Read Report as of August 15, 2015

For the time being, I'm going to call my round-up of articles and blogs I read recently the "Read Report".  If you have better ideas, let me know.

First up is a post by Heather Wolper-Gawron on how to host a twitter chat with your school community.  This isn't just for the faculty, but for parent's and students.  I found it really interesting, and I might approach my principal about doing one for our school.  I think we would start "easy" with maybe one a grading period.  I may do a few on my own for my students.

Next, Alice in WonderTech discusses creating an environment that discourages plagiarism.  She makes some good points about how getting students started in class lessens the probability that they will try and take the cheating shortcut of copy and paste (not always though).  I found with the 11th-grade research project that I had less plagiarism this time around where we did most of the work in class.

Over at a Meaningful Mess, Andi McNair was talking about the question of "What If?"  As educators, particularly at the beginning of a school year, we often as ourselves that question, but in the negative:  What if I do it wrong?  What if the students make things difficult? 

Well, what if we flipped the script and focused on the positive side of "what if?":  What if I do it right?  What if the students make it the best year?

Tired of standarized style of assessments?  Take a look at John Spencers Ten Alternative Assessments.  It's a pretty straightforward list and won't take you long to check out.

Let's Play Catch Up

Almost 3 months since my last blog post?  I know; I know; I'm not a very consistent blogger.  Feel free to wag your finger at the screen.

So, what's been going down since May?

Well, in March, I said I was going to have students retake a survey to get their feedback on the use of Chromebooks in the classroom.  Well...note to self: set reminders for surveys you want students to take at different points in the year.  Yeah.  I got overwhelmed with end of the year stuff and forgot.

The end of the (school) year was a typical scramble to get things done.  I was not happy with the overall grades of my students, but talking with other teachers on campus, neither were they happy with the results.  Since most of the other teachers did not move to blended-learning like I did,  I'm going to hazard a guess that the apathy from the students didn't have anything to do with my transition into using the technology, but with the change in climate and expectations our school experienced last year.

I'm looking forward to being able to teach the 11th grade two years in a row for the first time in my now 10 year career as a teacher.  I'll actually be able to build on what I did the year before.  Imagine that!

The day after the last teacher duty day, a Saturday (yes, a Saturday), I participated in a summit at one of our district campuses that was put together by the EdTechTeam.  I really enjoyed it and gained a lot of useful information, particularly with Google Forms and branch logic (I'll talk more about that perhaps in another post once I get the hang of it).

That summit also had me contemplating trying out a 20% Time/Genius Hour Project with my students.  I'm not sure exactly what I want to do, but I'm thinking of using the first few Genius Hours (because that's what I'm going to call it because I think we'll skip them when we have short weeks), working with the students to create the criteria and protocols for it.

I spent some time this summer going through the Fundamentals Training at the Google for Education Training Center  to begin getting GAFE certified.

I took the Level 1 test today, and I PASSED!!!

I've gone through all the Chromebook training as well and as soon as I get everything I earned from my Level 1 certification, I might go and take that test as well.  I'm hoping I'll be able to find time to get Advanced Training in this year, but with with the last half of my Masters, I doubt it.

Speaking of my Masters.  I aced the first half of the program. I got an A in all my classes and a 100% in 4 of the 5 taken.

One way I'm going to try and be a better blogger is to start posting interesting articles/blog posts that I come across on the web or my Feedly reader.  A friend of mine outside of the education world does that on her blog each week, and it appears that my friend over at Flipping With Kirch has started to do something similar as well.  I'm not sure I'll be able to do every week.  But, I should be able to do at least once a month.

Student Engagement...such an awesome title.

I was reading this blog post by John Spencer about student engagement, and it got me to thinking about it in my own classroom.

I started out this journey hoping for many things, but an increase in student engagement was definitely one.

Was it successful?

Yes and no.

It really depends on what we are doing in class.

Lately, I've been noticing that students are getting their work done (on some assignments) in class a lot faster than they were towards the beginning of the year.  My fear is that they aren't really thinking about the questions and the answers.  They are just doing it to do it.

Grades are not great, at least at the college prep level, but I'm not sure how much of it is the change to paperless and blended-learning, and how much of it is a change in student accountability protocols within the school.  I'm seeing this more with my college prep students than I am in my honors students.  One of my honors students (when asked) said that she thinks more about the questions because I ask them to (*cough* insist they *cough*) use quotes from the text to back up their answers to half their answers. 

One area where I've seen a definite improvement in engagement was when my 11th graders did their debatable issue persuasive research paper.

This is a very extensive, 1000 point project.  It can make or break a student's grade.  In the past, this was spread out over the end of January through March and interspersed with other content lessons.  It included annotated bibliographies, two outlines, notes, and three drafts; and every few weeks, we would come back to the project and get a step done.  Most of the work was done on the student's own time.  I would then spend weeks (months) after the final draft was due going after most of the students to turn in the paper.  In other words, turn in rates for this assignment sucked.  I would get like maybe 1/4 to 1/2 of them to turn it in on time.  This was pretty much how it was across the entire 11th grade.

This year, since I have the Chromebooks, I took all the month of February, which was not enough and kind of crazy (this month is pretty cray cray too with family graduations, birthdays, my own Masters program, and a friend's wedding I will be flying out of state for), to work in class with the students on their projects. During the process, they were engaged in their topic. They were asking me questions and for my feedback like they never had all year.  We were pretty rushed in the end (and it kind of reflected in their actual papers), but out of my 120 11th graders, I had maybe 10 not turn it in. 

So what do you think about student engagement?  What works for you?  What doesn't work for you?

Blending Doctopus and Goobric with Google Classroom

Not a very inventive title, but an accurate one.

So, I just graded my first set of research papers using Doctopus so I can use the Goobric grading rubric.  It was....pretty dang awesome.  It made grading the essays a lot easier and less irritating than I remember them being in the past. 

What Doctopus is is a free way to use your Google Drive via sheets to handle Google Document assignments from your students.  Here is a quick video on what Doctopus is:

I had never looked into Doctopus before since I use Google Classroom, but the prospect of being able to use Goobric to grade some projects intrigued me, especially for the 11th grade research essay.  This essay took up a month of instruction and is worth a lot of points for the students.  Here is a video about using Goobric that includes some direction.

I did a little research to find out about Doctopus and Goobric (The two go hand-in-hand).  I was particularly looking for ways to incorporate it with Classroom and found some blog posts.  Here are two good ones I found:  one from Richard Bryne and one from Jennie Magiera.  There I found some very useful "How To" videos.

Now, I'm not sure how often I'll be able to use Goobric for grading because it's department policy to use the district's 6-point grading rubric for essays, which is holistic.  Goobric is not really set up for holistic grading, but this was definitely worth sharing.

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.

Reflections and Comparisons...yet not really

Back in October, right after that seemingly disastrous test my 11th graders took,  I created a form to get some feedback from them.  28 out of my nearly 200 students filled out the survey for me (and for extra credit).  Here are some of the results and the results of a more recent version of the survey 44 students took.

I can't really make any accurate analysis because I don't have the same number, or even the exact same students, filling out the survey, but I think the fact that I have almost twice as many kids taking the survey does say a lot.  I have at least built up enough of a relationship with my students that more want to help me out (or maybe just themselves for the extra credit).

 

The percentage of students who like using the Chromebooks went down, but the number of students who do like using the Chromebooks went up.  Just a little more than the number of students who even took the survey last time, like using the Chromebooks 4 months later.  I'm going to count that as a success.

The percentage of student that felt they stayed more on task with the Chromebooks has gone down my nearly 20%.  This I can believe and I've seen it first hand in my class room.  The percentage of students that feel their attention with the Chromebooks isn't any different than in other classes without them went up a little.  

The problem is that students have a hard time staying on tasks, with phones at the ready especially, period.  I don't think the Chromebooks have changed that at all.  

What I think that could help kids stay on task better with Chromebooks is to get something like Lanschool.   That costs around $1000 for a class liscense though, so I might do a DonorsChoose.org or apply for another grant (maybe the OCCUE) to get it.  In the meantime though, I have started using the grid function and last modified sorting option in the Google Drive folder for the Google Classroom assignment to keep track on student progress during class.  I call out the kids that haven't been updating their work and give positive feedback for those that are.  It seems to keep them on task a little better.

I may start projecting the grid view of their assignments so they can see the progress they are all making (or not making).

 

This one makes me happy.  Not only did the percentage of students that feel they are learning more with the Chrombooks rise, but the number of students nearly doubled.  More kids are saying that they are learing more with the Chromebooks, and less are saying that they aren't.  While this is still a learing process for me and the students, I don't think I made the wrong choice in working so hard to bring this tech into my classroom.  But, we'll see way they say at the end of the year.