best practices, Edtech, Tech Tools, technology, Video Tutorials

Vol.#109: My Favorite Teacher Website Hack

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I’m in my 20th year of teaching middle school. It’s rare, but every so often I discover a way of doing things that really simplifies my life. This is one of those things. Seriously. I cannot oversell this. This was a total game changer for me.

And yet, it’s so simple that it actually makes me wonder if those of you reading this are going to say, “Well, duh. I already do that. What took you so long?”

Before I made this change, I’d write out my agenda for class each day on the board. Eventually, I graduated to putting my daily agenda on google slides, where I could edit them easily, insert timers and links, and have them ready-to-tweak for the next year. Anyway, with either system, at the end of each long day, I’d go onto my teacher website and type out all the information for my students and their parents to reference.

If you still do this, get ready. I’m about to change your life.

I still make google slides based on each unit. The first slide has buttons serving as links to each day, and each slide thereafter is a day in the unit. But now… I embed the slides directly in my website.

And therefore, whenever I update my google slides, even on the fly during class when I realize we are not going to get to a certain activity or need to skip something, it’s already on my website.

Seriously, I update my teacher website at the beginning of the year and once briefly at the beginning of a unit, and don’t touch it again, and yet every single step we do in class each day is always immediately on my website.

Here’s a video from my YouTube channel that tells you how:

Want to skip creating the google slides for your unit? I have some google slide templates with linked buttons, all ready for you to embed and update with your own lessons. Please visit my Teachers Pay Teachers store here.

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What’s your favorite teacher life hack? Please share in the comments!

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Vol.#108: My Mid-Teaching-Life Crisis

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I spent the early days of my teaching career determined to be the best teacher I could be. I got my masters right out of the gate. I went to the SC middle school state conference both years I taught there. I worked hard to get all top marks in the ADEPT program for initially licensed teachers. Once in NC, I started my national boards, despite having to start over in the NC three year Beginning Teacher program. (I’m probably one of the only teachers to get NBCT as a BT2. The paperwork at the county level kept getting kicked back. ) Anyway, I continued to serve on leadership teams. As team leader. As department chair. As School Improvement Chair.

And then…

After amassing lessons and units and strategies and skills over 18 years in middle school language arts, I had my oldest son in my own third period language arts class. And the same year, the county adopted a canned, scripted curriculum.

If a mid-life crisis is defined as “an emotional crisis of identity and self-confidence”, as a teacher, I was definitely there. Why have I worked so hard to build skills and lessons I feel strongly about? I’d cultivated an educational program of which I was proud but from which my own child wouldn’t benefit. “Just record some teacher giving the mandated lesson and I’ll just hit a play button”, I’d often thought. I had so many lessons that were so much more engaging than those four county-mandated workbooks my son and his classmates had to slog through every day.

I was undoubtedly depressed. And I was so, so angry.

Oh I gave it the old college try for sure. Of the 39 resources posted in the community to support the new mandated curriculum, 8 were from the county, 9 were from other teachers, and 22 were ones I’d created and shared. But I definitely felt like I was at a dead end. I’d stopped blogging here and started seriously thinking I need to find something else to do.

And then my social studies teammate told me he was going to be moving grade levels. After some thought, I emailed my principal to be considered for the social studies position and he agreed.

I made the subject switch the following school year, starting the next chapter of my teaching career. I can be creative again. I have autonomy over how I address the student needs. I’m not in meetings about test scores. I am not driven to over-analyze data. I don’t have to write detailed intervention plans for each student who didn’t get a certain score on a bubble test. I am the decision-maker in my classroom again.

And I am free.

reflection, technology

Vol.#107: NCTE Presentation

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Today at 3 pm, I am presenting at the NCTE 2017 conference with many of the other authors of the book Applying the Flipped Classroom Model to English Language Arts Education.  What follows are the slides from that presentation and a list of linked tech tools I discuss.

 

Tech Tool Glossary

The interactive reading platform that makes it possible to implement best practices for teaching and learning.

  • Doctopus: Found under Add Ons in a Google spreadsheet

A Teacher-built Google sheet Add On that  gives teachers the ability to mass-copy (from a starter template), share, monitor student progress, and manage grading and feedback for student projects in Google Drive.

My 2-minute video tutorial. This is a wonderful tool for flipping your classroom! Select or upload  a video, add audio notes, and design multiple choice and open-ended questions to track your students’ understanding.

  • Goobric: Found at the Chrome Webstore

An amalgamation of “Google” and “Rubric”, this a Chrome Extension that allows teachers to use rubrics to “automagically” score student work. Grades are pasted into the doc and recorded in the original spreadsheet as well. Works well in conjunction with Doctopus.

This is a Learning Management System (LMS) including productivity tools such as Gmail, Drive and Docs. Teachers can make announcements, ask questions, link assignments,  and comment with students in real time.

  • Google Docs When in your Google Drive:  New, Google Doc

A family of Web-based applications from Google that includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentations, forms creation and cloud storage. Launched in 2006, documents can be uploaded and downloaded in Word, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML or text formats.

  • Google Drive: When logged into Google, click the waffle icon by your profile picture and choose “Drive”

Google Drive is a personal cloud storage service from Google that lets users store and synchronize digital content across computers, laptops and mobile devices, including tablets and smartphone devices.

  • Google Forms:  When in your Google Drive:  New, More… Google Forms.

My tutorial on how to make an Unfailable Quiz” Using Google Forms. Google Forms is a tool that is part of Google Drive for creating surveys, tests, or web input forms. Google forms allows anyone to create an easy-to-use web form, and each user’s response is placed into a row of a corresponding spreadsheet. Google now allows you to create a “quizzes” – which is their term for any graded form. Google form quizzes compute the average assignment score, the average score per question,  and shows you a grade distribution graph. Teachers have the option to allow students to see their results immediately or at a later time, as well as to email each student a copy of their quiz answers, with or without providing an answer key.

My post “Five Google Tools that Rule at School” cover most of the above mentioned tools.

An online adaptive platform for practicing grammar and usage skills which instantly differentiates, uses student interests to build questions, and track progress toward mastery of Common Core and state standards.

My 2 minute video tutorial. Read Theory provides passages and text-dependent questions for comprehension assessment on each student’s grade level. It also provides the reasons why each answer choice is right or wrong, so students can reflect and improve with practice. Read Theory adapts to student performance. This means the reading difficulty level may change after each quiz. The reading grade level may go up, down, or remain unchanged based on the score from the text-dependent questions.

A free, simple tool to create a screencast (a digital recording of a computer screen, often containing audio narration) in order to save or share the resulting video file.

  • SubText: iPad App Store

This iPad app allows students to interact with text. You can embed polls and comprehension questions, video clips, provide different levels of text, and more.

Word Clouds:  www.Wordclouds.com

This is one of several free online word cloud generators online. Try making a word cloud using a short story text and use it as an anticipation guide before reading.

Tech Tools, technology, Video Tutorials

Vol.#106: EdPuzzle 2 Minute Tech Tutorial

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I’ve been meaning to make this tool into a “2 Minute Tech Tutorial” for a while now. EdPuzzle turns any video into a lesson. Students can’t skip ahead in the videos (unless you select to let them) but they can rewatch.  The teacher’s dashboard shows you if they rewatched any sections of the video. It’s great for flipping instruction to teach new concepts and skills, or reviewing  already-taught information.

 

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Vol.#105: Google Certified

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GCE_Badges_01

So if I am being honest, I’d spent way too much time perseverating over completing this. My advice? Just jump in and do it. It’s only ten dollars, so you have little to lose. I mostly ended up scanning the topics and looking for YouTube tutorials on a few topics I was less familiar with. It was a good experience being a learner again. Teachers forget the test-taking experience. Onward to level two!

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Vol.#104: Published

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type-1161952_1280Even though I have been writing here for several years now, I’ve never considered myself “published”. Last fall, I was approached about writing on the flipped model of instruction in ELA when my student teacher’s professor came to observe me last year.

Fast-forward over a year, and here it is: Applying the Flipped Classroom Model to English Language Arts Education.  My contribution is listed as Chapter 5.

It’s a university textbook, so I guess I shouldn’t be so shocked that it is so expensive, but still! Yikes!

Tech Tools, Video Tutorials

Vol.#103: The Unfailable Quiz

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When I publish a new tech tutorial, it is blog worthy here too? Do I need a separate “vlog”?  Is cross-posting about my new YouTube video as a post on my Teaching Speaks Volumes facebook page as well as here on TSV wordpress obnoxious, or just good marketing?

While I sort this out, here’s my latest “Two minute Tech Tool Tutorial for Teachers” video:

reflection, Standardized Testing, TeachersPayTeachers

Vol.#102: NCCAT Revisited

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This week, I went to the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching and attended the usually funny and always insightful sessions of Dr. Deb Teitelbaum during a program entitled “Teaching Beyond the EOG“. I hadn’t been to NCCAT since June 2012 as a Kenan Fellow. I wrote about that experience way back in Volume #5 when TSV was in its infancy.

I have taught middle school language arts for seventeen years, have a master’s degree in teaching, and am twice national board certified. One might wonder if there were professional development that could significantly improve upon the instruction of a teacher with this much time and training already dedicated to perfecting the craft. However, this week at NCCAT will unquestionably make a profound impact on teaching and learning in my classroom. I appreciated learning, practicing, discussing, and analyzing research-based pedagogical strategies. The time we were given to create materials using these high-quality strategies and then share them with each other was particularly valuable.

I learned about one particular strategy for students completing nonfiction passages on standardized assessments. This nonfiction strategy didn’t have a catchy name or clever acronym, as most all pedagogical techniques do. I was initially very skeptical, since it called for students to not necessarily read the entire passage. (*gulp*) Then we actually used the strategy on an 8th grade EOG passage. I got 100% of the questions correct. This was clearly a game changer.

I determined that to be comfortable using it with my students, I needed to convey to my students that I was not saying, “only read these parts”, but how to mark what to go back and reread as they completed the questions. After all, to get every question correct, I never read all of the body paragraphs, but I did read one of them three or four times.

Screen Shot 2017-03-23 at 8.40.48 PMSo, with this message as my goal and my penchant for  designing these types of things, I created an alliterative name and an analogy to using GPS technology. These are the resulting directions for students. I am most excited to use it with my students in the coming weeks.

 

 

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Vol.#101: Hiatus

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It has been exactly one year to the day that I have posted anything here at TSV.

I’d built today day up as sort of “D-day”. Either I needed to start to publish again, or accept that I just wasn’t going to be blogging anymore. And since I am not ready to make that decision, here I sit, writing without being sure of what I want to say.

No small part in this hiatus has been my adjusting to changes on all fronts. In this year’s time, I have sold and bought a house, changed schools to a new school in its inaugural  year, and changed both my children’s school as well. I’ve had a student teacher. I’ve been a contributing author in a book “Applying the Flipped Method to English Language Arts”, currently in press. However, saying “I’ve been busy” is an oversimplification that borders on disingenuous.

Mostly, I have been struggling with what to even say in regards to the state of education in the current political climate. It’s not that there hasn’t been much to discuss, goodness knows. Betsy DeVos’s appointment alone should have warranted a diatribe or two from me. I’m just… struggling with outrage overload. Also, I’ve been feeling like what I post doesn’t “don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” In the face of all of the problems with the current direction in education, my posting about teaching just seems so…futile.

I realize educators, more than ever, need rallying cries and inspiration, not the fruitless twaddle that’s been bouncing around in my head lately. To that end, I am closing TSV post #101 with the brilliance of Bald Piano Guy. He does both with musical talent and humor:

 

 

Edtech, Tech Tools, technology, Video Tutorials

Vol.#100: Read Theory Tutorial

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My principal encourages us to be able to explain the great work we do at our school in a “five floor elevator speech”. I like the vivid case for brevity when delivering powerful information. Therefore, in honor of the one hundredth volume, I have created the first installment of what I hope will be a recurring series here on TSV: “Tech Tool Tutorials for Teachers in Two Minutes”.

There are so many tools and teachers have so little time. They need to know what tools are worth their time exploring further. Plus, as a language arts teacher, I’m a sucker for alliteration. 🙂

Have a tech tool you’d like to see me cover in two minutes? Make sure to leave it in the comments!

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