Personal Thoughts Today

I make an attempt to keep this blog as professional as possible and share ideas and ways to integrate technology purposefully in the classroom.

In light of recent events, I have been thinking how much the world has changed in my lifetime and it saddens me. I grew up in a small town in North Carolina and I remember not having to lock our doors when we went shopping. I remember going to an elementary school that housed kindergarten and first grade in a separate building and the school doors were never locked. I remember being able to play with my friends in the neighborhood until dark during the summer without having to worry about something bad happening. It saddens me that children today are missing out on innocent times.

I pray that God wraps his arms around each and every family member of those lost last Friday. I pray that God holds close the faculty, staff, and students that survived that horrible event. I pray that God keeps our high schools safe today and tomorrow as the talk of bringing a weapon to school for the "last day on earth seems to be everywhere in the news. I pray that we can help our students be as innocent and worry free so they can enjoy their childhood.

Merry Christmas everyone and have a safe and happy New Year.

Classroom Strategies That Work - Generating & Testing Hypotheses & Cues, Questions, & Advanced Organizers

The process of generating and testing hypotheses involves the application and use of knowledge. It is a complex mental process that is often associated with and isolated to science. But take it out of the science context. It's simply a matter of asking, "IF I do this, WHAT might happen? IF that things acts or responds in a certain way, WHAT may happen?"

Researchers suggest the following six tasks for students in classrooms:

1. System analysis: For example, students study the ecosystem and make predictions about what would change if a certain species of animal were altered or removed.
2. Problem solving: Have students look at various solutions given obstacles posed by the problem. 
3. Historical Investigation: Construct hypotheses about historical events for which there is no agreed-upon resolution. (Assassination of JFK.)
4. Invention: Students examine a need and then work to create a solution for the need.
5. Experimental inquiry: Students observe a phenomenon, make a hypothesis about why or how that event happened, and set up an experiment to test their prediction. 
6. Decision Making: Students define a situation and then weigh criteria to decide which choice makes the most sense.

Technology plays a role with hardware items such as probeware for the science experiments. Then, of course, the software applications that can be used for data collection such as Google Spreadsheets or Excel. There are many interactive flash activities on the web for cause and effect as well. Finally, I want to mention Google Earth Historical Imagery. Using the feature within Google Earth allows you to time travel. So you could go back in time and hypothesize what happen to make things appear as they do now. 

The final Classroom Strategy that Works is Cues, Questions, and Advanced Organizers. This strategy focuses on helping students learn to retrieve, use, and organize information. Teachers use cues as explicit reminders or hints about what students are about to encounter. Use technology to create visual cues to help students and post around your room. Teachers use questions to trigger student memory to access their prior knowledge. Using blogs would be a great way to pose questions for students. Blogs allow shy students to voice their thoughts that they may never voice in class.  Advanced organizers are structures provided to students prior to learning to help them classify and make sense of the new content. There are lots of technology applications for students and teachers to use to create graphic organizers which will be the focus of this post. I have written about graphic organizers before, so I am going to add some additional options here.

What are your ideas and thoughts on these two strategies?

This post concludes the series on Using Classroom Strategies that Work in the 21st Century Classroom.

Classroom Strategies that Work - Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback

Wow! What a month! Our district has been transitioning from one email program to another. Part of our jobs as ITFs was to train every single employee in the district on the new email program. Needless to say that is why it has been a while since I posted.

It is the day before Thanksgiving break around here, which means that I have time today to catch up a little bit. So, first thing is to share my thoughts on Marzano's strategy for setting objectives and providing feedback.

Students learn best when they know the goals or objectives of a lesson or activity. Teachers do this by using essential questions, "I Can" statements, rubrics, and graphic organizers. Research indicates that when students know the goal or learning target, their performance increases by 27 percentile points. Teachers should also help students set their own learning goal and can use sentence stems to help them in the process. For example, "As a result of this lesson, I will be able to..."

A great way to incorporate setting objectives and technology is to let students keep a digital portfolio with artifacts for each objective. In our district, we have Google Apps so Google Sites would be an easy way to create portfolios. Other options could be Wikispaces, PBWiki, and the like.

For the feedback portion of this strategy, research indicates four criteria for effective feedback includes:

• Feedback should be corrective in nature.
• Just indicating which answer is right or wrong has a negative impact on achievement. The best feedback includes an explanation of why a choice is correct and why the other choices are not.
• It should be timely.
• Timing is crucial. Immediate feedback right after a test is best. The longer the delay, the less improvement three is in achievement.
• Feedback should be specific.
• When feedback relates specifically to identified knowledge or skill, the student understands what they need to do to improve their performance. Tap into your inner coach!
• Students can provide some of their own feedback.
• Allow students to track their own progress. For example, they might keep a chart of their accuracy, or speed, or both while learning a new skill. 

Technology provides some options to help teachers give feedback. Most of my schools have some type of student response system, but there are free options available online.

Socrative is a free online smart student response systems that is getting great reviews from educators. They provide "educational exercies and games." Socrative works on tablets, smartphones, and laptops. Teachers select the activity and students login and interact real time with the material. Reports are available online, but can be saved in a Google Spreadsheet or as an Excel file.

Poll Everywhere is free for 40 participants or less. It provides a great way to create real-time experiences using mobile devices to obtain instant feedback and information.

If you use Google Apps, there is Google Forms. I love Google Forms. They are simple to create and can be used for a multitude of things. One great aspect is the fact that the data is dynamic. It is added to a spreadsheet as the data is collected which allows you to manipulative and analyze. It also has a feature called flubaroo (flubaroo.com) that can be used to grade the data collected from the form. How cool is that!?! For ideas on how to really use Google forms in the classroom, check out this site for 80+ ways.

Please feel free to share other ideas in the comment section.

Pinnacle Visits

There are things about my job that I love. You already know that I love to plan lessons and really look at curriculum and technology integration with teachers. The other thing I love about my job is the opportunity to work with our county's "Pinnacle Leaders."

What's a Pinnacle Leader you ask? It was a program started in the county by our Chief Technology Officer, Debbie Core. The premise is that teachers that really want to utilize technology with their students apply for the program. If accepted, these teachers receive technology to use in their classrooms as well as lots of professional development to help them along the way. Basically, these folks are our teacher leaders in the buildings showing the way in 21st century education. They may be called upon to help their peers with technology integration, deliver professional development in technology integration, or even be our guinea pigs to try new technology within our system.

For the past few days, I have been in nine of those classrooms ranging literally from Kindergarten to 8th grade, from a special needs class to an ESL class. The various personalities and technology comfort level of these teachers are very evident when watching them orchestrate learning using things such as student response systems, SMART Boards, laptops, desktops, and iPads. The excitement and the engagement of the students are almost palatable too. And when I hear someone say, "Kindergarten can't do those things with technology!" I know better and so do our Pinnacle leaders. 

Among my visits, I saw students researching and creating a visual representation of what they have learned, I saw students revisiting text and creating a presentation about the book, I saw students working collaboratively to create an eBook, and more.

These fifteen were charged with using their technology in student centered technology integrated centers. They are doing well, but with our changes in curriculum we can always use new ideas. So...if you had a minimum of five laptops or five iPads, a SMART Board, student response system, a couple of desktops, microphones, cameras, and a document camera, what would you have students doing in your classrooms?

Classroom Strategies that Work - Cooperative Grouping

It has been my experience that elementary teachers have been using cooperative grouping techniques for a while. Research indicates that with effective cooperative grouping, student achievement will grow 27%. According to Marzano, the groups should not be always based on ability, should consistent of small numbers of students, and not be overused. Best practice also indicates to use a variety of grouping such as informal groups (shoulder partner, think, pair, share), formal groups (literature circles, project based learning group), and base groups (homeroom, table group).

So just how can technology help with grouping students? To group students physically while in the classroom, you could use random group selectors. There are many online tools to use as selectors for groups. Check out this blog post to learn about those.

But what about in cyberspace? How can we group students there? Some technology tools that come to my mind are:

• Edmodo
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Google Docs
• Epals
• Flat Classroom Project
• Social Bookmarking
• Skype

For this post, I am going to focus on Edmodo and Skype. I have mentioned Edmodo before for effort and recognition. Edmodo is a secure social networking site for teachers and students that looks very similar to Facebook. Within the Edmodo account, teachers and students have a place to connect, collaborate, share, and discuss content. Edmodo gives you the flexibility to create classes and groups in a safe environment. If you haven't yet, I really encourage you to check it out. Remember, if you work in Gaston County Schools, we have our own Edmodo domain, just ask your ITF for the school code.

Skype allows you to connect with others either by text, video, or voice all by using the user friendly interface of their program and you can do these regardless of where the people are! Skype provides a free and easy way to really show your students that the world is flat. Imagine being able to show your students how to connect with other cultures, learn from other students, and truly expand their world. Please check out this great post on 50 Ways to Use Skype in the Classroom.

Are you using any of these tools for groups or do you have others that you want to share? Please leave a comment!

Best Part of My Job

I have had the privilege of spending time with grade levels this week during their PLC time. I love this part of my job. We were able to delve into the curriculum and plan lessons integrating technology, both for teacher use as well as students from kindergarten through fifth grade.

http://eatoneducationalinsights.edublogs.org/files/2012/04/common-core-2d1rbn5.jpg 

I have mentioned before in my blog how much I enjoy curriculum and with all of the changes this year with common core, I felt like I was losing touch with that part of education. Spending three days looking at science and social studies across the elementary span has been enlightening. It  has been interesting to hear first hand from teachers how teaching expectations have changed and what they are doing to meet those challenges within their classroom.

I will say that every single one of them are working hard to make sure their students are getting the education they need and deserve.The group of teachers at this school are willing to embrace incorporating technology as well, which makes my job easier.

I just want to say thanks to them for allowing me to be a part of their PLC and I look forward to our monthly sessions!

Overwhelmed

I saw a cartoon posted in one of my schools recently. It shows a desk piled high of work and a person kind of buried in the middle of the paperwork. The caption reads, "I am not overwhelmed...I am in demand!"

As an Instructional Technology Facilitator for eight schools, I too am "in demand." Our county has a lot going on right now...common core rollout, beginning of year assessments, Gmail rollout, SMART Board training, technology integration, reading workshop, and on and on. You can walk through the elementary halls and feel the tension as teachers are redoing everything. You hear veteran teachers exclaim,"I feel like a first year teacher!"

When I start to feel overwhelmed, there are some things that I do that help me put everything back into perspective.

• First, I think about all the blessings that I have. 
• I exercise. Right now that means getting up an hour before I would have to, but the benefits have helped me deal with the stress.
• I try my best to surround myself with positive people. Negativity pulls me down so quickly and so fast, I prefer to try to look for the positive. 
• I take deep breaths. The other day, right in the middle of a Gmail training, I had to stop and take a deep breath. That calmed me and the participants as well. They took note of their actions while I was taking that breath!
• When I go home at the end of the day, I welcome my fur babies into my lap and spend a few minutes loving on them and allowing them to love on me. It is amazing how much calmer I am while I am petting my dogs.
• Finally, I take a break. I just returned from a twelve day vacation. I feel rejuvenated and ready to tackle things again.

We are all faced with seasons of stress or being in "demand" at some point in our lives. We can allow it to make us physically sick or we can find ways to cope. How do you cope? Please share your ideas as well. 

Classroom Strategies that Work . . . Non-linguistic Representations

We teach right? When we teach, we usually talk to the students about the content or perhaps have them read about the content. We depend on the students to create their own mental imagery. We focus on the linguistic. What about those students that don't know how to create their own mental images or those students that rely on images to truly understand content. Research indicates that knowledge is stored in two forms: linguistic (associated with words) and nonlinguistic (mental images or physical sensations like smell, touch, sound, or movement). The more we use nonlinguistic representations, the better we are at recalling our knowledge.

What are some ways to create nonlinguistic representations.

• Graphic Organizers or other graphics
• Physical models
• Pictures and Pictographs
• Engaging in movement activities

Simple application of using technology with nonlinguistic representations would be to include clip art and photos to handouts, word walls, and vocabulary sheets. Use video clips and slideshows while presenting the content. 

To really increase learning, involve students in the creation of the nonliguistic representations.Which brings me to the technology to use.

Animoto provides educators a free Animoto Plus account for classroom use. I honestly love Animoto and its ease of use to create beautiful, Hollywood quality, "movies" that incorporate images, video clips, music, and text. Think Hollywood book or movie trailer. It is so easy to use that it frees you up to think about the content. You can share your creation via email, an embed code, uploading to YouTube, or downloading to add to a presentation. Sign up for your free educator account and try it out. I think you will love it too.

Google Lit Trips (and Google Earth of course) According to Google Lit Trip's website, GLT "are free files that mark the journeys of characters from famous literature on the surface of Google Earth." It utilizes Google Earth's ability to add placemarks with popup windows to contain relevant resources such as images, video clips, or links for that part of the story. The is another love of mine especially creating such trips using images from Discovery Education.

If you have an iPad, then you have to know about Puppet Pals or Sock Puppets. Both allow you to create your own shows with animation and audio. Choose your actors and tap to record. Your movements are recorded as well. I highly recommend both!

Classroom Strategies that Work ... Homework and Practice

Wow! It has been some time since I have posted. Can you tell that school has started and things have been craazzzy? I have just a few moments in between PLC meetings at one of my schools, so I thought I would take this moment to share the next set of Marzano's strategies and some technology choices that fit.

We are now to the homework and practice strategy and are ready to see how technology can turn this into a fun activity for students. According to Marzano, homework should give students a change to practice and review what they have learned to deepen their understanding and proficiency. Research indicates that students need to practice a skill twenty-four times to reach 80% competency. Brain research indicates that practice must take place over several years for the understanding and proficiency to be deepen and cemented. But who wants to practice and who really likes homework?

Flashcard sites to the rescue! There are dozens of flashcards sites on the web. The one I use the most is quizlet.com. Quizlet allows you to create online flashcards or even use flashcards created and shared by others. There are four ways to use the flashcards including a couple of pretty challenging games. Quizlet is available of course on the computer, but can also be accessed through apps for most mobile devices. Check out this video to learn more or better still, sign up for a free account and try it out. Let me know what you think. Also, tell me about any other online flashcard site that you use and like. 

Communication

Ask Google for a definition of communication and the result is "the imparting or exchanging of information or news." Communication is a focus for our school district this year, an effort to let our parents, community, and world know the great things that are happening in our schools.

In light of a recent communication snafu, I started thinking about communication and how important that is. As I reflect upon my past twenty-one years in education, I have thought about people and entities that have had good communication skills.

Rewind back to my first years of teaching. I worked for a very small city school district in our state, and I mean small. We had four elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school. I had central office administrators in my classroom on a regular basis, including the superintendent. All central office personnel knew all the teachers by name and we all understood the mission and vision of the school system. I guess it was easy since we were so small.

Fast forward a couple of years, when all three systems in the county merged into a county system. We grew to eighteen elementary schools, four middle schools, and four high schools. Smaller than most, but much larger than we had been used to. Did things change? A little at first, but to the credit of some amazing leadership, all three districts merged and still was able to communicate to everyone in the system. Every teacher knew the initiatives of the district and the reasoning behind them. After a couple of years, the departments at central office knew all the teachers names and still visited classrooms.

Then I started thinking about some key people in my career that emulated great communication to their faculty and staff. I have been fortunate to work for some amazing principals who were great communicators. They kept us abreast of everything from DPI to Central office, to PTO, to well anything and everything that had an impact in our school. Some of this was even before email!

Today we have Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis, Google Apps for education, smart phones, and the list goes on. The question is, how can we truly leverage technology to communicate effectively?

So with the district focus on communication and communication a key component to success in the 21st century, what are some ways that you make sure you are communicating effectively? Seriously, I want to know, so please list your ideas here.

Classroom Strategies that Work...Effort & Recognition

We are a third of the way through our Marzano's classroom strategies that work and today I want to share some ideas for recognizing effort and providing recognition. According to Marzano, "students who believe the amount of effort they put into a task increases their achievement actually do better." The trouble is students do not inherently know the relationship between their effort and their success. So they need opportunities to see that relationship, perhaps by tracking the amount of effort to the achievement level.

Hello technology, ready to help!

Google Sites: Our county will be moving to student accounts within our Gaston Google Apps account beginning next semester. Think about using Google sites to allow them to create portfolios. There are basically three ways to use sites for portfolios: storage of digital work, single space for storage/reflection together, and then as a showcase in which the learner chooses things that really show off their learning. The thought processes behind the last two choices will help students make connections between effort and the results. A student blog, such as Kidblog or Edublog could serve a similar purpose.

Edmodo, a secure social networking site designed for teachers and students (think of it as as an educational Facebook), added a new feature a year or so ago allowing you to award badges. What a great incentive! Students love to earn the badges and again they will make the connection between effort and the recognition provided once they have the badge. Edmodo makes it easy to award the badge to the student by simply visiting the profile of that student and choose "award badge" button. You will have the option of creating your own badges or those from the Edmodo community. As a GCS teacher, you have access to Edmodo within our Edmodo domain. Just ask your Instructional Technology Facilitator for the school code.

I know one of my teachers' favorite is ClassDojo. Teachers use ClassDojo to build good behaviors and learning habits. Kids love it because they get instant feedback, have ways to earn points, and have cool avatars.

Check out these tools and please leave comments if you have any to add!

Classroom Strategies that Work for a 21st Century Classroom Pt. 2

Johan Larsson flickr 

The strategy that I want to focus on in this post is Summarizing and Note Taking, another of Marzano's high yield strategies. As teachers, we work to enhance the students' ability to synthesize information and then distill it into a concise form. This process brings in the higher order thinking skills of analyzing the information to determine key concepts and deleting the extraneous material. Note taking is related as students take notes by writing down every word or phrase. To be successful note takers, students must summarize the information to get the meaning which leads to greater understanding of the content. Again, note taking is a skill that students must be taught.

There are many tech tools which can be utilized as you teach and students use this strategy.

Google Docs - A collaborative platform in which students can work together to takes notes and summarize key ideas. Our school system is moving forward with Google Apps for Education which will include student accounts by 2013.

Wikis - are a collaborative website allowing users to add, modify, and delete content online. Our school system uses Wikispaces.com for our wikis, but you can also utilize Google Sites or PB Wiki. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia.

Evernote - This is quite possibly my favorite tool. Evernote works on computers, phones, and tablets and allows you to create and organize documents, pictures, lists, and more. You have the option to add recordings right into the notes as well as photos. Its optical character recognition ability allows you to search via keywords pictures that contain text. I love the fact that you can create notebooks to house your notes and share with others, all in the cloud. Truly, anytime, anywhere access.

Twitter - Utilizing the platform of 140 characters, challenge your students to create summarizes that are Twitter friendly. You don't even have to have a Twitter account. While perusing Pinterest, we found an idea from a teacher who is using sentence strips as "tweets" for exit slips. What a great display idea while telling others what your students are learning. You could also use a class Twitter account to create tweets to your parents about what students did in school that day.  This would be a great end of day closing activity where you write the tweet together and then you post as the teacher.

Classroom Strategies That Work: Identifying Similarities and Differences

As educators, we are probably all familiar with Robert Marzano and his work with Classroom Strategies that Work. In the book, Marzano presents nine strategies for teachers to use in the classroom to improve student achievement in dramatic ways. When you look at the results from using the strategies as seen in the table below, you may ask yourself, "Why use technology?"

That would be a good question to ask. According to research, when applied effectively, technology implementation not only increases student learning, understanding, and achievement, but also provides motivation to learn, encourages collaboration, and supports the development of critical thinking and problem solving skills. (Schacter & Fagnano, 1999)

So you may be wondering what technologies can I use for these strategies to improve the initial percentile gains?

Jason Mammano and I presented a session at Gaston County Schools Teaching & Learning Conference on this very topic. I hope to share some ideas on the strategies over the next several posts on this blog.

Today, I want to cover the strategy of "identifying similarities and differences." There are four processes that can be utilized with this strategy: compare/contrast, classify, creating metaphors, and creating analogies. Graphic Organizers are the easiest way to help students with these processes. In my previous county, we used the same mind maps or graphic organizers from K--12. Of course, the early grades focused on teaching students the thought processes behind each map and how to know which map to choose, but by the time the students got to third grade, it became second nature.

Students love technology and by combining the use of free programs, the four processes for identifying similarities and differences will become second nature to them as well.

What programs can you use? I have written about mind maps before, but I have added a couple new ones here.

Mindmeister is a free online mind mapping tool that basically walks you through creating the graphic organizer. You do not even have to sign it to use unless you wish to save the creation. It also has an app for your Android or Apple device.

Bubbl.us is another free online mind mapping tool that works better for upper grades than elementary. Again you do not need to create an account unless you want to save the map.

Linoit is a digital corkboard for sharing ideas using digital sticky notes.  What we like about Lino.it is that you can upload documents, pictures, and even, video. Although you do not have to have an account to use, you can use your Google log in for the account.

I just learned about MindMaple recently. They have a pay version, but they also have a Lite Version that is free. This is a program that you download to your computer. The interface reminds me of Microsoft Word, so it would be pretty easy for your students to use. They are also have an IOS app in which you can view the maps, and are moving toward creating the ability to edit within the app.

Popplet is the final online mind mapping tool that I am going to share, but it is definitely not the last one available. However, it is super easy to use. It literally walks you through how to use it and provides the ability to upload files. There is also an IOS app for that!

When students understand the how things are similar and how they are different, it allows them to use that knowledge in other ways and move up in the higher order thinking skills. There is so much information at our fingertips today due to the technology we have, let's teach our students how to map the information so it is easily assimilated and used.

Let me know which tools you like and don't forget to check out Jason's blog for lots of great information.

Just Wondering: When Will Technology Stop Being an "Add On"?

“Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.” -Marilyn Monroe

Change. That word has played out in conversations around me and in my head for a few weeks now. Some changes are happening in our group of Instructional Technology Facilitators that have had me thinking about change and what it really means to hold the position of ITF. We have two amazing people leaving us to pursue their dreams and follow their hearts to new positions. To both, I say, "You will be missed and God speed! I wish you success and happiness in your new paths."

The word change has played inside my head over and over leaving me wondering have I made the right decisions in my career for myself and my family? Have I followed my dreams and passions? Is it time to take a different path, perhaps that of an administrator or getting another degree?

As I talked to my best friend and confidant, my husband, the passion for what I do now came bubbling to the surface. It is really hard not to be so passionate about this job and doing what is right for students because I love curriculum and I love technology. My dream, my passion is for instructional technology to stop being an add-on, an entity unto itself, or an isolated event. I mean, really? We are twelve and half years into the 21st century and we are still isolating technology or clicking on web links for integration. Not only are our students proficient with digital tools, their parents are as well. Unlike me, they have grown up with technology surrounding them 24/7. So, the students expect to be able to use and create with technology and their parents expect them to be able to as well.

The curriculum expects it. Have you taken a few moments to really look at Common Core? Students "use technology and digital media strategically and capably. Students employ technology thoughtfully to enhance their reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language use. They tailor their searches online to 
acquire useful information efficiently, and they integrate what they learn using technology with what they learn offline. They are familiar with the strengths and limitations of various technological tools and mediums and can select and use those best suited to their communication goals" You will find such language throughout. 

Businesses and corporations (read employers) expect for our schools to reflect the world in which students will go on to pursue jobs. It is no longer about keyboarding or consuming media from the Internet. It is about creating, communicating, collaborating, and sharing with a global audience. What better place to start than within our classrooms and our schools across the nation, across the world? Are we going to meet these expectations by continuing to see technology as an add on or something cool to do?


As I talked about options with my hubby, he commented that I had plenty of opportunities to take the path of administrator and I was so adamant about not taking that path because I didn't want to lose sight of curriculum and instruction. Needless to say, he helped me to see that I still do not want to be an administrator because as you can probably see too, my passion lies elsewhere. So I will not be making that change.

But change is coming to our group. As we move forward to try to find people to fill the vacancies (not replace the folks), I am going to keep Marilyn Monroe's quote in my head. Maybe better things will fall together, and part of those better things will be that we stop thinking and talking about 21st century skills, technology, and instruction and actually integrate it as it should be.

Closing Out Another Year

This is the last week of school for students in our district with three workdays for teachers following. As I get ready to pack up my school-based office for the summer and get ready to head to Central office, I have some mixed feelings. At this time of year, I miss my fourth grade teaching colleagues more than ever. We always planned some cool units and exciting events to send our students off for the summer. It makes me laugh to think of some if the crazy activities we enjoyed. Time goes so quickly and it hard to believe but my last group of fourth grade students will be graduating high school at this end of this week. To each and every one of them, I wish great things as they embark on the next journey in their lives.

On the other hand, I can't believe the school year is ending already. It just seems like a few weeks ago that we launched into another year of our District SMART Board Initiative and introduced Google Docs to our teachers. I guess a part of that is because I was out of my schools for several months. I was put on light duty (aka desk duty) when I lost my voice.  During those five months, I learned to depend on others for things that I usually did myself (making appointments, keeping up with friends and family, doing my own presentations and staff development sessions, even ordering in a restaurant). You don't realize how much you depend on your voice until you lose it. I was scared (what if my voice doesn't come back? How will surgery help me? Will this happen again?) and felt isolated a lot of the time. Fortunately, I have an amazing husband as well as some awesome colleagues who took over at my schools. You can't imagine the thrill when my voice started returning (without surgery) and is now back to normal. I am so thankful to God for answered prayers!

The teachers and principals at my schools welcomed me back with open arms and admonitions to take care of myself. Several have started talking about plans for next year and I must say I am excited about some of things that want to happen in their schools. I have some planning to do during the summer!

Speaking of summer, it looks like a busy one! We have Pinnacle, SMART Lesson Camps, technology integration for elementary lessons, Teaching & Learning Conference, and more already creeping onto our to-do list and calendars. Not to mention, the summer honored tradition of educators everywhere...making stuff for next school year.

So as I store the last of my office possessions so the office floor can be waxed, I want to wish each of you a blessed, restful, and productive summer!

Big Huge Labs

I have discovered another cool free web 2.0 website that I just have to share with you! It is called Big Huge Labs. It is not new, but I heard about it while I was in Philadelphia at the ASCD and have been playing around with it hoping to use it for a session at our Teaching & Learning Conference.

I can certainly understand why it has been a favorite of educators for a while now. Big Huge Labs provides over
thirty different tools (or toys) to create a variety of things such as motivational posters, magazine covers, trading cards, jigsaw puzzles, cubes, slide-shows and more. When teachers use these tools to support project-based, student centered learning, the potential is there for some great higher order thinking skills.

Just a few of the tools and an idea of how to use them in the classroom follows:

Motivator: Upload your images and create motivational posters. First thing I thought of was creating character education posters to allow students to show how they understand how to demonstrate those character traits. Students can also describe a book character, a historical person, a science or social studies concept, vocabulary, and a math concept.

Movie Poster: First thought that came to mind was creating a movie poster related to a book they have read. These could be an awesome addition to your classroom library. How? You can save them to your computer and print! Use the movie poster for the student of the week. Even use it to summarize a class field trip and then send the poster to them for a keepsake and a thank you.

Pocket Album: Begin with allowing the students to create their story following the normal writing process. Then use PowerPoint as a means to create the images and combined text to tell the story. Save the presentation as JPEG images. Then upload those JPEG images here to create a pocket book. Print and add these pocket books to your reading center.

Trading Cards: Character cards, student biographies in trading card format, or create a set of cards to create a game about science or social studies concepts. Then allow students to play the game and use the winning hand to create a newspaper article about the concept.

These are just a few of the tools, but hopefully it has whet your appetite to slide on over the http://bighugelabs.com/ and check them out. You can create for free, but you can also sign up for an educator account. It is super easy to do. Simply sign up for a free account, then send them a photo of your educator ID badge. They will approve your account in a couple of days (mine was approved within a couple of hours). The educator account allows you to enter your students names and it will generate log ins for them (no student email needed). You can then view your students' creations. Big Huge Labs will delete student creations after a couple of weeks, so you will want to save them if you want to keep them for a long period of time.

There is an option to create gift items for purchase, but you do not need to buy anything. Check it out and let me know what you think and how you plan to use the site in your classroom!

ZooBurst

I had a few minutes yesterday, so I began to explore some new web 2.0 tools that are available that teachers and students can use for Digital Storytelling. I actually have a session on this at our Summer Teaching and Learning Conference and was looking for some new ideas.Digital Storytelling provides a way for students to tell their stories or share their content knowledge using technology in a fun and creative way.

I stumbled across ZooBurst, discovered it had a free version, and immediately signed up for an individual account. ZooBurst provides a way to create your own 3D pop-up books. Best of all, it is pretty easy to use.

You arrange characters and props within the 3D world of the book either using items from their free collection or uploading your own images. You set the stage for what is happening on the page. You can also make your characters or props "clickable." When the object is clicked, a speech bubble pops up allowing you to narrate the story or provide information through the character itself. The finished book can be shared via email, through the link, and/or embedded into a website. I did find the set-up of their database to be a little cumbersome, hopefully they will add a search feature in the future.

If you upgrade to the $49 per year version, you have additional options such as the ability to create and manage a class, add sound, record your voice, print copies, and share images across the class. Pretty cool, huh?

Check it out for free and let me know what you think!

SMART 11

In case you haven't heard the news, SMART Technologies has released the new version of their Notebook Software, SMART 11. Our district plans to push this out to our teachers this summer so it will be ready for use as soon as they return from summer vacation. In preparation for this and to recertify for SMART, I have been playing around with the new version. I wanted to share what I have learned with you.

First, you will notice a redesigned toolbar. In Notebook 10, things could get a bit cluttered as you added things to customize the toolbar for your students' use in just a single row.

The redesigned toolbar has two rows so you can add more tools without becoming cluttered. It is also organized into groups, if you will. On the left hand side of the tool bar, all of the actions reside such as the navigation arrows, adding new page, saving, etc. In the middle, you have your plug ins and tools section. The plug ins will show SMART Response or SMART Math tools if you have those installed on your machine. The tools section, located to the right, has the pens (which have now all been grouped together), eraser, shape tool, line tool, etc. The cool thing about this new toolbar is that when you click on a tool, the properties for that tool open on the right eliminating the need to go to the Properties tab as often.

The second thing you will notice is a new tab located below the Properties tab called the Add-ons tab (the icon looks like a puzzle piece). Currently, the only thing in the Add-ons tab is the Activity Builder. If you are familiar with Promethean's ActivInspire software and its ability to make containers, then you already know what Activity Builder will do. This feature allows you to create interactive drag and drop activities that respond to student choices for immediate feedback. If the answer is correct, the container will accept the answer, if not, the answer is rejected and returned to its original location on the page. SMART has made the ability to create these containers very easy, in my opinion, must easier than Promethean.

I can't tell you how many times students and teachers have asked how to reset a page once they completed the activity without closing the file and not saving changes. SMART heard and answered with Reset Page. By clicking the drop-down arrow on the page itself in the Page sorter tab, and selecting Reset page, the page is returned to its last saved state without saving and reopening the lesson. How cool is that?  

If you want to get really creative, you now can customize your own creative pen by using objects on the page or picture files saved on your computer. Instead of the daisy pen, perhaps students would want to write with their school mascot or even their smiling face!


Another cool feature is the ability to record sounds right onto the object with SMART. No longer do we have to create a MP3 sound file and then insert that file into our lesson. This will make is so easy for primary grade teachers to record instructions for their students at the point of need.

This is super easy to do as well by simply clicking the object, clicking the drop-down arrow, and selecting Sound. You will then see the record button along with the options to add as a corner icon or to the entire object.



You still have the ability to link to websites that you use to enhance your instruction, but with SMART 11, you have the option to actually embed the web page right into SMART. This allows you to still interact with the website plus use the pens to annotate on the page and drag and drop images onto that page. The one thing I wasn't too wild about is you are totally dependent on the web page resolution. So it may be better to use the Transparency Mode to interact with the web.

You will notice you have a new pen tool that allows crayon style drawings as well as a regular polygon tool that allows you to draw polygons with 3 sides to 15 sides that has been added to the toolbar. SMART also allows you to fill irregular shaped objects you have drawn with pens as long as they are completely enclosed. You will have to group your fill color and the object together though.

All in all, I like the changes SMART has made and honestly think this will not be a huge learning curve to learn to use. Check it out when you can and tell me what you think and wish me luck on certification!

ASCD Conference & Brain Research

Okay, pinch me. I can't believe I had the opportunity to go to a session conducted by Eric Jensen, Brain- based Research Guru. I was so excited and Mr. Jensen did not disappoint. his presentation was called Secrets to Teaching with Poverty in Mind and I highly recommend it if you ever get a chance to hear him.

I like to take lots of notes so I can go back later and process everything. Of course, during his presentation, he kept incorporating brain based activities which meant we were moving every ten minutes. Note taking was a challenge! But somehow I was able to get some information down so I can now share with you guys.

Start everyday in your classroom with G-N-L.  Have students share what they are Grateful for, New Learning, and what they are Looking forward to (what will be a joy?). Change this up by having students share with partners, in small groups, as a writing assignment, etc. Makes a positive change in the brain emotionally.

Brain can change for the better (or for worse) and educators can help with the change. Stress (distress) causes the brain to shut down and actually shrinks brain cells. Once stressed, it can take from thirty to ninety minutes for the brain to calm down enough so learning can take place. Educators can help students deal with stress by appropriately giving them increasing control over their lives at school and teaching them coping behaviors.

Help the brain change for the better by helping students build their applied skills, providing opportunities for activity, and attitude shifting. Check out his book on the subject for specifics for school and classroom level success factors.

Using iPads or iPods in the Classroom

There were several sessions at the ASCD annual conference on using iPads and/or iPods with students even as young as PreK. I want to share a few of the apps and ideas for their use in the classroom.

Sock Puppets: This is a free app for iPod and iPad. It publishes the finished video to YouTube which could be put on a teacher channel for the class to view. Great for kids to publish book reviews, science experiments, public service announcements, biographies, autobiographies, debates. Let them use the app to explain math problems, practice fluency, or a new way to publish their own writing.



Storykit App: Another free app for both iPod and iPad that provides stories from the public domain. The cool thing is that it allows you to edit those stories as well as create your own books. So make those stories modern by changing up the characters and language. Let students create their own biographies at the beginning of the year as a cool way to get to know everybody in the class. Start a ABC book and add letters as you learn them because the stories can be edited at any time.


BrainPop Featured Movie App: Free for both iPod and iPad. School subscription is not need to access a featured free movie every day. Questions are asked after each video to check comprehension.




StopMotion Recorder ($ .99): It is an iPod app that will also work on an iPad. A toy video camera that allows you to make stop motion video like those claymation clips you have seen before. Allows you to edit as well as share on YouTube (again think about saving to your teacher channel.)






Songify: This iPod app turns speech into music, automatically. Kids love it and can be used for storytelling, spelling lists, water cycles, life cycles, math facts, and more. Also works on an iPad.




Show Me: The iPad only app allows you to record voice over tutorials and share online. Let your students use the app to create their own Kahn Academy like tutorials to share with each other and online. Maybe create tutorials for your school or district. You can also insert pictures and have students voice over information about the photo. Think of a new way to label the parts of a plant for example complete with the purpose of those parts in the plants growth and survival!



A couple of things to keep in mind when choosing and using apps in the classroom:

• Mobile learning allows teachers to layer learning which is a requirement in Common Core.
• You can't rely solely on the apps for higher order thinking skills, it is the teacher's responsibility to use multiple apps if necessary so students can analyze, evaluate, and create.
• You can't teach the same way with the new technology. Pedagogy has to change by integrating the device into a sequence of activities. 
• Take advantage of the social aspect of the device. 

What are some of your favorite apps for classrooms? How are you changing your teaching as a result?

ASCD: A Collective Call to Action

I was fortunate to attend ASCD's annual conference held March 21 through March 26 in Philadelphia. The conference was amazing and I highly recommend going to one if you can. Next year's annual conference will be held in Chicago, but they have several conferences throughout the year. The Summer Conference will be in St. Louis, MO in July. In my next several blog posts, I would like to share some of the things that I learned.

I began the conference with a two day preconference session on 101 Tools & Techniques to Improve Teacher Effectiveness. The one thing I love about ASCD is the research behind everything they do. The session was led by Drs. James Stronge & Leslie Grant who did a phenomenal job of tying research principles to ways to help teachers become effective. Research shows that ineffective teachers have a detrimental effect on students, so much so that two straight years of effective teachers cannot remediate the achievement loss caused by one year with a poor teacher. Research also shows that classroom management and a caring teacher are the two top teacher effectiveness variables for effective teachers.

During the session, the presenters kept our focus on the teacher rather than outside influences and provided tools and ideas to help teachers be the best they can be. Check out their books for more information. Both can be found at amazon.com.

April Ideas

It is hard to believe that April is almost upon us and Spring Break is just a couple of weeks away. Upon returning from Spring Break, there is the push toward EOGs. Sometimes in that rush, we overlook a great opportunity to bring fun back into the classroom. Did you know that April is National Humor Month? It is also National Poetry Month. What a great excuse reason to combine the two and lighten up just a bit. I have found a few resources that you can use.

ReadWriteThink has several interactive tools to use to write your poetry as well as lesson plans for all grade levels.

Thinkfinity has combined resources on poetry and humor, again for all grade levels.

Museum of Humor provides educational articles, lesson plans, and printables for using humor in your classrooms. I like this site provides some humor related lessons for every subject.

Finally, Education World has a lesson plan on creating Funny Poetry Mobiles.

Pull the computer mic out of storage and incorporate some of these ideas with fluency practice. Allow the students lots of practice and then let them record in Audacity. Bring in background music and sounds that will enhance the reading and turn the recording into a MP3. Viola, you will have lots of material for a listening center.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dancingtuna/ 

Brain Friendly Learning

I am fascinated by our brains and love to apply the research to learning and life. A few days ago I attended a webinar on Brain Friendly Learning from Discovery Education. Ginny Washburne, the presenter, provided five instructional strategies based on brain research and tied those strategies to services from Discovery Streaming.

As an Instructional Technology Facilitator, I started thinking what technologies we have in addition to Discovery that educators can use in their classrooms. Here are my thoughts, please feel free to leave comments to add your ideas as well.

Strategy 1: Buy In (Start with Why) 
              We need to know the why before we know the how or what. According to Ms. Washburne, educators can get student buy in by using Hooks such as Stories, Enthusiasm, Mystery, Bigger Kid Challenge, and Meaning.
              Technology to use: Video clips, images, Mixbook, StoryJumper, Little Bird tales, and animation in SMART Notebook to slowly reveal hidden images or content.

Strategy 2: Emotions
              Google emotions and learning and you will get hits on many scholarly articles on how emotions trump reason. Providing student choice, goal setting, hope, and letting students know they matter play a huge role according to the brain research.
               Technology to use: Audio and video clips, Class Dojo.

http://media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2011/10/brain-figureines.jpg

Strategy 3: Movement & Brain Breaks
              Research shows our brains can only take so much direct instruction before our minds begin to wander. The time varies from five to eight minutes for K-2 students to fifteen to eighteen minutes for adults.
John Medina, author of Brain Rules, talks about the ten minute rule. Basically, you start your lesson with something that captures the brain's attention and then ten minutes in, you need to do something else to capture the brain's attention again. A great idea would be to build that ten minute rule into a slide in your SMART Notebook lesson. Get students up and moving, even if it is just walking around the room for 30 seconds!
             Technology to use: Interactive WhiteBoard (remember all those times I have said students need to be interacting with the content on the board?).
             Use centers some with technology options and some with hand-ons learning. For example, have stations for MP3 player to listen to stories, flipcams to do digital recording, desktop computer for publishing or interactive learning games.

Strategy 4: Play (Can't help but think of Daniel Pink's Whole New Mind)
             Even at my age, I love games! I love to be doing things. Ginny Washburne recommends including interactive games, virtual labs, digital storytelling, project based learning, learning centers, and experiments. (Sounds suspiciously like what the ITFs in Gaston County Schools recommend.)

Strategy 5: Feedback during learning process
             Technology to use: Student Response Systems can be used throughout the lesson, not just at the end!

If you think of others, please add!

Graphic Organizers

The Instructional Technology Facilitators had an interesting conversation at our recent meeting, we were talking about how our district would no longer need to purchase graphic organizer software because there are so many good ones available online for free. This is so exciting because McRel conducted research to identify instructional strategies that provide the largest gains in student achievement. The ability to identify similarities and differences produces an average 25 percentile point gain and is something that all students can do regardless of their age. With that in mind, I thought I would share a couple of online options.

Spiderscribe.net is an online graphic organizer tool that allows you to organize ideas by connecting notes, files, images, etc. in a collaborative way.

ReadWriteThink has student interactives available for use. Most are tied to great lesson plans, but all can be used as a resource for your own lesson.

Bubbl.us is yet another online graphic organizer tool that allows you to create and print your results.

Do you have a favorite online mind map that you would like to share? Please add in the comments.

StoryJumper

I have just found another neat site that I have to share! It is called StoryJumper and it is a website that allows students to create their very own books. Once the story is complete, it can be shared online, printed, or parents can order hardback books starting at $25.00. But you can create more than just stories such as calendars, adventure maps, photo journals, book reports, and more.

The interface is pretty easy to use. Students can choose a book that is already started and finish the story, or they can start a story from scratch.. You can use StoryJumper's props and scenes or you can upload and use your own photos. Their work saves, so this could be a project that continues over time.

As a teacher, you set up your class. At this time, there is no limit to the number of students you can have. Your class is assigned a class ID and you provide a password. Students then use the class ID to log in, select their name on the screen, and type in the password. They are then ready to go.Of course, as the teacher, you can see all of your students books.

As a former fourth grade teacher, I wish I had had this in my classroom. There is a downloaded lesson plan that uses seven steps to help students put together their story. Each of the seven steps include guiding questions to get students really thinking about the story elements. Lots of prewriting takes place before you ever step in front of the computer and begin using the site beginning with a graphic organizer. I know some of the provided props are elementary, but I think this site could be easily used with high school students as well. Check it out and let me know what you think!