This year I am trying a more transparent and strategic approach to my technology integration. I've always been mindful of the purpose of the tool, but I wonder if I've consistently conveyed that purpose to my students and colleagues. I have a plan. I know what I'm doing, but do others see it?
So, to get things started, I created a Digital Dashboard Google Document on which my students will see what sites we will be using consistently, the rationale for using that site, and an area in which they will type in login information---not their actual password, but hints or clues in case they forget. There are important class links to district sites, as well as extra rows for students to add additional sites they may choose to frequent.
Both Edmodo and Google Classroom give users the ability to generate an editable copy for each student with the file name and sharing permissions, so in the event that someone does not remember his/her password, the student can access the doc or I can offer clues. Many of the tools we will employ in class allow the teacher to reset passwords, but I want students to be responsible for their accounts before I access my dashboard.
If you like this design, go ahead and snag a copy, customizing it for your students. In the comments for this blog post, please share how you convey the purpose of technology integration to your staff and students.
Showing posts with label digital. Show all posts
Showing posts with label digital. Show all posts
Sunday, September 3, 2017
Tuesday, July 21, 2015
Collaboration & Community
The word "collaboration" is thrown around so much that it should be the center square on a bingo board. Not that I am denouncing or mocking collaboration, on the contrary, I believe in the power of collaboration and think we can take systemic approach whether collaborating with folks across the country or the hallway.
The first step with any collaboration is to find people to work with (duh!) and the purpose of the collaboration. Serendipitously, I've connected with like-minded folks on Twitter via #flipclass and we've collaborated on numerous projects: research projects, writing groups, and overall curriculum. We discussed community building during last night's #flipclass chat. The Flipped Learning Community is the most collaborative group of folks I have ever met and this got me thinking about why that was so:
I think the #flipclass folks collaborate so well because we all have recognized a need to change. We weren't satisfied with how we were teaching and felt the need to evolve. I'm greatly over simplifying things in my response above and in this post, but part of the lack of collaboration locally may be due to others not having a need to change or understanding how to change. If there isn't a need, why do it?
About 10 years year ago, I collaborated with two other English teachers in my hall to craft a freshmen curriculum that would lay the groundwork for prepping students for the NJ-HSPA exam taken in 11th grade. The power of that paper-based collaboration was seen in our exemplary test scores (I know that isn't the only measure of success, but prior to the great digital data era we are in now, those scores were important). We saw a need and fulfilled it with collaboration. Now that HSPA is gone and PARCC is king (for now), we are recognizing the in-house need to collaborate and prep our students again. While I do collaborate with individual colleagues on lessons, I wish a standardized test wasn't our primary extrinsic motivation for large-scale collaboration. I want to collaborate so that we can be #BetterTogether-- the sum of all of our parts creating something greater than the whole.
Throughout the 2014-15 school year, I was able to collaborate at home with a new to my district English teacher who also taught senior English next door to one of the classrooms I used this year. My traveling schedule dictated that we collaborate online via email and Google Drive, creating lessons for the new-to-both-of-us senior English prep. Having taught senior English only for the first time 2 years ago, I did not feel like an expert in my craft and welcomed her ideas. We had similar teaching styles and enjoyed working digitally. Our collaboration was born out of a need to strengthen our understanding of the texts we were teaching to better engage our students. I greatly appreciated our collaboration and hope it will continue when I'm on the other side of the building teaching freshmen full time again.
So as we are moving more and more towards paperless learning, I have been thinking about how to craft a digital curriculum-- house all of those lessons and materials I create with colleagues. I presented on the technical aspects of collaboration for curriculum design at NCTE's Conference on English Leadership (CEL) in November 2014. While I've evolved many of my classroom activities and resources to a digital format, there has been little digital collaboration on a departmental level--other than emailing Word files back and forth or keeping an inventory of books via Google Sheets--with my colleagues in my building. The objective of my CEL session was to give other ELA educators easy to use tools and strategies for creating, sharing, and housing an archive of digital resources particular to their curriculum.
After looking through the slides below, I'd love to read about your strategies for collaboration. Heck, we could collaborate about collaboration!
Am I thinking too much out of the box?
Do you have a better way?
What is the impetus for collaboration? I often think about what motivates people to do things. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is always floating around in my brain. If I'm hungry, my stomach needs to be filled, I am motivated to eat. If I'm confused by something, I'm motivated to ask a question and seek answers. If I don't know how to do something, I am motivated to find people to teach me. As a swim coach, I constantly think about motivating my swimmers through tough workouts or difficult meets. As a classroom teacher, I think about fostering intrinsic motivation in my students. As a colleague part of a large professional network, I see motivated folks abuzz with activity. I realized the impetus and motivation for anything in life comes down to one simple thing: fulfilling a need. Collaboration won't work if you don't feel the need for it to occur.
The first step with any collaboration is to find people to work with (duh!) and the purpose of the collaboration. Serendipitously, I've connected with like-minded folks on Twitter via #flipclass and we've collaborated on numerous projects: research projects, writing groups, and overall curriculum. We discussed community building during last night's #flipclass chat. The Flipped Learning Community is the most collaborative group of folks I have ever met and this got me thinking about why that was so:
Q2: How do your on-site local community-bldg experiences compare with your experiences here in #flipclass chat (or at flipcon)?
— Andrew Thomasson (@thomasson_engl) July 21, 2015
A2 #flipclass= get me, understand me, help me grow. Home = I'm odd ball, too out of box, "i could never do what you do" comments
— Kate Baker (@KtBkr4) July 21, 2015
I think the #flipclass folks collaborate so well because we all have recognized a need to change. We weren't satisfied with how we were teaching and felt the need to evolve. I'm greatly over simplifying things in my response above and in this post, but part of the lack of collaboration locally may be due to others not having a need to change or understanding how to change. If there isn't a need, why do it?
About 10 years year ago, I collaborated with two other English teachers in my hall to craft a freshmen curriculum that would lay the groundwork for prepping students for the NJ-HSPA exam taken in 11th grade. The power of that paper-based collaboration was seen in our exemplary test scores (I know that isn't the only measure of success, but prior to the great digital data era we are in now, those scores were important). We saw a need and fulfilled it with collaboration. Now that HSPA is gone and PARCC is king (for now), we are recognizing the in-house need to collaborate and prep our students again. While I do collaborate with individual colleagues on lessons, I wish a standardized test wasn't our primary extrinsic motivation for large-scale collaboration. I want to collaborate so that we can be #BetterTogether-- the sum of all of our parts creating something greater than the whole.
Throughout the 2014-15 school year, I was able to collaborate at home with a new to my district English teacher who also taught senior English next door to one of the classrooms I used this year. My traveling schedule dictated that we collaborate online via email and Google Drive, creating lessons for the new-to-both-of-us senior English prep. Having taught senior English only for the first time 2 years ago, I did not feel like an expert in my craft and welcomed her ideas. We had similar teaching styles and enjoyed working digitally. Our collaboration was born out of a need to strengthen our understanding of the texts we were teaching to better engage our students. I greatly appreciated our collaboration and hope it will continue when I'm on the other side of the building teaching freshmen full time again.
So as we are moving more and more towards paperless learning, I have been thinking about how to craft a digital curriculum-- house all of those lessons and materials I create with colleagues. I presented on the technical aspects of collaboration for curriculum design at NCTE's Conference on English Leadership (CEL) in November 2014. While I've evolved many of my classroom activities and resources to a digital format, there has been little digital collaboration on a departmental level--other than emailing Word files back and forth or keeping an inventory of books via Google Sheets--with my colleagues in my building. The objective of my CEL session was to give other ELA educators easy to use tools and strategies for creating, sharing, and housing an archive of digital resources particular to their curriculum.
After looking through the slides below, I'd love to read about your strategies for collaboration. Heck, we could collaborate about collaboration!
Am I thinking too much out of the box?
Do you have a better way?
Monday, March 9, 2015
Reading for the Jaded Student & All: Curriculet partners with USA Today
I'm super stoked for today's announcement from Curriculet.
Curriculet has proven its worth and merit as I flip summer and independent reading, PARCC prep, and novel studies. Building on what they already do well--creating authentic reading experiences for students and behind the scenes data for teachers to use to drive instruction-- Curriculet is announcing a partnership with USA Today:
Curriculet's partnership will enable me to give my students relevant and current SHORT reading pieces that appeal to their interests AND provides me with data on their skills--and I don't have to do any extra work. Like reading the newspaper, I can keep my students up to date on current events, sports, national news, international events, and my favorite category, "Good News" featuring positive focused human interest stories.
My seniors who usually fight me on EVERYTHING I ask them to do can't complain about reading a short article. My reluctant freshmen who don't feel like they are competent readers can feel competent with Curriculet. There's no harm; there's nothing to fear. High interest, appropriate reading level-- read it, enjoy it, and answer a few questions for me... nothing too arduous. And since each article targets one specific Common Core Standard at a time, I can keep an eye on their skills and alignment to the standards with little effort on my part.
Beta-testing the USA-Today feature two weeks ago, it was seamless to choose articles and assign them to my students. Clicking on USA Today in the navigation ribbon, I selected and assigned texts the same way as I normally do in Curriculet. Since the students are already familiar with reading via Curriculet, it didn't seem like anything new to them either. I started off with articles on Mars exploration, high school basketball, and the movie American Sniper.
In each of my 5 classes the same thing happened each day: my better-performing, compliant students got started right away, opened the articles, and I listened to them chat with their neighbors... "Hey, this is cool what the team did for this girl. Reminds me of the Challenger League we have here at Southern... Oh, I want to see that American Sniper movie... Wow, it is based on a true story?... Whoa they showed this movie in Baghdad? People had to freak!... What?1 There was a contest to go to Mars? That is crazy!... I think it would be cool to be part of that...No way dude, I'm happy here on Earth."
Overhearing the conversations, my lower-performing, not-always-compliant students were intrigued and, not wanting to miss out, opened Curriculet and started reading. I circulated around the room checking in with groups of students and then called the class together for a wrap up discussion. We talked about perspective and audience perception, inclusion of special needs folks, and setting and achieving long term goals. All of that was accomplished with three short, nonfiction articles. On days two and three of our beta-testing, I didn't need to prod any students to get started, they jumped right into reading new articles and we had a repeat of engaging class discussions. The positive energy carried into the rest of the period as we switched to reading Hamlet (seniors) or The Odyssey (also in Curriculet).
I really like that I'm not sending my students to another site for nonfiction, digital reading. Within Curriculet, students can read anything and everything from contemporary YA lit novels from publishers to canonical texts to documents I upload to current nonfiction articles. With its broad service offerings, Curriculet once again proves to me that is the only digital reading tool I need to get all my students reading.
I envision using the Curriculet-USA Today articles as a daily Do Now/Bell Ringer activity for all of my classes. Students enter the classroom, grab a Chromebook or sign on their smartphones and spend the first few minutes of class reading, answering questions, and discussing the articles with their neighbors. We could continue to do a quick round-robin discussion of the articles and what they found interesting in each. Students are staying informed on current events AND demonstrating valuable life reading skills.
There are so many MORE activities I could do with Curriculet & USA Today!
I'd love to read about your ideas, too. Please comment and share!
Curriculet has proven its worth and merit as I flip summer and independent reading, PARCC prep, and novel studies. Building on what they already do well--creating authentic reading experiences for students and behind the scenes data for teachers to use to drive instruction-- Curriculet is announcing a partnership with USA Today:
"Now, students and teachers can access relevant and timely news from USA TODAY through Curriculet's dynamic reading platform. In addition to its free on-demand digital library filled with popular books, Curriculet now allows students to read news articles with embedded assessments that develop literacy skills and build subject area knowledge. Known as "curriculets," these integrated checkpoints focus on specific skills and Common Core Standards.
Every day, Curriculet delivers articles curated for classrooms and pre-loaded with interactive layers of instruction that include annotations, rich media and question sets. Every article includes three differentiated layers targeted to elementary, middle and high school reading levels so that each student can interact with the text.
Curriculet’s real-time reporting feature lets teachers track student achievement in every assignment. Teachers can assess progress on standards and literacy skills, track time spent on-task, and identify where individual learning gaps are.
Whereas other news services for students offer outdated news stories, Curriculet’s partnership with USA TODAY makes it possible to supply students with articles the day after publication, in their original form."
Here's why I am excited about this announcement: Curriculet is providing me with another way to reach struggling readers and jaded students. To be honest, I'm not worried about my Honors students-- they will read whatever I give them--but, I'm worried about getting and keeping my lower-level freshmen and disaffected seniors reading. Asking them to sustain their attention for a whole novel is a Herculean feat. They often give up before they ever get started, intimidated by the length and preconceived notions about reading for class. But reading one, heck, even two short, high-interest articles a day (and answering a few questions and clicking on a few annotations) will build a daily habit for reading because they can do it.
Curriculet's partnership will enable me to give my students relevant and current SHORT reading pieces that appeal to their interests AND provides me with data on their skills--and I don't have to do any extra work. Like reading the newspaper, I can keep my students up to date on current events, sports, national news, international events, and my favorite category, "Good News" featuring positive focused human interest stories.
 |
| Selection of articles updated daily with older ones still available. |
My seniors who usually fight me on EVERYTHING I ask them to do can't complain about reading a short article. My reluctant freshmen who don't feel like they are competent readers can feel competent with Curriculet. There's no harm; there's nothing to fear. High interest, appropriate reading level-- read it, enjoy it, and answer a few questions for me... nothing too arduous. And since each article targets one specific Common Core Standard at a time, I can keep an eye on their skills and alignment to the standards with little effort on my part.
 |
| Data on student reading performance: available by student & question |
 |
| Whole class progress bar for easy viewing |
In each of my 5 classes the same thing happened each day: my better-performing, compliant students got started right away, opened the articles, and I listened to them chat with their neighbors... "Hey, this is cool what the team did for this girl. Reminds me of the Challenger League we have here at Southern... Oh, I want to see that American Sniper movie... Wow, it is based on a true story?... Whoa they showed this movie in Baghdad? People had to freak!... What?1 There was a contest to go to Mars? That is crazy!... I think it would be cool to be part of that...No way dude, I'm happy here on Earth."
 |
| From the article, What moviegoers in Baghdad think of American Sniper, students answer questions embedded in the text. |
Overhearing the conversations, my lower-performing, not-always-compliant students were intrigued and, not wanting to miss out, opened Curriculet and started reading. I circulated around the room checking in with groups of students and then called the class together for a wrap up discussion. We talked about perspective and audience perception, inclusion of special needs folks, and setting and achieving long term goals. All of that was accomplished with three short, nonfiction articles. On days two and three of our beta-testing, I didn't need to prod any students to get started, they jumped right into reading new articles and we had a repeat of engaging class discussions. The positive energy carried into the rest of the period as we switched to reading Hamlet (seniors) or The Odyssey (also in Curriculet).
I really like that I'm not sending my students to another site for nonfiction, digital reading. Within Curriculet, students can read anything and everything from contemporary YA lit novels from publishers to canonical texts to documents I upload to current nonfiction articles. With its broad service offerings, Curriculet once again proves to me that is the only digital reading tool I need to get all my students reading.
I envision using the Curriculet-USA Today articles as a daily Do Now/Bell Ringer activity for all of my classes. Students enter the classroom, grab a Chromebook or sign on their smartphones and spend the first few minutes of class reading, answering questions, and discussing the articles with their neighbors. We could continue to do a quick round-robin discussion of the articles and what they found interesting in each. Students are staying informed on current events AND demonstrating valuable life reading skills.
There are so many MORE activities I could do with Curriculet & USA Today!
I'd love to read about your ideas, too. Please comment and share!
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