Ditch That Textbook Digital Summit

Matt Miller, of Ditch That Textbook fame, is once again hosting a digital summit that consists of recordings of interviews he has with some top people in education technology.  Last year was the first year of the digital summit, and I enjoyed all of the videos that he created.  I was excited to hear that he was running the summit again this year.  The only downside is that the videos are only available until December 31st.  It would be nice if they were available year round to re-watch and reference.  You can access the recordings from the Ditch That Textbook Digital Summit website.

Splat!

I recently had the privilege to work with our seventh grade math classes.  They were beginning a unit on equations.  I had read about Steve Wyborney's Splats on his blog and suggested to the seventh grade math teachers that we try using them at the beginning of the unit.

What are Splats?  They are PowerPoint presentations of chips and "Splats" that give a visual representation to help promote number sense.  Given that we are a Chromebook district, we uploaded the PowerPoint presentations to Google Drive viewed them with the Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer extension.  Here are some examples of what the slides look like:

     

Splats can be used with any grade level and with many different math concepts.  They worked really well with the equations unit as the Splats provided a visualization of the variable(s).  The students caught on to Splats very quickly which allowed us to ask higher level questions to invoke deeper thinking.   The teachers commented that students who usually did not contribute to class discussions had their hands up during the Splats lesson.

The math teachers felt that the students had a better understanding of equations as compared to previous years, which they attributed to starting out with the Splats.  I was invited back later in the unit to observe a lesson in which Splats were once again used to solidify the concepts of equations.  When reflecting on the unit, we decided that next year we would give students equations and have them build the corresponding Splat images using Google Slides.

I am grateful to Steve Wyborney for making his Splat slides available for free downloads.  What a difference it made to our seventh graders!

Storyboard That

One of the tools that we had to give up when we moved to Chromebooks was Comic Life.  It was an easy-to-use program that our teachers and students really liked.  However, Comic Life currently only works on a Windows PC or Mac.

We experimented with some of the free web-based comic makers, but never found one that fit our needs.  Last spring, we stumbled on Storyboard That, which looked promising.  After having our coaches try it out, our tech committee decided to purchase a subscription for our district.  While there is a free version available, we felt that the paid version would better suit our needs.

Storyboard That is more than a comic creator.  It is a user-friendly tool that allows students to create storyboards, graphic organizers, comics, and more.  Storyboard That has thousands of built-in images that can be used to create projects easily through its drag-and-drop interface.  If you can't find an image you like from their collection, you can upload an image, allowing for even more flexibility.  The Storyboard Their Teachers Guide and Resources page offers many ideas for using Storyboard That in different subject and grade levels.

So far I've been impressed with what our students have created with this new tool and am looking forward to future student-created projects as we all become more familiar with Storyboard That.

Summer Reads

I read some inspiring educational books this summer.  Here are my top five:

1. The Innovator's Mindset by George Couros - This book seems to be at the top of the reading list of many educators, and with good reason.  We used this book for our summer book study, and the teachers who read it not only liked it, but were inspired by it.  As the title suggests, The Innovator's Mindset presents ideas for creating a school culture based on innovation and creativity.  Be sure to check out the Innovator's Mindset website for additional resources.
2. Empower by John Spencer and A.J. Juliani - For me, Empower seemed like a sequel to The Innovator's Mindset - or maybe the 'how-to'guide.  Empower offers practical tips that the authors used to transform their classrooms from teacher-centered to student-centered.  This is a fast and easy read with lots of good ideas.
3. Shift This! by Joy Kirr - Similar to Empower, Shift This! is a 'how-to' guide for transforming your classroom.  Middle school teacher Joy Kirr talks about how she shifted her classroom to a place where students took more control and were excited to learn.  What I especially like about Shift This! is that Kirr broke down each change into small, manageable parts, and encouraged teachers to make small changes over time rather than become overwhelmed by trying to make too many larger changes at once.
4. Making Your School Something Special by Rushton Hurley - Similar to the other three books I mentioned, Making Your School Something Special presents ideas for making your school become a place for innovation, exploration, and creativity.  This book offers several good classroom learning activities that are easy to implement.  It also offers a framework for evaluating learning activities by dividing them into four categories: powerfully memorable, generally effective, weak but easy, and waste of time.  This is another fast read with many good, practical strategies.
5. Learning First, Technology Second by Liz Kolb - Unlike the other books on this list, Learning First, Technology Second focuses on effective and authentic classroom technology integration.  The book promotes the use of The Triple E Framework for creating lessons in which technology engages students, enhances learning experiences, and extends learning opportunities.  What I like best about the book were the Case Studies describing exemplary lessons created and used by classroom teachers.

ISTE Standards for Students

After looking at the word clouds for the ISTE Educator Standards that I posted yesterday, I decided to create word clouds of the three sets of ISTE Standards for Students:

Technology Foundation Standards for Students (1998)

ISTE Standards Students (2007)

ISTE Standards for Students (2015)

ISTE Standards for Educators

This morning, I watched an EdTech Team Live video that focused on the recently released ISTE Standards for Educators.  If you aren't familiar with the EdTech Team videos, I would highly recommend looking at their YouTube Channel.  They have many good videos related to technology and learning.  In the video that I watched earlier today, they mentioned that the new standards are the third iteration of ISTE Standards for Teachers/Educators.  I thought it would be interesting to compare the three sets of standards by creating a word cloud of each set.

ISTE National Educational Technology Standards (NETS)
and Performance Indicators for Teachers (2000)

ISTE Standards Teachers (2008)

ISTE Standards for Educators (2017)

It's interesting to see the trends through the use of words in the standards.  'Technology' is the single most-used in the 2000 version, but now so in the other two.  In 2008, you see words like 'model', 'engage', and 'global'.  The most current version uses words like 'collaborate', 'design', and 'authentic'.  Notice how the word 'teacher' shrinks while the word 'student' grows with each iteration.  It would be interesting to give these to a group of teachers and see what they notice.

Infographics

I'm not sure if it's laziness or a short attention span, but when I get to a web page or blog post that is filled with many paragraphs of text, my reaction is to close out the page and move on to something else.  If it's something I'm really interested in, I might read through the first few paragraphs, then usually just skim the rest.  I think this is why I'm drawn to infographics.  Much of what I look at online are new classroom ideas or tools.  In the initial introduction to a concept, I would much rather get a big picture overview than have to wade through all the minor details.  Infographics are great for that.

I just completed a free, online course about infographics offered through KQED's Camp KQED Teach.  It was a good introduction to the basics of creating effective infographics.  As part of the course, we were asked to create and share infographics with their community of learners.  I felt uncomfortable with that at first, but after getting some feedback on them, I'm glad that I posted them for others to see.  Here is one of the infographics I created in the course.  I plan to share it with teachers when they come back in the fall.

I used Google Slides to create it because of it's flexibility and ease of use.  Then I turned the file into a JPG for posting.  I suppose I could have also turned into a PDF.

I found the process of creating the assigned infographics worthwhile and can see several benefits of using them with students.  I would like to see our students create infographics as I think that the process of summarizing information or data in a concise, easy-to-understand, and attractive way can help develop higher level thinking skills.

I'm wondering how other schools are using infographics in their classrooms.

Soundtrap

It was not long into the first year of our 1:1 Chromebook rollout (2015-2016) that we realized that we needed to find a good audio editing tool that would work on a Chromebook.  Prior to the rollout, students and staff used Audacity on the district's Windows computers and laptops.  Audacity is a great, free, feature-rich program that was relatively easy to use.  Unfortunately, Audacity does not have a web-based version, so we were out of luck on the Chromebooks.

After trying out several tools, we decided to go with Soundtrap.  Soundtrap is a cloud-based program that allows users to create and edit music compositions, podcasts, and other audio files.  It allows for users to collaborate on a project, although the collaboration feature is somewhat confusing for many of our students.

We introduced Soundtrap in the fall of 2016.  Our music teachers jumped on board right away and had students creating music compositions and audio books with music accompaniment.  A handful of teachers in other subject areas had their students use Soundtrap to create podcasts and make simple edits to audio files, but overall we didn't see a lot of use in the regular classroom.  So, when planning our summer PD offerings, we decided to include a focus on Soundtrap during one of our sessions.  Our hope was that if we showed teachers how easy it is to use, and gave them some examples of how it can be used in a non-music classroom, they would come up with ideas of their own of how they could use Soundtrap to support learning.

We were not disappointed.  During our overview, we saw the excitement building as teachers began to talk about ways they could use Soundtrap with their students.  We were impressed with what they came up with in such a short time.  Here are some of the ideas they shared:

• put poetry to music
• create raps
• record student writing
• practice reading fluency (record themselves reading a passage, then re-record themselves reading the same passage, and see if the wave length of the second recording was shorter than the first)
• record readers theater
• add appropriate music to a passage that reflects the tone of the passage
• record interviews
• create original (copyright-free) music compositions to add to videos

I am looking forward to seeing these and other Soundtrap ideas in action during the upcoming school year.

Soundtrap is expanding its education program and has recently created an EduBlog that contains lesson plans, teacher stories and tutorials.

I would be interested to hear how other schools are using programs like Soundtrap with their students.  Please include these by leaving a comment.

Summer PD

This week we started rolling out our summer PD.  As much as I enjoy providing professional development for our teachers, I find the planning to be quite stressful.  It's hard to know what is going to be successful and what is going to cause a room full of eye rolls.

In today's workshop, we tried a couple sessions using the EdCamp model.  Only one of the teachers in the group had EdCamp experience, so this was an introduction for most of the teachers.  Based on the feedback we received, I think it was successful.  Teachers really liked the fact that it was geared specifically to their needs.  Several teachers thought it would be great to offer EdCamp PD during the school year as it would give them a chance to bounce ideas off of other teachers while they're using them in the classroom.

I'm always looking for different models of PD, so if any of you have any good ones to share, please add them in the comments.

Welcome to It's Not About the Technology!

So, this is something I've been wanting to do for a long time -- start a blog.  I actually have a blog, but the only thing I post are links and descriptions of various tech tools and websites.  This blog is going to be about my experiences working in the ed tech field.
I'll start out giving you my background.  I am finishing up my 18th year of being a Technology Coordinator in a small K-8 public school district in the Chicago area.  The past three years, in addition to being a tech coordinator, I have also been an Instructional Technology Coach at our middle school.  Working with students and teachers has always been my favorite part of this job, so my move towards coaching and away from boxes and wires has been great for me.

Those of you who are in the tech ed field will most likely understand the title of this blog:  It's Not About the Technology.  While my jpb titles might imply a love for technology, my true passion is for helping students learn in fun and meaningful ways.  I have seen that done without the use of any electronic devices.   We are in year two of our 1:1 Chromebook rollout, and I often get asked the question:  "How can I integrate technology into my classes?"  My response is always:  "What do you want your students to learn?"  While we usually end up using some form of technology in many of the projects and activities that we try in the classrooms, it's never a requirement.  The focus is always on student learning.

I am grateful to ISTE's Blogging Buddies program for encouraging me to get this blog up and running.  I am looking forward to taking part in this program and learning from other educators around the globe.