Showing posts with label #iste2015. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #iste2015. Show all posts

Saturday, July 18, 2015

Clicking with Cliques at Conferences #Flipcon15 #ISTE2015 #ECET2


We've been having a discussion in the newly formed #Flipcon15 Continued Voxer group about how to get new attendees more comfortable and connected at the conference. Check out Jason Bretzmann's blog post and Christina Roy's post on this subject too.  Attending large conferences is an overwhelming experience:  so many sessions, so many people, so many places!  I would not recommend STARTING to form a Professional Learning Network when attending a conference for the first time.  In order to have a connected experience at a conference, the connections need to be made before I ever set foot on site.

I did not learn about ISTE, ECET2, or Flipcon from an advertisement online or in a mailer. I am not motivated to attend the conferences because of the glossy pictures or catchy graphics.  I am motivated to attend conferences because of the PEOPLE.

Having an insatiable hunger to learn, I first dove into the professional education pool through Twitter.  The very first conference I "attended" (ok, lurked via Twitter) was the 2012 State of Now #140 conference in New York City. Happening upon the link to the live stream of Chris Lehmann's keynote, I was captivated. I was even more enthralled as I realized folks were talking about the conference through Twitter.  It was here the I first connected with Cheryl Morris and Andrew Thomasson who were also lurking online. Discovering we have similar educational mindsets, they connected me to the #flipclass chat.  Having found the #flipclass chat, I discovered #Flipcon and attended virtually in 2013 which then led to attending in person at #Flipcon14 and #Flipcon15.  The #flipclass chat also connected me and many others to Jason Bretzmann who crowdsourced us as contributing authors for the book Flipping 2.0.  Say what?! Yup, thanks to a Twitter chat, I'm a published author.

When I attended #Flipcon14, I had a list of people I "knew" through Twitter and #flipclass who I couldn't wait to meet in person.  The experience is akin to online dating:  connect online, then meet in person.  At #Flipcon14, there was no awkwardness or trepidation because, unlike folks who may misrepresent themselves on online dating sites, who we are online is who we are in person.  There was and still is no need to misrepresent ourselves online. Meeting Shai, Carla, and Lindsay for the first time face to face at #Flipcon15 was not an awkward experience because we already connected throughout the year via the #flipclass chat.


As Crystal Kirch and others stated, attending #Flipcon is like attending a family reunion. And while I want to form new connections with new attendees I have never connected with before, I am just so thrilled to see face to face the online folks who I've already "met" and who "get me" and understand me.




Keep in mind, my connections have grown with conference I attend. So in my first iteration of attending #Flipcon13 virtually, I really only knew Cheryl and Andrew, but at #Flipcon14 I connected with more people, and at #Flipcon15, I connected with even more people as evident by all the selfies I took (see all the pictures here).  My connections have grown exponentially each year. Also, the connections I've made have encouraged me to not only attend conferences but also to present at them. I'm no longer a passive attendee, but an active participant. My confidence and comfort level has increased the more I've interacted.

I've also learned not take for granted the connections at home.  In 2012, I happened upon a tweet sent by Kyle Calderwood who was calling for proposals for #TeachMeetNJ.  So ecstatic that there was a local conference, I signed up to present and started talking to him via Twitter. 
When I read the above tweet, I thought, "Oh! She must be reading my blog!" How else would this wife of a guy from Twitter know that I do "amazing stuff" with my students?!  Well, I started poking around through Twitter profiles and realized, (insert Homer Simpson "duh-oh!"), that Kyle's wife TEACHES IN MY DISTRICT.  Talk about slap to the forehead and lesson in humility.

Long story short, Liz and I threw together a session at the 2012 TeachMeetNJ on Edmodo and it went so well that we continued to present together at local edcamps and decided to submit a proposal to present at Edmodocon in the summer of 2013. Presenting at Edmodocon 2013 connected us to Edmodo staff who then encouraged us to submit our session, "Classroom Gymnastics: Using Edmodo to Flip and Blend your Class," to present at ISTE 2014 in Atlanta.

Presenting at ISTE 2014 was not an overwhelming experience because I had Liz and Kyle showing me the ropes of attending a big conference.  We carved out our niches in the vast ISTE landscape as the folks we knew from Twitter met up in Blogger's Cafe and the New Attendee Lounge areas.  If it weren't for my conference buddy, Liz Calderwood, and the #eduawesome folks of Twitter, ISTE 2014 would not have been such an amazing experience that influenced me to present at ISTE 2015.

It is also through Twitter that I connected with the indomitable Barry Saide who, long story short, crowdsourced a bunch of New Jersey educators to create the NJPAECET2 convening in September 2014 and later invited us to the national ECET2 convening in New Orleans in October 2014. It was Barry's ability to see our strengths and talents and bring together the group to connect us to the greater ECET2 network.  We are in the final stages of planning the 2015 NJPAECET2 convening to get other local educators connected.  Because Barry paid it forward to me to attend ECET2 in 2014, I paid it forward to my colleague Kim who I knew needed to be elevated and celebrated and nominated her to attend the 2015 ECET2 convening in Seattle.  Whereas I knew people prior to attending, Kim did not and was new to Twitter. So while she was in Seattle and I was on the road at #Flipcon15, I texted and tweeted her with missions to go find specific Twitter people who I knew were also at ECET2.





The point I'm trying to make is that I primarily use conferences to solidify and strengthen relationships. I do connect with new folks, but most of those new connections are because the new person is connected to someone I already know from Twitter.  So my advice, get connected before ever setting foot on site at a conference.

To recap how I make large conferences feel small:

  1. Get on Twitter and find folks who help you grow as an educator. Through them you will make new connections.
  2. Find a conference buddy who has attended the event previously and either travel together or plan to meet up.
  3. Follow the conference hashtag, follow folks who are tweeting, start an online conversation, then find out where folks are meeting up face to face. If your Twitter handle is written on your badge, folks will realize who you are from Twitter and you won't need to break the ice face to face ("Oh, YOU'RE  @____, I follow you!"). 
  4. Keep tweeting and keep attending conferences to expand your circles of friends.
  5. Find ways to pay it forward and bring new folks into the fold.


And as a final note, if you are wondering how to take the first step, click on all the hyperlinks to people's Twitter profiles in this post to expand your PLN and consider the words of Saint Augustine below...






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Wednesday, July 8, 2015

#ISTE2015 Peer Evaluation & a BAM Radio Interview

So, this happened.....  Jon Bergmann, flipclass pioneer, interviewed me about my peer evaluation techniques at ISTE.

How did that happen???  Well, after chatting about what I do during lunch with Jon Bergmann, Aaron Sams, and Crystal Kirch, Jon says, "I need to interview you right now for my radio show!"  Say, what?!  I didn't even have time to process his statement.  Next thing I know, Jon finds a quiet spot, whips out his phone and starts recording and asking me questions. You can listen to the podcast of the interview with Jon Bergmann here.

That was on Sunday. On Tuesday, I presented my ISTE session, "Best Practices & Digital Tools for Feedback, Assessment, & Evaluation," to a packed room. No open seats and folks were even sitting on the floor!





To learn how/why I got started with peer evaluation, read this.


Since my student teaching days, I've been refining my peer evaluation process, and with Google Apps for Education, the process has become paperless. Google Classroom makes it easy to manage the workflow. Keep in mind, the following steps take place over the course of a week or so. Students get their writing evaluated by classmates, and then the writers evaluate their evaluators. The objectives of this process are centered on fostering a community of writers and having a dialogue about student work. Students are engaging in an analytical, reflective, and metacognitive process.


GOOGLE CLASSROOM STEPS:
  1. Create an assignment in Google Classroom for students to turn in their writing.
  2. Create a Google Form for the peer evaluation.  I use a combination of rubrics: checklist of requirements, numerical qualities, and Outstanding/Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory (OSU) to assess quality. 
  3. Share the writing pieces with the class. Classroom will automatically put all student work in to an assignment folder which you can share with the class. I prefer to set the permissions to "Anyone with link can COMMENT." When you change the folder settings, it will change every document in the folder to match the sharing permissions of the folder. 
  4. Create an announcement where you provide the link to the shared folder and the Google Form for evaluation. Students open folder, select essays to read and evaluate on the Google Form. I encourage students to do at least 5 different evaluations. 
  5. Create another Classroom assignment for analyzing the evaluations. I create a template Google Doc with guiding questions and have Classroom create a copy for each student and I attach the master spreadsheet for the students to copy/paste their particular data. Students analyze their data and agree/disagree with the itemized evaluations as well as the whole evaluation. They must provide evidence to support their agreement/disagreement with the evaluations. 
  6. Create another Google Form for the Evaluation of the Evaluator.  Writers will fill out the form providing their evaluator with feedback on the quality of the evaluation. I've also used the Autocrat add-on to auto deliver the feedback to a Google Doc for each evaluator instead of doing the next step. 
  7. Create another Classroom assignment for analyzing the evaluation of the evaluator with another Google Doc template (again set it so Classroom generates a copy for each student to edit) and the link to the spreadsheet attached. Students copy/paste their corresponding data on to their Google Doc and analyze/reflect on how well they evaluated their classmates.

Throughout this entire process, I am monitoring the students and checking the spreadsheets.  If I see something out of joint (someone isn't pulling his/her weight), I will speak directly to the student and provide redirection.  Students are also allowed to talk to one another while working on the evaluations. I keep an ear on the conversations and will jump in as needed.




So I know this process is an overwhelming amount to digest at once.  I do not do all of this right away.  I scaffold the process and gradually ease students into this. Here is my instructional design:

Marking period 1: Foster an open community by getting students accustomed to sharing their work.  Everything from worksheets to quick writes is shared with a neighbor.  I also have students post their finished work to our Share Our Work small group and Scribe City group in Edmodo (more on the Edmodo groups in another blog post).  We do quick peer evaluation activities on paper to start and by the end of the marking period use Google Forms. We have discussions on how to evaluate each other's work with students writing self-evaluations. No formal evaluations of the evaluator just yet.

Marking period 2: We maintain our open community, but the writing tasks and peer evaluations have increased in complexity and length. We no longer use paper to evaluate, everything is on Google forms.  Students still complete self-evaluations and begin to use Google Forms to evaluate the evaluator.

Marking period 3: Pull it all together!  Students engage in the entire process completing formal evaluations of writing tasks and the evaluators. Everything is on Google Forms and in Classroom.

Marking period 4: Continue. Continue. Continue.  As a final project, students write up a final self-reflection as a writer and evaluator examining their growth through out the entire year.



So that is it in a nutshell.  Did I lose you through all of this?  Need clarification?  PLEASE, share and let me know what you do with your students.  I am continually tweaking this process, so I value your contributions!
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