Here is something to address the digital learning
environment of the AdvancED ELEOT observation tool…
Padlet
is not a new site, but it is effective and versatile. To use Padlet for
brainstorming, open up a wall and then invite students to join and share their
ideas in sticky note format. Create a custom background for your Padlet wall
and you can then sort the notes into categories.
It was really neat to see AHS teachers using Kahoot! during the NCED Cloud/Canvas PD yesterday. Hopefully everyone saw just how easy (and engaging) formative assessments can be. Kahoot!'s quick pace, suspenseful music, and instant scoreboards keep competition lively and learners engaged. Students will definitely ask to play again and again.
Kahoot! is one those tools that you can learn about today and use tomorrow...but if you need more help, click here a step-by-step guide. (I talked to a math teacher after school who already created one to use in class.) Teachers can use it for pre-assessments, during instruction, or at the end of a lesson to gauge understanding.
Here's an idea: Your students can also benefit from creating their own Kahoot!s as a means of review. Students who truly understand topics should be able to craft meaningful wrong answers, too. Further, Kahoot! creation can work well as a component to a research project. Students or groups could present information and then Kahoot! the class.
Tina Webster has shared a great tech tools video! It describes 7 free online sites that support literacy instruction: Subtext, ActivelyLearn, EtherPad, HemingwayApp, StoryBird, GotBrainy, and Newsela. We have previously highlighted two of those sites on this blog. (I linked you to those again.) The blog and video provide more ideas and support for both students and teachers.
Friday, March 13, 2015 is Digital Learning Day (search for #DLDay on Twitter to jump in ongoing conversation with educators about digital learning in their classrooms and schools). While we are all at different places on the digital continuum, please use this day for both you and your students to reflect and discuss the impact of technology on our educational lives. Digital Learning Day is about empowering students and teachers and increasing college and career readiness. It's certainly too be to confined to one day or one activity. Your #DLDay activity can take place next week or even next month!
Resources to explore from www.digitallearningday.org:
Here is a great resource, particularly useful to Asheboro High School teachers and students using Chromebooks! Check it out...
Tina Webster, Instructional Technology Facilitator at the high school, shared with the SMART Notebook Express site with me last spring. This is a way for students to access Smart Notebook files on their Chromebooks. It basically allows all your interactive notebook files to be accessible to students, which most of us know is great for flipped learning or for students when they are absent. It is very responsive; even interactive games and activities still work...perfect for test review time.
One part of the writing process that may get unintentionally overlooked is the publishing/sharing element. Holding writing celebrations is an excellent way to get students motivated and excited about writing.
Flipsnack is a digital tool that can take a PDF and turn it into an online digital flipbook...a perfect way to share student writing within and beyond the classroom walls! Documents can be downloaded, embedded, linked out, or shared. It is free and very simple to use. You don't even need to register to use the basic services. Please note that Jay Williams, NAMS Instructional Technology Facilitator, brought to my attention that the Terms of Service specify that users need to be at least 13 years old or have parental permission to use the service. Whether the PDF has images or is just text, Flipsnack will make the final copy look professional and thoughtful.
These make for really engaging informational texts like procedural manuals and brochures, which are authentic writing tasks in science, social studies, and technical subjects. Hopefully, once you look it over, you can think of many ways students can use it for your class.
National Teacher Appreciation Day is tomorrow, Tuesday, May 6. Dubraska Stines, ESL Lead Teacher, shared a neat campaign from the U.S. Department of Education. They want us to tell the world what we would like to #ThankATeacher for doing.
It's pretty simple:
Click here to download the Dept. of Ed's "#ThankATeacher" sign.
Fill it out.
On Tuesday, post the picture on social media using the hashtag #ThankATeacher.
If you want to do this within your class, skip the social media aspect and post around the classroom or school building!
Actively Learn is an online e-reader that allows students to
interact with text in a unique way. Teachers can upload texts from PDF files
and websites and insert questions, comments, and multimedia. Students can work
through the text at their own pace, get help when they need it, and share their
ideas with other students. Watch the video below to take a quick walk-through
of the site.
Pros
·It’s 100% FREE!
·The kids love it.
·Kids can see and respond to other peoples’
posts.
·Inserting videos and pictures is super easy and
adds a lot to the text.
·You can assign different texts to different
classes. If you wanted small groups you could easily create “classes” with just
a portion of your students. (Just your AIG students, one literature circle
group, etc.)
·Kids can sign up easily using their ACS Google
accounts and a class code or link. If they use Chrome and log into their Google
account, they are automatically logged in to Actively Learn. I use a couple
different websites with my kids that they have to sign up for, and this one is
BY FAR the simplest.
Cons
·Uploading a file can sometimes be tricky. Some
PDFs don’t load or look right. Sometimes links, comments, or captions on
websites end up included in the text. Occasionally I’ve had to upload a text
multiple times in a few different ways before it really worked right.
·Once you upload a file, there is no way to edit
the text or things like the title.
·The site can be a little buggy at times. It
occasionally freezes up or doesn’t load. Refreshing the page usually fixes it.
·There are no alerts or anything to let kids know
they haven’t finished an assignment.
Many of us know how to use Google Docs for online annotation. It works, but there is an even better tool: NowComment.
Here is a video on the basics:
Some advantages of NowComment over other annotating sites:
Two panes scroll independently, allowing better focus on flow of text, video, images, and comments.
Annotations always appear to the right of text, never blocking the text.
Teacher options control precise access dates when the text can be read, and when comments can be added. The same time controls can be used to hide classmates' comments from individual students until a specified time; thus, students in the first round of annotation will not be able to simply parrot the comments of peers, nor will they be swayed by what anyone else has said.
Comments can be sorted by user which allows for easy assessment, or for students to the locate the responses of select peers.
Notification options can be customized, allowing you to schedule the "feed" from the site, and "Update" lets you stay informed of every single comment that is added.
In addition to the two-pane view, a combined view aggregates both panes into a narrative timeline, easily allowing you to note which lines and paragraphs receive the most annotation.
The number of simultaneous viewers/annotators doesn't seem to be an issue; according to the site, over one hundred users have accessed the same document concurrently without a problem.
Students can upload their own writing to engage peers in discussion. Microsoft Word works extremely well in the interface.
Many classic works of literature are now available in the public domain online at sites such as Project Gutenberg, providing teachers a huge list of texts. Mashable also has some online texts.
NowComment is especially useful for leaving responses regarding images and videos.
Tina Webster, Tech Facilitator at AHS, sent me links to some writing web tools a few days ago. The sites are created to help students through the writing process, from the pre-writing stage all the way to publication. She shared them just in time for me to add it to wikispace I want to reveal to you all...
It is a writing instruction site that the AHS Literacy Leadership Team has worked on for the last year. It's geared toward helping you, the teacher, have quick access to tools, tips, and resources. The first section is all about the writing process. The web tools from Tina (Kaizena, Crible, Protagonize, and Slatebox) are found in the appropriate stage of writing in this portion of the wiki. The second portion provides content area writing tips. We wanted to create a site for all content teachers. It is still a work in progress, but it's meant to be collaborative. Share your resources with me and let's learn from each other.
How many of you have used Google Forms to create quick, online assessments for students? If you have, you probably know that after students complete the form you receive a spreadsheet filled with student responses. Are you looking for a way to dig through that data? I have a tip for making that Google Form work better for you (just in time for end of semester assessments)...it is called Flubaroo.
It is a free tool (it's actually a Google script) that can help you grade multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank assessments created with Google Forms. In addition to correcting your quiz, Flubaroo computes the student's grade and provides teachers with a summary of class data, inclduing identification of low-scoring quiz items and a distribution graph of student scores.This is a great alternative to other sites that may be slow or connectivity may not be reliable. Click here to access the Flubaroo website that has more details, a sample form, and a 3-minute video tutorial. Please use Google Chrome as your browser. It doesn't play well with Internet Explorer or Firefox. If you want help trying this out, I am happy to help. Just email me and I can set up a time to walk you through the process. Isn't this awesome for formative assessments?!! ~Chandra
There is a lot of information out
there…..both authoritative as well as junk.
Students often need help in muddling through the plethora of information
available. The following search engines
are credible alternatives to standard Google, the largest search engine on the
planet.
A public service organization and learning/teaching
environment that is maintained by students and volunteer library and
information science professionals. This
site is hosted by Drexel University’s College of Information Science and
Technology.
Web search engine for students and researchers that aims to
make academic information easily accessible to everyone. RefSeek searches more than one billion
documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers.
Blogging is simply the publishing of a personal website or
online journal that contains opinions,
reflections or comments about a specific
topic or a range of topics. With millions of traditional blogs available online, and the popularity of many micro-blogging based social networking sites like
Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram, there is a good chance that
blogging, in one form or another, is something that your students are not only
familiar with, but are already doing. It’s time we harness that energy in the
classroom to facilitate learning, engage students, and provide an effective
platform for self-reflection and collaboration among teachers.
Blogging for Learning
Blogs provide an excellent outlet for students to
demonstrate their understanding of course content and concepts. For example, students can post or link to digital research papers, current events, special interest topics, or
additional resources, such as pictures and embedded or linked multimedia
content. Those visual resources make blogs more appealing and help classmates with
lower literacy skills.
Blogs also lend
themselves well to a divide and conquer (jigsawing) strategy of covering some
topics.
Creating and maintaining a class blog over the course of the
semester or year can provide a great way for students to review when it comes
time for a unit test or year-end exam. Design a rotating schedule where each
week, a few students are responsible for creating one or more blog posts that
cover the important concepts, naturally written in kid-friendly language, learned that
week. Over the course of the class, students will have easy access to a central
location with all the important concepts learned throughout the course.
Blogging for Engagement
Freedom with visual design encourages ownership.
Student control over the content is an excellent way to get students excited about contributing to their blog.
Allow students the opportunity to align their blogs according to their interests.
It is a great outlet for outspoken students and the quieter ones as well.
Kick it up a notch and have students visit, read and leave comments on each other’s blog posts. Feeling like no one is listening can kill blogging enthusiasm, but having a thoughtful comment from someone on a post can be a catalyst for sustained involvement and improved quality.
Blogging for Teachers
Teachers
can also benefit from blogging. At blogging’s fundamental core is journaling.
Teachers can create blogs as a vehicle for self-reflection. They can be used to
review effective (or ineffective) strategies and resources. When finished with
a post, links can be easily forwarded to colleagues who may benefit from the
information. Additionally, teachers can create and maintain blogs with multiple
authors and each make their own unique contributions. At a time when teamwork
and collaboration are highly valued and expected, blogs offer a powerful tool
for teachers to utilize.
Important/Helpful
Tips
Blogger.com is the
largest blogging site and since it is owned by Google; students within Asheboro
City Schools already have access to it within their Google apps.
Security is an important issue to be aware of when having
students post content online. Require students to not publish any identifying
information in their posts or comments. Additionally, blogs can be removed from
the results of search engines, meaning the only people with access would be
people provided with a direct link.
Set expectations from the beginning about what is to be
included and not included in each blog post and reply comment. Regularly check blogs
and comments to verify compliance.
It is important to make sure students fully understand
how to navigate their blog dashboard before moving forward. Some students who
don’t understand will inevitably create a different blog for each one of their
posts.
Have a central place open to all students where they can
go to access their classmates’ blogs. The links provided should be to the
student’s main blog page and not to a certain blog post.
Be organized, especially if you are creating a class blog
that will have lots of content and will likely require searching. Create tags to
apply to each post so that posts are grouped together within categories and can
be easily found. For example, a post on the trial of Socrates gets tagged
“Ancient Greece”.
I am not the top expert, but if you have questions, you
may email me at jfaircloth@asheboro.k12.nc.us
and I will do my best to help where I can.
NC WiseOwl is a great, FREE resource for students in our state. NC WiseOwl is far safer and more scholastic than a random Google search. Today, I want to highlight the "Featured Web Sites" section. This is located in both the Middle School and High School Zones. This portion of the website houses links that are appropriate for the current month or season. For example, there are sites on Native American Heritage Month and Thanksgiving. Click below: Middle School Zone Featured Websites High School Zone Featured Websites Professional Zone Archived Webinars (for educators to learn how to better use NC WiseOwl)
Penny Crooks, assistant principal at AHS, recently shared with me her visit to a classroom where the teacher was using YouTube. I know most of you are thinking, "OK, that's nothing new." However, this teacher was not just using a clip that she found, but it was one that she made herself! Nicole Winsley, English teacher at AHS, is trying out the "flipped classroom"concept and has created several short instruction videos to help students with English/Language Arts concepts. Her latest video combines grammar with her love of music. Check out the video she created on "5 Ways to Spot a Fragment" set to the popular tune of "Blurred Lines" by Robin Thicke.
The National Day on Writing first took place on October 20, 2009. This year, since the day falls on a Sunday, celebrations of writing will be held October 20-21. The day, sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), asks Americans to consider the role of writing in everyday life. Here are some ways you can get in on the celebration. This year's theme is "Write to Connect". Writing today is the way we most often connect--through texts, status updates, blog posts, and multimedia compositions. Writing is also the way we connect across disciplines and connect to other writers, thinkers, and innovators.
Twitter chat on October 20 with Penny Kittle (@pennykittle) and Katherine Sokolowski (@katsok) at 8:00 PM ET. Use the hashtag #nctechat to follow their discussion on writing with technology (in honor of Connected Educators Month #ce13) and how to write to connect across K-20 curriculum.
On October 21, tweet out the ways you use writing to make connections using the hashtag #write2connect and, if space allows, #dayonwriting.
The conversation continues on October 21 at 7:00 PM ET with NCTE members Sarah Mulhern Gross (@thereadingzone) and Meenoo Rami (@meenoorami) and the #engchat discussion, which takes place every Monday.
Aside from the Twitter chats, the National Writing Project is encouraging everyone to share their actual writing in all forms via Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or Instagram.
Here are some "Write to Connect" resources for educators:
My September 4, 2013 "Graphic Organizers" post used a web 2.0 tool called ThingLink. ThinkLink helps images come alive by embedding video, links, and information within an image. It is a great way for teachers to give information to students and also a fantastic way for students to show learning by creating their own.
If you want more examples of how you can use ThingLink in your classroom, read the links below:
