Category: Web 2.0

K-12, Language Arts, Social Studies, Student Products, Teaching Tools, Web 2.0

Distance Learning and Chronicles of COVID-19, Part 1

Terri Eichholz

One of my biggest pet peeves is filling out paperwork at doctors’ offices, especially ones that I have already visited in the past.  I feel a quiet rebellion overtake me when I am given a clipboard full of forms that ask me questions I’ve already answered about everything from my gender to my health history.  I’m tempted to use biographical information from Anne Boleyn to see if anyone notices.  Birthday? 1501.  Major health issues?  Decapitated head.

In this day and age of computer technology, I have an overwhelming suspicion that the medical office database already knows more about me than I do, and that I’m just being given these sheets in the hopes that I won’t notice that I’m still in the waiting room 30 minutes past the time my appointment was supposed to begin.

I’m sure you’ve deduced that I’m making the connection between my own hatred of “busywork” and the way our students feel when they think they are being given assignments just to pass the time.  The number of homeschooling/distance learning resources out there are overwhelming right now, and many educators are spending this week coming up with plans for their students.    As Sonya Terborg, one of my favorite colleagues who I need to meet in IRL, mentions in this blog post, it is important that educators begin with the end in mind.  Mistakes will still be made, but we can avoid the largest and most predictable one – assigning busy work that will serve no purpose.

The above reasons are why I provided the COVID-19 Diary by Kids Around the World yesterday.  I know that many students love to share about their own experiences, and that they often like an authentic audience.  I am also hoping they will learn from what others have to say, and will gain a broader perspective.

I considered using other tech tools such as Flipgrid or YouTube, but settled on using Google Slides because of the flexibility of being able to choose if you want to add your own video or just write.

As Sonya asks in her blog post, “… what are we doing to connect them with each other in meaningful, authentic ways, and how are we supporting and planning for the same opportunities for student agency that have become so revered in the classroom?”

Here is a slide provided by one student today who has chosen to connect, and I hope that I will have many more to share in the future!  Please share this with any students you know!

Our COVID-19 Diary from Kids Around the World (2)

Education, K-5, Math, Web 2.0

#gmttc

Terri Eichholz

#gmttc is the official hashtag for the Global Math Task Twitter Challenge.  Classrooms around the world are invited to participate by solving the problems that are tweeted and/or tweeting out their own.  You can formally sign on to be a #gmttc tweeter on this spreadsheet, but this is not a requirement.  It is easy enough to find recently tweeted tasks for your grade level by doing a search for #gmttc with your grade level number at the end.  For example, #gmttc4 will provide you with recent 4th grade challenges.

I enjoy seeing the variety of images students use to present the math problems, and your students will begin to make connections between what they are learning compared to students in other parts of the world.  This is a quick, no fuss way to “flatten the classroom.”  As a whole-class, center, or extension activity, #gmttc is a fun idea to help students get excited about math!

Screen Shot 2017-09-18 at 7.33.39 PM.png

Education, K-12, Motivation, Web 2.0

#NEISDPLN – Internet Memes in Edu

Terri Eichholz

Testing week.

Ugh.

Stressful.

Depressing.

NOT fun.

So, why not join us in a light-hearted Twitter chat using memes to discuss education?

Everyone is invited!

It’s tonight (Tuesday, April 21st, 2015) at 8 PM CST.  #NEISDPLN

picardmeme

Here are the questions:

1. Haters gonna hate – what’s something you hear educators complain about too often?

2. Grumpy Cat – How do you deal with the grumpy cats you encounter in your job?

3. Facepalm or Epic Fail – What is a teaching mistake you made that you’ve since corrected?

4.  Like a Boss – What are the ideal features of an administrator?

5.  1st World Problems – What are “problems” in our education system that other countries might find silly?

6. Charlie Bit Me – What’s the funniest thing a student has said in your class (and you wish you had video of it)?

I know you were testing today, and it’s exhausting.  But, look on the bright side – you don’t have any papers to grade tonight!

It’s going to be fun.  It’s going to be EPIC.  Do you want to be this guy:

grumpycat

or these guys:

epic

The choice is yours!

Apps, Education, K-5, Language Arts, Student Response, Teaching Tools, Web 2.0

Please Allow Me to Reiterate

Terri Eichholz

I was feeling pretty clever.

As most of you know, that is never a good sign.

My creative, engaging activity for the day turned out to be one of those lessons that makes a teacher ask the dreaded question, “Should I continue this fiasco or give up and find a video?”

The concept was simple: I wanted to use the idea of Hexagonal Learning with my 3rd graders so they could synthesize what they had learned from our systems thinking book, Billibonk and the Big Itch.  One of the online tools for hexagonal thinking is called Think Link.  This reminded me, of course, of ThingLink.  And I thought, “They can make ThingLinks of their Think Links!”

Technically, the students didn’t use Think Link, though.  Instead I used the Hexagons Generator from ClassTools to print out the hexagons with words that related to the book. The students worked in groups to connect their hexagons in deep and meaningful ways that they could explain in detail using an interactive ThingLink.

Well, that was the plan.

The students quickly arranged their hexagons.  Then they took pictures of the groups and started making their ThingLinks.  They liked the idea of using video to explain each node that connected 2 or 3 hexagons, and started to get creative – using newscaster and professor voices.

Then they started to get a bit silly.

Plus I realized that their connections weren’t exactly deep and meaningful.  And some of them didn’t make any sense at all.

And then 2 groups accidentally lost 45 minutes of work on their iPads.

And the third group finished theirs, but ThingLink stubbornly refused to save it – grimly offering that I could “retry” or “delete” each time I attempted to upload it, but making absolutely no effort to offer the preferred third option, “Start this day over with a little less smugness and a little more planning.”

I looked at my giggly group of grade schoolers and took a deep breath.  Despite having to start their projects over, they were all quite cheerful.  And, the truth was that I had learned a lot from listening to their recordings – a lot that I needed to discuss with them to ensure they understood the text better.

We gathered in a circle and reflected on the day.  We clarified lessons learned.

And we decided to try it all again next week.

Earlier in the day, I had talked about “iterative”  with some of the teachers in the lounge.  We  agreed that it seemed to be quite the education buzzword these days, and I looked it up to make sure I was using it correctly.

This was the first definition I found. (Google’s version)

iterativeNot exactly helpful.

So, without any sense of irony, I looked it up again. (Wikipedia’s verson this time)

Screen Shot 2015-03-24 at 5.33.55 PM

Next week, we will attempt iteration #2 of the Hexagonal Learning Lesson.

Hopefully, we will get some things right and all of the mistakes we make will be new ones 😉

Education, K-12, Motivation, Student Products, Teaching Tools, Web 2.0

District Twitter Chats

Terri Eichholz

A couple of weeks ago some of the librarians in our district sent out an idea for a district Twitter chat for our students.  They included a great form that we could use for the students to fill out. I had just participated in a professional chat a few days before, hosted by Todd Nesloney, about creating a positive school culture.  In fact, Todd’s recent #EduLS challenge was to celebrate someone. So, the third prompt on the Twitter sheet appealed to me, “Give a Shout Out to a Teacher!”

As the GT teacher, I have students from all grade levels, so I thought this would be a great opportunity for my classes to perform a random act of kindness for potentially every staff member in the school.

My younger students dictated their Tweets to me, while older students wrote their own and then tweeted them from our class account once I approved them.

Knowing that not many teachers follow our class account, I’ve been collecting the Tweets in Storify each day, and mailing the link to the teachers included in that day’s accolades.  All of the students were allowed to choose who got the shout outs, and most of them chose to recognize two or three staff members each.

Twitter Shoutout

I am trying to encourage the students to name something specific they remember about the person, rather than just saying, “You’re nice.”  It’s been gratifying to see that they are happy to include all staff members – not just classroom teachers.

I want to thank Irene Kistler(@IreneKistler) and Sara Romine (@laffinglibrary) for spreading this idea.  I believe Irene is the author of Twitter Paper.  When I asked her if I could share the idea, she pointed me to a very cool website that inspired her.  It is called KidsEdChatNZ, and has fabulous prompts for their New Zealand student participants each week.

It appears that the New Zealand chat happens at a weekly scheduled time.  However, I think that doing this as a “slow chat” was great so that we could get more participants.

If you are interested, you might also want to check out the “S.C.A.M.P.E.R.” Twitter Chat with students that we did in February.

 

3-12, Apps, Creative Thinking, Critical Thinking, Education, Language Arts, Student Response, Teaching Tools, Web 2.0, Writing

Reflections on our GT Twitter Chat

Terri Eichholz

A few weeks ago, a few of the teachers in our district participated in a Twitter Chat.  The topic was to S.C.A.M.P.E.R. Education.  You can read more about the S.C.A.M.P.E.R. chat here.

After the chat, a few of the GT teachers suggested that it might be fun to try doing the same chat with our students.  So, last week, we decided to try it.

I’m not sure how many schools ended up participating in the chat, but I believe there were around 13 classes.  Some of us had the students respond to the teacher who then tweeted out the answers, and some of us allowed our students to group up and use various devices.  It was not smooth-sailing.  Here were some of the glitches:

  • Twitter and Tweetdeck are blocked under student sign-in in our district.
  • Tweetdeck kept refreshing and losing columns at the beginning of the chat in my classroom (maybe for other people, too).  We surmised that this might be b/c more than one device was using the same account.  However, after we refreshed the page on the 6 laptops it seemed fine.
  • Some of us couldn’t see each other’s tweets because some of our accounts are private.  We made sure we were all following each other beforehand, but that still didn’t seem to help everyone.  Fortunately, everyone knew the questions ahead of time, so even though they couldn’t all see them, they could guess by the responses which question had been asked.

Overall, it was an eye-opening experience for the teachers and the students.  Most of my students (5th graders on that day) had never used Twitter and finally understood the use of hashtags.  Many of them saw ideas that were new to them and got different perspectives on the topics.

For example when we went over the questions before the chat, one of my students was adamant that we should eliminate art from the curriculum.  I told him that he would probably find that many people would disagree and that he would have to be able to support his viewpoint.  Sure enough, others strongly argued that art is vital. This exchange turned out to be an excellent lesson on multiple perspectives as well as social media etiquette.

A student from another school suggested getting rid of free time – which caused a public outcry in my classroom.  However, a few minutes later the writer explained that he or she disliked all of the time wasted when students finish work early and are just “told to read a book.”  Again, another lesson on how important it is to ask people to explain themselves instead of just immediately condemning their opinions – also a lesson that the brevity used in social media can sometimes distort the message you are trying to communicate.

After all was said and done, I asked my 18 students to complete a reflection about the experience.  (Yes, we did old-school handwriting b/c some of their typing can be painfully slow!)  When I surveyed them, most of them gave the chat a 2 or 3 (3 was the highest).  However, there were a couple of 1’s.  Understandably, those students found the whole procedure to be too chaotic and fast.

Would we do it again? Yes, I think seeing different points-of-view is really helpful for my students. I’m still debating the importance of keeping our account private.  I also am considering giving students the option of participating or not.  Those who opt out can consider the topic in an alternative way.

If you are interested in doing the S.C.A.M.P.E.R. chat in your district, here is a link to the document Kimberly Ball (gttechguru) made for us to use to prepare the students for the chat.  And, if you’re not ready to do Twitter, check out this great Google Tweeter Template from Tammy Tang that will help you to simulate the process!