My Week in Tech - Success Story

Good Advice

  "Learn a new skill, take a break." Advice from the longest-serving teacher in her building. "Kids need a bit of down time to process the skill they just learned, don’t force them to practice over and over until they hate it."   The Freshman English class is almost finished with Romeo and Juliet. From my 30 minutes in the class it seems the students have done:

• Active reading
• Guided questions,
• Discussions (online and offline)
• A movie,

Can we cover this play from any different angle? Maybe they need a Google survey? Seriously, they were better at decoding Shakespeare than me.   I created a list of tech tools to use in the classroom, I know it seems long, but it is barely a fraction of the stuff created for teachers. Please, take a look. https://sites.google.com/a/rbchs.com/technology-integration/teacher-tools

Success story

  Almost three years ago when I started this job. One of my first mistakes was telling a teacher she was using technology wrong. The next day her principal called and gave me an earful.   Luckily for me, she asked for some help putting spelling words on the web. We talked about options and ended up meeting every week after school talking technology and education.   Each week she had a list of questions and we usually never got past the third question, getting sidetracked not by the technology, but by how it integrates with teaching. She is now the proud owner of a grade level website designed to enhance learning. More importantly she is more comfortable trying new things in her classroom.   This week she introduced a tech tool to her building staff. She didn’t teach the tool, she taught a lesson using the tool.

 

I love the combination of tools to meet all needs   

Way back when she was asking the computer to teach, afraid to interact too much with a tool she didn't understand. Today she teaches using technology. Is she a computer expert and able to fix your computer? No, she is a teacher who uses technology as a tool.   I seem to have a bit of dust in my eye now. Enjoy your Memorial Day weekend.

This Week in Tech - Writing and Games

Last Friday I visited a Maine Township High School. I didn't have time to write about my week. I'll put a reflection on what I learned there early next week. Today some classroom stuff from last week and this.

Writing

Working with letters and fluency in writing seems to be the theme. Not long drawn out essays, but the very beginning. How do our interactions with letters and numbers influence our learning. I love how this kindergarten teacher not only organizes her ipads by letter, but she went through the trouble of making individual backgrounds for each ipad.

    

Then there is this student working with numbers in three different ways - at the same time.


I’ve seen a couple of teachers teaching handwriting. Wouldn't it be nice to bring it back on a computer? Here’s how Might be a fun project for extension or fun way to practice handwriting. If you name everyone's personal font on a classroom computer they could write reports in their own handwriting. Finally, of course there is a long essay, but wait it isn’t. These older students were making alphabet books. A letter with a sentence and a picture, researched online and written on a Word document.

 

Stuff from the web:

Game based learning. At first it meant answering questions in some sort of competitive electronic worksheet. We still see it a lot. It isn't learning, it’s practice. Ask your kids how to cheat, if there is learning going on that’s what they learn. The nice thing is it is possible to pretest students and track their scores so they are at least working on problems in their wheelhouse. Next, we had a game reward system. Level up and stuff. Learning is more like a scavenger hunt. Fun, but can easily devolve into just another reward system. With prepackaged tasks and such it still doesn’t have much student input. On the other hand people are taking into account easier entry points and motivation. Think Angry Birds, a game with no instructions but gets harder and adds new challenges along the way. Now if we could harness that process for teaching multiplication or something that would be awesome. Perhaps, Angry Birds led us to games that are intentionally made to feel more like games and less like academics. Problem based learning for the gamer set. Included with these games are commercial games that were not created for the education market, but have found a niche, like minecraft. The difficulty here is connecting to formal learning. Games built for the educational market start with a standard and try to teach. It often makes the learning boring. Consumer games start with a story, they know they have to hook a person and make them want to come back. Their problem is connecting to formal learning usually doesn't happen, at least without help. Just like technology in general, it isn’t about what technology you use, but how you use it. There is a place for educational games that teach to standards, or more correctly let students practice. On the other hand there is also a place for games that allow students to explore and play in less formal ways. There is no one right way to use technology or games in the classroom.

Three great articles on games in the classroom 
http://www.eschoolnews.com/2015/04/07/students-choose-learn-063/3/
https://synapse.pub/empowering-high-schoolers-to-build-from-the-perspective-of-a-high-schooler-84ace316e472?section=published
http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/03/30/three-awesome-educational-games-hiding-in-plain-sight/  

Speaking of projects vs practice

The work for some projects takes less time than the actual creation of the vehicle to present it. This often happens in school. Sometimes by design. The time spent working and the organization helps students understand the connections between the different parts. A visual and tactical clue of how things are connected. So why is it in the technology world we don’t expect students to create. Instead we spoon feed them information and practice. Think of technology as the Swiss Army Knife of classroom tools. You can cut, paste, copy, color, write, share, or just about anything you can do hands on. Stop trying to figure out the tech and start trying to figure out how to make something.

My Week as Tech Integration 2/27/15

I was asked to do a bit of research on online comic creation sites.



My first thought was to share the comic book dissertation. Comic book readers have always bristled at the idea that comics are not a true literary form. This just steps up the quality to the nth degree. I grew up reading comics, but I was never as serious as most comic book lovers. I just liked the stories. I hated that they just never seemed to stop. No purpose, no end etc….I watch the movies that come out now, but I don’t get too worked up about them, the stories aren't as good, more snark and less human frailty. The life lessons like “With great power comes great responsibility” Uncle Ben from Spiderman are lost.



Using comics in class.

PIXTON

Pixton is usually recommended as the cadillac of interactive comic sites. It does seem to have more options than the rest. http://www.pixton.com/comic/sbjamh97 This comic took me about five minutes to create from scratch.

When you click the pencil button on the top right

you are taken to a page where you can create a comic or a character. If you create a character it walks you through the process with almost no words necessary, even non-readers can do it.



If you choose create a comic you are immediately given the choice between beginner and advanced. I choose beginner. The beginner process allows you to choose from stock backgrounds, characters, and speech bubbles. The advanced process gives you a blank slate, but allows you to add backgrounds and props just a bit at a time. Unless creating the scenery and characters are important I would stick with the choice of beginner.



I did not examine the pricing structures. For a one off assignment this seems to work fine and allows you to send a link of your work to the teacher. Plus you have a range of privacy options which is great.

MAKEBELIEFSCOMIX

I liked makebelievfscomics, very basic and easy to get started.  It took me even less time to make this comic. http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/Comix/?comix_id=23207637C1547204



With makebelievefscomix (easy to misspell) you don’t even have to sign in to create a comic. Head to the comix creation page and get started. You have only the basic three panel scheme and you cannot create personalized characters, but for young kids this is the choice. Literally everything for creation is on one page. Click next and you can review, print, and email.



STORYBIRD

Storybird, is not a comic creator, but a book and poem creator. I like it because it allows you to choose great art and then write a story. Or if you like  you can upload your own picture prompt. It took me about 15 minutes to create this picture book. http://storybird.com/books/dancing-before-the-sun/?token=rbkaj6m3w3 It is also easy to share, plus commenting with moderation is built in.



As a teacher you can easily create a classroom and add assignments for students (free).  Students can write a poem, a short picture book,  or a long form chapter book. As a teacher you can choose the type of book they write for their assignment, you can add some pictures or art for a prompt, and set due dates.


GOOGLE DOCS

It is very easy to forget about Google Docs. Opening a blank document it is easy to insert a drawing (which can be a picture with a textbox overlayed). If we create a table and add these drawings into the cells we have a simple comic strip with text boxes instead of thought clouds.  The pictures can be a simple hand drawing that we take a picture of with our phones and upload to Google Drive, they can be pictures from the internet, or even snapshots from our webcams.



ICE 2015

ICE is the Illinois Computing Educators annual conference. We are lucky to have such a large and vibrant community of technology educators in Illinois. They also love to share in the knowledge, the notes from almost everyone at ICE2015 can be found here.

Effective Presentations for 21st Century School Leaders
I spent two days this week at the ICE conference in St. Charles, IL. My first all day session was Presentations for Administrators. Lot’s of good suggestions. (shared notes)

• When watching a video open a back channel like todaysmeet.com and have students discuss the video while watching.
• All presentations should probably start on paper using basic creative writing 101 skills. Tell a story don’t read bullet points from a slide.
• Seven Tips for Storytelling

1. Stories are about people.
2. Let your characters speak for themselves.  
3. Audiences bore easily.  Make people wonder what will happen next, always throw up obstacles.
4. Stories stir up emotions.
5. Stories don’t tell: they show.
6. Stories have at least one “moment of truth.”
7. Stories have a clear meaning.
8. Finish with a STAR moment (Something To Always Remember) Nancy Duarte

• A good presentation will kind of look like this

Tuesday was three distinct activities. A half day program on Google for students with mild to severe disability, a few short speakers, and EdCampAfterDark.

I tried to put some of these practices into my presentation on helping students make better presentations. A new tool - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Google for Students with Mild to Severe Disabilities
I love these Special Ed programs because most of the tools can be used in the regular classroom, they just don’t have to be used. (shared notes)



Speech to text

Nothing on the market today seems to match the accuracy and functionality of Dragon Dictation software. If however, you have a chromebook or don’t want to pay there are still options.

• Read&Write for Google Docs (free for a year subscription for teachers)
• Previously we pushed out a speech to text chrome extensions to D2 called SpeakIt. You may have noticed it reads a webpage when you highlight the words. Read&Write is much more advanced.
• Read&write also helps convert text to speech and predicts the next word when writing.
• Dictanote A speech to text writer. Also recognizes foreign languages. This program and most like it probably uses the same speech to text engine as when you talk to your phone. It isn’t great or fast, but works pretty well. This also means it can tap into google Translate and allows you to speak in any languages they have (a lot).
• Use Hello sign to have parents sign forgotten field trip forms etc.. up to 3 per month free.
• Workflows When working on a building it might be nice to add workflows so everyone knows who is doing what and who needs to sign off on what.
• Using a single google doc for repetitive notes. Create a table of contents at the top, use bookmarks or headings to create links to days. I’ve put my blog post drafts on a Google doc on this manner so you can see.
• If you use headings 4thor insert > bookmarks you can create hyperlinks within a google Document. Then you can insert>table of contents to create a quick hyperlinked table of contents anywhere in your document. Or add the hyperlinks one at a time to the top.
• This is great if you have regular meetings on the same subject or student. Instead of creating dozens of documents and maybe losing one everything is there and easily found.
• Distance measurements on maps or Map a work-out
• You can add several flags on a map and ask students to measure distance, create directions etc….
• Adding pictures to Google forms and spreadsheets. When you click insert > image on a google form or spreadsheet you can search online or your computer and add a picture. This can be great for students who make grocery lists and need pictures.

EdCampAfterDark
I used my new better presentation skills to create a quick presentation on HaikuDeck about HaikuDeck. A great little web and iPad tool to break out of the worst PowerPoint mistake (too many words on a slide).



THINGS FOUND ON THE WEB

DOE clarifies student privacy policies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deo2F19DK_o



3:36 using websites and parental consent in class.

6:30 using free apps - This site may help with terms of service https://tosdr.org/

The official government website on student privacy http://ptac.ed.gov/.

Technology Integration in the Elementary School

I think this just about sums it up. 

Poetry and Math

I love going to visit elementary schools, they do so many cool things and the kids are just so much fun. They aren't shy that is for sure, I had several kids volunteer to show me what they learned today.

The teacher here has her children working on half a dozen different exercises at the same time. As the students finish their pencil and paper work they can read a book, order numbers, create math sentences, or use a variety of iPad apps.

In the old days, when I was a kid, if we finished our work we either read a book quietly or did the "extra" worksheet. Differentiation on skills was just not that personal.

I think we all know that apps are great at adding the sounds and visual elements that make learning more exciting for the students. http://youtu.be/6-QuYYtRUpo

The can read words with the teacher  http://youtu.be/1vGRX8Rl4ek

Read a story independently http://youtu.be/dJTPQHEYTKM

She can quickly change levels for the student http://youtu.be/1QhnXWXKPZ0

The self check with computers is also one of the big bonuses. 

Tech tools are great, but students still need to touch and make contact with objects. Apps are great for bringing leveled content to students. This allows them to practice a skill at the appropriate level. But sometimes we just need open ended play to learn and explore. It also helps when two students of different levels work together, they can teach and learn from each other. http://youtu.be/W9DUbC5o2Uc

The students in this class have the option to use technology after they had finished some writing (one student actually was writing his poem in Word) This allowed students to transition from one activity to another at different times without disrupting the entire class. I like how the teacher didn't have students put away their electronic tools, they just closed the covers and left them on their desks because they would be going back to work on them soon enough. It isn't just a wasting time activity until the real teaching begins, it's a powerful learning tool that for a moment does not need to be used.

The activity may not seem like it included technology, but now that it is recorded and on youtube students can see how well they did and reflect or comment. http://youtu.be/-M9ilIEwWcE

Evaluation

It seems to me that teacher evaluation is becoming a bigger and bigger topic of concern. I think perhaps most people are starting to realize that no matter how big or expensive, or well crafted a test might be, it is still just a test. Some people will do well even when they guess and some people will freeze up and do worse than they should.

The obvious solution of course is to work together with master teachers and constructively critique each other until everyone is an outstanding teacher. If we had money, time, and patience for such an endeavor we would be doing it.

Some companies suggest schools should implement a video evaluation system. I don't think a video is any substitute for an actual live person in the room and therefore shouldn't be used for evaluative purposes. I like the idea of working with colleagues in a constructive manner to improve teaching practices.

There are many methods that don't involve direct observation - LASW - PLC - Lesson Study - COP - Reflective writing, blogging, twitter, etc....But I think this video stuff could be one of the many tools teachers can use to improve their own practice. We just don't need to pay for it.