I can't believe it! My last blog post for grad school. I never thought I would be a blogger. Well that changed and I have actually enjoyed blogging. It is so reflective. I enjoy reviewing what I have learned each week and sharing tips that may help other educators. That's another thing. I never thought that anyone would want to read my blog aside from my instructor (because she assigned it) and my mom (because she's my mom). Well, with a little motivation I put myself out there and shared my blog on social media. It is exciting to see more people read my blog. I hope that others have learned some helpful tips to try in their classrooms. Who knows, maybe I'll keep blogging because I'll have all the time in the world next year since I won't be in grad school! (I am jumping up and down right now, fist bumping the air in excitement.)
This week I focused on quite a few tricks to search the internet. Google has so many special search tips. Here are a few:
Probably my favorite search tip is that you can search by filetype. This has saved me so much time. When I need a worksheet or some extra practice problems, I search the topic I am teaching and then filetype: pdf.
If you want to learn more, read my "Google Search Tips" post from January.
This week I explored searching Google as a news source. Google has its own news app. You can personalize your news feed to be about what you want to read. You can select which edition of news you want to read. This could be helpful if you are studying about another country. Searches can be customized by top stories or you can choose to let Google recommend news for you based on your location and interest. Learn more about Google News here.
Another cool search tip I learned this week was how too find images that are not tied to copyright licences.
After doing a Google image search, select Search tools, and then Usage rights. You can narrow your search to images for your classroom that do not break copyright rules. If you are in a Google Doc, you can do a Google image search within your document. All images that are brought up are labeled for commercial reuse with modification. You can set specifications if you want to search Google images, Life images, or Stock images. Images can be sorted by type and color.
(The more I learn about Google and its features, the more I love it! I mean these these are pretty nifty tips for every day use, but they open up so many options for education.)
Learning internet search tips is very useful. When I have a question that I don't know the answer to, I usually Google it. Well this week I was introduced to Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha does more than just find websites that pertain to your topic or question. Wolfram Alpha compiles a vast quantity of data that may be helpful in answering a question. Let's consider a math question for example. I asked my Honor's Algebra 2 students the following question:
Once they had an answer, I wanted to be able to show my students a correct version of this graph. The only problem was that the window on their graphing calculators were too small. Wolfram Alpha provided me with the following graph:
Aside from the graph, Wolfram Alpha also gave the roots of the equation, the domain and range, and other possible forms of the equation. Check it out here. Well math may not be your thing. Watch this short YouTube and consider what Wolfram Alpha has to offer you and your classroom.
Hopefully you have learned some great internet searching tips. Sometimes things are just lost because we don't know how to search for them. Well feel empowered. Use some of my Google search tips and give Wolfram Alpha a try. I hope that your internet searching will lead you to find some great things for your classroom.
Everyone uses social media. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and probably a whole lot more that I don't even know about about. Some people use social media as a way to stay connected with old and current friends. Others use it as a form of news. Overall social media is used as a way to network, share ideas and stay up to date. So the question becomes, should social media be used in the school setting?
There are quite a few positives and negatives to incorporating social media sites in the school setting. Before one jumps completely on board, I think that it is important for them to consider possible dangers such as cyberbullying or the fact that social media can distract students. On the other hand, there are many ways to advance education through social media that one should not eliminate it completely. Students make connections online through social media sites. Social media can aid students in collaborating on projects outside of the classroom. Social media also provides a platform to communicate which can encourage quiet or introverted students to contribute.
In my classroom I have tried to incorporate technology that mimics the pros of social media without taking on all of the downsides. I encourage my students to use Google Drive apps when completing group projects to assist student interaction outside of class. I have used a website called Today's Meet to give all students a voice as I propose questions in class. Remind is a great tool for one-way communication with students and athletes. By using this app I am able to sent text reminders to my athletes.
Some would argue that my incorporation of technology is not the same as incorporating social media. Although this is true, I looked at what were the benefits of social media and tried to find a way that I was comfortable incorporating it into my classroom. Others may choose to use social media in their classrooms and that is fine. My district has stricter restrictions on social media preventing me from doing so. If someone were to ask me if they should incorporate social media in their classroom, I would say that they should look at both sides of the issue. If a teacher feels prepared to overcome the difficulties that go along with social media, then I say go for it. I do not think that a school district should set the rule on social media, but that individual teachers should think about what their goals are and if social media would aid in that endeavor.
But wait!
Regardless of what you decide about using social media in your classroom, you should definitely consider using social media for your own professional use. Think about all of the connections you could make with other educators. Trends in education are investigated on social media and teachers post great ideas that they have. One of my favorite forms of social media for education is Twitter. (If you want to to learn more about Twitter as a professional learning network, read my "Connections" post from May.) This week let me introduce you to two new forms of social media that are great for sharing ideas and websites.
Pinterest is a great tool for "pinning" ideas, websites, videos, or lessons. Start by creating boards to organize your resources. Here are a couple of my boards:
As I search through Pinterest or browse the internet and find things that I like, I pin them to one of my boards so that I can easily find them again. I have used Pinterest as a way to get inspiration on how to collect student work or new class activities. Pinterest has a "wall" like Facebook. When I first login, I can view pins from boards or pinners that I follow. If you are a creative or visual person, Pinterest is the thing for you. To learn more, watch this YouTube about Pinterest for Education.
This YouTube also shares how to embed your Pinterest Board in a website in case you want to share it with students. Let's see if this works!
I love it when I learn something new . . . especially when it makes me feel like a technology wiz!
For those of you who are more analytical, Pinterest may not be the thing for you. Still wouldn't it be nice to have a way to organize all of your favorite websites and resources? Symbaloo EDU is just the thing for you! Symbaloo is a visual bookmarking tool. Each square icon can be linked to a website that you or your students frequent. Icons can be grouped under particular topics. I have a list of twenty-five websites and apps that I use frequently in my classroom. I created a symbaloo to organize them. If you hover over the squares grouped by the same background color, you can see how I categorized my websites. Check it out. (I just learned how to embed another tool into my blog!)
Aside from organizing websites, symbaloo is also an excellent way to learn great ideas from other educators. You can search symbaloo for public webmixes. I found some with resources that I will use in the high school math classroom. Take a look for yourself and see if you can find any geared towards your content area.
Well I hope that you are inspired to try some new forms of social media. Get out there and learn from others, but don't forget to share your great ideas!
There is a lot on a teacher's plate: lesson planning, meetings, grading, tutoring, contacting parents, etc. Ugh...I just got a knot in the bottom of my stomach thinking about these things. I still have about two more months of summer before that all comes crashing down in my lap again. Some of you may be spending your summer laying out at the pool or traveling to adventurous places. Well let me encourage you to take a look at some organizational and time saving tools so that you will have more time for the things you love once school starts up again.
Organizational, Time Saving, Classroom Management Tools
Remind is a great tool for communicating with students and athletes. I use Remind with my track athletes. I am able to send them text reminders the night before a track meet to bring their uniform and track gear to school. Advantages of Remind is that I am able to have one way communication with my athletes without exchanging phone numbers. Students can sign up with their phone number or email and receive messages that I send out. Students join "classes" and may receive multiple messages from different coaches or teachers. I like that there is an app I can download on my phone that allows me to send out messages like a text without getting on my computer.
Although Remind is great, some students have experienced difficulty signing up. I have not figured out why, but sometimes students' phones do not work with the 81010 number listed. I wish that all of my athletes could use Remind, but not all of them have cell phones or texting capabilities on their phones. At least there is an email option, but that does not really help students who lack internet connection at home. These are all issues that I face by working in a low socioeconomic school, but they do not reflect on issues with Remind. Using Remind, I am able to communicate with more students than I had in the past.
Doodle is a great tool for polling people. This would be a great tool to use at school when trying to pick a time to meet with multiple people that do not see each other on a regular basis. Since school is out and I wanted to experiment with Doodle, I decided to poll my sisters on when we should go blueberry picking.
Doodle was very easy to set up and invite people. I gave my Doodle a title, picked times that we could go blueberry picking, and then entered emails to send invites to the Doodle. As people respond, a tally is created at the bottom to highlight the favored time. I like that everyone can view each other's responses. Sometimes one may adjust their schedule when they can see that a particular time is best for everyone else. There is also a place on the bottom for comments.
Teachers Pay Teachers is a great website where you can find already made lessons and activities for all grades and subjects. When I was first introduced to Teachers Pay Teachers, I was a little skeptical. I did not want to pay for a resource that I could have created or one that did not fit my objectives exactly. Although I was told there was a "free" section, most of the teachers who raved about it were elementary teachers. I don't hold anything against elementary teachers, but sometimes they just do not understand that there are a lot fewer resources geared towards up level math. Just because something involves math and application does not mean that it follows the standards that I have to teach.
Well if you are an upper level teacher, especially one who teaches math, I hope I haven't lost you yet. I decided to take a break from the pool and give Teachers Pay Teachers another chance. I started by narrowing my search to "free." I was surprised by the many great activities I found! I decided to search for lessons geared towards functions, domain and range, polynomials. etc. These are all concepts that Algebra 2 students struggle with. I was ecstatic to find that there are teachers, who having found success with their students, are excited to share their resources.
Here are a few of my favorite activities that I found:
Teachers Pay Teachers is not the only time saving resource out there. If you use SMART notebook software, check out these websites with lessons and activities: SMART Exchange and Harvey's Homepage.
Online Stopwatch is a helpful tool to keep students and instructors on track. I project this timer when my students are working individually or with a group so that they can pace themselves to finish on time. It also helps me know when to bring the class back together to check for understanding.
Bouncy Balls is a tool that can help monitor noise level. This website utilizes a computer's microphone to assess the noise level in a room. When the noise level is low, there is not a lot of bouncy balls. As the noise level increases, more balls appear and they start to jump very high. It is a visual to help students gauge their noise level.
I'm excited to try some of these tools in my classroom next year. Hopefully you will experiment with some of these organizational, time saving, classroom management tools as well. In the long run, I hope to save time and energy so that I can give my best to my students and still have time for things I love to do outside of school.
When I think of collaboration, I can't help but think of Parent Trap. Maybe it's because I am a twin, or maybe it's because I loved watching this movie growing up, but regardless, great things happen when you collaborate.
Imagine the great things that could take place in education or your classroom when collaboration is involved! This is one of the biggest reasons I love Google Drive. (If you want to learn more about what Google Drive is, read my "Let Google Drive" post from January.) Not only is Google Drive accessible on any device, you can collaborate with others on a shared doc, sheets, slides, etc.
By clicking on the blue share button you can select people to share with and give them editing privileges, or just the ability to view or comment.
I coach track and made a shared Google Sheets for our meet sign ups. Each coach was able to enter their athletes and take note of other entries. (The blue and pink outlines represent two users inputting info at the same time.) To learn more about collaborating on Google Apps, check out this website.
Google Drive has so many apps to offer. Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides are the most common, but let me introduce you to a new one.
Google Forms is a great tool to use if you want to survey your students or give a quiz. You can select a variety of question formats: short answer, paragraph, multiple choice, check boxes, drop down, linear scale, multiple choice grid, date, and time. You can add an image or YouTube to go along with the question.
I love the ease of creating forms and the ability to personalize them, as well as how the responses are collected. By clicking on the response tab, I can see how everyone responded and compare answers.
My favorite option is exporting all of my results to a Google Sheets where I run an add-on called "Flubaroo." Flubaroo will grade every entry and identify areas for improvement.
To learn more about Flubaroo, check out this YouTube.
Sharing your Google Form with others can be simple Usually I post the link to my student's Google Classroom page. But what if you don't have an online format to post a link to and the URL is extremely long and confusing? Thankfully there are many URL shortening services. Here are a few to try: https://goo.gl/ https://bitly.com/ http://tinyurl.com/
My favorite is tinyurl because I can create custom URLs that are easy to remember. Sometimes I create a URL that says something quirky about math or that includes the name of the quiz or survey I am giving. If you want to check out one of my Google Form quizzes, here is the tinyurl that I created for it: http://tinyurl.com/parentfunctionsquiz
Another cool feature of Google Drive is its template gallery. Check it out here. This template gallery has thousands of templates for Google Docs, Sheets and Slides.
Instead of creating something from scratch, find a template and adjust it for your needs. A couple of templates that I found and will be using are student certificates, a monthly calendar, and a cover page with correct headings in APA formatting. Explore for yourself and find templates to make your life easier.
When we collaborate, everything is better, yeah yeah yeah!
Picture end of the year craziness, and then all of a sudden it's over. Students are gone, grades are turned in, and summer has arrived . . . well sort of. Are you ever "off the hook" as a teacher? My mind is always thinking of new and better things to try. Just because something worked last year with last year's group of kids does not mean it will work next year. If it did work, is there a way to make it better? One of the things that drives me crazy as a teacher is disorganization with the distribution and collection of papers. Even if everything goes smoothly on my end, there is bound to be a student who is absent or lost their assignment and needs a new copy. Argh... Well let me introduce you to Learning Management Systems (LMS).
According to wikipedia, "A learning management system is a software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting and delivery of electronic educational technology (also called e-learning) courses or training programs." If you have ever taken an online grad class, you have probably used an LMS such as Moodle or Blackboard. Through the LMS, an instructor can post content, resources, discussion boards, polls, quizzes and assignments. Some LMS can be synced to your gradebook so that when an assignment is turned in, the instructor can record a grade and provide comments right there in the LMS.
You might be thinking, "I don't teach an online course." or "I do not have time to set up a website." (Or it may just have been me thinking these thoughts as a new teacher.) Well after five years of teaching, I was willing to give it a try and I won't go back. Two of the most popular, free LMS available to educators are Edmodo and Schoology. Although some people would argue that Google Classroom is not an LMS, it is comparable so I will introduce you to all three.
Edmodo is sometimes referred to as a school Facebook. The look and feel of Edmodo resembles Facebook, which has appeal for students. The first year I used Edmodo, I used it solely as a place for uploading in class notes and assigned practice or homework. I trained students to check Edmodo for work when they were absent. If a student needed to make up an assignment that they did poorly on, I had them look up the notes on Edmodo. Slowly but surely I was able to teach my students responsibility when it came to their learning. I also was able to eliminate the piles of old worksheets that were lying around my classroom. Here's a pic of my first Edmodo group:
Edmodo has a lot more to offer than just a "wall" to post to. My second year I experimented with writing and administering quizzes on Edmodo. Edmodo also offers a feature called Snapshot. Using Snapshot, I was able to select standards that I wanted to assess my students over. Snapshot created a multiple choice quiz over these standards. Once my students took the assessment, I was provided with data analysis and additional practice resources based on my students' weaknesses. Some people who look for a LMS for the ability to create and collect assignments within that system. The two years that I used Edmodo, my students did not have reliable access to a computer or internet so I did not experiment with that feature.
There are a couple features of Edmodo that I do not like. Once files or posts have been uploaded, they cannot be rearranged. This makes finding old posts tedious and sometimes frustrating. There is also not a good place for a discussion board. The discussions take place pretty much like they do in Facebook and are added to the "wall" along with all other posts.
I was hopeful that I would find a new love for Edmodo when I learned about the PNL aspect of it. My district offered a class over Standards Based Grading a couple summers ago and all of our assignments and discussions were posted to Edmodo. This week I also learned that you can follow "topics" to connect with other educators. I started following a couple topics related to teaching high school math, but was disappointed. Most of the posts were educators asking questions or seeking help, not posting their own cool resources. I guess I wasn't surprised. I am not someone who posts to Facebook and I don't read a lot of people's posts; why should I be surprised that I would not like "School Facebook" posts. Well, there are other LMS.
My experience with Schoology is very small, so let me introduce you to Schoology with this short video:
Since so many people like Schoology, I thought I should give it a try. I created an account, joined a class and explored its features. To get a better feel for Schoology, I decided to create my own Schoology class. (Check it out by going to Schoology and joining my class DWKX-PRX6). Within Schoology I was able to upload material and organize it into a resource folder, assignments, quizzes, or discussion posts.
One of my favorite features of Schoology is the discussion forum. I just taught my students how to match real life scenarios to corresponding graphs. I posted a discussion question with three graphs and asked students to create their own scenarios for the graphs. As a facilitator of the discussion, I am able to see the progression of the conversation. I can note who comments on who. I can also select one student's name and view every place they have posted. This makes assigning grades for the discussion simple. Aside from the discussion board, I really like the organization of Schoology. Students have a running list on the right side of their screen with upcoming assignments for all of their Schoology courses. As a teacher I can rearrange and organize materials in any order after I post them to Schoology. For someone just trying to learn Schoology, this is a nice feature.
One downside I noticed with Schoology is the inablity to add comments when I uploaded a website or YouTube. I share quite a few websites with my students. I had to create everything as an "assignment" if I wanted to add comments about what students were to look for or do in response to the website. As a math teacher, I know that some math work is difficult to complete on a computer. Usually I am more concerned with students' work than their answers. I am not sure what issues I would face by posting websites as "assignments" if I did not intend for students to turn anything in online.
Well if I were to pick between Edmodo and Schoology, I would pick Schoology for its organization features and discussion boards. Although organization and the management of all sorts of crazy random papers lying around my room is key for me when picking a LMS, I believe the greatest benefit comes when multiple teachers in your school use the same format. Students are more likely to use the LMS and you as a teacher will spend less time teaching students how to use the LMS. This is why I switched and use Google Classroom.
Google Classroom is currently only available for Google Apps for Education users. This last school year, all English, math and some science and social studies teachers in my district got a class set of chromebooks. With chromebooks, we were encouraged to use all things Google. Well that was easy because I love Google! As this post is getting very long, I will spare you and only share my thoughts on Google Classroom at this time.
Google Classroom has been a place where I post notes and extra practice for students who are absent. This year I have experimented with creating assignments that students turn in to me on Google Classroom. I love that Google Classroom is connected with Google Drive. I am able to make a template of an assignment and share a copy with each of my students. Students are then able to add their work and then resubmit it to me without messing with formatting issues. Students have also created videos or Google Stories online and then are able to submit their assignments to me through Classroom. All assignments are automatically organized and saved to my Drive. I am able to monitor who has turned in an assignment and who I need to check in with. Google Classroom is improving every day. A couple weeks ago Google adjust Classroom so that I could create an assignment or post and then determine when I wanted it to be published. This is nice because I have some students who complete assignments as soon as they get a text notification instead of waiting for my in class specifications. Here's a quick look at one of my classes on Google Classroom:
Learning Management Systems can make your life as a teacher easier and add to your students' educational experience. Explore Edmodo, Schoology and Google Classroom for yourself. Pick one to try and encourage a colleague to try it as well.
