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/.

This week in technology integration - 2/20/2015

I spend too much time in my office, trying to solve the worlds problems. I am going to do my best to stick to my schedule of one day a week in each building visiting classrooms, then on Fridays reflect. Classroom stuff first then some resources down below.

Classrooms Around Town

Smartboards are great for organizing class during transitions. Many teachers have a list of names, especially in the morning and let students move themselves from absent to present or to hot or cold lunch. Even kindergartners can often do this activity.

Daily Agendas are also a great way to keep students informed and involved in the school day - http://exchange.smarttech.com/search.html?q=%22Daily%20Agenda%22

In one class I visited, a teacher asked a volunteer to read a book while she was getting the next lesson ready. I thought, students love to hear their teacher reading a book, why not record yourself reading a book and post if for your students? Copyrighted books should not be posted online, but anything written before 1930 is fair game. In the case of needing a few minutes of time you could record yourself reading and save it on your google drive for play in the classroom. This is fair use and perfectly legal. 

About 5 years ago I recorded a Dr.Seuss book for my kids. I had fun finding images for this book and recording myself reading.I wonder if the kids would like to do this too?

Dr. Seuss from Brendan Murphy on Vimeo.
  https://vimeo.com/9612338

That reading took me an afternoon of playing around with MovieMaker and finding images, but today I would just create a powerpoint or Google presentation and do a screen recording. I am checking with seussville.com to see if Dr. Seuss books allow this type of recording. I think they might. 

A teacher took just a few seconds before turning off her document camera to pan around the room. Kids waved and danced as they showed up on camera.

Math fluency and speed in computation is not the same thing. However, competition can often be a way to practice math facts until they are automatic. Live mathletics and games on ixl.com (free daily practice usually 15 questions), mathplayground.com or arcademics.com can be fun.

Some of the hardest days teaching can be reviewing study guides, or walking the whole class through instructions to make sure everyone understands exactly what they are supposed to do. It always takes three times as long as it should and even then there are those one or two students who just don’t seem to get it. I wonder if we could flip these lessons. A ten minute video going through the review questions or a podcast? Could this be a job for a star student? Maybe, during the year students can earn the right to be the homework instruction star? They can record the instruction video or audio and post it to the class youtube channel or something.

I sometimes see teachers writing homework assignments on a word document projected on the wall and asking students to copy to their assignment notebooks. What if I did this on a Google Document then clicked File -> Publish to the Web? It becomes a webpage that automatically updates itself as I put the next day’s homework on top. I can send the link home to parents through skyward everyday (just resend the same message everyday) I can publish the link on my classroom or department web page. I can even embed the page into an existing webpage.

Things Found on the Web

Anytime we try to convey information to the entire class students have questions. Some are shy and don’t want to raise their hands, some don’t think of the question until too late, and other times the answer to the question is coming up if they just hold on.  That’s why I think it can be useful to have a backchannel up and running, especially during these review or instruction settings. Questions can be put on the backchannel and even sometimes answered by other students without slowing down the pace of the class. https://tackk.com/backchannel1

The ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) is attempting to create child friendly translations to the NETS-S (national educational technology standards for students) standards. What do you think? 


Stuck trying to create a new lesson try this: Search for publicly shared Docs. Just type site:docs.google.com "Example Topic" into Google Search. See how it is done here.  (Quotes will force google to search for the exact words, but are not required. Try with or without for different results.)

Taking notes on paper and reviewing them, enhancing them and then sharing digitally. This is pretty advanced and might be best for high achieving high school students.


A different way to learn vocabulary. 

8 apps to turn your ipad into an interactive whiteboard. You may not have $2,000 for a Smartboard, but can you get $400 for an iPad? I wonder how well they work on the $300 Google Nexus?

Surveys for grade 2 using forms. Teaching questioning skills as well as math skills as they examine the results.

If you only read one thing, then read this post.
Tech Integration - "There is No App for Good Teaching"

Ask the Right Questions

When bringing technology into the classroom, how do you know you’re asking the wrong questions?

Can you help me find an app that will teach ...?What kind of tech should I have in my classroom?How do I use this in my classroom?Can you show me how to use this?How do I find time for this?How do I fit this into my lesson?

When your questions have to do with bringing something extra or replacing expert knowledge of teaching.

Instead ask:

What do I want my student to learn?What ways to I want to present the content?How will students prove they have gained understanding?How will I give feedback to my students?How will students make corrections and resubmit? (iterate)

Excuses

CCSS doesn't leave time for this.I have so much more content to cover. The kids are/will be off task.Students just know how to play, not learn.Texting, slang, etc... is not real speaking writing.The technology/wifi/site doesn't always work.Students wont get enough practice.They cheat on tests/quizzes.I don’t know how to do it. I don’t have time to learn.

Classroom Visits

Today was a great day to visit in classrooms.

In the library Mrs. Richer has been teaching students how to search with Google a day.

As we move into a digital culture we learn that student know how to play with technology, but they have to be taught how to use technology, For example, there is more to search than just asking questions in Google. Learning to search is part of the Mozilla web literacy standards.

Up in 8th grade Science it is CSI week again. Totally awesome interactive presentations that include writing, audience participation, and great acting skills.

Using movies and a presentation software (usually PowerPoint or Google Slides) the students Created and solved a mystery al a the popular show CSI. Showing how Science not only teaches the basic Sciencey skills, but can also include writing and drama as well. 

Later Mr. Hepner exploded from his room and into the library. His students were so into their Veteran’s Day projects that they have continued to work on them over the last three days. This student was using a picture from the netbook as a model for her hand drawn art. The group next to her were adding music to a presentation, while still others didn't even have computers.

What I love, as a Tech Integration Specialist, is how all of these lessons included technology, but only one had one to one computers. Even then the students were often discussing what was happening on their screens with their partners. 

Using Ted-Ed in Your Classroom

At first I was just going to send out this Ted-Ed Lesson for the Science teachers in the district, but then thought better of it. (Be careful before you start watching they are very engaging shorts for each element.)

Then I realized it has been a while since I have shared the Ted-Ed resources. I love how they have created a simple resource that can so quickly and easily be used to engage students, and even make them think. like this one.

The concept is simple start with a video and then ask some questions, all in four or less steps.

1. Watch
2. Think 
3. Dig Deeper
4. Discuss

Like the Dan Meyer's three-act lessons (More from Andrew Stadel here) the technology (videos, online discussions) isn't there to teach or assess it is just there to spark curiosity. 

The best part of Ted-Ed is the ability to take any video, either a current Ted-Ed, a youtube you found, or something your created yourself, and quickly add your own questions and discussions. I've created a quick example (it took all of 15 minutes) just to show you what you could make for your classroom. So if you have a few minutes, watch my lesson and then start the discussion, here or there, it doesn't matter.

Connected Art

In case you forgot (or just didn't know) October is Connected Educator month.

At the middle school Mrs. Lauer has taken the challenge and connected to an online community of Art educators. http://theartofeducation.ning.com/

Nings were a very popular place for educators to connect and share for many years, right up until the point when they decided to start charging to host the communities. On the other hand if a ning community is still going then you can be pretty sure the people running the thing are going to make it valuable to you.

So cudos to Mrs. Lauer for joining the ranks of the connected educators. The rest of us can follow along as she goes from a new blank flickr account (Staff are encouraged to follow this professional account) to one full of students examples like this one.

https://secure.flickr.com/photos/suzanne_tiedemann/collections/72157626708058663/

Maker Party - AppMaker

Maker Party

Yesterday evening the school district again hosted a #teachtehweb Maker Party.  As they did last year Mozilla, NWP, and several other non-profits are promoting digital literacy around the world. 

We started the evening asking why apps such as Flappy Bird might ask for things like location data? It was quickly decided that while it doesn't seem harmful (if they are using the information to provide more targeted adds) it is certainly a bit uncomfortable having so much information about ourselves being passed around. We realized that free apps aren't actually free, we are paying for them by selling information about ourselves. If an app is free to you, that means you are the product being sold to someone else. 

If we want to play games on a tablet or phone it would be nice if we could create the games ourselves. How could we do that? We would look at two app building programs Mozilla Appmaker and AppInventor from MIT.

We started by creating a simple counter app. Add a button and every time you click the button it counts. Some of the participants modified the app to use pictures of cats inside the button, some added a second button to count down, and some added automatic counters. 

With our first app created I passed out some paper planning sheets.  However, most were busy creating apps already and didn't want to step back and start planning. 

Fifteen minutes before the end I stopped everyone and asked they to take a tour around the room to see what everyone else had created. 

Some had created musical instruments that would play when tapped. Others created video players that would play favorite youtube videos when a button was pressed. 

Especially, nice was the way parents worked with their children to create, but the kids did most of the heavy lifting and were the creative force behind the app being created. 

After our tour of each other's work we took a quick look at AppInventor from MIT. This is an actual programming system for Android. Appmaker from Mozilla is a bit easier and allows students to create an app quickly. AppInventor will allow the kids to create something at home and actually put it on the phone or tablets. Eventually, if they want they can also share their apps with their friends. Hopefully they won't create a messaging app that they will then use in school. 

We ended the day talking a bit about net-neutrality and the implications around the world.