Love Paper 53 to take #sketchnotes!
Monday, July 13, 2015
Friday, July 10, 2015
"Learning All the Time; That's Our Jam" - MERIT Days 4-5 Reflection
These past two days have been a flurry of learning, inspiration, and excitement. Everything at MERIT has been so well presented and accessible that I haven't taken many thorough notes, but I wanted to list a few highlights for my own processing and organization. (Well-designed blog posts still to come.)
Digital Citizenship
I was interested in Common Sense Media certification and Parent Info Program.
Kas Pereira walked us through some Creative Commons and Fair Use. Still so many rules to figure out and keep in mind, but I thought this Copyright for Education flowchart by Meryl Zeidenberg and Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano was very cool, and eye opening:
Infographics
Rachel Diephouse led us through thinking about designing infographics using Steve McGriff's design instruction. She had interesting ideas for having students research with nonfiction text sets, then using Piktochart, Glogster, Google Drawing (see Alice Keeler), and/or Google Pages to create their own infographics.
Power of Feedback
We watched an awe-inspiring video Ron Berger "Austin's Butterfly" about the power of feedback for students. It was a great reminder to give kids multiple opportunities to do better so that they can grow. This tied in well the next day with Kevin Brookhouser's message (and amazing Autorap song) that "Failure is an option. Failure to deliver is not."
This idea of feedback also made me want to join forces with Imagine K12.
Try it Out
This morning we were treated to an amazing Meritcon keynote speech by Kevin Brookhouser on creativity and "trying things out," even "bad ideas," and even to Yoda's dismay. He talked about Functional Fixedness, thinking outside the box, and getting our students to participate in audience centered learning via autonomy, mastery, and purpose. This is what will elevate learning to those higher levels on Bloom's taxonomy. I REALLY want to get a 20% project going in my class next year, especially since we are moving to block schedule and could have the time to not only get into the zone but also get out into the real community. He also inspired me to leverage technology to outsource menial tasks, like using forms to submit student blog links and data validation to check character count.
Frequent Freak-Outs
Finally, Diane Neebe walked us through three key Mindsets to remember while facing common freak out phrases from colleagues. They were: "task over tool," "good teaching is good teaching," and "know your audience." Tech pioneers can employ these mantras as responses to many of the most common forms of anxiety some teachers express when overwhelmed with "all the new tech."
In Conclusion
Our week ended today with a hilarious and light-hearted closing keynote from Diane Main about the importance of being a Lifelong Learner. She had so many nuggets of wisdom, like "the journey is the destination," that our kids need to be working harder than us teachers, and in reference to she and her family, but hopefully true for all of us, "learning all the time; that's our jam."
I'm still curious about:
Digital Citizenship
I was interested in Common Sense Media certification and Parent Info Program.
Kas Pereira walked us through some Creative Commons and Fair Use. Still so many rules to figure out and keep in mind, but I thought this Copyright for Education flowchart by Meryl Zeidenberg and Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano was very cool, and eye opening:
Infographics
Rachel Diephouse led us through thinking about designing infographics using Steve McGriff's design instruction. She had interesting ideas for having students research with nonfiction text sets, then using Piktochart, Glogster, Google Drawing (see Alice Keeler), and/or Google Pages to create their own infographics.
Power of Feedback
We watched an awe-inspiring video Ron Berger "Austin's Butterfly" about the power of feedback for students. It was a great reminder to give kids multiple opportunities to do better so that they can grow. This tied in well the next day with Kevin Brookhouser's message (and amazing Autorap song) that "Failure is an option. Failure to deliver is not."
This idea of feedback also made me want to join forces with Imagine K12.
Try it Out
This morning we were treated to an amazing Meritcon keynote speech by Kevin Brookhouser on creativity and "trying things out," even "bad ideas," and even to Yoda's dismay. He talked about Functional Fixedness, thinking outside the box, and getting our students to participate in audience centered learning via autonomy, mastery, and purpose. This is what will elevate learning to those higher levels on Bloom's taxonomy. I REALLY want to get a 20% project going in my class next year, especially since we are moving to block schedule and could have the time to not only get into the zone but also get out into the real community. He also inspired me to leverage technology to outsource menial tasks, like using forms to submit student blog links and data validation to check character count.
Frequent Freak-Outs
Finally, Diane Neebe walked us through three key Mindsets to remember while facing common freak out phrases from colleagues. They were: "task over tool," "good teaching is good teaching," and "know your audience." Tech pioneers can employ these mantras as responses to many of the most common forms of anxiety some teachers express when overwhelmed with "all the new tech."
In Conclusion
Our week ended today with a hilarious and light-hearted closing keynote from Diane Main about the importance of being a Lifelong Learner. She had so many nuggets of wisdom, like "the journey is the destination," that our kids need to be working harder than us teachers, and in reference to she and her family, but hopefully true for all of us, "learning all the time; that's our jam."
I'm still curious about:
- Best ways to protect student privacy while making their work public. How to find the best balance?
- Nearpod for presentations to student devices and formative assessment
- Remind
Wednesday, July 8, 2015
Drinking from the Firehose- #MERITKCI Day 3
When I got accepted to the 2015 MERIT Summer Institute, my colleague who had already gone through the program patted me on the back and said, "Congratulations. Now get ready to drink from the fire hose."
She was right. Three days in and my brain is swimming. Today we got into just what I had been craving- some of the nooks and crannies of using Google Apps for Education. I spent last year exploring and experimenting with Google Docs, Forms, Sheets, Sites, Classroom, trying to launch everything at once with my newly acquired Chromebooks, drenching my poor students in tech. Even though I created a fair amount of chaos, I learned a lot and became thirsty for some fine tuning. Now, our amazing MERIT instructors have exposed us to so much already.
Best nuggets of the day:
She was right. Three days in and my brain is swimming. Today we got into just what I had been craving- some of the nooks and crannies of using Google Apps for Education. I spent last year exploring and experimenting with Google Docs, Forms, Sheets, Sites, Classroom, trying to launch everything at once with my newly acquired Chromebooks, drenching my poor students in tech. Even though I created a fair amount of chaos, I learned a lot and became thirsty for some fine tuning. Now, our amazing MERIT instructors have exposed us to so much already.
Best nuggets of the day:
- Using Autocrat and Google Forms/Sheets to create individualized feedback pages for students
- Use Google Forms as rubrics
- To easily organize form responses from multiple classes, choose "new sheet in existing spreadsheet" under response destinations
- Get URLs for partially pre-filled in forms to use for easy sign in/out
- Google updated their themes on Forms! Customize away!
- Password protect Google Forms with "Advanced Settings for Text"
- Freeze important rows and columns to keep them present when scrolling
- Easily view a set of Google Classroom turned-in assignments by clicking on the Drive folder, selecting all, then "preview"
- Number your Google Classroom assignments! (001...)
- Extensions are amazing! For example, OneTab, goo.gl URL Shortener, Google Docs Quick Create
- Ask parents to view and comment on blog posts
Things to explore:
- Class Dojo for class participation management
- Doctopus
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Digital Writing: Analyzing Character Change with Avatars
After finishing the novel, Peak, by Roland Smith, my sixth graders had gathered a lot of evidence in relation to how the main character, Peak, went through significant changes. Armed with this evidence, students were able to think deeply about the significance of his transformation and how it contributed to the overall theme of the book. Now they needed to write about their thinking. Here's how I tricked them into crafting multiple, meaty, evidence-based paragraphs through the use of innovative technology...
Climbing the Mountain
With an engaging plot set on the intriguing Mt. Everest, and a host of complex characters, Peak is a great book for teaching characterization, including character change. After giving a short lesson on characterization-- how to learn about a character through his or her thoughts, feelings, speech, etc., I broke the book into reading chunks and had my sixth graders track what they were learning about the main character, Peak, by using a simple three-column graphic organizer that includes evidence, trait, and student thinking. Students used these organizers during biweekly book club meetings to discuss their thinking about the character and story events. Also during these meetings, group members hashed out any confusions and used Costa's Levels of Questioning to guide and deepen discussion.
At home, students responded to blog posts relating to how they would have handled certain situations that characters had to go through. To get them thinking about different points of view, I asked them to respond to certain events from the book through the eyes of one of the secondary characters. This was a fun step for the students who produced more writing than I expected for the assignment.
After the Summit
After several book club meetings, we held a class Socratic Seminar to orally exchange and evaluate our ideas about the characters and the book from start to finish. This step helped many students (as they themselves reflected) clarify their thinking about different aspects of the characters and plot. Now it was time to write. Voki.com is a website that allows users to choose from a variety of physical features, backgrounds, and voices to easily create speaking avatars, or characters. (I ended up creating and paying about 30 dollars for a one-year Voki Classroom account in order to make student log-in easy, but there are ways to use the site for free.) First, I previewed Voki for my students by creating an avatar of myself giving them instructions, which were to create a character from Peak to be interviewed as part of a news story about the changes they witnessed in the main character. Seeing my Voki energized students to get started on their own. Instructing them to use their graphic organizers and book club notes, I had partners begin working together to add character transformation ideas to a class wall at Padlet.com, which is a great site for group brainstorming. From these ideas, pairs chose a character through which to speak, and started settling on traits to analyze in their script for their Voki avatar.
Positive Effects of the Exercise
Students were excited to write because the end product would be more than just paragraphs. They wanted these characters to have substance, so they worked hard to choose (with my guidance) relevant evidence and clearly explain its significance. An added bonus to using this site as part of the writing process arrived unexpectedly as students started copying parts of their scripts into the text box to experiment with voice options. The computerized voice would would read back exactly what was written, only pausing if properly placed punctuation had been inserted, and only pronouncing correctly those words that had been spelled right. All of the sudden, even my hastiest little editors were poring over their scripts, making tweaks to their writing, tweaks that I'm not sure I alone could have motivated them to tend to. In the end, we ended up with a beautiful collection of articulate characters speaking thoughtfully about their observations...
Stumbles
That is not to say there were no technological hiccups along the way. Voki limits speak time to about 90 seconds, so some scripts had to be split up over two different student accounts. Also, I'm still working on how best to sew all of the interviews together to tell a cohesive story, other than just filming the computer screen as each interview runs. If you have ideas or feedback, let me know!
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Who is my audience and what is my purpose?
There are so many tech buzzwords flying past my ears these days: tweeting, blogging, Google Apps, Google Drive, Google Forms, scripts, QR codes, one-to-one, BYOD, ... the list goes on. As I step on the gas to try to stay up to speed, I can't help but wonder when these terms will take their exit and I'll find myself trying to merge with the next big apps and advancements. How can we teachers ever stay ahead of our students when Flappy Birds is up, crazed over, and out before I can even make up my mind to download it?
So maybe this is my attempt to reach out to others on this road and join the caravan down this expanding highway. On the way I hope to archive what will soon become obsolete artifacts, explore literacy-linked side roads, and be ready for what's around the next bend.
So maybe this is my attempt to reach out to others on this road and join the caravan down this expanding highway. On the way I hope to archive what will soon become obsolete artifacts, explore literacy-linked side roads, and be ready for what's around the next bend.
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