I use Twitter often but find it difficult to follow along with hashtags because sometimes the tweets are relevant and useful and sometimes it has nothing to do with what I'm looking for. What I did find were a couple of new things I can try to implement in my classroom. I really like the idea of digital storytelling that someone posted. This is a great way to enhance the assignments that my students already do. It will give a chance for my more artistic students to learn a skill online and my less artistic students to possibly do better than they would drawing it out. I was also really excited to find out some improvements with Google Classroom such as creating an area for classwork. I think that organization will help keep things separated and allow students to easily navigate to either their homework section or classwork section. That's why I liked using Google Sites in conjunction with Google Classroom because I was able to keep the sections separated, now I need to play around with this new feature. Overall the ISTE conference looks like there would be a lot of information to take in and take back and I would love to see how I can attend next years conference!
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I already use Google Forms quite often for assessments. I find Google Forms to be incredibly useful and time saving for having my students take quizzes. It grades it automatically and putting it into a spreadsheet lets me input the grades a lot easier. I also like to use Google Forms as an exit ticket which allows me to go through their responses quickly and assess what I need to re-clarify the next day. Learning about the add ons that Google Forms has I can now see myself using it a lot more for filling out forms. I can see this as a great way to quickly formulate a discipline letter for parents. I often spend so much time writing personal emails to parents that this would allow me to personalize the important parts while having a generic response. I also would like to get something set up for the start of the year to have a personalized letter for all parents, which Google Forms can make happen with ease. Meg Conlan's idea to use Google Forms as a rubric is something I never considered but the way Google Forms has it set up, I think it would work very well and save me a lot of paper since I always tend to print them out so I can circle where they are in each category.
For my capstone project, I would use Google Forms as a survey to get an understanding of what knowledge my students have of using technology. I would also use it to give them a pre and post test to see if the variable I added does have any effect on students. And since I already use rubrics, I now want to try to make a rubric through Google Forms and see how that differs in use. Reading through Matt Miller's "20 practical ways to use Google Forms in class, school" article, I am willing to try some of his suggestions such as a check in/check out system for my class library. The one that seems the most interesting to try is to create a "make your own adventure" form. I think that would be really engaging for my students and can see that being used for some of the short stories we read in class. While thinking of my audience, I think my students should be my primary audience since I got into the program to find new innovative ways to help my students stay engaged and motivated to learn. My students might not end up seeing my capstone project but they will be the ones who will benefit from it the most as the strategies will be used on them. Since my district is focused on academic conversations, I want to focus on how I can help my students improve the quality of their academic conversations in the classroom and which technological tools can help with that. While my students are going to be my primary audience, my colleagues will be the one who actually look at my capstone project. So while I hope to help my students improve their academic conversations, I hope that what I do with my students can translate to something useful for my colleagues to apply in their own classrooms.
Since my school's English curriculum, Springboard, already follows Clark's instructional design model, I want to find a way to continue to use this model with our curriculum but at a level that works for my students who are not quite as advanced as the book requires of them. Since we're starting off the year with a fresh start and since I am getting a 7th grade only line, I think it's going to be very important to think of my end user and how I'm going to ensure that the technological tool I end up using, makes sense to use with this group of students. I've been using social media since its existence. I was on MySpace, on Twitter when it first started and continue to use it, took longer to join Facebook but I'm there, I had an Instagram since it's conception and SnapChat as well. What can I say? I'm a true Millennial. Over the years, what I have posted has drastically changed from my MySpace days. I cringe at a post I clearly remember posting and am ultimately so glad MySpace died and with it that post. Now as an adult, as an educator and a leader, I am more cautious about what I post or am more private with my posts. I have a personal Twitter and Instagram that I keep private and only close friends can follow me as I do have a strong opinion about things. While I haven't quite used it, I do have a public twitter account that I always had the intention of creating an online community that consists of my students, their parents, and other educators. I follow a lot of political Twitters and see how they collaborate with each other to spread credible information and build on the conversation that is being had and I can see that happening in an education setting. I've been to a professional development that showed the importance of using social media to build a following. If we're trying to teach our students how to be part of a 21st century world then we need to be part of that 21st century world ourselves and that includes immersing ourselves into the social media world where there is so much information to learn from. What I like about Twitter is that it allows for a whole dialogue to be said in so little words and the participants are from all over the place. You get perspectives from all over the world right there in the palm of your hands from topics such as lesson plans to classroom management. It's a discourse that never stops because people keep adding to it. While it's a great tool, there are a lot of things to be cautious of. I have a personal twitter that stays on private because I have a strong opinion about things, but would I say that on my public twitter? Nope! As a professional, it's important to keep an image and that includes what you say online. Just as the article "6 ways to avoid social media landmines" suggests.
If I saw one of my students post something inappropriate online outside of school then it would depend on what the post was about. If it was something that could cause harm to another student or that student then I would report it as I am supposed to and also confront the student. If it's a post about something minor such as inoffensive language or something like that then I would simply confront the student about the negative effects that can cause. If it continued to happen I would then involve the parents. I would not involve the parents at first though because then that would lose any trust the student could have in me, I think kids don't really think about these things so it's best to approach them from a place of well being and not as an attack. My innovative learning journey has so far been useful in my practice. Since I just finished my first year of teaching there is a lot to look back and reflect on. My action research from last semester helped me realize that there are a lot of technological tools that I can be using to help my students. Now that I know of all these tools, I also need to learn how to properly use them so that it is enhancing their learning experience instead of just acting as a substitute. While last semester helped me explore new tools to use, I feel that it was a bit all over the place so I don't think my research went as well as it could have.
I am most hopeful to learn how to bring my classroom into a 21st century environment. With my class going 1:1 this year, I think it's important to know how and most importantly when students should be on their Chromebooks and when it would be detrimental to their learning. My school district is currently focused on increasing academic discourse in the classroom and I wish to learn what technological tools can help me with that which is why my action research for my capstone project will revolve around using technology to promote academic discourse. I currently use Google Sites with my students. I first started using it as a tool that would help with my research for the previous semester. As a class we use Google Sites as an e-portfolio where I get to post all the work students need to be doing and when and where students get to store all their work in one site and share with others. I was introduced to Google Sites during my student teaching where my Master teacher's seniors were going to post their Senior Project through Google Sites. It took me a couple hours to play around with it and then I was ready to teach the Seniors how to create their own. This year when I thought of using it again, it took me about 2 hours to set up my whole site with all the links I wanted and would continue to add to it throughout the coming weeks.
Overall, it was a great portfolio and made grading their assignments a lot easier because I could check off what they had and find everything in one place. Some of my students had a little bit of a hard time figuring out how to use it but I take the blame for that since we had to rush through the start up process since it was on a short time schedule. The students who figured it out actually liked that they could customize the sites to be more personal and liked writing their journals online instead of by hand. One issue I did have was that not all students listened when I asked them to make sure their links were viewable by me (Scott, I know how you feel and apologize if mine are ever an issue!) I had to spend a lot of time ensuring that I could access their links and some students did not get their assignments graded because they never gave me access. Going into the next school year, this is something we're going to be doing from the beginning so I expect there to be far less issues with this. I think Google Sites is great to use as an online portfolio because it easily stores all their work in one place with easy to use features. I personally like it a lot better than Weebly. I've been trying to figure out how to incorporate a blog aspect to Google Sites and that seems to be the only negative that I have encountered. The other reason I like Google Sites as an online portfolio is because I have my students use all Google products so it's really easy for them to find their assignment from their drive and add it to the page they need to. Once I figure out how they can respond to each other's posts, then I will 100% love Google Sites and would even recommend this program to switch over to it. It does seem daunting to have something added to our plates to teach this coming school year, but when you think about the world we're in and how everything is evolving, it's important to teach students digital literacy and digital citizenship. If we want students to succeed in a 21st century world then they need to know the do's and don'ts of the the internet. Luckily, there are already so many resources that can help us incorporate this into our lessons so that it doesn't seem like we have to learn something new or take away from our already busy day. I think I could easily incorporate digital literacy into my curriculum because it already goes hand in hand with things we do in English, such as research.
The KQED website had a great article "What Writing Wikipedia Entries Can Teach Students About Digital Literacy" that showed how and why it is important to combat misinformation on the internet. There is a program that Wikipedia offers to professors that allows their students to create or edit an existing Wikipedia. The purpose is to make it as accurate as possible and fix any inaccuracies that were previously written. Little things like this are important to teach our students because with so many false stories out there, it's important to be the one putting out credible information. I was actually considering doing something very similar to this to first show students that any information can be written on Wikipedia and to be very wary when using any facts from there. This showed me another way I can use Wikipedia to show them the right way to write credible facts. These websites and articles can be used easily in the curriculum as a weekly "digital literacy day" where we explore new articles that continue to teach them and help them make better decisions on the internet. An example on the Common Sense Media website is an article called "Teaching Kids Media Smarts During Breaking News." This article could easily be annotated by my students as a class and in turn will teach them how to stay cautious about the news being delivered to them. Since my school is restructuring our Wednesdays to be shortened days, a digital literacy day would be perfect for those days as we get to still learn the curriculum but it isn't taking away from our regular English curriculum since that day is meant to be an intervention day.
Well I don’t think I was using my mental processes to the best of my ability. I had to read and reread over many sentences many times until I could vaguely grasp what the concept was. To be quite honest, I don't think I really understood what it was saying at first because a lot of the terms were unfamiliar to me. I made sure to define the vocabulary for unfamiliar terms which in turn helped me understand it slightly better. Another thing I found was that I could not just read the article and understand it, I had to break it down so that it actually made sense to me. I wrote down key quotes that stuck out to me as well. What I found interesting about this article is that it did get me to start thinking about my students and how they process their own information. The quote, “Humans by continuing dialogue and sharing of personal observations do arrive at always limited but more stable observations” is kind of what made me make sense of “sense making” and how my students make sense of things. As an English teacher, I'm always having my students discuss their own thoughts on the topic and to add to what others say and while they may not be able to grasp the concept completely, they get a better understanding. The other quite that stuck out to me was “Sense making assumes that the important things that can be learned about human use of information and information subsystems must be conceptualized as behaviors: the step-takings that human beings undertake to construct sense of their worlds.” Sense making is not just “oh now I understand this” but you have to consider the different steps it will take to help you understand a difficult concept. Just as I took certain steps like identifying vocabulary and taking notes of quotes that made sense to me. For this article in particular, I wouldn't give my students this exact article. Rather I would pick the parts that made the most sense to me and have them identify the vocabulary and annotate it as if we would with any other article we read. I would also supplement it with different videos that talked about sense making and other articles that took apart Dervins article and made it more accessible to read. |