The Read Report Lives: the trilogy

Shall we make this journey to get caught up on all my saved Feedly posts a trilogy?  It will probably be more.

We reach the "summer" months with a post by Jacqui over at Ask A Tech Teacher.  Jacqui writes about the 7 Must-have Tools for Ed Conferences.  Now, I love Ed Conferences.  I'm at one right now (CATE).

• Her first suggestion is a navigation app on your phone.  She suggests WAZE, and I agree, but I would also have a backup like Google Maps.  Depending on the conference, you may need to travel around the city to find your sessions, let alone if you are driving to the conference itself.
• Her second is to download the conference app if they have one.  I've been to a few conferences that don't have a Sched, and it drives me crazy trying to decide and keep track of possible sessions to attend.  Here is a little personal tip when going to conferences and dealing with the schedule:  Choose multiple options for each session so that if one turns out to be a dud or full, you can go right to another choice instead of searching through the schedule to find something else.
• Next?  Don't paper and pencil it.  Bring tech that is easily transportable.  My first year at CUE, I brought my laptop for use in the hotel room and my iPad for the sessions.  I no longer bring my iPad and instead bring my Chromebook and only my Chromebook.  If I charge it overnight, I don't (usually) need to charge it during the day.  It's light-weight, and taking notes on a keyboard is easier for me than trying to do it on my iPad.  I have my phone for anything that needs a QR code, but now I won't even need that thanks to different Chrome extensions.
• Note taking.  Jacqui talks about Evernote and Notability, but I tend to create a shared notes document with my Technology Committee or anyone else that is attending the conference, so we can all add to our resources (and sometimes divide and conquer the sessions).  Nothing works better than Google Docs for that.  In the past, I would create a table of contents, but now I just use the heading functions and the outline tool.
• Messaging App.  You're basically going to need Twitter.  Most conferences have hashtags that you can use to share and converse about what is happening.  I use Tweet Deck so I can have multiple columns of hashtags open.
• QR Reader.  Numerous apps you can download for this.
• Digital Scanner.  She talks about using it for business cards.  I've never used it for that, but I have used it for making copies of receipts for reimbursement.  I use the app Tiny Scanner, on my iPhone.

Heading backward into March, Alice Chen wrote about how sharing on social media helped her become a better educator.  I'm nowhere near as a prolific tweeter and she certainly has more blog cred than I do, but I do agree with her.  Blogging, however sporadic I may be with it, forces me to reflect on what is going on in my teaching.  While I know that some people do read these blog posts, they don't seem to spark conversations (yet?).  As I've gotten more active on Twitter, I find myself building a more robust PLN and creating conversations.  The trick with Twitter is finding the right hashtags so people see what you have to say.

Jumping back to May, and another post by Jacqui, we have a post about using the SAMR Model to direct your technology integration.  I definitely agree with much of what she wrote about.  Her suggestions remind me a little of Catlin Tucker's suggestion about (and I paraphrase) learning to use one tool really well before adding other tools to your box (and then use the ones that you like the best/most in your tool belt).  We have Federal Program Monitoring this year and in our mock assessment, one of the evaluators mentioned how there was a lot of substitution going on by teachers.  Well, of course, there is.  We've only had 1:1 for one grade level for a year.  It is going to take time for many of the more veteran teachers to integrate tech in the classroom beyond what they do on the whiteboard.

I'll stop there.  For today at least.  If you have any blogs that you follow, let me know.  I would love to add them to my Feedly.

Add-Ons Can Save Lives, Or At Least Time

It's been awhile since I've made a post about anything other than Kid President.  It's been a very busy year.  I no longer have to worry about my Master's Degree, but I'm department chair this year and become a site rep for the union.  We also have had a lot of administrative absences for various reasons and a few of us have been picking up some of the slack when we can.

Last week, my Safe School Ambassador "club" hosted an Anti-Bullying Week.  That kept me pretty busy, but that's a kind of busy that is definitely worthwhile.  We got some help from one of the AVID classes and created a "Take What You Need, Give What You Can" board to share

#takewhatyouneed #givewhatyoucan #endbullying #bpawsitive

A photo posted by Miss Barron (@missbarronsfhs) on Oct 24, 2016 at 2:30pm PDT

I'm, as always, behind in my grading.  One thing that helped me so far this year is a Google Doc add-on called JoeZoo.  It's not perfect.  It would be great if you could go from giving grammatical feedback on an assignment, to grading it (using a rubric to give it a grade) instead of having to go back to the start screen.  But, if you use many of the same rubrics for different assignments, it's pretty handy.  I just had to set up my districts narrative rubric once, and now I can use it with multiple assignments.  It saved me a lot of time and it will show the students the areas they need to work on.

It also integrates with your Google Classroom (GC), so you don't need to enter in all your students and assignments.  If you have them in GC, it's there in JoeZoo.  I still suggest edits for mistake students make because the feedback function is not foolproof.

I discovered two new Docs add-ons the other day as well that I'm pretty excited about, though like JoeZoo, they aren't foolproof (apparently, it's nigh on impossible for AIs to identify comma splices).  These two add-ons have similar functions:  proofreading.  One is called GradeProof and the other is Proofread Bot.

GradeProof Screengrab

GradeProof reminds me of Grammarly in function and aesthetic.  I really like it.  It gives statistical information too like how many words, sentences, etc. the paper has.  It also gives a readability score and a "grade level".  The grade level isn't really what most teachers would consider a grade level.  What it is is a number of years it is estimated one would have to be in school in order to underestand the text.  So, my students and I figured out that the higher a readability percentage, the lower the grade level was.

Proofread Bot is interesting in that it explains the error and why it shouldn't be made.  I like that about it because it teaches along with guiding you through corrections that maybe should be made. This tool in particular could assist students in self (and peer) editing. Here's a video to see it in action:

I was a little surprised to hear about the change in name for GAFE to G Suite.  I'm curious how that will affect the Ed Tech world.  For instance, will EdTechTeam rename their GAFESummits?

Read Report Beginning of February 2016

Going through the voluminous blog and article posts filling up my neglected Feedly, these are the ed tech ones that I felt were worth sharing.

Jennifer Gonzales over at Cult of Pedagogy blogged about 6 Ed Tech Tools to Try in 2016.

She mentioned some that were unsurprising, like Formative.  I really want to look more into this one, but with everything on my plate the thought is a little too daunting for this school year.

One I'm going to try for sure, in fact right now, is Noisli.  Noisli is a white noise app.  Currently, I've just added a crackling fire to listen to since I have the sounds of rain from an actual storm outside.  It's making me feel just a bit more toasty.  I can see playing this is class to help students focus, or allowing students to listen to it instead of music they spend too much time picking in order to help them focus and be productive.

Another that sparked my interest was Write About.  Jennifer writes that Write about "provid[es] students with an online space to write on high-interest topics and get feedback from their peers".  The other things she mentions, like a collection of writing ideas and voice recordings, intrigue me.  But --yup, I have a but--the free version only allows for 40 students.  This is something that as a teacher in a secondary (junior high and high school) classroom frustrates me with many programs out there for teacher-to-student use.  Why do only elementary school teachers get to try things for free?  Or, why do secondary teachers only get to choose one class?


Over at Ask a Tech Teacher, Jacqui Murray talked about a service called Storyboard That.  I was intrigued by it because it appeared to allow students to create comic book style storyboards, which would be a great tool for sequencing the plot of a story we've read in class, instead of doing a flow map.  It seems to have multiple visual uses and some work already created, like for Romeo and Juliet.  But, it's only free for a two-week trial.  The pricing isn't outrageous.  Elementary school teachers, you could get away with $60/year, and I would spend $75.  They do have department and school pricing, but there always needs to be someone who tries it first.

Jacqui also supplied me with a tip for my Chromebook I didn't know about.

Two months of turmoil....tranquility tested.

I know.  Trust me, I know.  It's been over two months now since I last blogged.  I'm sorry for those that actually read what I put out there.

I'm just going to be bluntly honest (not that that I'm often not), and tell you this last month, in particular, has been emotionally taxing.  I was hoping to get caught up on my grading during the holiday break, and while I did in the last week get the 5 sets of 5 blog posts and 4 comments graded, I ended up having to deal with something a little more pertinent, particularly that first week.

The Sunday before Christmas, I got into a car accident, or more accurately, I was forced into a car accident.  I've been dealing with the aftermath ever since.  I'm physically okay for the most part, just lots of trips to the chiropractor.  And, the logistics of everything but bodily injury have been taken care of.  But, emotionally--between thinking I was going to die (yup, she went there) and already being stretched thin emotionally with work and my graduate work and having to replace the life saving car that I had had for 9 years (a very pretty blue Honda Civic that I called Belle) with a new car (a very pretty blue Kia Soul named Luna)--it has been noticeably draining.  

But now that the semester is over, all the grades are in (well, all except maybe two, but that depends on if I get an essay on the positive effects of procrastination from a particular someone on Monday morning, and if one student is out of the hospital and can take their final--I hope that is the case), and I finished the working draft of my section of a group literature review for my graduate group's action research project on badges in education, I have a little time to sit down and do some reflecting on my teaching through the written word.

Let me start with the most important tech tool EdTechTeam Google Summit I mentioned in my last post gave me.  I've used it with my 10th-grade honors students a few times now.  I love it, and the kids are still making up their minds about it, but let me--if you don't already know about it--introduce you to ActivelyLearn.  

There are different pricing level's, but there is a free level, which my account reverts to tomorrow (I think) after getting a free trial upgrade from the summit.  You can find some content that comes with questions and notes built in; you can start completely from scratch or add your questions and comments to the ones that already exist.  You can add media right into the story.  I put pictures and videos in the margin notes, which was  helpful with "Murders in the Rue Morgue".  You can also add media and directions to the beginning of the story, like this video I added for "The Tell-Tale Heart".

The aspect I enjoy most about ActivelyLearn though is the ability to grade by question, rather than student.  This is immensely helpful in seeing where the weaknesses and needs are for the class.  For example, for "The Raven" (we just finished a unit of Edgar Allan Poe if you didn't guess), I had added a question about the setting of the poem.  If I was grading it student-by-student, all questions at once, I might not have caught the fact that many of them were forgetting that setting is both time AND place and address it with them.  I was also grading as they were reading and answering questions so, in some cases, they were getting real-time feedback from me on their answers.

I also like the fact that teachers can reset students' answers, or that students can request this themselves.  That way you can give them a chance to get it right.  Sometimes they still don't get it.

I was tempted to give him points for persistence.

But, they often come up with answers that make you chuckle.

As a Walking Dead fan, I enjoyed this answer.

ActivelyLearn integrates well with  Google Classroom.  You can set up your assignments for Classroom from ActivelyLearn.  You can also pull your roster to create the class from Classroom as well.  

You don't have to be an English teacher.  They have content for various subject areas and grade levels, and--depending on your price plan--you can upload your own text.  I highly suggest you check it out and, at least, give it a try.  I'm probably going to try it with my 11th graders for "The Battle with Mr. Covey" and "The Lowest Animal".

I think I'll leave it there for now.  I'll follow up with a quick post about the fun we had reading "Masque of the Red Death" in my next post.

CUE the Recovery

I love CUE.  I really do.  I love the CUE Conference, and I want to go every year.  Yet, I need time to recover and sort through all the information I gathered. 

I hope to have some more information and neat tricks, etc. for you from CUE in the coming weeks as I disseminate and try out different things, but we're going through WASC right now, so things are a little crazy, and I'm a little behind in my grading.

One thing I do want to share that I've tried out with my 11th grade students is Pear Deck.  Pear Deck allows you to broadcast your presentation to and integrate interaction with the students and their devices (Chromebooks in my case).  So, instead of students following along on the screen with your PowerPoint or Google Slide, you can have them following along directly on their own screen (works with anything that has a web browser) and even have them answer questions that you can then project up onto the board.

Here are some videos about it that I found.

There is a free version and a premium version.  I'm currently doing a 30 day trial of the premium version to see if it will be worth the cost.  I'll give my opinion on it when I make the decision.

Project and Padlet Pensiveness

Forgive the title but I love me some alliteration.

My 10th grade Honors students are about to embark on a reading of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club.  Before they read, I assigned a research project.  A small one.  I found the idea online last year and adapted it for my own needs.  Here is a copy of the handout.

The students will choose a topic in pairs or groups to research and create a presentation that incorporates an online tool to share with the class so that everyone gets a little background on Chinese culture before the book.  The students do the presentation together but write their own paper.

Theoretically, the presentations should have only taken a day, but today is day two and we still have some for tomorrow.  In my opinion, these are the possible reasons for the delay:

• Students in my second group were not ready yesterday and only about 3 groups went.  The groups that went today cannot get an A on the presentation due to the fact that they weren't ready yesterday.
• Students didn't have their online tools ready to go.  It ate up a lot of time to log into accounts and bring presentations up.  Next time, I'm going to insist that students provide me a link that I can click on in the assignment on Classroom.
• I insisted that students give feedback on a Padlet wall (more on that below) and that took up some time between each presentation.

Some students got very creative (and one group brought in food) in some of their presentations.  Those that created videos seemed to do the best in engaging the class.  Some students didn't pay attention to the fact that I wanted more than for them to just stand up there and go through their Google Slides (sigh).

In my own graduate work, I was instructed to create or adapt a project that had students collaborating via technology somehow.  I chose to use the research project to fulfill this assignment.  I decided to use Padlet and create a wall for students to leave notes to each group giving their feedback. 

Here is Period 4's.  

I had the wall set to free form at first and that was just a fuster cluck of wading through the notes.  I switched it to grid view and immediately sighed with relief.  As did the students when they saw it the next day (some actually thought I went through and spent the time hand organizing it at first).  I think I'll set it that way automatically next time.

Ultimately, I like Padlet so far, and I think it's a good way to have students give feedback and be mindful of what they are saying because other people can see it.

Have you used Padlet?  Something better?  Let me know your thoughts and suggestions.

Okay, that was scary but easy.

So, I just dipped my foot into the the world of screencasting.

For my master's program, I had to create a lesson for my students where they had to apply something they learned and create something using an online tool.

I find it is sometimes hard to come up with "real-world application" style projects in English Language Arts.  If I had my students going around and correcting people's grammar, they would probably land in hot water.  So, what I did come up with (and will do if I have time at the end of the year) was a project where the students become the teacher.  They pick a topic or skill we learned during the year, do a little extra research on it, create a lesson that includes an online component, and teach it to their classmates.

One of the required components of my assignment was to create a "student" example using an online tool I'd never used before.  I decided to make a video using Screencast-o-matic on Jane Schaffer's Chunk Paragraphs.  This way, I can actually use the video in class if I need to.

Because I use Chrome for my browser, there was an issue with using the Screencast-o-matic webpage recorder, but there was an option to download a free application to my Mac, which is what I did.  It. Was. So. Easy. 

I could capture any part of my screen, and pause the recording and restart the recording and not have to start all over again from the beginning.

What I'm Working With

I've already blogged about my LMSs and what kind of Chromebooks I'm using.

Here are a couple of other sites that I use, whether a lot or sparingly:

Quizlet is a website that allows teachers and students to make online flashcards and study them.

Quill.org is a site I found that allows students to practice Common Core grammar and conventions.  I have not used this as much as I would like to as when time is short (and it often is), grammar always seems to be the first to go.

Here is a tutorial video for teachers.  And, there is a separate one for students.

Google Apps for Education is what I am using the most (read:  all the time).  With Classroom, it makes going digital too easy.  

One thing I like about moving my 'worksheets' to things such as Google Docs is that I can add things in color, including the student's answers.  My students and I also find that putting the questions in a table with a corresponding column for them to put the answers in is even better (and easier for me to pre-format with the color coding).

Here are some screen shot examples of how I can use color coding in tables.  Before I attach it to Classroom in an assignment, I make sure that I have already set up each box to the color I want.

I really like Schoology.  Apparently, my district is looking into getting a bid for a district-wide LMS.  I'm going to suggest Schoology.  I really like that I can automatically push updates to my school Twitter.

 I also like how all upcoming assignments are in the corner of the page.

But what I like about it most of all is the ability to create discussions and then get analytics on the discussion.  That means that Schoology will keep track of how many times a student responds and the traffic/popularity with dates and times (not that I wouldn't notice since I get an email sent to me each time a student responds).

If anyone has any other useful tools, sites, etc. that you think I should try, let me know in the comments.

The Tools of the Trade...So Far

I'm excited.  The grant check came Wednesday night; I deposited it Thursday afternoon; it cleared yesterday morning, and I ordered 20 more Chromebooks, a cart, and a printer.  One leg of the journey is almost complete.  And...then came some issues in trying to order them that hopefully have been ironed out (fingers crossed).

I feel (hope?) that once every student has a Chromebook, it will be easier to integrate the technology as thoroughly as I would like.  I'm hoping it will help students get better with turning their digital work in more consistently.

But, on to the topic at hand:  What am I using?  In case you were wondering.  I hope you were wondering.

*~*~*~*~*~*

Let's start with the Chromebooks themselves.  I (will) have 4 different types of Chromebooks.  This isn't a big deal to me because they run the same way and off the same operating system (Chrome).  I simply got the cheapest I could get, when I was ordering them.

I have 2 HP Chromebooks  that have a great screen, but the battery life doesn't always stand up to the other brands I have.

I have 8 Samsung Chromebooks that are really great.  They have a nice screen, are the lightest in weight, have a great battery life, and are the easiest to get out of the cart I currently have (but that's about to change).  They were the most expensive (I got these through DonorsChoose.org) when I ordered them, but are currently the same price as the HPs and 9 of the Acers were when I purchased them.  I should have done this blog post before I ordered the books I did today. Or maybe not.  A friend forwarded some information about the trackpads essentially becoming useless and needing a mouse.  We'll see.

I have 11 black Acer Chromebooks not including the one I bought myself that I use for travel and my own Master's program.  These aren't as pretty to look at as the Samsung or HP books, but they are almost always affordable and have the best battery life of the three brands so far.  They are currently the biggest pain to get in and out of the current cart, but they will become the easiest to deal with in the new cart (I assume).

I will have 20 white Acer Chromebooks, hopefully, next week.  I was torn between the black Acer and these, but I decided that they were essentially the same price so why not go with the prettier ones.  They are supposed to have the same battery life as their older sibling, but we'll see.  I'll let you know what I discover about them.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Now onto the Learning Management Systems (LMS) I use.  

I used to use Edmodo, and I hope to one day go back.  But, after listening to Alice in Wondertech at the CUE conference last year, and doing some research, I switched to Schoology.  The things I like about Schoology that I can't get with Edmodo are:  the abiity to create discussion boards and the analytics that go with it, the ability to automatically push posts to my Twitter if I click the correct box, the ability to format text (As an English teacher, it would drive me crazy when I couldn't italicize book titles on Edmodo, I can with Schoology), and having Remind built in (though this is something new I'm trying out this year).

I never used and still don't use, the quiz features and gradebooks that are on both Edmodo and Schoology because our district has an online gradebook that we must use and assessment software built into another district-wide information system.

The other LMS I'm using this year is new from Google and it's called Classroom.  Your school has to be a part of Google Apps for Education (GAFE), but if they are it's free.  Your students and you also need to be on the same domain.  Classroom is in its infancy, so it's not as complete an LMS and doesn't compete if stacked up to older LMSs.  But you can send feedback on what you would like to see, and get ideas on GoogleProduct Forums.  

Where Classroom rocks my socks is in it's organizational aspects.  If you are going to have students do work digitally and collaborate with each other and you, you want Google Classroom.

When you sign up for Classroom, a folder appears in your Drive (with the obvious title of Classroom).  When you create a class, under the Classroom folder, subfolders for each class appears.

Then once you start creating assignments for each class, folders for those appear as well.

And finally, as students either create or add documents to their assignments, the folder for the assignment populates with the students' work.

That alone is worth using Classroom, but I don't think I'll be using Classroom on it's own unless it gets to a point where it's on par with Edmodo or Schoology.  Both Edmodo and Schoology also have a parent component that Classroom does not.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*

I think we'll leave it there.  The post is long enough and I don't want to bore you.  If you have any questions about what I'm doing or using, feel free to contact me or comment.  Thanks for reading.