FTT - Beginner Tips for School Gmail

You've Got Mail!

5 Beginner Tips to Get You Started with Gmail

@LisaBerghoff/@joe_edtech

As we make our way through the transition from Outlook to Gmail, we will continue to provide you with resources, tips and tricks. Many of you are figuring these out on your own and it's exciting to see colleagues sharing their new knowledge with one another. As a reminder, please use the Outlook To Gmail website, created by Ron K. You can find it by clicking this link. I recommend that you bookmark it by clicking on the star located in the URL bar in Chrome. 

Here are 5 Tips To Get You Started...

1. Know How To Get To Your Mail

Gmail is web-based, which means you can access it from any device on the internet. You can get to it by opening a browser tab, preferably in chrome, and click on "mail".

You also have the option to get to it from your apps doc. If you add the gmail app from the chrome store, you can pin it to the taskbar on the bottom of your screen.

2. Set Up Your Signature

This is a great first step because it will help you learn how to go into the settings menu. You just click on the gear in the upper right corner of the mail screen and click settings. Don't be overwhelmed by what you see there. There are many options in gmail and you have plenty of time to explore and check them out, pace yourself! You will notice that you are in the "general" tab of the settings page. Scroll down almost to the bottom of the page and you will see where to add your signature. Yes, you can copy and paste your old Outlook signature in your gmail signature box. After entering your signature, scroll to the bottom and click "save changes"

3. Learn How To Set Vacation Notifications

It's almost vacation time! Make sure you go back into settings by clicking on the gear and click "settings". Stay on the general tab of settings and scroll to the bottom of the screen where you will see "vacation responder".

You can add your vacation message in the box and set the dates for that message to be automatically sent as a reply to your incoming email messages.

4. Get Yourself A Reading Pane and Mini Calendar

This one is very polarizing. People either love the reading pane or they hate it. I'm in the love it category so I was excited to see how easy it is to set it up. Click on the gear and click settings. Then, click the "labs" tab. You can enable or disable these features. Here, you will see the preview pane and the Google calendar gadget. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click to save your changes. Then, when you go to your gmail inbox, you will click the icon just to the left of the gear and click "vertical split"

This will add your preview pane. You can adjust the size of your preview pane by clicking and dragging the line that separates the pane from the list of messages.

5. Choose A Theme

Is there a specific color that makes you happy? Maybe you have a vacation photo that makes you smile. Set a theme for your gmail by clicking on the gear and clicking "themes". You can choose an existing theme or use one of your own photos. You can adjust the contrast for your text background, blur or darken the edges of your theme. 

These first steps should help get you started in the world of gmail. I know that intially it may feel like trying to cram a square peg in a round hole, but I believe that this is an opportunity for us to work together and learn from one another. It's so interesting to me to learn the different styles and preferences people choose for their email. It also gives me pause and makes me reflect on what it was like to teach without email at all. The fact that we can communicate with each other, our students, parents, and community members at lightning fast speeds still amazes me. We've come a long way!

Have you found some new and favorite features in gmail? Feel free to share below. 

FTT - Google Calendar

Getting Started With Google Calendar

@joe_edtech/@LisaBerghoff

Even before I started in District 113, I've had teachers and administrators ask me about the best way to take advantage of digital learning platforms. There are tons of great things to do, but my experience tells me that the biggest game changer is the ability to share live digital calendars with our students. As an adult, I have grown to rely on calendar reminders, emails, and text messages to remind me of important upcoming events. I know that a simple calendar with due dates and test dates would have made me a better student in high school. 

That's why I was always stunned by the fact that we had teachers and staff on one digital platform and our students on another. In order to share calendars with students, we were asking our teachers to live in two different digital worlds. Our switch to Gmail changes all of that and I'm really excited about the possibilities.

There is too much to know about Google Calendars to share everything in one post, but today I want to focus on what I believe are most important things to get started using Google Calendar well: settings, sharing, viewing and hiding calendars, editing events.

Settings:

Every Google App has its own settings so that you can customize it to work the way you'd like:

There are two ways to get to your calendar settings. The first is to click the pull down menu bar from "My calendars" on the left hand side of the screen:

Or, as with every Google App, you can click the settings gear in the upper right hand corner:

The first thing I changed in settings was "Default event duration." In Outlook, the default for a meeting was always 30 minutes. I like to events set at 60 minutes. But you have several different choices. However, the most important part about settings has to do with how you view your calendar. I like to look at it this way:

I want to see the whole week, including Saturday and Sunday, at one time. Notice at the top of Google Calendar, you can choose to look at your calendar by Day, Week, Month, 4 Days, or as an Agenda. However, one of those will be a default view. In other words, every time you open your calendar it will default to...something. I like the Week view. But in settings, you can choose any of them.

You can also set a Custom view for your calendar. If you only want to see a five day calendar, you can make that a Custom view and then set that as your default.

Sharing Your Calendar:

You can change share your calendar with colleagues, spouses, or students by clicking on the pull-down menu bar next to your individual calendar and selecting "Share this Calendar" from the list:

I don't expect everyone to be as open and public as I am, but my calendar is shared with anyone who wants to see it. People who add my calendar can only see when I'm free or busy, and they can't make any changes to my calendar, but anyone can see my calendar. By default, we should share our calendars within District 113 with free/busy times so that admin assistants and department chairs can see your calendars and propose meetings during common free times.

But, you can also choose to share your calendar with individuals. In the example I've included below, I've shared my calendar with several of my colleagues and my personal Gmail account with different permission levels. If someone sets appointments for me, I want them to be able to see all events and be able to edit events.

Viewing Calendars:

In the example calendar I posted above, I can actually see 3 calendars at one time. The first is my normal work calendar, which shows my scheduled school events. The second is my calendar for home, which shows when my daughter's concerts and school events are, when my wife or daughter has something important planned for us to do, and when I need to mentally prepare for family coming to visit (this shared home calendar has prevented many arguments and created some measure of family peace - I highly recommend a shared calendar at home). The third calendar doesn't have many events on it, but it is the most important. It shows when I have tickets to see Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. For easy differentiation, my work events are in grey. My home events are in red. And my Star Wars events are in Orange.

You can hide or view your different calendars by clicking on their titles on the left hand side of your Calendar screen. In the example below, I can see the Joseph Taylor, Birthdays, Brian Verisario, and DHS Library calendars. However, the Free Tech Tools Tuesday calendar is hidden (The color block is white and the text is greyed). 

If I click on the Birthdays, Brian Verisario, and DHS Library calendars, they will be hidden from my overall view. But all I have to do is click them again to make them reapper. If you decide that you want to get rid of a calendar, or if you want to change the default color for a calendar, take your mouse and hover over the particular calendar, then select the pull down menu for the calendar:

From here you can select "Hide this calendar from the list," which means it won't appear on your calendar or in your list of calendars any more. Or, you can simply choose a new color for easy differentiation.

Editing Events:

While you can do an event quick add by simply clicking on the calendar and typing in the name of an event, you can add a ton of information and invite other people to events by clicking the "Edit event" button.

 

At the top, you can add a title, change the date and/or time, or make the event an "All day" or "Repeating" event. You can also put the event on a different calendar. For instance, I could use the pull down bar next to Calendar to add this to my home calendar instead of my work calendar. You can add a description, add an attachment (especially useful if your are using this with students), color code individual events and add guests. My favorite part about Google Calendar, though, is the fact that you can decide what notifications to add - and how frequently. And I can choose to be notified by email, web browser, or SMS text notification.

By the way, I would love to be able to set the calendar so that all of my students can be notified of major events through SMS text messaging - but I can't. These are individual settings. However, in calendar settings, everyone can set up default notifications. So, you can walk your class through that process or send a short hand out home so that parents know that kids can set up text notifications.

These are just the basics for getting started. There is a lot more information to come, and both schools will be setting up hands on training sessions in the very near future.

FTT - Triventy

From the Triventy Website

Sharing the Load: Collaborative Online Quiz Creation with Triventy

@joe_edtech/@LisaBerghoff

It is the day before Thanksgiving Break and I think one of my friend's Facebook Posts from last night summed up everyone's feelings perfectly, "I have decided that I no longer want to be an adult. If anyone is looking for me, I will be in my blanket fort, coloring."

It has been an eventful and crazy Fall. After suffering through 108 years of abject failure, the Cubs won the World Series and an entire region of the country came together to celebrate a victory which transcended baseball. As a country, we are dealing with an election cycle that more closely resembled a badly staged reality TV show than anything I've ever seen before. Even still, with seismic social events going on, our lives, and our students' lives, go on. Kids are dealing with classes, activities, medical issues, family issues, stress about the future, and the pitfalls of navigating everyday spaces in high school. This Fall, more than almost any other, I'm conscious of the fact that our kids need us to talk to them - they need to know that there are adults who care about them and will be there for them. It is a reminder that the most important thing that we do is teach kids, not content.

But having said that, class goes on. And we are faced with meeting the challenges of providing our students with the skills and knowledge necessary to be successful at the next level. Especially when demands are high, and timelines are tight, I think we have to find ways to share the load and work together. If we've lost some class time this Fall because of, well, the world interfering with our plans, we at least have great colleagues on whom we can rely and with whom we can collaborate. 

Generally speaking, the Free Tech Tools that we choose to share are selected to provide you with a different way of engaging students. Today's tool was selected as a different way of engaging your colleagues and capitalizing on our shared ideas and efforts.

Most of us are familiar with online quiz/gaming tools like Socrative, Kahoot, and Quizlet (see our previous blogs for detailed information about all three). Triventy.com is not a paradigm shifting online quiz platform. It is an online quiz platform that makes it easy for several teachers to work together to create a quiz. Need to pare down a lesson to its most important skills to save time? Or do you want to spend a little time during your late start working together focusing on the essential questions from a unit of study? Triventy.com is a tool that can facilitate some of that work.

Start by going to Triventy.com and sign up for a free account. Since Triventy integrates nicely with Google Classroom, make sure that you use your district email account when you sign up. Also, in order to use the full product for free, you'll need to select the Free Edu version and identify District 113 when you sign up.

Once you've signed up and you begin writing your first quiz, the platform will look a lot like other quiz creation tools. You can add images to identify topics. You compose questions and answer choices. Decide if you want the questions to be worth points and have a right answer, or serve as a poll/discussion starter. There is even a place to provide hints and feedback.

What makes Triventy different, though, is the ability to invite others to add questions to the quiz.

Once you click the button to invite question contributors, you get a link that you can share with your colleagues in a variety of different ways (email seems to be the most efficient). Your colleagues click the link and add questions. As the owner of the quiz, you can always decide to edit or remove any questions that have been added to your quiz. Also, if you have a group of people adding questions, their will be an author's name attached to each question. No question is submitted anonymously.

Finally, since you can integrate the tool into Google Classroom, you can actually invite your students to create quiz questions. Never underestimate the power of asking your students to find the right questions to ask! The same rules apply to students. They cannot submit questions anonymously, and all questions they submit will have to be approved by the quiz owner.

Here is a short video introduction to Triventy.com from Richard Byrne, author of the Blog Free Technology for Teachers. (I highly recommend his blog - if you are ever stuck for an idea, that is a great place to start.)

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Got any other tools that help you share the workload with your colleagues? Tell us about them below!

FTT - ePals for Global Connections

From the ePals Website

Making Global Connections in Your Classroom

@joe_edtech/@LisaBerghoff

One of the many things that has impressed me in my short time in District 113 is how globally aware our staff and students are. As proud as we are to be Giants and Warriors, I don't get an insular feeling of isolation at all. All eyes are focused on the future of our global community.

With technology in the hands of all of our staff and students, our global connections can become more than just theoretical. However, based on several conversations I've had this year, there is a little bit of trepidation about connecting our kids with that global community online. At a National School Board Conference a short time ago I was introduced to the online tool called ePals, designed to give students authentic cross-cultural experiences in a completely safe, managed environment.

From the ePals website, "Teachers use the free ePals Global Classroom to create real world, culturally- enriching learning experiences for their students. With ePals classroom matching, a high school class studying Chinese can connect with a class studying English in China, or the classes can work on a special project together." While ePals is great for World Language, it is also perfect for any globally minded classroom.

Here's a short video that shows you what ePals can do and how to get started:


For the High School Classroom:
There are a lot of tools included in the ePals suite, and you may want to use some of them with your classes. I've found that the tools we have in Google Apps are probably better for collaboration and production with high school students, but ePals overall has been designed to be a safe place for students as young as the elementary age to develop authentic global connections. The "Classroom Match" tool is what really makes ePals powerful for high school students.
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Have you used ePals or a similar tool to make global connections in your classroom? If so, please share your experiences below.

Not a Free Tech Tool

Stolen Image from Amazon.com - but since I'm sending
business their way, my guess is that they will be thrilled.

I Will Never Get Through My Reading List!

@joe_edtech

Frequent visitors to my blog (Hi Mom!) will know that I usually dedicate my time to discussing free tech tools to use in the classroom. Money is tight in every school and I take the responsibility of finding and teaching quality tech tools accessible to ALL very seriously. So, my Free Tech Tools posts will return in the Fall ("Winter is coming!" - House of Stark). This post is really all about you, and how one tech tool may be worth the investment.

I love to read. However, my time is limited. I have a hefty commute to and from work every day. I have my school work and I'm writing a pretty substantial research study. And, I have a 14-year-old daughter that demands and deserves a fairly significant amount of whatever is left of my free time. While I do read for pleasure in the few spare minutes remaining, I find it isn't enough.

For instance, I just read The Girl on the Train, and I found it compelling. It is hard to put it down and walk away - so I didn't. I bought the Kindle book and downloaded it to my iPad, and I bought the audio edition as well and loaded the Kindle app on my phone. The reason is that WhisperSync from Amazon.com actually syncs the Kindle version with the audio. So, I read a chapter at night on my iPad, then got up and listened to the next couple of chapters on my phone on the drive into work. When I got back to my iPad, it would sync to the last page I heard in the audio book. 

This is available for virtually any book that is available with both a Kindle version and an Audible version. So, the downside is that it sometimes costs a little extra. You do have to pay for the Kindle version, but you can usually add the Audio for free or at a significantly reduced cost. For instance, if I were to buy Stephen King's 11.22.63, it would cost $8.99 for the download, but the audio is actually included in the cost.

WhisperSync is a service of Amazon.com, which owns both Kindle and Audible. Click here for more information.

I hope this helps you enjoy your summer break just a little more, and get closer to getting through your reading list. Then, next Fall, we'll talk about kids who might benefit from hearing the story while they read it. :)

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Have other tips for teachers as they head to a summer of recalibrating and learning? Tell us about them in the comment section below.

FTT - Student Backchanneling

Encouraging Productive Online Conversations in the Classroom with Today's Meet and 81 Dash

@LisaBerghoff/@Joe_EdTech

I was at a conference a few years ago and even though the session that I was in was fascinating, it had been a long day and in typical fashion, I found my mind wandering.  Typically, I would have started making lists of things that I needed to accomplish in the upcoming week, ingredients that I needed to pick up from the supermarket, or my March Madness picks.  However, at this particular session the presenters had set up a backchannel.  I was new to the idea of a backchannel and was curious to give it a try.  One of the presenters was moderating the backchannel while the other was presenting.  Before I knew it, I was exchanging ideas with other participants in the room.  Did we stay on topic the entire time? Absolutely not. Was I more on task using the backchannel than I would have been if I was writing out my grocery list? Definitely. Also, I was actually interacting and creating meaning with other educators and not just sitting and consuming information. During this particular conference session, the backchannel gave me permission to converse with other teachers who were also in the room without disrupting the session. I was hooked!

The term backchannel refers to a digital conversation that runs concurrently with a face to face activity. Backchannels have many applications in our classrooms. They empower student voice and help allow every student in the room to feel that they are participating in the knowledge building that is taking place in class.

Here is a just a short list of ways to use backchannels in class:

1.  Assess prior knowledge. Have students use the backchannel to share what they already know about a topic.
2.  Hold discussions of video content shared in class.
3.  Have a "fishbowl" conversation where the students observing are actually interacting digitally.
4. Check for understanding after a lesson.
5. Crowdsource feedback from students on learning activities and then use the information for future lessons.
6. Take a poll on a particular debate issue or topic. All students can participate in an unobtrusive way.
7.  Have students ask questions or ask for clarification on something they don't yet understand.
8. Engage shy students in classroom conversations.
9. Brainstorm ideas for a project.
10. Do a collaborative note taking activity.

Credit to Sylvia Rosenthal Tolisano: http://www.langwitches.org/blog

I'm ready to start using backchannels! Where/how do I start?

Ok, there are always multiple tools to use and people prefer some over others for various reasons.  Here are two backchannel tools that won't steer you wrong.

Today's Meet

Today's Meet is the most widely known backchannel. It is incredibly easy and a teacher can quickly set up a backchannel room in less than 30 seconds. Getting students on a Today's Meet backchannel room is quick and does not require a student log in but you can set your room for students to log in if you choose.  This backchannel is free and you can set your room to remain open for as little as a few hours or a full year. I'm excited to tell you that Today's Meet has recently added some teacher friendly features that were previously unavailable such as a projector view and built in QR code for your room but they also now have their "teacher tools", which are a paid upgrade. Join my Today'sMeet room here. 

81DASH  

81Dash was developed by teachers for teachers and they promise that it will always be free because they believe teachers should get free stuff.  How do you not love that?  This backchannel is perfect for classroom use because it is safe in that the teacher has the ability to monitor and control the discussion environment, called the "room" by 81 Dash.  Students can be uploaded by the teacher or the link to the room can be shared.  It also has the ever popular share to Google Classroom button. Conversation transcripts can be easily saved in pdf format and if a student deleted a comment, that comment will appear on the transcript in red. You can have unlimited students in a room and they are limited to 160 characters per comment in order to make the conversations easy to follow. Students can create their own private notes for themselves and you can create task lists for everyone in the room. You can also open or lock a room to control when comments can be added.  It sounds complicated doesn't it?  I promise that it is not. Here is a handy instruction sheet. Want to try it?  Join my room here and check it out.  

FTT - Dotstorming

Real-Time Group Collaboration with Dotstorming

@LisaBerghoff/@Joe_EdTech

According to Mirriam-Webster, brainstorming is defined as a group problem-solving technique that involves the spontaneous contribution of ideas from all members.  Brainstorming is such an important part of the learning process.  It is imperative that students learn how to generate ideas, collaborate, and then make decisions about next steps for problem-solving. 

The main issue with traditional brainstorming in the classroom is that not every voice is heard. We tend to cater to our outgoing, confident students in these activities.  It's not that the quiet kids don't have thoughts to contribute, they are just, well, quiet.  Also, once your list of ideas has been generated, the next step is to discuss the merits of each idea and then make decisions about next steps.  Again, this is an exercise that will most often involve a few students. It can be awkward to make these choices as a group, even if all voices are heard.  When the goal is to engage and involve all of our students, it's time to add some new tools to our toolbox.

I'm excited to tell you about Dotstorming. Dotstorming is a real-timegroup brainstorming and decision making app.  This free tech tool allows all of your students to participate in brainstorming activities in 4 easy steps.  You create a dotstorming board, invite participants, add ideas, and vote on the ideas that you like. This site is no-frills and easy to use.  You can whip up a dotstorming board right in the middle of class and your students will think you're a genius.  Here is a video showing you the features of Dotstorming. 

Want to try Dotstorming as a participant? Click on this Dotstorming board to brainstorm your favorite tech tools.  Please feel free to add images or text. Don't have anything to add?  That's ok, just take a look at what is on there and vote for your favorites.  I can't wait to see which one wins!

Happy Dotstorming!

FTT - All Of Them

Unveiling the District 113 Technology Learning Center

@joe_edtech

I believe teachers learn best when they can explore new things at their own pace, can select the tools that best suit their needs and purposes, and are provided with both formal, delivered instruction and 1 on 1 time for deeper questioning and exploration (sounds like it would be good for students too - hmm). That said, in order to facilitate that kind of exploration and learning, today's Free Tech Tool is actually a collection of all of the Free Tech Tools that I've discussed this year.

In the first truly collaborative project between myself and my new partner, Lisa Berghoff, Director of Instructional Technology at Highland Park High School, we are unveiling our new district wide support site for innovative teaching with technology. It is tentatively called the "District 113 Technology Learning Center." However, it is still a work in progress. While this will eventually be the spot where you can go to get information about all kinds of Open Educational Resources, the latest and greatest regarding Google Apps for Education, full-blown professional development modules on integrating technology into the classroom, and information about technology tools specifically designed to level the playing field between advanced and challenged learners, the "Free Tech Tools" page is up to date and available beginning today to anyone interested.

All of the Free Tech Tools have been categorized by purpose (for example, tools for flipping your classroom, tools for global education, tools for formative assessment). Then, on each page, there is a short description of each free tool followed by a link to the original blog post with training materials, and then a link to the tool itself:

From the "Social Media" page - Each entry uses the same format.

Lisa and I both believe in sharing our products with other teachers, and neither of us believe that this is the perfect website. If you know teachers in other districts who would benefit from our "Free Tech Tools" page - please send them the link. If you have suggestions on how we can improve the site or any of the entries, please let us know in the comment section below.

We hope you have a great summer! And, Mom, I hope you will come back to read more of my blog entries in the Fall.

FTT - Published Goobrics

From "New Visions Cloud Lab"

Shared By Professional Educators For Professional Educators

@joe_edtech

It's funny - in life in general, I am not a collectivist. I believe strongly in the power and rights of any individual to pursue his or her own passions and to achieve based on that pursuit (yes, I do know that Thomas Jefferson said it better). However, in education, I very strongly believe in the power of collaboration. Whether we work in PLCs inside our buildings, or PLNs made up of real and ethereal connections, there can be little doubt that there is a lot to be gained from the shared resources of our professional educators. Maybe it is one reason I bristle at the idea of treating schools like businesses. We aren't creating widgets and the power isn't in competition with one another, but in collaboration to provide as many opportunities for students as we can. - And that in a nutshell is why I believe so strongly in both the Google Education Community and the movement to pursue Open Educational Resources for schools, both topics I've written about in blog posts before - here and here. When we create resources that are good for students, and share them with other professionals, we have the potential to improve things for an exponentially greater number of students than the moments when we work in isolation.

Andrew Stillman and his fellow geniuses at New Visions Cloud Lab have been creating and sharing awesome educational resources for a number of years, and their library continues to get more impressive. I have already written about some of their awesome add-ons, like autoCrat, and just a few weeks ago I wrote about integrating Doctopus and Goobric with Google Classroom. 

Goobric, my loyal readers (Mom) will remember, is a tool to integrate writing rubrics pretty seamlessly into Google Docs. One of the very few drawbacks to Goobric was that there weren't many exemplars or samples to choose from. Recently, New Visions Cloud Lab went a long way towards solving that problem by posting libraries of "Goobrics" to their website. So far they have posted rubrics from New Visions for Public Schools, the Literacy Design Collaborative, and the New York Department of Education, which has already been a huge contributor to the OER movement.

The libraries of documents can be added as "View Only" docs to "My Drive" in Google Drive. From there, you can use them as is and attach them to any assignment as a completed rubric. Or, as is the case with any Google Doc, you can make a copy and adapt the rubric to your assignment.

This is a great addition to the New Visions Cloud Lab arsenal, and it promises to grow.

Brainstorming Tools

10X GameStorming: Brainstorming with Big Changes in Mind

@joe_edtech

This blog post is really a reflection of a bunch of great ideas that were hatched by several different people and then brought together and improved upon by still more people. In otherwords, it's really about the power of group collaboration. 

Several weeks ago I attended what I hope was the first of many Illinois Google Education Leadership Summits. A couple of guys from Google were there and they were demonstrating some of the activities that happen in the "Garage" on the Mountain View campus. The "Garage" for Google is a little like Microsoft's Hackathon centers, it is a place designed to facilitate group thinking and tinkering.

While we were there, they talked about the goals of their brainstorming sessions, inspired by the 10 X Rule recently written about by Grant Cardone. From Cardone's book cover, "While most people operate with only three degrees of action-no action, retreat, or normal action-if you're after big goals, you don't want to settle for the ordinary." In other words, don't just imagine change - take whatever change you've imagined it and make it 10 X bigger. At the Summit in April someone made the point that the alternative is to plan for incremental change. But if you do that you will only get incremental results.

After talking about the goal for a bit, the Google Edu team shared with us one of their methods. They called on strategies from a website called "Gamestorming" (but actually is http://www.gogamestorm.com/). On it's Wiki page, Gamestorming offers a tremendous list of brainstorming activities that you can try. The one we practiced with that day, and that I have since used with a great deal of success, is called, "Start, Stop, Continue." The activity begins by having participants reflect and write on practices in their organization that they would like to see started, those that should be stopped, and those that should continue. Collaboration in growing concentric circles leads a couple of big ideas to bubble up and reach a critical mass in the group.

This is actually the time of year when hope for even better things in the Fall starts to build. Is there a group that you work with on a regular basis that you can challenge to think not of the safest baby steps you can take for next Fall but of bigger things - maybe things that are 10 X better? And what kind of conversation could you have if you asked every member of your group, PLC, team, or classroom what they would like to start doing, stop doing, or keep doing? 

The conversation might be life changing.

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If you have a great brainstorming technique you've used with success, please tell us about it below.

Chromebooks - Aren't They Just Toys? II

Posted by Rachel Wente-Chaney CC License

A Flippin' Success: Chromebooks in a Freshman Science Classroom

@joe_edtech

One of my favorite made-up words is "transformativeness" (I want to give Renee Hobbs credit for that. I heard it first at her workshop on Fair Use in the Classroom.). I think of that word everytime we talk about our 1:1 program. We didn't roll out Chromebooks so that teachers and students can do what they've always done more efficiently. We rolled out Chromebooks so that our students could have learning experiences that were never possible before.

It is still early in our program, but we already have some success stories to tell. For instance, Mr. Bill Stafford, science teacher, has been experimenting some with the "Flipped Classroom" instructional model. In a nutshell, in a "Flipped Classroom" model, students receive lecture instruction at home from online videos or interactive materials, and then practice the skills they learned in classroom with the guidance and support of the teacher and collaborative groups. In this model, students are up and active in the classroom as they interact with the material. 

When she works on math homework in the traditional model, my daughter only has her parents to turn to for help at home. That is a problem when they were both liberal arts majors! In the "Flipped" classroom model, parents can actually watch the instruction with their students at home, and students have their classmates and teachers to rely on for support when they are working towards mastery. (For more information on the flipped classroom, you can visit the District 113 "Flipped Classroom" Resources page. Or you can join my partner Lisa Berghoff and I for our Education On Air session on April 9.)

The following is the first in a series of videos that we are producing in conjunction with our monthly principal's newsletter to highlight some of the "transformativeness" that is happening in our 1:1 classrooms. This is Principal Audris Griffith interviewing Science Teacher Bill Stafford about his "Flipping" experiment:

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You can find the DHS Principal's Newsletter by clicking here. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to include them in the comment box below or email me at jtaylor@dist113.org.

FTT - ePals

ePals Logo

Making Global Connections in Your Classroom

@joe_edtech

One of the many things that has impressed me in my short time at Deerfield is how globally aware our staff and students are. As proud as we are to be DHS Warriors, I don't get an insular feeling of isolation at all. All eyes are focused on the future of our global community.

With technology in the hands of all of our staff and students, our global connections can become more than just theoretical. At a National School Board Conference a short time ago I was introduced to the online tool called ePals, designed to give students authentic cross-cultural experiences and provide teachers with ideas and tools to work with partners in other parts of the world.

From the ePals website, "Teachers use the free ePals Global Classroom to create real world, culturally- enriching learning experiences for their students. With ePals classroom matching, a high school class studying Chinese can connect with a class studying English in China, or the classes can work on a special project together."

Here's a short video that shows you what ePals can do and how to get started:


For the High School Classroom:
There are a lot of tools included in the ePals suite, and you may want to use some of them with your classes. I've found that the tools we have in Google Apps are probably better for collaboration and production with high school students, but ePals overall has been designed to be a safe place for students as young as the elementary age to develop authentic global connections. The "Classroom Match" tool is what really makes ePals powerful for high school students.
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Have you used ePals or a similar tool to make global connections in your classroom? If so, please share your experiences below.

OER - Teacher Collaboration

See Attribution Below

OER Is More Work - Why on Earth Would I Do That?

@joe_edtech

Tuesday, my blog post was about all of the Open Educational Resources (OER) available to us thanks to projects like Lumen Learning and Creative Commons. Today I want to discuss why we would want to invest our time in searching for, adapting, and using OER. After all, that certainly sounds like a lot of extra work. I'll skip the obvious diatribe about the democratization of information on the grand scale of Gutenberg's printing press revolution and just focus on the products we provide to students, for now.

Anna Yezierska wrote a short story called, "America and I." It is one of my favorite stories ever specifically because of the conclusion that she draws from being a newcomer to the US. She said that while there were a lot of things she could complain about as an immigrant, she loved America because whatever else is true, "America isn't finished yet." It is constantly being recreated and improved.

Think about the text books that we use in class. Despite the exorbitant cost, I have yet to find a slick packaged text book that is what I would call "good." Good means - well written, with a compelling narrative, complete with a deep discussion of multiple perspectives, offering a full breadth of coverage, enhanced by images that create a memorable experience, and allows for easy, appropriate differentiation. BUT, since we spent so much money to get the text book in the first place, we can pretty well guarantee that we, or more accurately our students, will be stuck with that text book for five or six years.

Using Open Educational Resources instead of commercial products would require us to do more work with our PLC members and other educators. There is no "canned" product to use with kids right out of the box. However, what we "create" for our kids is really just text book 1.0. Within PLCs or other collaborative teams, we can engage in an iterative process that can improve our classroom materials not only from year to year, but from day to day! That means we can look at our materials and reflect on the whole experience after every classroom use, Using OER can help us engage in reflective professional conversation with my colleagues, and help all of us produce something even better for the next time. Then the best thing about our adopted classroom materials is that they aren't dependent on a six year purchasing cycle. Instead, they become like Yezierska's America.

So, that's extra work...but it sure seems worth it.

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What do you think, would you adopt OER for your school?

Picture Attribution:

By lumaxart (LuMaxArt Gold Guys With Creative Commons Symbol) [CC BY-SA 2.0 or CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Education is Change

photo credit: Schoolhouse (winter) via photopin (license)

What is Formative Assessment Assessing?

@joe_edtech

I am just starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel of my doctoral program, so I can say with some confidence that I've spent too much time over the last couple of years studying instructional design models. The biggest criticism I have of most of the models is that they appear to be based in behavioral psychology, not cognitive psychology. I still think it is worth the effort to study them, though. It is always good to discuss and review the basics of instructional design, no matter where we are in our careers.

The most important aspect of the ID models so far is that each one of them is fundamentally an iterative process based on lots of formative assessment. Each time I read that a light goes on because I think we often forget what formative assessment is really all about. On the one hand, it is a measure to gauge student progress towards mastery of a skill or content area. However, another equally important function of formative assessment is to gauge the effectiveness of our classroom instruction. The idea is that if the students aren't successful, it might be our instructional methods or processes that need to be changed. In other words, maybe there are things we can and should do to reach the students who aren't succeeding.

The key is that we may always have to be changing our methods, messages, and means in the classroom. As teachers, I think we are sometimes reluctant to do that. There was a myth propagated in my earliest days of teaching that if we just work really hard to develop our materials and lesson plans in the first couple of years, we can simply reuse those materials every year. Hopefully you clearly read that as a MYTH.

Working in technology has taught me that the world is in a constant state of change, and it should be. The tools we have access to this year are better and more effective than the tools we had access to 19 years ago when I began. And we should be excited to embrace them and re-imagine our classrooms every single year. Furthermore, the group of kids I have in class this year might be a lot different than the students we had last year - and that means that our instruction, processes, methods, and messages should change, too.

Teachers aren't lazy. They hold onto materials because they believe in "tried and true." We are taught to seek best practices and hang on to them once we've found them. The one lesson I wish all schools of education would teach at the very beginning of any education program is that the "best practices" are actually processes, and they have to be constantly updated, changed, re-invented, and re-created. In other words, teaching, like technology, is always changing - and that means we should always be presented with new learning opportunities, for ourselves and our students.

Integration through PLCs and COPs

photo credit: CraigTaylor74 via photopin cc

How Do You Get Everyone On Board?

@joe_edtech

I recently saw a very good question asked during an Ed Tech Twitter Chat. The moderator asked, "What examples of PD/support have led to the most positive instructional changes surrounding digital resources?"

This is an often overlooked or underrated question when we consider the history of integrating technology into the classroom (see previous posts, I won't belabor the point). But if every previous attempt at transforming the classroom was ultimately doomed to fail because of teacher resistance, then the real question is, how do we create PD that is teacher driven and fosters innovation?

I think most of us in education intuitively know that we have to provide a two pronged support plan. In the first prong, we have to provide formal training that teaches the basics of technology tools and methods of integrating and teaching with technology. The second VERY BIG prong is ongoing PD that is embedded and focused in building or district PLCs, and which encourages teachers to work together and form connections through informal Communities of Practice that are formally supported by district and building administration.

Not surprisingly, the research backs this up. Let me discuss the results from just one study published in the Journal of Educational Computing Research, entitled "Technology Integration Through Professional Learning Community" (Full APA citation below). In it, the authors operate from a very basic premise, "Sustained and socially driven involvement in professional development programs is a factor contributing to teacher content knowledge and teacher satisfaction" (p 60).

In fact, their study shows what a factor it can be. The study examined a program that embedded sustained PD in PLCs and Communities of Practice. When the study began, a majority of teachers achieved only very basic levels of technology integration (think "Substitution" on the SAMR model). By the conclusion of the two year cycle, a majority of teachers found themselves at the upper ranges of the Stages of Adoption scale labeled "creative application to new contexts" (p 70). And, important to note, only one teacher dropped out of the PLC voluntarily.

I've seen similar results in teacher teams I've had the privilege to work with (without the benefit of detailed statistical analysis - thank God). I firmly believe we get the best results when we provide teachers with an appropriate level of formal training, support them as they work in their teaching teams to change practice, and encourage them to collaborate and experiment with other teachers who have some of the same teaching goals. 

But, I couldn't find a way to fit that into the 140 character limit on Twitter, so I had to say it to you. Aren't you lucky. :)

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Cifuentes, L., Maxwell, G., & Bulu, S. (2011). Technology Integration through Professional Learning Community. Journal Of Educational Computing Research, 44(1), 59-82.