I'm enjoying this long (extra-long - four days!!) holiday weekend, and it especially pleasant because I am still on an all-natural high about how well my first week of school went this year. My students love my classroom set-up, they seem enthusiastic to come to class, and I heard from other teachers that students were telling each other that my class is fun and I seem "cool." Is there any higher accolade I could possibly hope to achieve? Well, maybe, but still. The best part of this week was when a former student of mine, now a junior, told me that a classmate of hers told their history teacher that they were familiar with the lesson because they had learned it in my class (the lesson was about fake news) and then she proceeded to tell the teacher about my class and how relevant it is. Boom! Because my course is brand-new to our school (this is the third year I've been teaching it), it is great when other teachers become aware of what we are doing in my class and how it relates to what they are doing in their classrooms. My top goal is to integrate lessons from my class with lessons in the academic and vocational classes as well. The more that the word gets out that I am not an "Office" teacher, the more traction I will gain in putting this integration into practice.
This summer I read Shift This, by Joyce Kirr. I loved the book and immediately wanted to put some ideas into practice. Some ideas, like not including behavior and/or class participation in the students' grades, are a little scary but I am committed to trying them. My favorite concept in the book is the idea of flexible seating options in the classroom. I had heard a bit about flexible seating towards the end of last year, and loved the notion. When I read Shift This, I was able to get some more solid ideas about how to set up the classroom. I started to beg for used furniture on social media, and didn't get too far. I got some rolling chairs from my parents, which are a huge hit. I then searched on Let Go and other online outlets for free furniture. Nothing clicked, until I went downstairs to my own basement and saw the perfect couch! It is worn, but in good condition. My son and a friend helped me maneuver the couch plus an upholstered chair into my classroom and I was hooked. I painted a side table and brought that in, bought some bungee chairs, a carpet and table from IKEA, and added that to the room. I also scored an oval conference table with four rolling chairs from an administrator at my school who was moving offices. My classroom lends itself perfectly for flexible seating. It was a science lab in its former life, so half of the room has black lab tables with stools, and the other half had desks. I asked for the desks to be removed to make room for the tables and furniture. My favorite feature in the classroom is a set of wooden shelves, built around the area where the SMART board used to be. They are perfect for baskets, decorations, supplies, etc. I spent a few days most weeks of the summer cleaning the room, setting it up, moving things around and trying new arrangements, and covering old yucky items with contact paper. I also brought in some decorations from my former days as an event planner, like some decorative chandeliers. The classroom has more of a Friend's coffee shop/living room vibe (Friends is one of my favorite television shows! I watched episodes on Netflix while working in my room - it was heaven.) than a Starbucks vibe, but I love the results. Most importantly, the students love the results! It is fun teaching freshmen because everything is new to them; I spend no time trying to make my class different from what they are used to. This year's freshmen were very excited about the classroom set up, and it set a great tone for the first week. All the freshmen will be getting their 1:1 devices, HP laptops, next week. With their laptops, they will be able to sit on the couch, the chairs, at the tables, wherever they work best. For this week, they were on the desktops, which are set up on the black lab tables. There are four computers on each lab table, and they are set up in a U shape with the students' backs to me. I wouldn't want this set up for the whole year, but for the first week it made it SO easy for me to see who wasn't on the same page as everyone else, who was struggling, etc. I encouraged the students to ask each other for help, and they got comfortable asking the students sitting at their tables for help before they asked me. It lends itself to cooperation and collaboration, which is a top priority. I have gotten great feedback from the students regarding the physical classroom set up, and I have also been getting positive reviews from my colleagues. It is not the norm at our school, for classrooms to have couches and conference tables, and bouncy bungee chairs. I haven't heard anything negative, and I did read some articles as well as highlight some paragraphs in Shift This to back myself up in case of any jabs or pointed questions. My favorite explanation of the flexible seating arrangement is that classrooms with desks in rows were designed for 19th Century Learners, and it doesn't make sense for us to use the same layout while teaching 21st Century Learners. I wish I remembered the author of that (paraphrased) quote, because it really stuck with me. I fully expected the students to enjoy the furniture and the novelty, but I wasn't really convinced that it would help the tone and environment of the classroom. It absolutely did, though. The students were hesitant at first, standing near the couch and shyly asking, "Can I really sit here?" Once I said yes, explaining that after the introduction of the days' lessons we would be moving to the desktops, they were very excited to sit down and trying out different seating. They said it made them feel like I was trying to make them feel comfortable by allowing them to try different seats. I told them that they were 100% correct! I have been trying to call it "our" classroom rather than "my" classroom. This was noticed when I told them that one classroom rule is to clean up your space before the bell rings. One student said, "It's our classroom, so we are responsible for it." This was what I was hoping to hear, and it also made me think about the mess that students often left in my old classroom in previous years. If I made it seem like "my" classroom, they probably felt that it was my responsibility to take care of it. I will post more photos to showcase specific parts of the room, but the panoramic picture above shows the general set up pretty well. I am so excited that I put aside some doubts about redesigning the classroom, and went for it. The students are excited about it, other teachers are taking notice (I convinced my sister, our ESL teacher, to try it in her classroom as well!), and it has completely changed the vibe in our classroom.
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Last week was the ISTE conference in Denver, Colorado. When I wasn't in sessions, I spent some time upstairs in the expo hall, meeting vendors, snagging t-shirts and other swag, getting a lot of ideas and resources and having a generally fabulous time. Every vendor wanted to scan my badge, and now my inbox is filling up with emails from the vendors. The extra email can be annoying but I have also learned a lot from some of these emails. Today, I got an email that reminded me about docs.com, which I had played with a little bit on the plane on the way to Denver but gave up when I got distracted by the Real Housewives reunion on television (I love JetBlue!). Based on first impressions, Docs.com reminds me of a Microsoft Pinterest. I have made some collections, and have documents and presentations loaded into the collections. The collections can hold any Word, PowerPoint, Excel, documents, as well as Sways and Office Mix presentations. These documents will retain all their formatting, which is awesome. I think Web pages can be uploaded as well, and PDFs. The collections can be shared through social media, and documents and collections can be embedded in blogs or webpages. Working at an Office 365 school, the potential of Docs.com seems very exciting. Notebooks can be shared, along with collections. Or maybe as part of collections? I have a lot more exploring to do! I have been using the preview version of Microsoft Classroom, which has been amazing in my freshman classes. But I am not able to use Classroom when I am working with the teachers, and I haven't found a great place to organize resources to share with teachers. The Staff Notebook was helpful, but I think Docs.com could be the answer to this organization and sharing hub that I have been looking for. I am going to try to embed my Collection of PowerPoint presentations for my Digital Literacy & Citizenship class on this page, and see how easy it is to do and what it looks like.
Wow, I added the embed code and there is the collection! I am so excited about this - I have to go play a little more at Docs.com!
I introduced three of my classes to Classcraft this week. I pretty much also introduced myself to Classcraft this week! I spent a lot of time this summer researching tools and resources to gamify my classroom for this year, and there were a lot of great ideas, but nothing really grabbed me. I am not even sure how I came across Classcraft but I am so glad that I did because I love it!! So far, two of my classes are loving it and the other class seems to be enjoying it but they're holding back a bit :)
If you're not familiar with Classcraft, it's a role-playing game that teachers and students play in the classroom. The students try to earn points and powers with good behavior, and try not to lose points by breaking class rules. It's customizable so the teacher can make the rules fit for his or her classroom. For example, I deleted the reward of eating in class, because I have a computer lab and there is a no eating rule! Today was the first day that we began playing, and one student earned points for helping another student. When the other students saw that, they were desperate to help someone to earn some points for themselves! It was great. The students are also on teams of 4-6 players, and they can help their teammates earn back points if some have been lost. This has encouraged teamwork between students who don't usually work together, which was amazing to see. Even more exciting than Classcraft is my upcoming trip to Rochester Institute of Technology to see my son on Parent's Weekend! I haven't seen him since we dropped him off in mid-August and I am counting the hours until I see him. It will be a short visit but it will be awesome to have him show us around campus, visit the fraternity house where he's pledging, see a hockey game, and we have tickets to see Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters! I'll take him shopping before my husband and I fly home - I CANNOT wait! Last year I started my job as an Instructional Technology Specialist. I began part time, and my main job was helping teachers introduce and integrate technology into their classrooms. At the end of the year, I found out that my proposal to teach an elective was approved, and I started preparing to teach Digital Citizenship and Literacy to freshman students (That looks and sounds awkward, right? But freshman is the adjective; I looked it up!). I started investigating curriculum ideas and resources and right away, I really liked the curriculum that Commonsense Media offered. There are four units with topics that cover everything from sexting, building community online, Creative Commons, cyberbullying, monitoring who has your data and more. The lessons are clearly spelled out, making it easy to use the curriculum pretty much as it is, or adapt parts of it to make it work in your classroom.
Nearpod was another discovery I made towards the end of last school year. Nearpod allows you to create lessons which you share with the students, and the teacher guides the lesson the whole way through. Because my students use PCs in our computer lab, I simply share a code with them and they enter it on Nearpod's home page. This brings them to the lesson and I control the speed of the lesson as I progress through the slides. Slides can contain content, quizzes, open-ended questions, polls, etc. The best part of the interactive slides is that the students answer the poll or question on their computer, and the answers all show up on their screens. The teacher can also generate a report of each lesson. A paid license allows the teacher to assign a Nearpod lesson as homework, but my paid account hasn't been approved yet so I haven't been able to try that out yet. I think this could be awesome for a flipped classroom environment. Not only can you create lessons, there is a huge library of lessons that are available to use. Some are free and some need to be paid for; I have only used free lessons so far. There I was, creating my digital literacy and citizenship curriculum, using a lot of material and resources from Commonsense Media, as well as a huge Nearpod enthusiast, and I got an email saying that Commonsense Media was offering their Digital Citizenship curriculum on Nearpod for free! It was a limited-time promotion and I jumped on it right away. Towards the middle of August I got access to the Nearpod Commonsense Media lessons and they have been amazing! I have been using these lessons a few times a week with my students and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. The videos are interesting, the questions are thoughtful and the interactive slides are great. The students are engaged throughout the lesson and eager to participate. Even my most quiet and reserved students are comfortable expressing their ideas and opinions using the interactive slides. I can't recommend both Nearpod and Commonsense Media enough - but put them together and it's really impossible to give them a worthy review! If you are using Commonsense Media Digital Literacy curriculum resources, I would love to hear what you're doing in your classroom! And the same goes for Nearpod - it's a fabulous tool that can be used in any classroom. I recommend it to the vocational teachers at my school as often - or more than - I do the academic teachers. If you know of any great lessons, or if you've created any, I would love to see them! When I left my former school district, I was clutching my Google Apps for Education certification in my hand, waving it proudly and enthusiastically. Working in a newly-converted GAFE district was a great opportunity. The high school in which I worked had just deployed Chromebooks for the juniors and seniors, while the freshmen and sophomores used iPads. I loved Google Apps for Education, adored my Chromebook and idolized Google Classroom. Working in a special education classroom, and following some students into their college-prep classes to assist them, I saw immediately how some tools in Google Apps would be game-changers for the students as well as their teachers.
When I began my new job last August, I found myself in an Office 365 district. I had never even heard of Office 365 before my interview. Most of my O365 training was done frantically in the beginning of the year, on my own, while I watched every training video I could find online. I searched for blog posts, articles, instructional videos and tutorials to help me understand what Office 365 is, and what it can do in the classroom. I started this research believing that Office 365 was a step down from Google Apps for Education and that I would just have to suck it up until I could convince my boss to move to Google. It took me quite a few months into the school year to realize how much I liked Office 365, and a little longer to not feel guilty about cheating on Google. Office 365 has some great tools and the possibilities of using it in the classroom are endless, just like Google Apps for Education. I can (usually) admit when I’m wrong, at least to myself, and I began to embrace the fact that I was becoming an Office 365 fan-girl. The most frustrating part of using Office 365 is the feeling that we are a minority in the field. More and more districts, entire states and colleges/universities are adopting Office 365. But Google is still more well-known, and information about how to use Google Apps in the classroom is to be all over the web. At conferences that I’ve attended this year, many workshops and sessions are titled as Google sessions. Workshops such as, “Teaching Research Skills Using Google Apps in the Classroom,” “Differentiating Instruction in Your Classroom using Google Apps, etc.” sound great and are easy to find. When some of my teachers see these workshops in conference listings, they assume that the information won’t apply to them because we don’t use Google Apps. I wish that these sessions were called, “Teaching Research Skills Using Technology,” or, “Differentiating Instruction in The Cloud,” or even the clunky-sounding, “Using Cloud-Based Services to Do Amazing Things in Your Classroom.” Maybe those are not the best titles, but the goal of the workshops isn’t truly to understand or use Google to do research or differentiate. The goal is to help teachers learn new tools to do these things. If you can design a menu to help differentiate your math curriculum using Google, you can do it in Office 365 just as easily! I am not saying that Google and Microsoft offer the exact same tools, but there is very little that you can do in one and can’t do in the other. What are some awesome things that can be done in the cloud to help teachers organize, collaborate, instruct, etc. in their classrooms? Create Writers Workshops, assign multimedia projects, teach research skills, encourage digital note-take, design exit tickets – the list goes on forever. Learning how to do these things, and using the cloud and technology to do them, will benefit every teacher. Let’s not focus on which company we use, but rather what we can accomplish using these fantastic tools. Let’s broaden our common understanding and language. We want to do the same kinds of things for our students, and it doesn’t matter what we use as long as we get there. I have learned so much these last few weeks! Leaving a Google Apps for Education environment and going to a Microsoft 365 school has been a culture shock, but eye-opening in a great way. I feel so annoyed when people don't want to try new things, especially in technology. The most dangerous, depressing sentence to hear (especially in education) is, "But we've always done it this way!" Yet
I was not a willing student when it came to Microsoft 365. My training has been on my own, so far: tutorials, videos, articles, etc. I will go to some more official/formal training in a few weeks and MassCUE has some interesting-sounding offerings in the schedule. I am really looking forward to the training, because I am loving using the Microsoft tools so far. My favorite thing about Office 365 so far is OneNote. It has such huge promise for classroom use. The Robotics, Engineering and Culinary departments at my school are piloting OneNote as an electronic portfolio, instead of a paper-and-binder portfolio. It's been bumpy so far - I went into one classroom (being observed by my mentor!) to introduce OneNote as a portfolio, only to find that Office 2013 hasn't been installed on the Engineering classroom computers. I should have triple-checked on that! I also tried to use a whiteboard as an interactive whiteboard - poking at it very inefficiently. Mortifying! The students were able to use OneNote online, but the limited functionality didn't work with what we needed to do. It was a learning experience, for sure. But bumps and all, I think OneNote is going to be great for the class. Now that OneNote Notebook Creator is available, a lot of exciting OneNote uses are on the horizon. My LiveBinder and Pinterest technology page are bursting with ideas! Another great Microsoft tool that I am still learning to use is OfficeMix. PowerPoint presentations are no longer boring and static slide shows with OfficeMix. Quizzes, polls, drawing, video clips - tons of interactive elements can be added right into the PowerPoint presentation. I am working on an OfficeMix for the freshman Digital Literacy Orientation this week. I love Prezi and it's usually my go-to presentation tool. OfficeMix is fun to use and i am excited about trying out on Tuesday. One big challenge at school is promoting Office 365 and convincing teachers and studdents to give it a try, rather than rely on their more familiar Google Drive tools. I know how they feel, because I was very reluctant to move away from Google. I think once the teachers have some training and become familiar with Office 365, the resistance will decrease. The students have been asking why they can't stick with Google Drive, but once we explain that we are trying a new initiative and really want them to try it out, they have been very willing to check it out. So, a lot of O365 training and experimenting is coming up and I am looking forward to it! There is a lot to learn and I am up for the challenge :) After day one of my new job (!) as an integration technology specialist, I was asked to think about how to help a teacher who wants his class to start a blog. He teaches robotics, and he doesn’t want to moderate the blog. I have been mentally gathering my classroom-blogging resources, and have come up with some blogging platform choices for his class. I will know more when I speak to him and find out what his goals for the blog and his students are, but in the meantime, these are my top choices:
1. Blogger, which is a Google service. It is free and very easy to use. 2. Edublog, which seems to be an extremely popular choice for classroom blogging. Teachers say that it is easily customizable, and allows users to add videos, photos, podcasts and text. 3. Google sites, a service offered on Google Drive. Users say it is easy to use and anyone with a Google account has access to the service. 4. Weebly for education, a personal favorite. Weebly is easy to use and has a professional look and feel to it. Weebly makes it easy to add links, buttons, videos, forms, etc. to a blog or Website. 5. Wordpress, which is the first choice of a tech-savvy teen who acts as my “first responder” to any tech questions. Wordpress needs to be installed onto a server, I read, and I am not sure if the free software is limited in its customizable features. More research will be done on Wordpress, for sure. 6. Tumblr, a blogging site that has great reviews from teachers and students. It seems to be the most popular choice for college professors to use in their courses. Once I talk to the classroom teacher, I will be able to help him choose which platform will work best for his class. I need to ask him what his goals for the blog are. Who is the intended audience? Will each student have a blog, or will they take turns posting to one class blog? Will he assign blog posts to be graded? I need to find out what kind of privacy settings need to be included, and what the school’s expectations are about online privacy of students. Will their last names be included? Are they allowed to post photos of themselves or other students and teachers? Do parents need to give permission first? Have the students had lessons about online safety and protocol? (Note to self: ask this question first!) A lot of groundwork needs to be covered, but it’s an exciting first assignment and I am really looking forward to helping this teacher get his class’ blog off the ground!
Last week was our first week of "summer school," which we call S.O.F.A. around here! S.O.F.A. = Summer of Fun Activities, and there are many activities for kids of all ages to try. Sports, crafts, computers, fencing - it's a great program. My sister and I have been teaching cupcake and cake decorating for the last few years, and we include other treats in the class. We introduce the importance (and simplicity!) of homemade buttercream and homemade fondant, and my sister teaches the kids how to frost a cake and cupcake correctly. I'm still learning that skill! This year we had an older group of kids; most were going into 6th or 7th grade, and they were a very easy group to work with. Check out the photos and prepare to be impressed!
They are: 1) a campfire and camper in a sleeping bag; 2) candy sushi; 3) on-the-grill cupcakes; 4) patriotic donuts; 5) s'more on a stick along with dipped marshmallow on a stick; and 6) a traditional s'more on a stick. |
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AuthorMom to two sons, married 23 years to college sweetie. Instructional Technology Specialist for a vocational high school. Educator for 20+ years. Love to read, do anything crafty, and spend time with friends and family. Passionate about education, technology, and the combination of the two! I'm a proud foster-failure with Big Fluffy Dog Rescue, having fallen head-over-heels for our first foster and adopting her :) Archives
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