Provide Shared Experiences
Create the Illusion of Being Together
Synchronous or Asynchronous Collaborative Idea
We want to connect with you!
#HaveFunMaking
~Mindy and Amber
Building and maintaining a collaborative and creative community has been on our minds lately. The struggles of keeping strong relationships with our students and our students with one another is challenging from a distance. We've gathered some ideas that we wanted to share! Provide Shared ExperiencesWe've seen so many great ideas to provide shared experiences for our students via Zoom/Google Meet. If it is pet parades, show and tell, costume dress-up days, or scavenger hunts, teachers are doing everything they can to foster the relationships between classmates. Building in these fun, community-building ideas might be the way to do it! Jennifer Gonzalez shares some other ideas here. Create the Illusion of Being TogetherUsing Remove.bg gives the effect of green screen without all the extra tools! Create a class photo or have students create their own. This simple, free tool will stoke those creative fires! Check out Amber's quick tutorial below and another example of how she used it with selfies from the team! Synchronous or Asynchronous Collaborative IdeaCreating a digital flip book with Google Slides is easy! Using the duplicate slide tool makes this idea a breeze! Create a Google Slides presentation so everyone can edit and then watch the magic unfold. Use this will small groups or as a whole class (with some guidelines, of course) and create something that represents your class! Check out Mindy's tutorial below! Bonus tip: Check out TallTweets (use Tall Tweets Classic in the middle of the page)! It will create a .gif file of your flipbook that you can share anywhere! We want to connect with you!Share with us how you are maintaining connections with your students! We want to hear about how you are fostering creativity in your classroom community! Tag us on social media with @DLGWAEA and, as always....
#HaveFunMaking ~Mindy and Amber
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Even our youngest students can be engaged in researching topics of interest on the internet. The stigma of ‘digital natives’ rears its ugly head (once again!) as a massive disservice to our kids. Although our students might reign supreme on YouTube and Minecraft, it doesn’t mean they have the innate research skills that will have them breaking earth-shattering headlines by lunchtime.
As with any new skill, students need to observe teachers modeling how to research. This might include:
Over the years, I’ve collected a few little tips and tricks that might be helpful in this process.
~Mindy Cairney When thinking of concept mapping, graphic organizers often come to mind. But concept mapping is more than that. The graphic organizer is the tool for this strategy, but can often be confining to our students that see connections outside of the typical graphic organizer. Concept mapping has an effect size of .64. It is important to highlight that this is effective when students are making their own connections and not the connections predetermined by the teacher. This instructional strategy is comprised of three specific steps. Step 1. Predetermine the topic or question for the concept map. “A helpful way to determine the context of your concept map is to choose a focus question--something that needs to be solved or a conclusion that needs to be reached (Kieschnick, Bold School, pg. 124).” Teachers can help students focus their concept map by asking essential questions. Step 2. Pull a list of key terms or ideas from the topic being addressed. Students should work to classify those key terms or ideas in some way. For example, they might identify the broadest ideas working down to the most specific details. Because students may visualize this in different ways, it is important they have the freedom to choose a tool that best supports their thinking. Step 3. Connect concepts by creating linking concepts and words. In this step students might need language stems to support the connections they are making. For example, “is related to”, “as a result of”, “caused or causes”, “leds to”, etc. Incorporating Digital ToolsIt is important to provide kids with a variety of options for concept mapping, both digital and unplugged. For example, Mindy would rather create a sketchnote as a tool for concept mapping while Gina really likes being able to have a stack of manipulatives with a broad canvas to organize and connect. Online tools that support concept mapping might include Jamboard, Mindmup, Lucidchart , or Google Drawings. For kids who prefer an unplugged option, the Post-its App can allow students to start their work in an analogue environment and then move it and manipulate it online. Finally, for kids who prefer a drawing or sketching method for organizing their thoughts, consider using a camera to capture and share unplugged work. Key Takeaways
~Gina Rogers ~Mindy Cairney Questioning as an instructional factor weighs in at a .48 effect size, demonstrating the capacity to have a significant impact on student growth. Teachers ask anywhere between 300 and 400 questions a day, with the vast majority of those questions being lower level questions - recalling facts, demonstrating knowledge of procedures, etc) (Wilen, 1991). The researchers suggest that since these questions are lower in their cognitive level, teachers need to use many of them to get students to recall concepts (Wilen, 1991). Effective questioning is a complex teaching task and should be planned for. Scripting out questions and evaluating them for their complexity has a significant effect on student’s ability to more deeply understand and evaluate concepts. According to Weston Kieschink, “What gets scripted gets asked”, and spontaneous questions are often low-level questions (Bold School). Additionally, supporting students in developing their own questions about concepts can lead them to deeper levels of conceptual understanding (Hattie, 1998). Using a resource to develop and evaluate teacher and/or student questions is key in this process. Here are a few tools that we use at GWAEA:
Looking to get your students to ask more questions? Incorporating Digital ToolsSo, what does this look like in practice in a tech-rich environment? Pre-planned scripted questions can be loaded into a variety of different tech options. Poll Everywhere lays the foundation for high-level, pre-planned questions. With one click, teachers can display responses or additional questions for a deeper classroom discussion around misconceptions or opinions. Additionally, teachers could also structure a series of higher order questions into Socrative or Nearpod. These could be used to launch into a longer discussion of a concept or as an exit ticket to help plan for further discussion and instruction. Teachers can display student answers anonymously for further consideration by the class. With regards to soliciting student questions and structuring student-led discussions, a few approaches and tools come to mind. Students can contribute their questions to an online board like Padlet. The ‘Shelf’ feature in Padlet can be used to model, organize, and scaffold student questions from recall to analysis/evaluative questions. This online question board may also serve as a spot for students to begin to prepare for a Socratic Seminar. As students are engaged in discussion, Google Slides Q&A option allows students to pose questions in real-time and additionally upvote questions they find intriguing. Teachers or student moderators are able to choose and present any question to the whole class to build-up the discussion or introduce a new thought. Key Takeaways
~Gina Rogers ~Mindy Cairney Digital Learning Consultants Communication could be one of the most important skills a teacher utilizes. Communication welcomes and encourages outsiders to peek inside that magical world of a classroom. I don’t think I truly understood how utterly important this was until I became a parent of a kindergarten student. Although you might not find me on Twitter quite like you used to, I feel very strongly about how important it is to continue to share ideas with other educators, which led Jonathan and I down the road to podcasting. It allows us to share all of the great things Grant Wood AEA school districts are doing to provide the best learning environment for our students. Because of this experience, we’ve been able to meet and chat with so many amazing educators that also share new ideas with us, which we then pass onto you.
Technology has truly changed the way we communicate with one another. And although there’s nothing that trumps a face-to-face chat, our conversations can expand around the world with the tap of a button. We would like to challenge you to take this month to try something new. Perhaps connect with someone outside your inner circle or share something a little differently with the parents of your students. We would love to hear about it! ~Mindy Cairney Digital Learning Consultant GWAEA Communication is increasingly important in education. It’s one of those crucial life skills that students will use long after they have finished with school. Yet, communication isn’t a new idea in education. We’ve been teaching this for years, but as Jeff Utecht noted, technology has changed how we communicate, and it will continue to do so as it evolves. The tools, etiquette and means we use to communicate today are a lot different from those that we used even 10 years ago. In this blog post I am going to take a look at some ideas to help you explore the notion of communication in the classroom and what that looks like for today’s students. The P21 framework suggests students need to be communicating to inform, instruct, motivate and persuade, and that they should this using oral, written and non-verbal mediums. So what does that look like in the age of technology that we live in? Here are some ideas for the kinds of mediums you could explore. It’s not an exhaustive list, but I think it includes some of the more popular communication channels that students are engaging in today. They include:
This inevitably raises the question, how can we help model and give students a safe environment to explore these kinds of experiences? Step one could be to practice with peers. When you are introducing one of these mediums to students, let them practice on each other before you go public on the web. Have a conversation about what is appropriate to be shared privately, versus what should be shared publicly, and if you need ideas for what that looks like, check out some of the modules from Common Sense Media’s Digital Citizenship Curriculum because if you haven't considered this before, communication has strong ties to digital citizenship. There are lots of great edtech tools to support communication in these kinds of mediums. In fact, many of the best communication tools are actually creative tools, because when we create something, more often than not, it is to communicate a message, tell our story, or share our thinking in a new way. Blogging, podcasting, video production, and graphic design are all creative endeavours, but they are also almost exclusively about communicating an idea or a message. So, if you find a great creative communication platform to use with students, (e.g. Flipgrid, Twitter, Anchor, Canva, YouTube, Adobe Spark, etc.), then by all means use it, but don’t get too attached. Anyone who has been a teacher for any length of time is well aware that tools come and go. In fact, the way we communicate with each other today has changed over the years precisely because tools have come and gone. Instead, teach the skill of communication. Teach students the value of communicating effectively, clearly, concisely, accurately, and politely. Teach them how to be empathetic, to be culturally aware, and to communicate with a purpose. If you teach communication in this way, the tool you use is just the vehicle that helps students share their story. If you teach communication, and not the tools, your students will become esteemed global citizens who are better prepared to succeed in a technology infused global workplace. Jonathan Wylie | Digital Learning Consultant | Grant Wood AEA | @jonathanwylie
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