Why I Love Skitch

I get regular questions from students about where something needs to be uploaded in Moodle or where something can be found on Edline. I always answer these questions with a visual by taking a screen shot of the exact location, opening the screen shot in the Skitch app, and adding arrows pointing to where students need to be looking. It's fast and super easy!

Infuse Learning

Hi everyone,

My students have a grammar assessment coming up this week on independent and dependent clauses. We're going to try using InfuseLearning.com, which is a site designed to measure both formative and summative learning, although the site is probably best used for formative assessments.

Teachers set up class rosters, and then results are automatically tabulated by class and student in spreadsheets. Teachers control everything at teacher.infuselearning.com while students log in at student.infuselearning.com and enter the teacher's unique "classroom" number. 

Here's a look at the site.

This is my teacher home screen so you can get idea of the options available:

This is the quiz manager page (I've divided my grammar assessment into sections so that the students are not forced to take the entire assessment in one sitting, and I also get separate scores for knowledge of independent vs. dependent clauses):

Here is a view of the part specific to the students' APPLICATION of their knowledge of the two types of clauses:

This is the student log-in page:

And this is an example item from the quiz in student view:

I especially like that I'm able to get feedback from the students on the difficulty of the assessment just as I could on a paper-and-pencil test:

Of course, there are a few things I would change. The "draw" option that is only available for formative assessments would be great for summative ones, too, because then I could upload a portion of text and have students directly annotate it. Math teachers could do the same with problems. Hopefully they'll add this feature in the future. 

I also wish they would increase the size of the text that the students see and make the size of images adjustable. Perhaps those are other changes they'll make in the future.

Overall, it's pretty robust. I'm excited to see how it goes!

The TodaysMeet Experiment--A Backchanneling Activity

I've been anxious to try a backchannel activity and thought that this past Wednesday would be a good time to try it since we would have eighth graders visiting classes. We viewed the Werner Herzog's short film "From One Second to the Next" and used TodaysMeet.com to discuss the film while it was playing.

PROS:
- The chat rooms in TodaysMeet take only a few seconds to set up.
- The students were able to jump right in--no learning curve!
- It was fantastic to be able to pose questions as the kids were watching the film instead of having to pause it or wait until the end.
- I received WAY more input from kids than I would have conducting a traditional discussion after the film.
- I could respond to the class as a whole, or I could respond to an individual student.
- Even normally reticent students seemed much more comfortable sharing their thoughts this way.
- I have a transcript of the discussion after it's over.
- The TodaysMeet chat rooms can remain open for up to a year in case a discussion needs to be continued later.
- Kids don't need an iPad--since TodaysMeet is web based, any device with a web browser will work.

CONS:
- Because we were viewing a film, it was difficult for some students to divide their attention between the film and the backchannel.
- TodaysMeet allows the kids to put in any name they want. Regrettable, even though we went over backchanneling etiquette and guidelines before we began, some students put in fake names and made silly, random comments just to be funny. This forced me to shut down the activity immediately in those two classes.
- TodaysMeet doesn't allow me to block users engaged in the above activity, but it doesn't matter--they could just log in again.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
I had the kids give me feedback on the backchanneling activity in Moodle, and overall the responses were quite positive. We brainstormed ways to make it even better, and we thought that dividing the class into groups with their own chat rooms would make it easier to follow the digital discussions. Since I learned that two of my classes have students who will choose to be unprofessional during this type of learning activity, I would set up chat rooms for those classes only in Moodle. That way, they are forced to log in with their Moodle usernames, and I'll know exactly who each participant is.

Another Great Webinar!

This one was Plug In: How to Integrate Tablets, Smart Phones, Devices & More with Leslie Fisher, hosted by PBS LearningMedia. Many of the things she mentioned I had already heard of--which tells me I'm on the right track, but I learned about some cool new things as well. Excited to check out Infuse Learning.

Webinar: Digital Citizenship in the Connected Classroom

Participated in this webinar today--so helpful! It validated many of the things about which I'm already talking to my students, which is always a great feeling. I hope to participate in many more EdTechTeacher webinars! They're a great way to learn about helpful articles and how to expand my PLN on Twitter.

I even earned this cool Digital Citizenship badge!

One Week In

The iPads were in the kids' hands this past week! Before that happened, though, I showed them a video I created using VideoScribe that distinguishes between one's social presence and one's professional presence online. The kids were pretty impressed by the video--I just wish the subscription fee to VideoScribe wasn't so hefty. I was working off a seven-day free trial, but I did get their iPad app, which was $4.99. I'll have to try that and see how robust it is.

Stressing to my students that the school iPads are for developing their professional presence online, we then discussed the rules for iPad use: 1. Respect the device 2. Schoolwork only 3. Images require permission. Then we got them on their assigned iPads--I keep rosters of who gets which number next to the iPads in case anyone forgets in these first few days, and our tech director also has a copy of the lists--and their first task was to set up a Gmail account specifically for school use. I'm requiring that they use our school initials + their first initial + their last name (e.g., bdhsjschmoe@gmail.com) so that I can email them or share documents with them via Google Drive without having to look up individual email addresses. I also gave them printed instructions on how to set up email forwarding if they want their school Gmail account to forward to another email address that they already use. I have a feeling, though, that once we start using Google Drive regularly that they won't feel the need to forward their school email.

After having several classes use the iPads, I discovered a fourth iPad rule that I'll be including: 4. Log out of accounts. I lost count of how many kids went to use their iPads only to find that the previous student hadn't logged out of their Gmail account.

Toward the end of the week I had the chance to teach one class another skill on the iPads using Google Drive. They had to take a photo of a diagram I had created on the whiteboard, upload it to Google Drive, and then rename the image to something easily identifiable for future study. I demonstrated first with my own iPad (projected via my document camera), and most of them got it pretty easily. Side note: I have AppleTV set up in my classroom, but I have yet to use it with my iPad. I find that using the document camera creates a much larger image on the screen than the AppleTV does, but the opposite would probably be true if my document camera and AppleTV were connected to a flat-screen monitor.

So everything pretty much went smoothly until the last couple days of the week. At that point, there were many adjustments being made to our student wireless network, which resulted in no Internet access whatsoever for the kids. Some got to access Moodle to read a PDF of a story I had posted there, but the remaining classes basically couldn't use the iPads at all. With our heavy use of Moodle and Google Drive, an Internet connection is going to be critical. Here's hoping that gets straightened out this week!

Big Hurdle to Digital Portfolios Cleared!

So I've spent a few years now thinking about the move to digital portfolios. The biggest hurdle, ironically, was something rather minor--how do I score students' written work submitted digitally and then preserve it as PDFs while maintaining my feedback using the "comments" function in Word or Pages? I need the PDF format so that scores don't--uh hum--get changed after I send the scored documents to the students for uploading/linking on their Google Sites (our platform for the digital portfolios).

I looked this issue up online, asked colleagues, even tweeted about it with my PLN (personal learning network)--nothing. Then it occurred to me: Why don't I just take the "sandbox" approach that I'll be encouraging with my own students once they have the iPads? So I went into both both Word and Pages and created test documents as if they were files that students had submitted to me via Moodle for scoring and feedback. I used the "comments" function in both apps to respond to portions of text, and I inserted a text both with the scoring category, the rubric score, and the numerical score. I then "saved as . . ." a PDF--and it worked just fine! I even printed the PDFs, and they still looked great. I really need to try the sandbox approach more often!

Just Starting Out

Welcome to Connected English! In a few days my students will have iPads in their hands, and we'll be off and running. I'm coming from a BYOD background (which basically meant MacBooks), so having a cart of iPads in the classroom will be a new experience. I've already been experimenting with some apps and getting our Moodle courses up and running with discussions and backchannel activities. I'm also thinking about how we can move to digital portfolios this year.

I'll be chronicling this iPad pilot program for the 2013-2014 school by keeping track of everything we try. My goals are to assist the other teachers on my campus as they start to more fully integrate technology and to inspire other English teachers with Common Core-aligned iPad learning experiences. Remember, it's not about the tool--it's about the learning that wouldn't have been able to happen without technology as the vehicle.