Summer PD

Our district has always been generous with their summer PD offerings. This year, they hosted a variety of sessions led by presenters from both within the district as well as outside experts. In addition, they offered three days in which teachers can choose to come to school to work with the instructional coaches. These sessions are always popular as they give teachers what they want most - time to work on planning classroom learning activities.

This year, the district has added summer book studies to the PD menu. The books chosen are Empower: What Happens When Students Own Their Own Learning, The Wild Card: 7 Steps to an Educator's Creative Breakthrough, and Teaching Student-Centered Mathematics (PK-2 and 3-5). These studies are all done digitally through Google Classroom -- there are no face-to-face discussions. Participants are given six weeks to complete the study and can work through the activities at their own pace. I'm curious to see how these work out. While I like how technology allows staff the flexibility to participate when it best fits their schedule, I think I am going to miss the person-to-person discussions that a traditional book study offers.

Our building is also offering "Ear" Buds this summer. This is a group of staff who will meet virtually four times during the summer to discuss podcasts they have listened to. Each session revolves around a topic:

Session 1 - Classroom Management
Session 2 - Assessment/Grading/Feedback
Session 3 - Innovation
Session 4 - Your Choice

We had our first session yesterday and I thought it was a good discussion. Most of the people that participated had not listened to podcasts before and were blown away at the wealth of information they have to offer. I look forward to the next three sessions.

We are always looking for new ideas to enhance our summer PD, so if your district is doing something creative, please leave a comment and tell us about it.

Animated Gifs in the Classroom

I'm always looking for ways to offer PD to our staff. One thing that I initiated last year is Take Five for Tech. We have our faculty meeting the first Thursday of the month during the half hour before school starts when staff is here but students are not. Take Five for Tech takes place five minutes before the faculty meeting begins. During that time, I share with staff some ideas of how technology can support student learning. I don't give them how-to's -- they know they can see me later for those -- but rather I plant seeds.

I was unable to physically do my Take Five for Tech presentation this month due to a schedule conflict, so instead, I created this slide deck with ideas for using animated gifs in the classroom:

No Room for Failure?

I have been rereading Joy Kirr's book Shift This!  As is typical when rereading a book, different passages that may have gone unnoticed previously stand out.  This is one that resonated with me this time around:

There is no room for failure.
"In order to prepare our students for the future, we need to give them opportunities to create -- and risk failure. Sir Ken Robinson also reminds us that kids will take a chance. "If they don't know, they'll have a go." They're frightened to be wrong. Once a grade is attached, the fear of failure is so strong that many students will only take the safe route and not try something new. They won't push themselves. They'll only do what we ask of them, and nothing more! Future careers require creativity and entrepreneurship. When do we give students work that is free from risks? If we are not giving that time to students, they will not be ready for those careers (we can't even imagine) that are coming down the pike." (Joy Kirr, Shift This! p. 144)

Our district, like many others, is in the process of moving to standards-based grading. This is a change that is making many of our teachers nervous, as they fear that if there are no grades, students won't do the work. I am looking forward to the time when students and teachers in our district will spend less talking about grades and points and more time focusing on learning.

DIY PD

Our district has been experimenting with different kinds of professional development for staff.  Something we tried this year was a Do-It-Yourself Professional Development Bingo board. 

We distributed the board to our middle school staff at the beginning of the school year, with the expectation that each teacher would have at least one "Bingo" at the end of the school year by completing the PD in the squares.  Over-achieving teachers who cover the whole board will get a special prize.  Several times throughout the school year, teachers shared their PD experiences with their peers at faculty meetings.  Our hope is that teachers start thinking outside the PD box.  We will gauge the success of this experiment when teachers do their final share out at the end of the school year.

OK Go

I recently attended a conference presentation given by Janet Moore, a professor at Illinois State University. In her presentation, Moore shared strategies of how the OK Go videos can be used to teach math and science. I have always been a fan of the OK Go videos -- such creativity! -- so this was an especially exciting presentation for me. I left her presentation with many ideas to share with our math and science teachers.

Here are some of the handouts that she shared:

• Skyscrapers: Modeling Patterns And Predictions Connections
• The One Moment: Rate Ratio Proportion Connections
• This Too Shall Pass: Rube Goldberg And Failure Connections
• Upside Down And Inside Out: Parabola Connections
• Writings On The Wall: Domain And Range Connections
• Writings On The Wall: Perspective And Eclipses

She also shared what she called "OK Go Kids Fan Videos".

• "The One Moment"
• Introduction
• Video
• "Turn Up the Radio
• Introduction
• Video
• "Another Set of Issues
• Introduction
• Video

Recently, OK Go partnered with the Playful Learning Lab at the University of St. Thomas to create the OK Go Sandbox. The purpose of the Sandbox is to provide teachers with tools to connect the OK Go videos with what students are learning in the classrooms.  I haven't had a chance to fully check out the Sandbox yet (that will most likely be a summer project), but from what I've seen I can't help but wish this was around when I was learning science.

Word Clouds

Word Clouds are not a new technology, but I think they have great potential for supporting student learning.  Word clouds provide a quick and easy way to summarize and are visually appealing.

In our building, word clouds are used as an about-me student project.  Teachers also have students enter their essays into a word cloud generator to help them find overused words.

Here are a few more ways that word clouds can be used in the classroom:

• Put text related to the day's lesson into a Word Cloud and have students answer the following questions:

What do you think the lesson is about?

What do you think is the main idea?

What are five questions that you have?

What do you think the title of the article might be?

• Create a word cloud of a current event.  Have students write a paragraph about what the event might be and why they think that.
• Create two word clouds from two different sources on the same topic.  Display them side to side. Have students write a compare/contrast paragraph explaining why they think things are the same and different.  Can be used with political parties, campaigns, speeches, primary documents, etc.
• Have students keep a journal of the foods they eat in a week. Then have them enter their list of foods into a food cloud generator.
• Before starting a new unit, a word cloud can be displayed as students identify and discuss both familiar and unfamiliar words related to a particular concept.  Students can also create their own word cloud during the unit as a review for previously taught content. After a the unit, students can create a word cloud as a class by brainstorming words that describe what was learned.
• Create a word cloud from parts of a novel chapter. (You can find PDFs of many novels online.) Ask students to:

Find three words that relate to: character traits, setting, theme, mood..

Predict what the book is going to be about.

Write a story using 10 or more words from the word cloud

Write a paragraph about their life using 10 words from the word cloud.

Have students write Haikus or other short poems using at least five words from the word cloud.

• Have students collaboratively create word clouds (using Answer Garden, Poll Everywhere, or Google Docs)

Define characteristics: What does it mean to be an American? An atom? A planet? An earthquake? A mammal? An ecosystem? A prime number? A noun?

Vocabulary: When introducing a topic or for review, ask students for all the vocabulary they can think of associated with the work they are studying.  Repeat the activity at the end of the unit and compare.

Summarizing: Have students enter key ideas from a reading from an assigned (homework) text or video.

Choose a topic. Have students enter words related to the topic. Can be used with description of character in a story, adjectives to describe a painting, poem, song...

After group discussions, have each group enter key points/words from their discussion.

As an Exit Ticket, students enter key ideas from the day’s lesson. Use as next day’s Bell Ringer.  Have students write a summary of the lesson using at least 10 words from the Word Cloud.

I would love to hear how other teachers are using word clouds in the classroom.

Falling Out

I follow many good blogs, but I don't keep current with reading all of them.  (There are only so many hours in the day.)  There is one blog, however, that I read faithfully every day:  Seth Godin's Blog.  When asked what his occupation is, Mr. Godin replies, "Teacher."  However, his posts aren't specifically written for teachers, and are often more business related.  That being said, I have found that many of his ideas are pertinent to education.

A couple of months ago, he wrote a post called "Falling Out". Here is the entire post:

"The hard part isn't coming up with a new idea.

The hard part is falling out of love with the old idea.

That's why editing work is so difficult.  In order to make the new thing, to make the old thing better, you need to destroy it first.

Situation switching, acting as if, loving the idea enough to sketch it out and then caring enough to stop loving it... that's where the tension often lies."

This post helped me to pause and reflect on my work with coaching teachers.  How often do I see teachers doing the same activities year after year?  Even when I share some newer, maybe even better ideas with them, I often hear "The old ways just work." The hard part is falling out of love with the old idea.  So maybe the reason that teachers are hesitant to try new ways of teaching is not that they think that the new ideas are bad, but that they're not quite ready to let the old ones go.

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.