ROBERTOGRECO:

A few more ideas from elsewhere:

Set some/all students loose with with post-it notes:
http://mentalhygiene.com/index.php/2005/06/04/post-it-mosaic-howto/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rsdio/sets/72157600081072682/
http://www.justkeepthechange.com/getting-creative-with-post-it-notes
http://blog.arlomidgett.com/2005/10/31/post-its/

Or the Rasterbator:
http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/

Of course, there’s also a math angle to explore:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/math5.geometry/syllabus.html
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/junkyard/all.html

Student-made furniture projects inspired by Frank Gehry:
Big Chair: http://www.lizettegreco.com/roberto/bigchair01.html
Armchair: http://robertogreco.tumblr.com/post/18924473

Underutilized space:
Floor decoration: http://robertogreco.tumblr.com/post/18925172
More of that here: http://robertogreco.tumblr.com/archive

Get the camera out:
Mugshots: http://robertogreco.tumblr.com/post/18927136
Photoscramble: http://robertogreco.tumblr.com/post/18926830

Been enjoying your design aware teacher posts.

The solution? Posters! I let the students make posters and I would help to pick out which ones would stay and which ones wouldn’t. They put them up on the walls.

Last year, we made “RESPECT” and “RESPONSIBILITY” posters for each class also. I find that the more the students get to do (such as bulletin boards), the more pride they take in keeping the room in good shape.

So what I did every year was start with nothing on the walls. High school kids hated blank walls–they wanted to start filling them up immediately. Students made posters (records of learning) on big sheets of paper from the roll the cheerleaders weren’t using and then hung them up. Posters might be a solution to a big problem they had struggled with, a review of a chapter, conjectures they wish someone would prove, etc. When the walls got too crowded, they discussed what should stay and why. It was always their stuff. Sometimes the ceiling was fair game. Sometimes the floor. Tons of learning happened around their work. They caught each other’s mistakes (I had to really work against my urge to take down wrong mathematics) and debated the beauty of what others saw and didn’t see.

Makes me miss the classroom all over again….

I’m busy trying to figure out, like, where a couch will go in my class and how best to feng shui the place. Rather, I oughtta figure out ways for my students to personalize it year in and out.

Oughtta save a bundle not buying those cheesy motivational posters in the process.

So I choose to turn the concert into an audience experience rather than just going out there and playing a handful of tunes.

I have groups of students introduce the pieces. They write their own introductions and rehearse them and everything. I understand that not every kid wants to do this, but some love it. And the parents love it.

I make visually appealing programs. I include graphics, readable fonts (I’ve seen too many concert programs that have a script-type font that makes them a chore to figure out what you are listening to), and plenty of white space. I let the students write program notes for the pieces we play. I list the names of all of the students. I use colored paper.

I keep the concert moving and minimize dead time. Transitions between pieces are covered by student introductions. At my last concert, I also had a slide show running in the background. Ultimately, the focus of the concerts is the students and their performance. I take myself out of the picture as much as possible.

We managed to peak that year with the sort of things that might look annoying in some classrooms but seemed to gel in ours. I worked on themes each term and the art, writing and maths tied into that theme for effective displays. One of the themes was “the ocean”, a common enough theme in primary schools and that’s my enduring memory of that year’s classroom. There were paper plate squids dangling from the ceiling, at a height where they were noticed but not interfering, and a pirate ship class collage hanging off the fish net on the side. There were printed stories artfully decorated in coloured pencil and textas (markers) and other thematic based work samples that have now faded into my collective approving memory.

Right now we’re getting our classes ready for a school Open Night and my classroom is slowly starting to reflect the theme of communication. Your ideas of design and attractiveness for the viewer are really helpful now as I try and recapture what seemed so easy and natural back in 1995!

It’s a beeeyooootiful building and every classroom has high ceilings and amazing views out of large (and just replaced with all new) windows. It was built in a triangle shape, with a cut-out courtyard in the middle — the classrooms are around the outside, the hallways run along the edge of the interior.

Instead they want them to go to a less centrally located school, built in that 70’s prison/bunker style. With temporary walls instead of real ones, and wee tiny window strips up near the lower ceilings.

Away from the marble and the glory and into the dim corridors and “stairtowers” Blech.

Besides all that, it’s the only school I’ve seen that come close to having some real interaction and mixing of diverse students. I can’t prove it’s the setting, but it can’t hurt them to be somewhere pretty. (The addition put on later? not so pretty.)