Category: Classroom management

In fifteen years of teaching K-8, I have learned that one factor provides a reliable barometer for student success: Parent involvement. In fact, it’s crucial. According to the National Coalition for Parent Involvement in Education Research Review and Resources, no matter income or background, students with involved parents are more likely to have higher grades and test scores, attend school regularly, have better social skills, show improved behavior, and adapt well to school. According to the School Community Journal, “There is a sizable body of research literature supporting the involvement of parents in educational settings and activities”.

The data is so overwhelming, one of our important jobs as teachers must be to facilitate the involvement of parents in their child’s education. There are as many ways to do that as there are parents who need alternatives to the traditional parent-teacher conference and back-to-school night. Here are some of my favorites:

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As a working technology teacher, I get hundreds of questions from parents about their home computers, how to do stuff, how to solve problems. Each week, I’ll share one of those with you. They’re always brief and always focused. Enjoy!

Q: So many colleagues are embedding documents to their blogs and websites, but I don’t know how to do that. Can you help?

A: I love this part of Google Apps. When your Google document is complete–that includes Docs, Spreadsheets, Slides, and Drawings:

• Go to ‘Share’ in the upper right corner; select the option you prefer–allowing viewers to just view or edit
• Click File>Publish to the Web (on the menu bar)
• Select the link and copy-paste to your website (I’ve done this below) OR select Embed
• Copy the HTML code that starts with ‘<iframe…’
• Paste into blog, wiki, website like I did below:

Let’s try this out. Here’s a collaborative spreadsheet to share Exit Ticket ideas. Your name is optional. Strongly consider adding the linkback so we can add each other to our PLN–a great way to share ideas and knowledge. Access the spreadsheet and tell us your favorite warm-up activities and exit tickets:

Here’s the embedded document:

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School’s back and it’s more important than ever to integrate technology into your curriculum. Why? Consider these thirteen changes to technology-in-education since 2013:

1. Windows has updated their platform—again.
2. IPads have been joined by Chromebooks as a common classroom digital device.
3. There is a greater reliance on internet-based tools than software. This underscores the importance of teaching digital citizenship to even the youngest learners.
4. Student work is often collaborative and shared.
5. Student work is done anywhere, not just the classroom and home, meaning it must be synced and available across multiple platforms, multiple devices.
6. Keyboarding skills are more important than ever, often critical to summative year-end testing for PARC, SB, and other formats.
7. Technology in the classroom is the norm, but teacher training isn’t.
8. Education is focused on college and career with tech an organic, transformative tool.
9. Teachers have moved from ‘sage on the stage’ to ‘guide on the side’.
10. Students have been raised on digital devices. They want to use them as learning tools.
11. Using technology is no longer what ‘geeky’ students do. It’s what all students want to do.
12. Printing is being replaced with sharing and publishing.
13. More teachers are willing to try technology when used authentically.

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Every Earth Day, someone in your school, maybe the parent group, raises the question of WHY NOT a paperless classroom? Everyone nods their heads, agrees this is a revolutionary idea, and moves on as Earth Day passes.

Really, though: Why not? There are benefits to adopting web-based alternatives to paper:

• it’s easy to collaborate when everything’s online
• nothing gets soda dripped on it or eaten by the dog
• students can collaborate without requiring parent time and gas fumes
• teachers can answer questions in a timely manner
• teachers can provide feedback on projects that students respond to and resubmit
• student work is simple to copy, back up, and share as needed

To kickstart your paperless digital classroom requires a modicum of preparation. Take a few weekends this summer to set up a class blog and class website and get comfortable with the digital side of your school. This may include:

• Google Apps for Education and/or Google Classroom–this serves as a basic digital portfolio for students, a collaborative tool with classmates, the teacher’s inbox, and her tool for returning graded and analyzed student work.
• an LMS like Edmodo, Otus, or MyBigCampus–these often include an interactive gradebook, parent inclusion devices, a student discussion forum, polls, a way to collect and share resources, a class calendar, and access across a variety of digital devices.
• digital portfolios for students–this can be accomplished with the LMS you use, Google Apps, Google Classroom, or even Dropbox

Four school-based pieces you’ll need:

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This is a reprint of an article I posted last Spring. By starting these tasks in Fall, you’ll be ready when yearly assessments arrive in April-May:

Between March and June, 2015, nearly five million students in 11 states and the District of Columbia completed the PARCC and Smarter Balanced testing to measure student accomplishment of Common Core State Standards in the areas of mathematics and English/language arts. Tests were administered via digital devices (though there are options for paper-and-pencil). Besides measuring student achievement, they also were an indicator of school facility to administer green digital tests instead of the traditional paper-and-pencil versions. Lots of schools discovered that, though student knew the material, they were unable to adequately communicate their knowledge using unfamiliar digital tools as basic as keyboard familiarity.

I polled my PLN to find specific tech areas students needed help with in preparing for the Assessments. It boils down to five tech areas. Pay attention to these and your students will be much more prepared for this Spring’s Common Core assessments:

Keyboarding

Students need to have enough familiarity with the keyboard that they know where keys are, where the number pad is, where the F row is, how keys are laid out. They don’t need to be touch typists or even facilely use all fingers. Just have them comfortable enough they have a good understanding of where all the pieces are. Have students type fifteen minutes a week in a class setting and 45 minutes a week using keyboarding for class activities (homework, projects–that sort). That’ll do it.

Basic computer skills

Skills that were listed by teachers as difficult for students included:

• Drag-drop
• Compare-contrast
• Write a letter
• Watch a video
• Fill in boxes on table
• Mouse manipulation
• Keyboarding
• Know keyboard layout—delete, arrows, space bar
• Drop-down menus
• Highlighting
• Unselect
• Scroll
• Use calculator, protractor, ruler
• Use video player
• Use multiple windows/tabs
• Use online dictionaries, thesauruses
• Plot points
• Read and comprehend online

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Lesson planning used to mean filling in boxes on a standard form with materials, goals, expectations, assessments–details like that. Certainly this is valuable information, but today’s lesson plans–like today’s lessons–demand less rote fill-in-the-blanks and more conceptualization, critical thinking, and collaboration. With the increased reliance on online resources, Skype interviews with professionals, and hands-on learning activities, lessons are no longer taught within four walls so they shouldn’t be planned that way. They need collaboration with all stakeholders from initial planning stage to revision and rewrite.

And that paper form that was copied in triplicate–now it’s an online tool that can be accessed, edited, appended, and viewed by everyone involved. In fact, it can be one of three tools, depending upon how your brain organizes ideas:

• mindmap–for those who love to throw everything out there on a canvas and arrange
• online planner–for those who fill in boxes with required information and want the lesson plan to appear fully formed from these ideas
• spreadsheet–for those who like to build from the ground up and have the lesson plan detailed and scalable–in a structured way

I’ve tried all of these and have found three favorite tools, one from each category, that work for me. Read through these, try them out, and then add a comment with what you think:

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As a working technology teacher, I get hundreds of questions from parents about their home computers, how to do stuff, how to solve problems. Each Tuesday, I’ll share one of those with you. They’re always brief and always focused. Enjoy!

Q: Sometimes, I just can’t remember how to accomplish a task. Often, I know it’s simple. Maybe I’ve done it before–or even learned it before–and it’s lost in my brain. What do I do?

A: One of the best gifts I have for students and colleagues alike is how to solve this sort of problem. Before you call your IT guy, or the tech teacher, or dig through those emails where someone sent you the directions, here’s what you do:

Google it.

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I’ve been on the hunt for a good–scratch that: excellent–Learning Management System for several months. There are a lot of options out there, but none had enough of the characteristics that most teachers I know look for with an LMS, namely:

• delivers content to students in a variety of formats
• tracks student progress on assigned activities
• assesses student learning (both formative and summative)
• provides for teacher-student and student-student communication
• intuitive to use for both teachers and students, to encourage daily access. It should be non-intimidating, non-threatening, even non-geeky, so stakeholders feel as comfortable as they would in a physical classroom
  
• works across all platforms–iPads, web, Chromebooks
• plays well with a wide variety of apps, such as Khan Academy
• easily monitors student progress, work, and learning
• includes reminders of activities
• communicates important announcements to students
• allows for co-teaching in a classroom (an arrangement that is growing in popularity)
• encourages parent involvement in the education journey

I know–sounds impossible. Then, an email from Otus showed up in my stream. It caught my attention because the conversation was straightforward, plain-speaking, and hit my high points. So I agreed to review it.

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The internet is unavoidable in education. Students go there to research, access homework, check grades, and a whole lot more. As a teacher, you do your best to make it a friendly, intuitive, and safe place to visit, but it’s challenging. Students arrive there by iPads, smartphones, links from classroom teachers, suggestions from friends–the routes are endless. The best way to keep the internet experience safe is to catch users right at the front door, on that first click.

How do you do that? By creating a class internet start page. Clicking the internet icon opens the world wide web to a default page.  Never take your device’s default because there’s no guarantee it’s G-rated enough for a typical classroom environment. Through the ‘settings’ function on your browser, enter the address of a page you’ve designed as a portal to all school internet activity, called an ‘internet start page’. Sure, this takes some time to set-up and maintain, but it saves more than that in student frustration, lesson prep time, and the angst parents feel about their children entering the virtual world by themselves. They aren’t. You’re there, through this page. Parents can save the link to their home computer and let students access any resources on it, with the confidence of knowing you’ve curated everything.

In searching for the perfect internet start page, I wanted one that:

• quickly differentiates for grades
• is intuitive for even the youngest
• is customizable
• presents a visual and playful interface so students want to go there rather than find work-arounds (a favorite hobby of older students)
• includes an immediately visible calendar of events
• hosts videos of class events
• provides collaborative walls like Padlet
• includes other interactive widgets to excite students about technology

Here are four I looked at:

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As a working technology teacher, I get hundreds of questions from parents about their home computers, how to do stuff, how to solve problems. Each Tuesday, I’ll share one of those with you. They’re always brief and always focused. Enjoy!

Q: I have a video on my classroom computer I want to use on my iPad. How do I do that?

A: There are ways to do that–email it to your iPad, open through DropBox–but those have issues:

• emailing requires extra steps and time you may not have
• many email accounts limit you to <10MB. What if a video file is larger?
• DropBox has limited space
• like email, you must put materials in DropBox to access them from there (I know–Duh, but that requires planning. What if your inquiry-driven class popped onto this topic on the fly?)

If you’re like me, anything to make your worker faster, easier, less steps is a good thing.

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