Pear Deck

If you still use power points in your classroom to teach, Pear Deck will be a life saver! Have you ever noticed while you are teaching with the power point that students begin to daze off, zone in and out, and sometimes don't seem very engaged in your lesson? Pear Deck is not only integrated with google, but it "puts inquiry at the center of your lesson and create[s] self-motivated learners," according to Peardeck.com. All you have to do to use Pear Deck is create an account and upload your already created power point. You will then give the students the log in code to join your class and you control the speed of the presentation.

Once your students are logged in using your unique class code, you can stop anytime during your presentation to ask quick questions or give polls. 

After the presentation, Pear Deck offers an opportunity for you to save your presentation to complete the next day or review. 

Take a Tour of Greece Using the Pages App

Our 6th grade world history students were beginning to study Greece and at the end of the unit, they will be making a pamphlet. The purpose of the pamphlet is to allow people to know what foods they would eat, what they would see, and places they could visit if they were to visit Greece. Originally, the students were going to create the pamphlets using a blank document on Pages. However, I showed our history teacher the ability to use a template that was already laid out with 3 columns, just like a pamphlet, where the students could input their own information but the layout was already done. He chose to go this route and said the students found the template to be much faster and very user friendly.

4th Grade Tree Salesperson

4th Grade tree salesperson? Come again?

In 4th grade the students are learning about the different types of trees and how to classify trees based off of their characteristics. Typically, our students research and create a keynote presentation to share with the other students about the tree they chose to research. However, it was time to jazz this puppy up! We decided to give sales a try. Our objectives still include teaching the students how to classify trees and separate the trees into angiosperms or gymnosperms. But... instead of your typical, "Let me tell you about this tree presentation," where students simply inform us about a tree, they will add the dimension of persuasion to their presentations.

Students will:
-Research the tree
-Create a presentation using the keynote app
-Their goal will be to inform us about their tree from the standpoint of a sales person. In order to accomplish this, they will need to research which climate and environment the tree adapts and grows the best and persuade their audience to buy their tree.
-Come up with a catchy beginning to interest the "customers" (AKA other students in class)
-Add images
-Potentially add videos

I love the idea of this project as it adds in multi dimensions and skills. The project still has the student inform the audience about their "product," but they also learn the art of sales and persuasion. At the end of all of the presentations, students will vote on which sales person truly persuaded them and which tree they would buy and why. You could use Google Forms to collect the data and then turn it into a graph. Hello, curricular teaching!

Virtual “Post-it" Wall

Typically when teacher’s review concepts, it looks something like this:

Teacher: "What is one thing you can tell me about yesterday’s lesson?"

Student raises hand. Teacher calls on student to answer. One student responds. Another student raises his/her hand and answers. And so forth. 

Point being, student’s respond one-at-a-time and more often than not, you only assess a few students rather than your entire class. What if there was a way to have each student respond with a virtual post-it response? Meet Padlet. (Website or app based)

Essentially, padlet is a virtual wall that gives you the ability to allow students to respond all at once in an organized fashion. Picture a wall in your classroom where you write a question on a large piece of paper and students respond on a post-it note. Padlet allows you to do this, virtually. Padlet also allows you to add images, links, and graphs to your wall. One of my favorite features of padlet, is the ease of sharing the padlet with your class! You can share via email, social media, and you can even embed the link onto your own website/class blog. However, I find the QR code that padlet creates for you (Genius! One less step for us!) to be the easiest way to share your wall. The students would use their devices, scan the qr code, and it would take them directly to the padlet in order to post their responses.

Ideas of how to use padlet in the classroom:

1.     Brainstorm new topics

2.     Exit Ticket/Bell Ringer (One thing you learned. One thing you remember.)

3.     Post, “What is something from this lesson that you need extra help with?”

4.     Book reviews (favorite quotes, characters, questions)

5.     Back Channel (As you teach, students can pose and respond to each other’s questions over the topic that you are teaching.)

6.     Prediction (Stop and predict what is coming up next in your novel.)

7.     Note taking

The ideas are endless!

The image below is a sample taken from the padlet website.

Wordle Pre-Read Activity

Last week, I was sauntering down the hallway to a Spanish classroom but had to make a quick pit-stop into an 8th grade English classroom because of what I saw on the board. As I peered into her small, classroom window, I noticed a Wordle on her board. Now, I have used Wordle in the past, but not the creative way that she was using it with her 8th grade students. I had always used wordle after I taught a lesson to review big concepts. According to www.wordle.net, "Wordle is a toy for generating "word clouds" from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to your own desktop to use as you wish."

The 8th grade English teacher was about to start a new novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, with her students, but instead of reading the back cover or filling out a KWL chart, she took the summary of the book and pasted it into wordle to create an image of the summary. The class had a great discussion because of it. She simply said, "Tell me what you think this novel is going to be about and why?" Student responses included:

"I think the main character is going to be someone named Scout because that word is really big."

"The book must be centered around a school with children and maybe Maycomb is the city in which the book takes place."

Other ideas of how to use Wordle in your classroom:

• biographies
• auto-biographies
• book reports
• essay writing- Imagine trying to teach students the importance of varying your sentences. Many times students want to start sentences with "I." To see if their essays are varied, have them put their essay in a wordle and make sure the word I is not the largest word on the wordle. Discuss how the main character, theme or location should be the biggest words. 
• speeches- what words were most important
• Vocabulary- give students new words and have them come up with as many words as they can that are associated with that word and create a wordle
• along with a survey- Survey students using google forms and put results into Wordle to clearly see the favorite

Awesome website with 125 ideas on how to use Wordle.

https://21centuryedtech.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/word-clouds-125-ways-and-counting-to-use-wordle-in-the-classroom/

Authentic Learning

While teaching, we always want to find ways to make our lessons authentic as often as possible. A colleague was teaching scale to her middle school, math students. After learning about scale, the students took a page from a coloring book and scaled it down on grid paper. Take that one step further... authentic learning with an authentic audience, but how? Students were then asked to respond to the following discussion post:
Now that you have learned about scale and how to scale drawings, what careers use scale on a daily basis? Give specific examples.

One step further... the teacher will be bringing in professionals who use scale in their daily lives and provide examples for the students to see and discuss. Authentic. Learning. 

Screencastomatic

"One-click screen capture recording on Windows or Mac computers with NO INSTALL FOR FREE!" Like music to my ears! I always want to try out new ways to capture teaching but there always seems to be something that has to be installed. 

Screencast-o-matic might be the easiest, most user-friendly screen cast website I have ever used. You literally go to www.screencastomatic.com, click start recording and it counts down 3-2-1. You record your screen, webcam or both, save the recording to your computer. Done. And yes, it is truly that easy! We have used screencastomatic many times. Examples:

• teacher creates a screencast with his/her voice recording a lesson using Microsoft word
• teacher creates a screencast of a you tube video, pausing to point out important points throughout the video
• teacher creates a screencast then uploads to edpuzzle to incorporate questions throughout the lesson to check for understanding and give immediate feedback

Other ideas:

• have students create screencasts to explain a topic taught in class
• students create screencasts on different topics, then do a "walk around share" where students walk from desk-to-desk watching different screencasts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jADJ_OoSnm8

Math in a French Classroom Using Socrative

3 - 1 = 2 is usually heard in a math classroom, but not today! Today, you can hear math being used in a French classroom as the students review numbers in French. Cross-curricular teaching right there, ladies and gentlemen! 

I have been working alongside the French teacher to find ways to give her students instant feedback during class time. The 5th graders have been learning their numbers in French and what a better way to do this than by using Socrative? The lesson started out with your simply, "What number is (insert number in French- I don't speak a lick of French!)?" and the students would respond on Socrative with the correct answer. But then, she turned it up a notch! Instead of simply asking for a direct translation, the teacher forced them to put on their math hats alongside their berets. She would say (Once again, she was speaking in French) "What number is 4 + 5?" Without a tool like Socrative, you would have asked the question, waited for a student to raise his/her hand, and had one student respond. Socrative allows for all students to respond at once without seeing each others' answers and the teacher instantly knows if the students have mastered the concept or if it needs to be retaught or reviewed. 

www.socrative.com

From Educreations to Edpuzzle

In an earlier post, I explained the benefits of using edpuzzle and shared the idea of using your own, pre-made videos. However, when working with a teacher on my campus with the idea of taking her educreations videos that she has made in the past and placing them in edpuzzle to add questions throughout her videos, we faced a problem... Educreations and edpuzzle do not communicate. You can't upload an educreations video as easily as you can a you tube or vimeo video. We did some research and found a way around this issue. 

How to turn an Educreations video into an Edpuzzle

1. Using your iPad, save educreations video to camera roll.
2. Open the You Tube “Capture” App and select the video that you saved to your camera roll and give it a name.
3. Once the video has uploaded, be sure that the privacy is set to public.
4. Near the top of the screen you will see the link. Click on the link and “copy to clipboard.”
5. Go to safari and sign in to Edpuzzle.
6. Click on search and paste the link you copied to the clipboard in the space. (If a screen comes up that says, “Oops! There was a problem with the video,” go back to the capture app and reselect public. Once you reselct public, copy the link to clipboard again. Go back to Edpuzzle and paste.)
7. Now that the video is uploaded to Edpuzzle, you will need to log on to edpuzzle on a desktop as iPads do not have flash plug ins.

Edpuzzle Excitement

Taken from www.edpuzzle.com

Awesome, innovative, creative way to take an already made video from the web (think youtube, vimeo...) OR your own video that you have created (educreations, show me...) and deepening students' learning and understanding by inputing questions throughout the video. To top that off, edpuzzle gives you a class code for each class you create that you can share with you students and it monitors their progress. Instant feedback! As your students watch the video and answer the questions throughout the video, edpuzzle shows them the correct answers instantly. There is also great feedback on the teacher end that lets you know exactly what you need to reteach or review with your students. 

Generally, edpuzzle is created by the teacher to teach and assess students. But how great would it be to have students be the teachers? 

Example) 

Lesson- Teaching students about the founding of Jamestown. Instead of you finding the youtube video that explains the founding of Jamestown and inputing edpuzzle questions throughout the video, have students find or create Jamestown videos and input edpuzzle questions throughout the videos to then share with their classmates.

Great video on how to create an edpuzzle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGjP7QrNo7U

Blogging in an Art Class

Yes. You read that correctly. Blogging in an art class. Why?

Portfolios are not new in an art classroom; however, the way that we create our portfolios can be. Imagine students being able to share their artwork with family members across the nation and being able to do this with a click of a mouse. Our students spend one, nine-week grading period in art in 5^th grade, a semester in art in 6^th grade and potentially an entire year in art in 7^th – 12^th grade should they choose it as their artwork. This year, our students will be creating blogs using blogger to act as an online portfolio to showcase their artwork throughout their career as an artist. It will be shared with family members and potentially, colleges or universities.

Students will set up a blogger account to use at school. Blogger accounts can be set up in many different ways:

Public, anyone can view and comment

Public, anyone can view but comments are moderated until published

Private, only people who are invited to read the blog can view the blog

Students will use the blog to publish their work during the beginning, middle and completed stages. They can also reflect on their thought process while creating their artwork. What a great way to create an authentic audience and receive feedback!

New Spin on Review Games

What is the challenge with review games? For me, one of the challenges I face is more often than not I have a group of students who dominate the game and another group who are not engaged. I have found that by using Kahoot (iPad friendly as well), I avoid this issue and many times my winner ends up being a student who would not have had the chance to show his/her true understanding in a verbal game.

What is Kahoot? 

-free

-game based

-website

-create your own kahoot game or choose from public games

Great website to use when you want to review for an upcoming test. 

The easiest way to explain Kahoot is to compare the game to your typical sports-bar, trivia game. If you have ever been to a "No Frills Grill" restaurant, they have the game I am talking about. You borrow a device from them, create a username, and answer trivia questions as fast as you can. Similar to this, when you play Kahoot, you earn points for not only answering the question correctly, but for answering it the fastest. I have found that all of my students are engaged in this hands-on, competitive game. 

https://getkahoot.com/

Flipped Classroom in the Elementary Setting

“Flipped Classroom” can be heard all across my campus on a daily basis. What is the flipped classroom? Is it possible to have a flipped classroom in an elementary setting? Where do I even begin? All questions that flooded my mind when I first heard about this new, innovative way to teach.

A flipped classroom:

-inverts traditional teaching methods by delivering instruction online at home and doing homework in the classroom

Why?

-spend more time on application and less on delivery

-more student-led exploration

Typical scenario in a math class:

The teacher uses class time to introduce a new topic, let’s say “how to find the area of a rectangle.” A few minutes are spent on practice and then we send a worksheet home for the students to complete. What happens next? The students spend time looking up how to solve the problems on the page they are struggling with or they ask an adult for help. Kids come back to school with a “check plus” for their homework and the teacher assumes, “Great! They understood that concept!” When in reality, a worksheet that should have taken 15 minutes to complete, has now taken 40 minutes after some intense googling and parental assistance.

Flipped Classroom Scenario:

For homework: Student watches a short video on how to find the area of a rectangle at home. (Video can either come from Khan Academy or a teacher made video. When I make videos for my students to watch, I use the apps “Show Me” or “Explain Everything.”) I record the video in the same manner that I would have taught the lesson in class. The great thing about using an app like “Show Me” is that is does not record you in the sense of a camera. Rather, it records your voice AND it allows you to either add pictures or draw on the screen. If you are like me, you don’t love seeing yourself on video! After the students watch the short video (key word= short. My videos are usually less than 5 minutes to keep their attention.):

Option 1: complete a few sample problems to bring to school the next day

Option 2: Have each student write a sample problem to bring to school the next day for a classmate to solve.

Option 3: Leave it open-ended. At the end of your video say, “Now it is your job to prove to me that you know how to find the area of a rectangle. You can make a video, write a problem on paper, create a Pic Collage… You choose!”

My first time to attempt the “flipped classroom” idea I definitely had some reservations. I will be honest and say that it takes more front-end time to teach in this manner but it was worth it! Plus, you can save the videos for the following years. When I did assign homework to watch a video, my kids came back the next day with the biggest smiles on their faces.

Student quotes:

“We felt like you were there with us!”

“I paid way better attention to last nights homework than normal because it was fun!”
“I loved being able to use my iPad for homework and I liked that I could create my own homework assignment.”

An Alternative to Homework

The situation: I want my students to read a section of their social studies textbook for homework.

Instead of: making students answer questions that prove that they have read the information

Try this: Ask students to list 2 important details they learned from the reading assignment AND post 2 questions they still have after reading the assignment.

For example, I had my 4^th grade students read Sections 3 - 8 in their social studies textbook for homework and wanted to have some sort of assessment to prove that they read the material. Instead of giving them a worksheet to complete either while they were reading or the next day in class, I posted the following on our class portal discussion board (you could use a blog if you do not have a portal) and had the students respond:

After reading Chapter 13 (Sections 3 - 8) on TCI, write 2 sentences describing what you learned from this reading AND 2 questions to ask another student.

Example (You may not use my example.)

1. After reading chapter 13, I learned that mercenaries are soldiers hired to fight for a foreign army.

2. I was surprised to learn that colonists refused to give the British soldiers food and supplies.

Questions:

1. Did loyalists fight for the British during the revolution?

2. After the war, were loyalists treated fairly?

Follow up assignment the next day in class: Review what the students posted and have them respond to at least one other person’s posts.