Blogging in the Classroom

Photo Credit: Kristina B from Flickr License Creative Commons

To Blog or Not To Blog . . . That is MY Question

@joe_edtech

NBC's The Office taught me years ago that blogging is dead. Well, since I'm doing that right now and I am incredibly hip (and isn't anyone who uses the term hip?), I know that can't be true. I read some great blogs daily, like Jeff Dunn's Edudemic and Richard Byrne's Free Technology for Teachers, but that is really what I do for my own professional reading.

The real question I have is about the classroom. Is blogging dead in the classroom? I know a few teachers who are actively using Blogger with their classes. The one who has been using it the longest teaches journalism and decided three years ago that if she really intended to teach authentic journalism to her students, she better be teaching them about writing online. I recently worked with a student teacher in Freshman English who started having her students write and respond to posts online. The reason, because it is gives them a place to practice formal writing collaboratively with their peers - it's yet another way to model good digital citizenship. She found that the writing the students produced was consistently better when they knew it is going to be published and visible by her entire classroom community.

I did help a teacher set up a private blog for her special education class the other day and her response was, "Jeez, I thought this would take all afternoon. This is so easy." I think so too - so why aren't more people using it?

My hope is that this post will be interactive. I'm going to ask several people to send this out to their teaching communities and I'd love to get responses to the questions:

1. If you are blogging with your classroom, how are you doing it and has it been successful?
2. If you are really opposed to blogging with your students, why?
3. And, if the reason you aren't blogging is because you don't like Blogger, have you considered other platforms, like WordPress?

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Please post comments and answers to the questions in the box below.

FTT - Accessible Video

From the Header of www.dcmp.org

Free and Accessible Videos for the Classroom

@joe_edtech

A student of mine was recently preparing for a classroom debate on the topic of 1:1 computing and he asked me if I thought 1:1 was a good idea. It is possible that as the Director of Instructional Technology, I may be a little biased. There are a whole host of reasons why I am in favor of creating 1:1 learning environments, but I think the strongest reason is that mobile computing devices put in the hands of our students gives them access to a world of resources that might not otherwise have been open to them.

In my history classes, I would frequently supplement classroom discussions or textbook materials with video clips. Visualization is a powerful tool. But, what can you do for students who are hearing impaired and can't hear the audio of the video? Or who have visual impairments that make taking in the whole scene difficult? 

Funded by the Department of Education, the Described and Captioned Media Program (DCMP) is a free source for captioned videos which can be ordered in DVD format or streamed direct from the website using your laptop. (Everyone recognizes the need to provide "Captioned" videos to hearing impaired students, but not everyone knows that "Described" videos enhance the experience for visually impaired students by providing a narration of the visual scene.

You can choose "Described" or "Captioned" videos from
their streaming service, or order a DVD.

DCMP is also piloting an accessible television portal through a variety of content providers. This service is very young, but there are already some good titles on the list. On a whim I searched for and found "America: The Story of Us" from the History Channel, "Bill Nye the Science Guy," and several Spanish language programs.

You can search the DCMP website by subject or title. They have all school subjects, at various levels, as well as full-length films in English and Spanish. When you search, they give a short synopsis and appropriate audience levels for each film that matches your search. To show a video to your students, all you need to do is create an account with a password, email, and the address of your school. After you create your account, they will send you an email (usually within 24 hours) to let you know your account has been activated. The only thing they ask for is a response to the video, which they send through an email. It is around 5 yes/no questions. This ensures their funding through the Dept.of Education continues.

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If you would like to make your own uploaded YouTube videos accessible to hearing impaired students, YouTube has an automatic captioning capability using voice recognition software. Click here for more details.

FTT - Hootsuite

Completely ripped off from HootSuite.com, but since I'm

basically advertising for them, I assume they won't care.

Managing Social Networks with Hootsuite

@joe_edtech

For several years now, I have begun every Tuesday by posting information about one "free" Web 2.0 tool that teachers can use with their classes or for professional development. Not surprisingly, one of the tools that has really taken off has been Twitter. Actually, Twitter has seen tremendous growth in the last year and a half just among professionals in education both looking for PD and the opportunity to share their success stories. I'm at a conference right now and participants are using Twitter to record notes on sessions and speakers, and share new discoveries with their teams back home. (If you are interested, you can search #CoSN15 and check out what's going on.)

Also, while students don't use Twitter as much on their own as they did a year ago, they do tend to use social media more regularly than they use email for social or immediate conversation. One of the speakers I heard yesterday said his son told him his presentation on school technology is flat wrong because, "you keep talking about how we use email. We don't use email. Email is for old people." Well, I don't wholly agree, because email is for a whole host of professional purposes. Nonetheless, savvy teachers and coaches have noticed. If you want to quickly get information to your class or your team, send a Tweet. Even if they don't have wireless Internet at home, we find that most students do have access to mobile phone technology 24/7 (whether they should actually be using them 24/7 is a topic for a different post, but here's a preview, "Go outside! It is nice out!").

When I first started discussing Twitter with my Warrior staff last Fall, I told them that the best reason to be on Twitter was for professional development and staying current with educational and technological trends. One of the things the we all noticed when we started using Twitter on a regular basis was how frequently and consistently some bloggers would be posting. @edudemic and @rmbyrne post through all hours of the night, and I was baffled. How in the world did they have enough energy to be that prolific? 

Then I stumbled across their secret. They manage their accounts and schedule tweets to be sent at certain times of the day using third party software like Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a web 2.0 tool that allows you to manage your social media presence all on one screen. For educational leaders, this means that you can follow your "Home" feed in one column, your favorite bloggers or news sites in another, and watch the entire thread of a Twitter Chat in a third column. However the greatest feature Hootsuite offers is the ability to schedule a Tweet for later delivery. For teachers and coaches, you can now schedule reminders for your students or team members to be delivered at the time of day that will have the most impact for them, even if you are happily snoozing away by then.

Hootsuite has some very nice getting started videos that are short and easy to watch. I recommend this one, #HootTip: How to Schedule, AutoSchedule, View and Edit a Pending Post.  

If you want to do a little more with Hootsuite, and manage your entire Social Media presence, or have a school activity Twitter account managed by more than one person, there are some very good in depth tutorials out there online. This is a good and fairly comprehensive by Steve Dotto from dottotech: Hootsuite Tutorial: How to Optimize Your Social Media.

If you are a teacher or administrator, and you want to use Twitter to contact your parents and students, make sure to check with your school's board policies and procedures. For teachers, it is a good idea to have your students follow you. It is NOT a good idea to follow your students! Avoid that if at all possible. If you think this kind of messaging can be valuable but your students and parents, but you aren't ready to try Twitter just yet, you should check out Remind or Edmodo for good alternatives.

Rolling the Fuzzy Dice

photo credit: Fuzzy Dice via photopin (license)

Using Free Tech Tools to Get Kids Active and Engaged

Guest Blog Post by

+Lisa Berghoff 

In my very first year of teaching I worked with 4th, 5th, and 6th graders with learning disabilities in a summer school program.  We were in an old, un-airconditioned building and frankly none of us really wanted to be there.  My main challenge that summer was to get those kids to continue working on their reading and math skills while making it somewhat bearable.  Being an optimist (I still am) and a new teacher (I am no longer), I wanted to challenge their expectations of summer school and make the kids see that learning in the heat doesn't have to be all that bad.  Their main teacher from during the school year left me with a depressing stack of worksheets taller than most of the students.  All of her games and fun teacher tricks were locked up with a padlock in the corner of the room. I knew I had to do something to make it enjoyable or the summer would drag on forever for all of us.  Being a brand new teacher I had very little money and educational technology hadn't really been born yet, so there was no such thing as a 99 cent app I could purchase on my phone.   

Lisa Berghoff, is a Special Education
Teacher at DHS and is the co-
moderator of #TbookC Chat

I went to the dollar store and bought two very large fluffy neon dice.  We used those dice to play math “games” that actually utilized basic math skills such as place value and rounding.  The kids were thrilled.  Every day they asked expectantly if and when we could play with the dice.  They loved taking turns rolling them on the floor as  they  guessed what numbers would come up next.  Those dice saved me that summer.  The kids were having fun, which meant my summer was also saved and by the way, they scored very well on their assessments.  Playing games with those dice also gave me some street cred with the students as I became known as the teacher who did fun things and created games for the kids to play.  For the rest of the summer they were more willing to go along with my other crazy activities and when I told them we were doing something new you could feel the excitement in the air.  

The neon fluffy dice were not some special tool or strategy that I had learned in graduate school. They weren’t a research-based, nationally normed approach to teaching math to kids with special needs.  They were just fun.  They were big, they were bright, they were new, and they were different.  They made it ok for the kids to be up and out of their desks and they made it ok for the kids to be loud and excited.  The students were engaged and working as a team and I managed to sneak some math in there as well.

I often think about those dice when I am introduced to a new website, application, or other piece of technology suggested for educational use. When I collaborate with  teachers and suggest some new technology tools they might want to try in their classrooms they sometimes say things like “this is just bells and whistles” and “where does the real learning come in?”

Educational technology is the current buzz and I agree that we as teachers must look at many of these new tools with caution.  Some may be complex to use or actually not do what they claim.  We also must not lose the basic frameworks  of good teaching for the sake of using technology.  Would I use those dice for every lesson of every day? Absolutely not.  It is important to look at and evaluate tech tools for what they are and understand that they are not all necessarily designed to be the holy grail of educational technology for every classroom.  First and foremost we as educators should always use what we know about our students,  where they are now and where we want them to go, to make decisions in our classrooms.   

I would argue though that there is a place for bells and whistles in education.  We know from our own classroom experiences that with increased student activity there is increased student engagement (see linked article from Edutopia).   Many of the free online tools allow  students to be more active, collaborative, and have a good time while they are learning.  So let’s embrace the whistles and the bells, and use them wisely.

Some of my favorites in the “bells and whistles” category:

Kahoot

Jeopardy.rocks

Smore

Blabberize
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Linked source: "How Do We Know When Students Are Engaged? | Edutopia." 2012. 12 Mar. 2015 <http://www.edutopia.org/blog/student-engagement-definition-ben-johnson>

FTT - Wonderopolis

Wonderopolis.org

What Are You Wondering?

Wonderopolis.org

@joe_edtech

If the mark of a good blog post is brevity, this one is already marked for the Ed Tech Blog Hall of Fame. But, I think it might be worthwhile.

Just in the last two weeks I was introduced to Wonderopolis.org. Since then I have seen it on Twitter, Facebook, read about it in Grad School, heard about it from a trusted colleague, and saw my daughter using it on her own. 

Wonderopolis.org is literally a site designed around questions. Are you wondering about Daylight Savings Time? If so, you can find a video and a written web post about it on Wonderopolis.org. Here is the Wonderopolis.org introduction video:

Ways to Wonder - Wonderopolis.org from Wonderopolis on Vimeo.

So, Wonderopolis.org is a great place to waste some time looking up useless information, right? Well, maybe. And I'm guessing k-8 classrooms will find many more applications than we will. But it can be a great place to go for "bell ringers" to start conversations in your class. Or you can choose a topic and flip the content introduction. Better yet, you can encourage your students to start here when they begin their own inquiry projects - or if they ask questions you can't answer.

Wonderopolis.org is not a broad content delivery service, but it is a great place to begin conversations. To get started, you don't even need an account. Just navigate to Wonderopolis.org and start asking questions.

What are you wondering?

BYOD - A Trend Without Research

Mobile_Geräte.jpg Posted by IHIZ to Wikimedia Commons

BYOD: Data Driven Decision Making?

@joe_edtech

Since my very first day at Deerfield High School, I have been impressed with the determination of all the stakeholders to make the 1:1 District Chromebook program a successful and transformative experience for our students.

I'm quick to point out "District Chromebooks" because I think it is important to differentiate the two major 1:1 trends that are dominant in technology integration plans in the US. The "District Chromebook" (or iPad) plan provides teachers with a classroom standard for hardware and software, and it ensures equitable access to resources for all students regardless of their socio-economic status. All year, we have been gathering data from our teachers, families, and students on the success of our deployment so far, and some areas for potential growth. Without a doubt, we have been looking at both qualitative data (engagement, student and parent evaluation) and quantitative data (attendance rates, passing rates, standardized tests, etc). I'm not sure how we could justify the expense in dollars and time to our taxpayers and stakeholders if we didn't focus on the data.

For the last two summers, however, I spent a lot of time investigating the integration model that is really dominating the discussion at tech conferences and in the blogosphere - Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). In the BYOD model, there is no guarantee that every student will have a device, and no teacher can plan on a standard software suite for their students or anything like consistent, equitable access to digital resources. At first glance, as a teacher, I would have no idea how to plan for success in that classroom - except to plan to teach as if no student had a computing device in the classroom at all. (For a passionate argument against BYOD, read Gary Stager's Blog Post BYOD - Worst Idea of the 21st Century.)

Because it seems to be such a hot topic in education, my summer research focused on BYOD integration plans for schools. I found dozens of articles in professional and educational journals that talk about how schools have implemented BYOD, and several that quote administrators, students, and parents discussing how engaging technology in the classroom can be. However, I did not find a single article that provided any quantitative evidence that BYOD implementations increase student achievement in the classroom.

I believe in improving student learning through technology integration in the classroom, and I believe it is critical that we explicitly teach our kids to use technology in educational ways. BYOD is seen as a low cost solution for schools who would struggle to provide a device for every student. But I'm afraid that it is a fool's path that could actually wind up leaving entire school districts behind.

If you know of quantitative studies that prove the efficacy of BYOD, please, leave a link, a title, or a comment in the box below. Regardless, the conversation will continue.

FTT - GoSoapBox

Logo from the GoSoapBox website

So, All My Students Have A Device ... Now What?

@joe_edtech

I'd like to start with a very brief story about successful teaching in a 1:1 classroom. One of my former colleagues, Tim Kosiek of Buffalo Grove High School, was led to pursue 1:1 computing for his AP Environmental Science classes. At BGHS, APES has generally been considered a "gateway" AP class. In other words, it is a class that many seniors take as a challenge, likely the first or only AP class these students take. It is a deliberate attempt to get seniors ready for the rigors of college. The challenge for Mr. Kosiek was that he just wasn't sure if he was ready to take his APES class digital. Of the classes he taught, he believed that Physics was more digital ready, and he didn't know if he had gone far enough in his digital conversion to make 1:1 computing in APES worthwhile. However, his fears were soon put to rest, and his kids, rising to the challenge, began to succeed like never before.

His first year piloting 1:1 devices turned out to be a great one. Not only did he wind up with a higher number of students choosing to take a rigorous science elective during their senior year in high school, his students also saw a significant increase in achievement both in the class and on the AP Exam. In 2011, there were 48 students that took the APES exam and 77% of them got a 3 or higher. In 2012, after introducing mobile computing to the curriculum, there were 84 students who took the AP Exam and an incredible 85% of them scored a 3 or higher. 

So, where the mobile computers the magic bullet? Mr. Kosiek said that some of the higher success rates can be attributed to better access to information through technology, but most of the additional success was due to routine formative assessment through online quizzing. There is actually a great deal of Instructional Design and Self-Efficacy research that backs up Mr. Kosiek's ideas about formative assessment, providing students with timely, personal feedback can be very effective.

Teacher Screen for GoSoapBox

GoSoapBox is an online tool that can help you integrate not just technology tools, but formative assessment strategies into any 1:1 classroom. With GoSoapBox you can create quizzes or polls for instant feedback and ongoing discussion, and allow students to post questions to the discussion board anonymously. Additionally, GoSoapBox allows for students to post suggested questions for review or discussion, and then the questions can be voted on by the class. The questions with the most votes rise to the top of the list and tell you which topics probably need to be discussed the most. 

If you do absolutely nothing except allow your students to log into your class (called an "event" on GoSoapBox) you can see which students are online and students can use a toggle switch, called the "Confusion Barometer," to tell you if they are "getting it" or if they are "confused" by the material. And yes, just as is the case with Kahoot and Socrative, you can export reports to give you further information about your students' individual answers.

Unlike the other tools we've talked about on this blog, it is not easy to find good, recent tutorials on YouTube, and the navigation around the website's help section can be a little confusing. However, if you are having trouble getting started integrating technology tools into your 1:1 classroom, GoSoapBox strikes me as a great place to dive in and start taking advantage of the opportunities afforded to you and your students in a digital learning environment. All it takes is a free account to get started.

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What digital tools are you using for formative assessment in your classroom?