Blog Posts

Researching with Elementary Students: Tips and Tricks

9/30/2019

Image by klimkin on Pixabay

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:

brainstorming questions around a topic
listing key terms or search phrases that would filter to the correct information
evaluating and vetting websites
how to curate resources and collect notes

With so many skills involved in researching, make sure to take your time and help students build skills. Unleashing a class onto 'the Googles' to scour for information could be ineffective, frustrating, and possibly even disastrous.

Over the years, I’ve collected a few little tips and tricks that might be helpful in this process.

Use a curation tool for your students. The internet is full of information. And although we should teach our students how to evaluate and curate their own resources, it is highly beneficial for students to have a list of resources the teacher has vetted for them. A great tool for this is Wakelet. It creates a visual board of resources that is easy to navigate. Even a list of resources on a Google Doc will help your students get started. For an even better experience, model for your students how and why you chose a few of those resources.
So, you want them to use a search engine. There are some ‘kid-safe’ search engines out there, but don’t trust them with your life. Always have a plan in place for students if they come across content that makes them feel uncomfortable or unsafe. ALWAYS. Be proactive, not reactive. Make sure parents are aware of this plan too. It will prove to be worth its weight in gold. Just trust me on this one.
Consider the reading level of your students. There might be a huge amount of information out there on the topic, but does the material match your students’ reading levels? Using a free tool like Rewordify can help simplify the complexity of the text, but it’s not perfect and shouldn’t be used to completely solve the problem of unsuitable reading materials. Other tools such as Tween Tribune, Newsela, ReadWorks, and GWAEA’s Online Resources, such as BritannicaOnline, allow students and teachers to choose from a range of reading levels.
Listening comprehension is usually higher than reading comprehension. Mobile devices usually have a text-to-speech accessibility feature built-in (iPad or Android), but other devices might need a little boost. Chrome extensions like Announcify and Select and Speak let students listen to the text. Both these extensions have a less robot-like voice and have proven to work pretty well for me. Yet again, see GWAEA’s Online Resources, Unite for Literacy, or Wonderopolis for built-in text-to-speech features.
Take away the clutter. Websites can be distracting and busy. Help students remove some of the visual noise by using Safari’s Reader View on the iPad or by installing the Chrome Extension Reader View or Mercury Reader. Both of these do a great job of cleaning up and isolating the text to help all readers focus on the task at hand.
Ask your teacher librarian for help. The end.

Researching is a skill that students will circle back to time and time again throughout their life. It’s much like riding a bike. It brings a certain amount of freedom, but can also end in a skinned knee. It is not an innate skill. It needs to be modeled, taught, supported, and revisited many times during the year. But by building solid foundational skills, researching is one of the greatest skills you will ever give your students.

~Mindy Cairney

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New Features in iPadOS for Schools

9/24/2019

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Apple’s latest software release saw a small divergence for iPhone and iPad. Although they both run a version of iOS, the iPad variation is now called iPadOS. This is because of the increasing number of iOS features that only work on an iPad. Here are some of my favorite additions to the new iPadOS as well as a quick guide on how to enable them.

New Home Screen Layout

The new iPad home screen includes a sidebar of widgets and an increased number of app icons. The scrollable list of widgets can be customized to include updates from all your favorite apps, and the day and date is displayed above them for a nice, clean look. If 30 apps on one screen is too many for you, head over to Settings > Display & Brightness where you can revert to the previous configuration of 20 apps, but more apps on one screen should mean less swiping, and maybe less hunting around for the one you need.

Desktop Safari Browser

In iPadOS, Apple upgraded the Safari browser so that it performs much more like the browser on your laptop. This means you will no longer see the mobile version of webpages like YouTube or Google Docs. It’s not perfect, but if you or your students are feeling hamstrung by the lack of features in some of Google’s iPad apps, you can get the full web experience when you use Safari, and you won’t have to request the desktop version because you get that by default. Live collaboration, Add-ons, and just about everything else works just as it should. There is also a download manager that makes downloading video and audio from the web quick and easy!

Use a Mouse With Your iPad

If you’ve ever longed for mouse support on the iPad, then the time has finally come. Apple included it as an accessibility feature for those who have difficulty interacting with a touch screen. It allows you to connect a Bluetooth or USB mouse to control a cursor and navigate your iPad hands-free. It is also great for making instructional videos when students can’t see where you are tapping on the screen.

To get started, go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > and turn on Assistive Touch. Then go to Devices and configure your mouse to work the way you want. You can assign different actions to each button on your mouse. The cursor size, speed and color can also be adjusted to your liking.

New Screenshot Tool

There is a new screenshot tool in iPadOS that includes some new markup tools, as well as the ability to take a scrolling screenshot of a webpage. Simply invoke the screenshot tool by pressing and holding the home button and the power button, then tap the thumbnail in the corner to get started. You can save a screenshot as an image, or as a PDF by tapping Done in the top left-hand corner.

New Multitasking Options

You can now add multiple apps to Slide Over by dragging and dropping an app from the dock onto an existing Slide Over app. You can switch between these apps the same way you do on your iPhone by swiping up from the home indicator at the bottom of the stack. For even more flexibility, power users will be glad to hear that you can also open more than one instance of the same app. This means you can have Notes and Safari open in Split View in one window, and have Notes and YouTube open in another window. With practice, this can make you more productive than ever on an iPad.

Dark Mode

Are you ready to take a trip to the dark side? Turn on dark mode in Settings > Display and Brightness to make the switch, or do what I do and have it turn on and off automatically at sunset and sunrise. Not apps support dark mode yet, but an increasing number do and this can make it easier on your eyes when you are catching up on school emails on your iPad at night.

QuickType Keyboard

Remember when you used to be able to split your iPad keyboard in two for thumb-typing mastery? That feature is no longer there, but if you pinch the iPadOS keyboard with two fingers you can shrinking it down to an iPhone-sized keyboard and use swipe-to-type to enter your text. You can drag the smaller keyboard anywhere on the screen. This is perfect for quick text adjustments or for times when you don’t want the iPad keyboard to cover important areas of the screen. Bonus tip: You can use QuickType on your iPhone with iOS 13.

That’s NOT all folks!

These are a few of the features that I have been enjoying from iPadOS when I was using the public beta this summer. If you are interested in finding out about the rest of the iPadOS features, make sure you check out Apple’s website for the full coverage. iPadOS can be installed on an iPad Air 2 or newer.

Jonathan Wylie
Digital Learning Consultant
Grant Wood AEA

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ArcGIS Online – For Educators Who Want to Know

5/17/2019

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Guest Blogger: Wayne Fritch

Home School Instruction, Cedar Rapids Community School District

(Photo captured from: https://www.esri.com/en-us/maps-we-love/gallery/election-2016-dot-density)

Every newspaper you open these days has a map with an informational overlay. These maps allow the reader to quickly make some analytical observations regarding a wide variety of topics, such as population density, average temperatures, wealth or poverty, migration of various animals, crime rates, traffic fatalities, etc. The same information could be displayed in a spreadsheet, but this would throw most of us into analysis paralysis with the overwhelming amount of numbers. Visualizing quantities of data in a geographic manner puts context to the data and simplifies the analysis process. Question: Who creates these kinds of maps and how are they created? Answer: They are created by people who know GIS—Geographic Information Systems and are created with a unique kind of mapping software. ArcGIS Online is powerful mapping tool which can be used by students, teachers, and professionals alike. Educators in the USA can complete a single page application to gain access to a free school, district, or state account. The account is robust and online--no downloading of software or worrying about software licensing.

Teachers can find tutorials for learning this program and lesson plans for teaching mapping skills that cross all curricular areas for grades 4 – 12. A set of GeoInquires, teaching plans, reach into the core content areas of American Literature, Earth Science, Environmental Science, Government, Human Geography, Mathematics, US History, and World History. In addition, there are over 100 free lessons to help newbies get GIS into the classroom.

In addition to lesson plans, ArcGIS offers GeoMentor support to teachers. GeoMentors are volunteers who work in the field of geospatial technologies and have signed up to assist teachers in implementing ArcGIS with students. Teachers seeking support should visit the GeoMentor website, where they can search for a GeoMentor in their area. GeoMentors can also be found by contacting your city or county Informational Technology Department and/or the Department of Natural Resources. Mentors bring a depth of understanding to the content and have personal stories to share that engage student interest. Having these local experts in the classroom lends itself nicely to career awareness opportunities.

ArcGIS provides an amazing application called Story Mapping. It is a powerful and informative presentation tool that rivals Power Point and Prezi. This tool can be used for a multitude of writing and publishing projects. It allows for the combining of text, Internet photos, video, camera images, all of which are geo-referenced to a specific location on a map. To see how engaging these Story Maps can be take a look at this Story Map Gallery. To learn how to create your own Story Map use this tutorial.

Students across the state of Iowa are encouraged to participate in an annual Mapping Competition. Winning students win $100 and get a write up in the Des Moines Register and their local newspaper. Selected winners compete for a national prize.

To see a couple of story maps created by my 8th grade students, you can view the map that won the 2018 State Mapping Contest in Middle School or a map was created after a student’s vacation to Disney World and the Soarn’ Virtual Reality Exhibit.

ArcGIS Online has tremendous applications for education! It can be used across the curriculum as a data collection tool, presentation software, or for writing and storytelling. It integrates math concepts, critical thinking, decision making, graphics and layout, technical skills, persuasive and informative writing, geography, and literature ties.

If this article has piqued your interest and you want a try out ArcGIS Online for yourself, download this PDF and try the 5 X 5 introductory tutorial. There is no login required. This document will walk you through 5 activities that can be done in less than 5 minutes each. However, you will become so engrossed in the learning that 15 minutes will pass as though it was five.

Backstory: While participating in a summer Teacher STEM Externship, I was assigned to create a map of wildlife habitat of Johnson County Iowa. My source, or base-map, was a 100 year-old hand-drawn map created by U of I professor. I was placing an overlay of symbols to represent an assortment of trees and brush—wildlife habitat. When my part of the project was complete, the GIS specialists over-laid the map with other layers from more recent years. The final layer being data collected by LIDAR fly-overs. Through manipulation of the map layers one could determine which areas of the county had been left untouched by human activity through the previous century. The Johnson County Board of Conservation was interested in this these areas for future conservation efforts. By learning a few basics of the mapping tool, and developing a network of DNR and GIS specialists, I was excited and equipped to return to the classroom and have my Middle School students begin learning this technology. I invited local experts from the Cedar Rapids Informational Technology Department into my classroom to serve as GeoMentors. They implemented several of the lessons provided in the GeoInquires as well as helped a group of students take waypoints with hand-help GPS units at a local mountain biking park and display these points on a map.

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Grant Wood AEA GAAD Series - #a11y in Education

5/16/2019

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Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day! To celebrate this occasion, Grant Wood AEA has hosted a series of blog posts on accessibility to support GAAD's purpose of getting people talking about designing online content and interactions that are accessible to a broad range of abilities. For those that missed it, here's a quick run-down of the series hosted on the Grant Wood AEA Blog, The Linker:

Thursday, May 9, 2019 - Introduction to GAAD
This post introduced readers to Global Accessibility Awareness Day and how web accessibility is defined in the K-12 classroom.
Monday, May 13, 2019 - It's As Easy As A-B-C
No, we're not learning to read! This post introduced readers to Grant Wood Area Education Agencies work to support employees to 'design with integrity' by ensuring Accessibility, Branding and Content.
Tuesday, May 14, 2019 - Designing with P-O-U-R
This post introduced readers to the Web Content Accessibility Standards and the acronym P-O-U-R.
Wednesday, May 15, 2019 - Let's Get Social!
Social media accessibility is essential in our world today. This post focused on some tips to create accessible social media.

The series has been filled with tips and strategies from the AEM Center to support designing content with accessibility in mind in our K-12 classrooms.

A Call to Action
"For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."
Newton's Third Law

Global Accessibility Awareness Day offers opportunities for educators and professionals in the field of education to reflect on the impact our practices have on student learning and stakeholder engagement.

Take a moment to reflect on YOUR practices. How can you strengthen your communications and teaching by supporting accessibility practices?

Now, commit to building that practice by recording a Grant Wood AEA GAAD FlipGrid video with the stem, "To make my space more accessible, I commit to..."

-Maggie Pickett, Digital Learning Consultant
Grant Wood AEA

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Concept Mapping: The Map that Leads to Effective Instruction

3/25/2019

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Gif of a variety of people viewing the same map

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 Tools

It 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

Concept maps are NOT graphic organizers. Instead, it is the process of organizing thoughts and key ideas.
Concept mapping is a scaffolded process facilitated by the teacher. Teachers help students identify the relationship between key terms by asking probing questions and providing language stems.
It is crucial to honor student voice and choice when concept mapping to support personal visualization of the connected concepts.

~Gina Rogers
~Mindy Cairney

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Reciprocal Teaching, it’s Not Just for Literacy Teachers!

3/15/2019

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Chances are if you have heard of reciprocal teaching you have thought of it in the context of an English Language Arts class. Although reciprocal teaching is a text processing strategy, its application is further reaching than the English classroom. Reciprocal teaching has a .74 effect size making it a powerful instructional strategy for all content areas where text is being used.

What is Reciprocal Teaching?

Reciprocal teaching includes four steps:

Predict
Clarify
Question
Summarize

Reciprocal teaching is a process that best works in a collaborative environment so most commonly small groups will be used in this strategy. Additionally, the process helps students organize their thinking about text. Creating a Doc or Slide Deck template for groups to use (see examples in Step 1) can be used to record ideas and provide links to additional tools used in the process.

Incorporating Digital Tools

Step 1 - Predict: The predict step can look different in different grade levels and content areas, however, no matter what grade level or what content area prediction involves previewing the text and connecting prior knowledge to what is seen. Additionally, students think a little bit about what the text might focus on based on the quick previewing that they did. Collaborative conversations are imperative to the prediction process. Recording thoughts on a table in a Google Doc or collaborative Google Slides can help classmates when returning to the conversation and for later evaluation of predictions.

Step 2 - Clarify: In this step students read through the text and note any areas that are unclear for them. One area that can be focused on is vocabulary. To clarify and further make meaning out of unknown terms, students can use an online dictionary tool (like the dictionary feature in Read & Write for Google or the Google Dictionary Chrome Extension) , but additional development of this new vocabulary might be needed. Vocabulary programs have an effect size of .62. One model that can support the explicit teaching of vocabulary is the Frayer Model. On a collaborative doc, students determine words needing clarification. Repeated words from the doc are collected and distributed to groups for further investigation. A shared Frayer Model tool can be used to further build the group’s understanding of their assigned words. Google Slides or Google Drawings fulfill the need to share and collaborate as a class.

Step 3 - Question: After all of the predictions have been made and all unknown terms have been clarified, groups begin in-depth reading of the text. Each group will record three questions they have as they read. Groups are encouraged to come up with a ‘right there’ question, a ‘between the lines’ question, and a critical thinking question (Kieschnick, Bold School). Teachers will need to model the question generation process prior to turning kids loose with this responsibility in addition to providing language scaffolds to help students generate questions. To learn more about question generation check out some of the resources in our Riddle Me This blog post.

Step 4 - Summarize: The final step in reciprocal teaching is summarizing. As a small group, students create a summary of what they just read and come to consensus on how they will show what they know about the text. There are a variety of different ways that students might share their summary of the text. With the time constraints of a classroom, this strategy might not be completed in one day. Flipgrid allows students to share their summary in the moment, with the ability to view with the class at a later time as they evaluate their summaries against previous predictions. This could also be great for students to reflect and review before an assessment.

Key Takeaways

Organization and planning for this strategy is essential. Use collaborative tools to keep groups organized.
Digital tools should not replace collaborative conversations, but instead help collect and record the ideas shared in small groups and provide an artifact to return to throughout the process.

~Gina Rogers
~Mindy Cairney

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Researching with Elementary Students: Tips and Tricks

New Features in iPadOS for Schools

New Home Screen Layout

Desktop Safari Browser

Use a Mouse With Your iPad

New Screenshot Tool

New Multitasking Options

Dark Mode

QuickType Keyboard

That’s NOT all folks!

ArcGIS Online – For Educators Who Want to Know

Guest Blogger: Wayne Fritch

Grant Wood AEA GAAD Series - #a11y in Education

Concept Mapping: The Map that Leads to Effective Instruction

Incorporating Digital Tools

Key Takeaways

Reciprocal Teaching, it’s Not Just for Literacy Teachers!

What is Reciprocal Teaching?

Incorporating Digital Tools

Key Takeaways

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