Mr. Miller's Classroom Blog

Posts under ‘Exploration’

Weigh anchor, off we go! oX)

Aug 30th, 2011
by John Miller.
5 comments

The Treasure Seekers! (Photo by Ms. Judd)

Welcome to the first post of the 2011-2012 school year!  We began school two weeks ago and have been VERY busy in “Tech Boot Camp” learning how to set up and manage our blogs. This year brings big changes. Unlike previous classes, every student in this group of 6th graders has their own blog. You can visit them by checking out our Blogroll.

We are also introducing a new theme and a new name with this class. We are calling ourselves the “Treasure Seekers” and we are taking on the role of pirates as we sail the globe in search of learning adventures.  We are casting off the anchors of “traditional” learning and raising the Jolly Roger as we look for other tech-minded classes to help us change the world!

Please join us as we unfurl the foremast and head off to parts both familiar and unknown. We greatly look forward to learning from our sailing and rugby loving friends in Australia and New Zealand, our trading partners on the continent, the Jack flying privateers in the UK, and the adventurous Canadians. We also look forward to sailing the high tech seas with our land loving friends throughout the U.S.

Look for many new and exciting posts to appear here often as we document our adventures with digital learning. Each of my students will have their own Google Docs account and we hope to collaborate with other students around the world. We are also using Haiku Learning as our online classroom this year and will share our progress. Feel free to contact us with ideas if we don’t beat you to it. We love to Skype!

Final week preparations

Aug 6th, 2011
by John Miller.
11 comments

I’ve apparently survived my exhaustive, yet exhilarating summer holiday and now prepare myself and classroom for the fun ahead. I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward more to a school year beginning than I do with this one. I’ve made lots of new friends and have discovered so many great educators to follow via Twitter, Google+ and the Google Teacher Academy that I look forward to learning new things each and every day.

That will be one of our class themes this year. I hope to be inspired by my new batch of students and, hopefully, inspire them to learn something new everyday. Our second theme is, as you can tell from our banner, PIRATES! We will sail the high seas in search of fun adventures on our 10 month voyage together and look forward to visiting dozens of ports of call along the way.

To honor our learning theme, I present this incredible short film produced by Australian, Rick Mereki. Learn.

LEARN from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

Guess Who I am? Can you seriously Guess?

Feb 28th, 2011
by Chloe.
8 comments

Who am I ?

Can you guess my identity by watching and listening to the clues in the video below? I will present 10 clues to help you guess who I am and what I do. 

The rules are: You can review the video as many times as you need and a week from today I will post the answer. Watch the video and comment on who I am. Have  fun guessing.

Who am I? Chloe from John Miller on Vimeo.

Geocaching Update

Nov 1st, 2010
by John Miller.
35 comments

Wow! What an amazing past two months we have had with our Geocaching Project. The students in Ms. Smith’s class have created a special page for their Dragon. Other bugs are headed to New Zealand (Trev’s Tag), Texas (Ramenstein), Australia (Kallista Jake), Illinois (Zion Mystery Sphere), and our latest release is bound for Kansas (John Brown’s Secret). You can keep track of all of our bugs on Mr. Miller’s Bug Tracker Page.

Here are a few statistics for you:

  • Number of bugs released – 6
  • Number of bugs awaiting release – 1 (bound for Mr. Webb’s class in NZ)
  • Number of kilometers covered by all bugs to date – 22,351
  • Number of miles covered to date – 13,888
  • Number of kilometers covered by busiest bug – 15,851 (Kallista Jake)
  • Number of students involved in our project – 200+

Frank flies these type of plane.

Frank flies this type of plane.

Kallista Jake is currently in the hands of a pilot! He has written to us asking if he can take Jake on some more adventures with him . . .

Whoa, ToTo, we’re not in Kansas anymore! How did I get here!?

Hi, all. Let me introduce myself. Currently I am the keeper of the Kallista Jake Travel Bug. I call him KJ. My user name is RangerG/75. I live in Southern California and fly for a U.S. freight company. I got interested in geocaching last year when my oldest son, Erik, introduced me to it. I’ve had a lot of fun caching and having the opportunity to do it all over the world. It’s been my pleasure to drag your bug around for the past month or so. I’ve asked Mr. Miller if I can hold on to him for a little bit longer and see if maybe we can’t add some miles and introduce him, and you, to some new and interesting places.

So, if any of you have questions or comments, fire away! Just remember that I’m old and that you need to use small words and short sentences. And, yes, I do speak Australian! I’ve had the pleasure to visit that great country many times.

G’day, Mates!

Frank

He is an instructor and has agreed to answer any questions that you might have. So how about it? Post your questions in the comment section.

Geocaching Challenge – Looking for Participants!

Sep 2nd, 2010
by John Miller.
18 comments

We are about to embark on what we hope will be a fun learning adventure and we’d like to invite nine other schools around the world to have some fun with us. We’ve purchased nine “travel bug” identification tags from geocaching.com that we will be attaching to some special tokens from Chalone Peaks Midle School. We would like to send each bug on a quest to reach a different destination. The propossed destination will be a secret “cache” located near a partner school.

A Travelbug

A Travelbug

Each bug will be trackable through this blog and through a dedicated page on geocaching.com.  We will illustrate their progress with Google Maps and Google Earth downloadable files. There is no guarantee that any bug will reach its ultimate destination, but it will be fun tracking their progress. If a bug does make it to a partner school, we would like a photo of it on your blog and then try to send it back this way or hang it in a fun place in your class.

How will this work?

We will place a travel bug attached to a unique token from Chalone Peaks Middle School into a hidden cache near our school. When a geocacher finds the bug, he or she will log into geocaching.com and enter the bug’s code.  The ultimate destination will be revealed as a cache site near your school.

The geocacher that originally finds the bug destined for your school will attempt to place it in a new cache closer to the bug’s goal. It will be up to other geocachers to move it on from there. With luck (maybe a lot of luck!), the bug will arrive at the pre-determined cache site near your school. In order to participate, you don’t need to be a geocacher, but it will help if you can find a local contact to help deliver the bug from its final stop to you. If it does reach you, it may take several weeks, or even months. The fun will be in the adventure and in learning about GPS, trackables, Google Maps, and geocaching.

We plan to have all of the bugs placed in caches by early October. Our campus is located near a popular travel corridor and we expect the bugs to be on their way by the end of October. They will be identified as school projects, which may expedite their travel a bit.

For more information about geocaching, take a look at the video below, or visit geocaching.com. If you would like to participate, please leave a comment or email me directly at jwmiller at kcusd dot org. We have nine bugs available and would prefer they travel outside of California, but we will consider other options or interesting variations.

Parent Conferences and the Jump to a Paperless Classroom

Jan 23rd, 2010
by John Miller.
3 comments

I finished the formal round of parent conferences for the year last week. I’m always open for scheduling more conferences, but the large, open format that we do twice a year can be exhausting. We’ve tried to schedule individual conferences during this period in the past, but too many parents either don’t show up, or pop in at a different time. That model is just not practical for my school community. This was the first time I was able to have each student present a truly digital portfolio to their parents. Each parent I meet needed to submit a comment via an embedded Google form on their child’s webpage. I was especially pleased with how they responded to seeing their child’s work in such a neat, organized, and engaging way.


I was very impressed. This does not even come close the assignments we did in school. I am very pleased with the work. It was very interesting and informational.

I feel I learned much about science and history. I highly appreciate her efforts in putting these assignments together.

I think the website is great! I like all the projects, but I think the blog is the best . . . I’m happy to see that she is exited about the website. I hope she learns more things.


I was impressed with the three assignments. It appears the students are learning some important skills. I was amazed at how the students are able to blend current technology with events of history. I believe these types of assignments will benefit the students in the present and future.

Using Weebly for Education worked out very well. I’ve been a fan of Weebly for some time and am appreciative of their new model that supports classroom and individual student accounts. I’ve decided to go totally paperless the rest of the year with all of my assignments. My students have created a webpage for third quarter assignments where they will link their Animoto videos, VoiceThreads, Google docs, Keynote slides, blog posts, and quizzes. They can even embed documents and files created with other programs. Parents were very excited to see that they will be able to interact with all of their child’s work in one place and can track progress. We’ve even slipped an RSS feed reader onto the page to follow our blogging.

Active communication between home and school is not something we do well. When we communicate to parents, it tends to be in a very passive form – notes and schedules sent home with students, progress reports delivered by the U.S. Postal Service two weeks after they are printed and, therefore, irrelevant, and flyers announcing picture day three or four times a year.

I feel a model that involves parents, teachers, and students regularly viewing and reflecting on work and progress collaboratively is a much better and proven option.

More inspiration: VoiceThread as a Digital Portfolio, Using Drop.io for Student Portfolios

Machinarium in Education

Dec 5th, 2009
by John Miller.
No comments yet

Machinarium_PC_jaquetteI’ve just begun using a terrific new online game with my ELD students. We are collectively participating in the adventures of a cute little robot in Machinarium City.  I’ve written about the game and a motivational theory behind it here.

Thanks for visiting

Oct 12th, 2009
by John Miller.
1 comment

Welcome to our home on the Internet. We are a middle school (11-14 year olds) in a small, rural town in California and we are looking for contacts. If you would like to comment on a blog posted by my students (see links on the left) please do. We welcome and greatly appreciate your efforts to contact us. I’m trying to teach my students that they are part of a much larger world and you can help me do that by adding a comment wherever you feel like it. Thanks for taking the time to visit us.

Tutorials For Students

Sep 27th, 2009
by John Miller.
No comments yet

I’ve created several tutorials on how to use different Edublog features. Students can login to our Moodle and get the links to watch my video segments.  So far, I’ve posted tutorials on how to upload an avatar, how to add a new post, how to add links and images to a post, and how to edit a profile.
I’ve used a great online tool to record my tutorials. If you are not familiar with Jing, take a look and I bet you will be impressed.

jing-logoI’ve created several tutorials on how to use different Edublog features. Students can login to our Moodle and get the links to watch my video segments.  So far, I’ve posted tutorials on how to upload an avatar, how to add a new post, how to add links and images to a post, and how to edit a profile.

I’ve used a great online tool to record my tutorials. If you are not familiar with Jing, take a look and I bet you will be impressed.

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