that this was really too big of a project to tackle in one semester of 36 minute classes.  Not only for the students but for me.  Several of the students need so much help with their writing skills and there just isn’t time to let them do the revisions they need to do.  In order to do that, the students would need to continue submitting drafts to me for correction and suggestions and really allowing them to do that on their own from my feedback could take a week a section.  I think also, if this project was all the students had to do it would have been doable but we are talking creating a webpage as well as being responsible for playing 8 songs on the piano and writing their own composition.  That is a lot to ask of anyone.  So, unfortunately (as I think they would have gotten a lot of valuable language arts skills out of spending more time on writing and revising) I have asked some other teachers to help me proofread and make corrections.

Then another idea dawned on me that I thought would be very exciting and it uses some cross curricular integration.  I talked to our AIG language arts teacher and asked her if she thought one of her classes would be interested in looking at our site and doing some editing.  Not only in the language arts aspect of grammar, spelling, etc. but also checking our links and references to make sure everything was in order.  She said YES!

Back to School, Back to Work

First day back, some of the pages were still incomplete.  The students who need to finish worked on them today in class but the grades are done, they have had plenty of time to complete this.  Not too happy about that.

On a good note, I have decided that the pages are a little too uniform in their layout so I found a great website with some very tasteful buttons and bars that the students could add to their pages.  They have free choice from this site of whatever they want to add to make their page more individual.  They are already excited at that prospect and I think they will enjoy adding their own personal touches.

Dedication!

Exciting news!  I have received email communication from two students about work they are doing on their page over break and I have looked at the wiki and seen new work posted by two others.  YAY!  I am very excited that they care enough about this project to put in this extra time.  Life is good!

Final Due Date

I just realized that I start a lot of my blog entries with the word “OK”.  I’m going to try not to do that anymore.  🙂

Well, the due date came and not everyone was finished.  😦  As this is right before the holiday break, I let them know that I would accept any work they wanted to complete over the break and that they could communicate with me by email with any questions or concerns.  I will give them a final grade on the day we return in the hopes they will take advantage of this situation.

Seeing the Site in My Sleep

OK, I have looked at this website so much I am starting to dream about it.  🙂  Going through each section as they are completed has been very tedious work.  I am fixing small things such as spelling errors and grammar but also issues with how things are appearing on the site.  I love working with wiki’s but they can be very temperamental as far as alignment and appearance.  Especially when you are copying and pasting work into the site but the students HAVE to do the work in Microsoft word for spelling and grammar (although some don’t seem to be paying attention to the needed corrections) before it goes into the wiki and it seems a waste to retype everything again.  Just a note that if you are working with the wiki, cutting and pasting can cause issues.

I have taught one student in each group how to change the fonts, etc. with the CSS format that wiki uses.  They are enjoying it and it does make my job a bit easier.  The text seems to respond better to CSS changes than the simple text changes that can also be used.

I would also like to give a shout out to our media specialist and a couple of our language arts teachers who have also been kind enough to look at the site and begin giving us some feedback.  You know how it is when you have been looking at something for so long you can’t even see the mistakes anymore.  That’s how I feel about this site.  I am thinking about talking with our AIG language arts teacher about the possibility of her classes looking at the site and checking it  not only for spelling and grammar but checking all of our links and references as well.  This is just too much for one person!

Yet Another Change

OK, so as ambitious as the idea was for the students to actually learn and play a song from their top 10 list, we just don’t have time to do it.  I did let them know that if they were adamant about playing a song for a video that we would add it to the website at a later date but that now was not the time for them to try to learn yet another piano song.  I don’t know if I have mentioned in the blog before but in addition to creating this website, the students still are responsible for playing 8 songs on the piano and creating one original composition.  Yes, it is a lot of work!

So instead of the piano videos we are using the program Animoto to create music videos of the number one song of each time period (or in the case of 20th Century they chose one from the list).  I have to say, they are coming out pretty darn cool.  One of the other teachers at my school contacted Animoto and got an upgraded account for our school for free!