A Scheduled Reflection from FutureMe (May 17, 2021)
A Scheduled Reflection from FutureMe (May 17, 2021)
Last year I sent myself a letter from FutureMe and it just arrived last week. I am happy to report that, for the most part, I have followed through with what I set out to do. Honestly, it was such a surprise to receive the letter, but it lifted my spirits as I realized how much I had accomplished even though this school year has been ROUGH.
We have all grown so much during the 2020-21 school year. Alphonse Karr said, “We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorns have roses.” It’s easy to recognize the thorns because they hurt, but there have been so many roses, too! I challenge you to write a letter to yourself so that next year you can reflect upon this school year and see how many roses have bloomed even amongst the thorns.
FutureMe is a free service that allows you to send an email in one year, three years, five years, or any other custom date you choose. For me, it has served as a great source of personal and professional reflection. I hope it does the same for you, and I hope you will consider sharing it with your students! We can all benefit from some more reflection, especially from a year that has challenged us in new and unexpected ways.
**Note: If you complete this on campus, you may have to confirm the email address once you are off campus. Our filters don’t seem to be big fans of this platform; however, FutureMe doesn’t share your information with third parties.
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
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Future Me - A Good End of 2020 Activity by Richard Byrne
FutureMe.org: Write a Letter to Your Future Self by Catlin Tucker
If you haven’t heard of Flipgrid, where have you been?! Flipgrid has blown up this school year because it is a simple, free, and accessible video discussion experience for learners and families. What that means is that your students (and anyone else you may invite) record videos and post them to a “grid” that is part of a “topic” to host an asynchronous discussion experience. Flipgrid is very user friendly, even though it has many new features. Teachers and students love using it!
When I first started using Flipgrid, you could record a video with a filter and stickers as a response to a teacher-posed topic. Then your classmates or others who were invited into the “grid” could respond with their own video. Now, you can respond with text OR video, you can do screen recording, or you can upload a recording from another device. There’s a lot of little things that have changed, but the ease of use is still there as is the ease of seeing and hearing your students thinking!
Flipgrid is a great platform to hear from all of your students. Students can respond when they are able (you know, when little brother isn’t throwing a fit or the train isn’t going by the house--these things happen when students are learning from home!) and when they feel comfortable (anyone else need more time to rehearse their answer? 😉). And if you feel like things are getting stagnant in your classroom, you can give your students a wider audience by using GridPals. There’s a lot to FlipGrid and reason that Common Sense Education has given it a learning rating of FIVE stars. Check it out if you haven’t!
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
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Flipgrid for ALL! 50+ ways to use Flipgrid in your class by Karly Moura
It’s here! It’s May! And we’re tired… Students are tired and teachers are tired. However, Dave Burgess reminds us, “Provide an uncommon experience for your students and they will reward you with an uncommon effort and attitude.” Finding novelty in May can be difficult, but perhaps now is the time to return to Mentimeter, an app that allows you to get real-time feedback from students anonymously. Many presenters embed Mentimeter into their presentations because A) there’s a free version and B) participants do NOT need to install or download anything.
Mentimeter is very user-friendly and you can create multiple choice or open-ended questions, word clouds, scales, rankings, and more. You can even have a quiz competition on Mentimeter! We have other tools that can do these things as well (I’m looking at you, Pear Deck!), but the true advantage of Mentimeter is that participants are anonymous. For the quiz competition, participants will be asked to type in a name, but students can use nicknames to remain anonymous. Mentimeter could offer you a way to get honest feedback from your students. It’s up to you if you want that feedback to be about the content or if you’d like it to be about something else. 😉
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
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Increase Engagement in Video Conferencing Sessions with Mentimeter by Catlin Tucker
If you’ve had your finger on the pulse of EdTech, you’ve probably heard of Wakelet by now. It’s a content curation platform that folks are wild about and I think I figured out why: the extension is amazing! I have used the bookmarks bar, Google Keep, and Diigo to help me save important websites and resources, but using the Wakelet extension has made things much easier and faster! If you already have Wakelet collections set, you are easily able to use the extension to add a website to your collection. You can also create an entire collection just by the click of a mouse (or touchpad 😉). It’s very easy to use, and it will help you organize your work like never before! For more ideas, check out Holly Clark’s Wakelets and blog posts or watch my YouTube videos to get started. You won’t regret it!
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
It’s here! Full re-entry. However, we will still have students who will be learning remotely (often referred to as “Zoomies”) while we have students in our classrooms as well (the “Roomies”). This provides a unique challenge, but we are better prepared to handle this now than we were in April 2020. 😉 In The Quick Guide to Simultaneous, Hybrids, & Blended Learning (Fisher et al., 2021), there are four tips for getting started in our new simultaneous learning environment:
Identify the most important learning outcomes for you and your students. Be sure to include success criteria, so students are better able to identify when they have achieved the learning outcomes.
Establish when it is appropriate to leverage asynchronous learning (possibly the preview and review parts of instruction). These tasks can also provide the formative assessment needed to inform further instruction.
Use synchronous instruction for collaboration or scaffolding of content, skills, essential knowledge. Be sure to build in formative assessment (Pear Deck, Google Forms, Kahoot, Quizziz, etc. can help!) to provide feedback to you and your students.
Establish norms with your Roomies and Zoomies so they know what to expect in their respective environments. How can/should they participate in class? (Bonus points for creating this together!)
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
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Simultaneous Learning: Blending Physical and Remote Learning by Douglas B. Fisher & Nancy Frey
I remember when my administrator suggested I give my high school students classroom jobs. I wanted to laugh it off, but it was the only actionable feedback I received, so I knew I had to implement this change if I wanted to receive higher marks on my next observation. I half-heartedly looked for classroom jobs, finding mainly resources for elementary school teachers. Nevertheless, I tweaked what I found and created jobs for my tenth grade classes.
To my surprise, it worked. I had a messenger (delivered notes to the office), an attendance monitor (took attendance), a delivery person (handed out copies or papers), a computer technician (made sure all the laptops were returned in their proper place and plugged in), a time keeper (let me know when there were five minutes left of class, so we could wrap up the lesson and clean up), a teacher assistant (my go-to helper for any job that wasn’t already assigned), and a substitute (kids miss days, too!). Having students take care of some of the classroom procedures was incredibly helpful to me, and I was surprised by the change in the classroom environment. Everyone seemed kinder as kindness begot kindness.
In today’s classroom, I think we would need to tweak those jobs again, but the value is still there. Like Ariel Sacks said, “We need to hand responsibilities to our students, freeing ourselves to use our time and attention during class more effectively.” This has never been more true now that we will have students in our classrooms and at home. That’s too much to do alone! But you know what? Our students are eager to help. Classroom jobs help take the pressure off of us teachers and it helps build a better classroom culture since our students feel and know they are an important part of our classroom. Here are some suggested student jobs for today’s classroom. I encourage you to try it out and have your students help you build their ideal classroom environment.
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
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Daily Helper and Team Captain: 2 Must-Have Classroom Jobs by Kelly Jackson
In our last EdTech Playground, we explored Nearpod, a platform that has “engaging media and formative assessments to make every lesson interactive.” Even with the free version, there is an overwhelming amount of resources! Nearpod touts 7,500+ pre-made interactive lessons, and you have the ability to filter by standard, topic, grade level, or if you are looking for a lesson, activity, or video. Talk about a timesaver! There are resources that have been created by Nearpod or other teachers and you can use these ready-made resources free of charge. 🙌
However, we have so many tools available to us, so as I thought about how and why to use Nearpod, these three ideas stuck out to me:
It’s a great asynchronous activity. (Could it be the perfect sub plan? 🤔)
Ability to create individualized activities (student-paced Google Classroom assignment assigned to specific students) using CFA data (or your own observational data).
It’s something different. 😁 (We need a little novelty now and again!)
We are a week away from Spring Break, and I know motivation can be a struggle for students and teachers. Nearpod has some wonderful resources like virtual field trips and educational games (you have to try Time to Climb!) to spice things up. Plus, Nearpod gives a report at the end of each lesson so that you don’t have to spend time grading student responses to modify instruction according to student performance.
Unni Koroth, EdTech entrepreneur and cofounder & former CEO of Foradian Technologies, said, “Equipping teachers with technology that will automate the boring work will enhance education and make it more powerful. Teachers can spend more quality time on what they are good at—i.e., teaching.” I think Nearpod can help us do just that. Check it out and let me know what you think.
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
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Nearpod: A Whole New World for Distance Learning by KC Testerman
In 2014, M. David Merrill said, “With the growing popularity in e-learning, it occurred to me that the ‘e’ should mean more than electronic. If we are going to call it e-learning, shouldn’t it be effective, efficient, and engaging?” I think we’ve gotten a lot better at finding tools that help learning be more effective, efficient, and engaging. One tool we explored in the EdTech Playground was Kami. Now, we all know Kami can help us fill out worksheets [insert yawn here], but there is so much more!
The easiest way to use Kami is to think of it as a blank sheet of paper. That’s right: you can assign a blank page, a lined notebook paper, graph paper, or a music sheet. I know I often grabbed scratch paper to have students share, so if you’ve been missing paper, perhaps Kami is your answer! You can even change the settings so that students can share a page or you can create a page for each student. The easiest way to give each student his or her own paper would be through a Kami Assignment on Google Classroom.
When you create a Kami Assignment on Google Classroom, you can also restrict the features available through Kami. So if your students don’t need to insert a signature, you can untick that box. Likewise, if they get distracted by adding images, you can take that option away. See how to do just that by watching this video and let me know how you are making learning more effective, efficient, and engaging.
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
I think we’ve all grown a special affection for our social media platforms, especially during the pandemic. It’s been a way to connect, a way to share, and a way to network with like-minded individuals. Even before we went remote last March, Mr. Wohlgemuth at Santa Teresa High School was convinced that teachers needed personalized PD and the only way to find it was to encourage teachers to join Twitter. At that point, I had a Twitter account but I rarely used it. Nonetheless, I started following more edtech people and retweeting what they said and reading their ideas and I was inspired. I wasn’t always inspired at work, but I knew I could find something online that would motivate me to keep going or to try something in a new way.
Not everyone at STHS got on the Twitter bandwagon, but other teachers told me about their Facebook groups for AP classes, their Pinterest pins, or specific teachers they followed on Instagram… The sky's the limit! The point is exactly what Germany Kent said, “If you are on social media, and you are not learning, not laughing, not being inspired or not networking, then you are using it wrong.”
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
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Suggested People to follow on Twitter for EdTech Tips & Tricks
If you tuned in to #LearningWithGoogle on Wednesday, February 17th, you heard about a LOT of exciting new features that Google is rolling out. There will be add-ons directly in Google Classroom, rich-text editing (yes, you can finally bold and underline in assignment instructions!), rosters that populate from school’s Student Information Systems (SIS), grades that export to your SIS, originality reports available in 15 languages, Google Forms that save your progress for 30 days or until it’s turned in, Google Docs that have smart correct in Spanish, Jamboards that show student edits, Google Meet will have a mute all button and Meets can be ended by the teacher, and the Google Administrator will have a plethora of ways to more easily manage groups and settings. It’s an exciting time, for sure! But this might also mean some headaches when it comes to the extensions we have been using. 🙈 If an extension isn’t working like it did before, try refreshing your page a couple of times or understand that the coding might have to be changed because of the updates Google has done. Be prepared for some short-term headaches, but be prepared for some awesomeness once all the Google updates are live. 🙌
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
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Our commitment to learning and 50+ new education features by Ben Gomes
A peek at what’s next for Google Classroom by Melanie Lazare
It’s no secret that we’re all struggling a little bit during this continued time of isolation and social distancing. Some days are better than others, and we hope the good days outweigh the bad ones. It’s been a challenge to keep our fingers on the pulses of our classes and know which students could really use our help. However, there is a FREE resource to help us know which students need our help: Closegap.
Closegap is a free program that helps students do daily emotional wellness checks. It asks students to pick from eight “planets”: happy, angry, sad, good, upset, frustrated, silly, or tired. Closegap guides students through their emotions, asking how their body feels, what could be possible reasons for those feelings (not eating breakfast/lunch, not sleeping well, etc.), and it offers activities (breathing, power pose, journaling) that students can do right now to improve their mood. Furthermore, Closegap will ask if students want to speak to an adult if their answers warrant that attention, and that alert will be sent to the students’ teacher and anyone else who has been added to that student (parent, counselor, social worker, etc.).
Be sure to check out this 17-minute webinar and the Educator Toolkit to help you get started with Closegap.
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
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Focusing on Student Well-Being in Times of Crisis by Cathleen Beachboard
If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a GIF worth? 🤔 A GIF is more dynamic than a picture because it shows motion. GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format, and since we are working remotely, GIFs can be especially helpful when we need to point something out to our students or colleagues. A GIF can be a quicker way to explain where to find a feature or what to click on because it loops so that users can easily follow along before attempting the task themselves.
If you’re wondering how to make GIFs, I’ve got a tool for you to try: Screencastify. You can screencast record a short video and export it as an animated GIF. This is even an option for the free version of Screencastify, so our students can create GIFs, too! GIFs are a great way to “bring learning to people instead of people to learning."
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
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Awesome Classroom Uses of #EduGIFs Created with Screencastify by Jake Miller
Have you ever taken a class online? I earned my Master’s degree online while I was working at an international school in Mexico. For me, online learning meant numerous discussion boards, lots of essays, some group projects, and a LOT of reading. It wasn’t always the most fun or engaging experience if I’m being honest. However, I learned to look for classmates who were working as hard as me to help push me forward: those who posted early in the discussion forum, those who responded to me, and those who asked questions and provided resources or quotations from our readings. Once I identified those people, my classes became more interesting and interactive because I knew my classmates would engage in a dialogue with me.
Cammy Bean said, “People expect to be bored by eLearning—let’s show them it doesn’t have to be like that!” I think Ms. Bean was referring to that peer-to-peer interaction; that made a big difference in my online classes. I know it can be difficult to provide those spaces for our students, but you can use a Question in Google Classroom and have students respond to one another. Another quick way to spur student discussion is to ask them to provide peer feedback. If you’re using Google Docs/Sheets/Slides, it’s easy for students to share their work with one another and leave comments on each other’s work. Depending on how you structure the activity, you might even reach the Evaluate level of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Teachers have been working so hard throughout the pandemic! It’s time to think about how you can structure assignments and activities so that students can provide feedback to one another and push one another. After all, it’s that peer-to-peer interaction that can be a surprising motivator for our students, especially since they won’t have 120+ peers to respond to so the chances of getting a quicker response improve. Divide and conquerー#TeacherHack
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
It’s tempting to find and use the latest and the greatest edtech tools in your classroom. However, it is usually best practice to limit the number of tools you use in online learning. This is because it helps you plan better (no need to spend precious time trying to find the right tool and then learn how to use it), and it helps your students feel successful (no need to learn something new yet again along with new content). And now that we have made it to the second semester, you should be able to identify what works best for you and your students.
In my experience, if I could accomplish my learning objectives from within Google Classroom, I would use Google Classroom. It’s tempting to use a fancier or trendier edtech tool, but if it isn’t necessary, it could add to the extraneous processing (all the work that isn’t related to the learning objective) of our students, therefore, hindering their learning experience. Heidi Hayes Jacobs, President of Curriculum Designers, Inc., said, “Teachers need to integrate technology seamlessly into the curriculum instead of viewing it as an add-on, an afterthought, or an event.” Using an LMS like Google Classroom can help us do that, especially when we can use the tools that are already integrated into the platform to help us engage students in learning. It might not be the latest and greatest tool, but it might be the best option for you and your students, and that is what matters most.
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
These past weeks I have been using Google Classroom as a teacher more than I have in the last 17 weeks of school. This has reminded me of perhaps the most impressive thing about Google: you can send feedback at any time! You should only send one piece of feedback at a time because that makes it easier for the Google developers to sort the data, but you can send it as many times as you’d like. It could be a suggestion, an issue you’re having, or even a compliment on their design updates.
Everything in Google Workspace has a feedback feature! In Google Classroom, Google Drive, Forms, click on the question mark icon, and choose to send feedback/report an issue. In Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, click on the “Help” menu and find “Help Docs/Slides/Sheets improve.” In Google Meet, you click on the kabob (the three dots) and choose “Report a problem” to send feedback. Basically, look for the question mark icon or find the feedback feature in the help menu.
If things aren’t working the way you want, let Google know! It’s almost Christmas, so you might just get your wish. 😉
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
This past week at our EdTech Playground, we had two amazing teachers share some different tools: Whiteboard.fi and Nearpod. If you aren’t familiar with either tool, Whiteboard.fi is like a personalized Jamboard for each student and Nearpod is like Pear Deck. Now you might be wondering why we are learning about new tools that are so similar to tools we already have; however, that is the beauty of many of the online tools available to teachersーthere are so many choices that you can find what works best for you and your students.
Let’s face itーsomeone is always going to come out with something new and different. That doesn’t’ mean we have to jump on the bandwagon if what we have been doing is working well for our students. But it’s nice to know about new tools and how they are being used. I think people were quite impressed with both Whiteboard.fi and Nearpod because they are just different enough to resonate with teachers who maybe didn’t get on the Jamboard or Pear Deck bandwagons. Even with the free versions of Whiteboard.fi and Nearpod, there is enough functionality (and perhaps novelty) to make an impact on student learning.
Bill Gates said, “Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is most important.” We don’t need to use the latest and the greatest technology; we need to use what works for us. However, when students tire of a tool or need a little spice in their life, that is what the EdTech Playground is forーconnecting with your colleagues to hear about tools that have been working well for them so that you can perhaps add that to your repertoire. Although, if GSuite tools are enough for you and your students, there is no shame in keeping things simple. Less is more and we’ve all heard, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Always do what works best for you and your students. Teachers know best.
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
Who doesn’t like a good meme? They’ve become an integral part of our culture, used on social media and in text messages, so why not use them in the classroom? There are a number of meme generators. Three that I would recommend are Meme Generator, Make a Meme, and Imgflip. All are free, user-friendly, and students will be able to screenshot their images to share or publish them on those sites. Students will not need to create an account either.
So how could you use memes in your classroom? I have used them to express classroom rules and expectations (something your students will remember!), and I have had students use memes to summarize chapters from a novel. You could use them to have students teach new vocabulary or new concepts. You could ask students to express an opinion about a topic you have been studying or they could summarize the topic. You might even just ask students to show you one thing they remember at the end of the semester and you might get a great way to jigsaw the semester with your students as you share the best memes. ;-) #TeacherHack
Winston Churchill famously said, “Where my reason, imagination, or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn." Perhaps using memes in your classroom would reach the Winstons in your classes. When I used this strategy, I recall lots of laughs, engagement, and more learning happening than students realized as they reread passages, scoured their notes, and shared their work with their peers. Give it a try and let me know how it goes.
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
Bill Gates said, “We all need people who will give us feedback. That's how we improve.” We teachers know how time-consuming it is to create and give feedback to students. I used to spend hours writing comments on students’ papers; however, now that we are working remotely and leveraging tools like Google Classroom, we have different ways to provide that feedback and we can do it before the assignment is officially turned in to practice the concept of feedforward.
One of my favorite tools is Screencastify. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is a video worth? You can highlight pieces of student work as you speak about it and you can embed your webcam video so students can see you as you deliver the feedback. It might even begin to feel like the individual conferences that you had with students in the classroom. Screencastify saves your videos in Google Drive, so you can leave the link as a private comment for your student.
If video isn’t your thing or you just want something that is quicker, there are audio options like Vocaroo. Vocaroo allows you to create a quick audio recording that you can easily share by copying the link and pasting it as a private comment for your students. You could even have students use this tool in their work to tell you where they would like to receive feedback.
Feedback is an important part in the learning process; it’s how we improve. Let me know your favorite method for leaving feedback or if you plan to try Screencastify or Vocaroo (or have your students use them to ask for feedback on a specific part of their work!).
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
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Perhaps you completed a scavenger hunt at summer camp or as a friendly competition at a family gathering. My favorite has always been purse scavenger hunts because I’m basically ready for anything. (Did someone need floss? A Q-tip? A snack? Hand sanitizer?) But this is a practice we can bring into our classes as well. Imagine using that form of exploration to engage your students with a new concept. At the beginning of school year, you did a virtual scavenger hunt to find edtech tools that you wanted to try out or have used. You probably used a Google search or your best teacher friend to help you complete the task. That is something anyone can do with their content area.
And some of you might decide to make it a real-life scavenger hunt. As I met with AVECHS seniors for their senior portfolios, I could tell they were struggling with the concept of why they would even need a portfolio. For the next class, I decided to use a scavenger hunt. I gave everyone two minutes to find something that meant a lot to them in their homes. We all raced off camera to find our treasures and spent about fifteen minutes sharing and learning more about one another. It was easy for them to find an object that was important and it was an analogy for the portfolio that would contain the important and formative moments of their academic careers. This group understood what would be going into their senior portfolio much better than the first.
So if you are going to talk about elements on the periodic table, perhaps you could ask your students to find something that they believe would show an element (or two) and explain why. Or if you were going to learn about angles, maybe you could have each student find the strangely shaped item and practice identifying the acute and obtuse angles. How fun would it be to explore as a class? Let’s bring some of that exploration and wonder back into the classroom with a good old scavenger hunt.
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
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Using Scavenger Hunts to Get Students Moving in Virtual Learning by John Spencer
Last week on Wednesday, I was having one of those days. If you attended the 2 o’clock EdTech Playground session, you know what I’m talking about. ;-) I had a plan, I had everything ready and hyperlinked, but I still forgot to turn on the voting for Mentimeter, and then I was fumbling around with it because I hadn’t used that function before. Then my Google Form didn’t turn on to collect responses… [insert facepalm here.] It was just one of those days, but I was grateful we could laugh about it, and I learned a few new things along the way.
Personal trainer Jillian Michaels said, “It’s not about perfect. It’s about effort. And when you bring that effort every single day, that’s where transformation happens. That’s how change occurs.” Now she might have been talking about exercise but that kind of attitude is essential for all new situations. Many of us have never taught online before, and while we want things to be as “perfect” as they were in the classroom, that isn’t really a realistic goal. “It’s not about perfect. It’s about effort.” We need to try our best. We need to laugh at ourselves and those situations that aren’t perfect because nothing is perfect right now! Things aren’t always going to go our way or work out exactly as we would like them to, but we can’t throw in the towel.
Furthermore, if what we are doing isn’t working, we need to try something new, and that is what I have loved about the EdTech Playground sessions--we are all learning and trying new things together. There’s more than enough new things out there to try, but if you’re still a little anxious because you want things to run smoothly, join us on Wednesdays at 2:00 or 4:00 p.m. I can’t promise things will be perfect, but I can promise you will see and hear about the efforts of your colleagues. Who knows--it might even transform your classroom.
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
Patti Shank, PhD. and president of Learning Peaks LLC, said, “If learners think it looks bad, you may have lost a good percentage of the battle in getting them to pay attention.” We’ve become a visual society, making judgments in a snap as to whether we will spend our time reading or watching content. Our students do the same thing. So how can we make things look good? Well, one possibility is using the website remove.bg to remove the background of a picture, therefore, allowing you to appear anywhere. If you’re teaching a unit about the election, you could create a slide that has you on the stage with President Trump and former Vice President Biden. It’s a little gimmicky, but if it gets students to pay attention, we’re getting there! And if you let your students participate in the gimmick, they might learn a thing or two while having fun.
Not sure how you can use remove.bg in your classroom? Here are some of my ideas:
As the teacher…
Pose a question for discussion (that will be seen because your face is there!)
Pose a research question with a contextualized background and maybe a personal touch (as if you are the client and students are the contractors)
Assign a jigsaw to your students, modeling the use of remove.bg and asking them to insert themselves into 1940’s Germany/Japan/Russian/USA/Great Britain/etc. to share and contextualize the lesson.
Create a fun icebreaker of “Would you rather…” with your picture in both dire situations. (i.e., Would you rather be in a pit of spiders or a pit of snakes?)
As the learner…
Give a tour of a country or place to add context to history class.
Tell a story in a foreign language, complete with visual aids to help your classmates follow along and understand.
Share your research as a story--maybe you tell a historical tale as if you were there or maybe you can show a well-known science experiment as if you were part of the team (because you can add your picture and pretend!).
Pretend you are a reporter, sharing breaking news about an issue of controversy (so students can take sides and debate in class!).
Create Slides of your ideal life (then your Math Teacher asks you to calculate how much the car, house, clothes, etc. would cost on a monthly basis).
Teach your classmates a new word with visuals and a personal touch.
The sky is the limit! And since remove.bg might make things look good, we are that much closer to winning the battle for students’ attention.
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
Well-known entrepreneur and businessman Elon Musk said, “I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better.” Google Classroom has the capability to have those kinds of loops. Students can turn in a part or all of a draft or project, get feedback from you, and then you can return it… without a grade and with feedback that the student must act upon. Once they have responded to your feedback, you can release the grade.
As a former ELA teacher who spent hours and hours writing what I believed was thoughtful feedback and insights to help each student grow as a writer, I can tell you that the moment some students see the grade, that’s all they see. No other comment matters because it’s over, right? The final grade is in bold, red/green/purple/whatever color ink the teacher decided to use. And that’s all that matters to that student at that moment. I did evolve my practice to have students edit their final drafts and turn in a new draft with the old one to improve their grade which later evolved into a writers’ workshop that only had me reading and grading entire papers once (work smarter, not harder!); however, with the help of technology, we can be even more effective with our feedback loops.
We know we can access student drafts as they work. We know students can provide peer feedback as they work. We need to provide a structure like a rubric to help students provide quality feedback, but we teachers can also use the private comments in Google Classroom to deliver personalized feedback to our learners. We know our students are at different levels of mastery, so when we are able to provide a personalized step to help them get closer to mastery, that’s when we see students blossom. Maybe it’s something like using transitional phrases or words to improve the flow of a written response. Maybe it’s simply requesting that the student provide an audio clip talking through the problem as a means of checking/reviewing work. Whatever you ask students to do, that feedback will help them learn and grow. Furthermore, the first attempt could be a small grade since it could be considered a formative assessment while the second attempt or submission of the same product could be the second grade for the week and it could carry more weight as a summative assessment. However you use private comments and feedback loops, rest assured that your students are thinking about what they have done and how they can do it better.
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
GISD’s EdTech Tips & Tricks Site
Google Meet Breakout Rooms by Eric Curts
Last week I attended New Mexico’s GEG Teacher’s Lounge to hear about those who have been in doing hybrid learning. We now know that we will be teaching remotely for the rest of the semester; however, I believe the sentiments I heard are still relevant. For those teachers who have gone back and are in the classroom, they were almost amazed at how much students did not care about the teacher--students wanted to connect with their peers, their friends.
I think we’ve been too focused on ourselves, thinking about if we are doing enough, if we are supporting our students enough, if we are creating lessons that are engaging enough, clear enough. It’s natural to be in that space--I’m sure we were all there in our first years of teaching, wondering if we were doing a good job. We were focused on our performance more than our students’ performance. I think this pandemic has put many of us back there. But the truth is that while our students need us (there’s no denying that!), they need each other, too. Our students need the chance to interact with their peers and those who have become friends throughout the years.
In the classroom, it was perhaps easier to facilitate group work and sprinkle it in when class felt a little dull. We may not always feel like we have the tools to help students interact; however, it doesn’t need to be something fancy. Esther Park, an ESL teacher in Virginia, has a simple breakout room strategy that lets students choose what they need. Read her guest post here and steal her breakout room template here.
We need to find ways to help students hold the spoon. It could be something as simple as offering a group room, a quiet room, and a teacher help room. Ask your students what they need and help them build it. If we are trying to be student-focused, we need to make sure our students have a voice and they are able to help create the spaces and supports they need. You know they have been cultivating technology skills as fast or faster than us, so why not let them be a part of the virtual classroom.
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
GISD’s EdTech Tips & Tricks Site
How to create Google Meet breakout rooms for differentiated learning by Esther Park
The end of the quarter is near and we all know what that means: students will do anything to improve their grades! Thus begins the steady stream of late assignments. However, if a student checked out this quarter but decided to dedicate themselves to the second quarter, doing that same desperate push at the end of the semester, they may do assignments from the first quarter out of desperation. It’s never fun to explain to a student that a particular assignment was due last quarter. (Speaking from experience, folks. If you’ve never done it, it feels awful to praise the student for their hard work, but then explain that those grades have been locked… for nine weeks!)
When we are face-to-face, it’s easier to help kiddos follow along. Now that we are completely virtual, I say archive that Google Classroom. Why? Archived classes can still be accessed so you (and your students!) can still see the work from last quarter, but it will be easier to navigate through a classroom that isn’t cluttered from nine weeks of prior instruction. You can post the code to the new Google Classroom in your old Google Classroom and archive first quarter’s Google Classroom after a week or so.
Archiving your Google Classroom might even send a message to your students that it’s a fresh start--for everyone! Now that you are better at organizing your Google Classroom, you can start fresh, using the new tips and tricks you have learned during first quarter.
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
Even before teaching remotely, teachers were using websites to supplement content and find new or different ways to captivate students. Before March 13, we could easily observe students engaging with these websites as we walked around the class and observed students and small groups interacting with the site. Now it feels like we are assigning the reading and hoping for the best as we assign Cornell notes or other familiar strategies we hope will help students engage with the reading.
While that may work for some students, there is another option (and it’s FREE!): InsertLearning. InsertLearning boasts that it can “Insert instructional content on any web page.” You can add highlights, notes, questions, and discussion prompts to any article on the internet to create an engaging lesson. Once you have added the extension to Chrome, you can click the icon in your extension bar and the InsertLearning toolbar will appear on the left-hand side of the webpage.
Here are some ideas to help you use InsertLearning to engage students.
Function & Ideas for Use
Highlight
Highlight new vocabulary
Point out context clues
Model how to highlight text when using Kami
Model how to highlight the topic sentence/supporting details/etc.
Highlight key information you want students to respond to
Insert a Note
Give students instructions
Connect a part of the article to the students’ textbook or another resource
Ask students to reflect in their journal/notebook
Leave markers for jigsaw groups
Add links to more resources
Insert a Question
Gauge student understanding
Encourage critical thinking
Collect formative assessment data
Ask students to evaluate the credibility of a claim
Ask students to make a claim or identify the author’s claim and supporting details.
Insert a Discussion
Encourage students to outline their ideas and opinions
Make reading a social activity as students respond to one another
Learn from their peers and diverse perspectives
Create a debate for your class
Encourage quiet or shy students to participate
Motivate students to think deeply about a topic
Let me know how you are using InsertLearning to enhance instruction as we continue to learn remotely. The free version allows teachers to design five interactive lessons and share those lessons with an unlimited number of students, but if you really like how this tool engages your students, there are plans that give you the ability to create unlimited lessons. Make sure your students install the extension and happy learning! :-)
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
GISD’s EdTech Tips & Tricks Site
How to assign a lesson [with InsertLearning] and get students there by Matt Nupen
In a traditional class, we’ve grown accustomed to using small groups to help with differentiation and student engagement, so we’re all waiting for that perfect Google Meet Breakout Room extension. Google for Education Enterprise will roll out that feature in September, but we aren’t Enterprise members. So what can we do? Sometimes, simple is better. Create a HyperDoc of Google Meet breakout rooms for students. Group students like you normally would, leave them instructions, and pop in and out as needed. This link could also provide students a place to meet up later and continue work if needed. (Some students have lamented that they are unable to create Google Meet links. This could help them work together more easily.) This HyperDoc will also allow you to better differentiate for your students since each group could have different instructions, activities, or strategic groupings. Here's an example of one HyperDoc for groups and here is another. Try it out and let me know how it goes.
Handy extensions for Google Meet:
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)
Last quarter we heard the message, “Less is more.” That still stands as we continue to teach remotely. If you’re new to edtech resources, it can be overwhelming. There are so many options! But the truth is, you don’t need to go much further than our GSuite to engage students in learning. Kasey Bell of Shake Up Learning calls Google Slides the Swiss Army Knife of GSuite. You can have all of your students in Slides, adding images, videos, text, or links to explore and share a new topic together. Students could even create eBooks or stop motion animation. And now that we have Pear Deck, you can use Slides for formative assessments, SEL lessons, and more! Don’t feel like you have to learn about all the latest and the greatest edtech tools--less is more! Learn how to use two or three tools (for example, Google Classroom, Google Slides, and Pear Deck) really well and explore how you can use those tools to enhance instruction. With that, you will be using less but doing a whole lot more.
GISD’s Teacher Tutorials started by Candace Buchanan and updated by us :-)