A Reflection on Student Presentations

I was on one of my campuses and received an invitation to watch student book reports in Ms Cole's second period class. This teacher's team uses technology regularly throughout the week and I was ready to enjoy some good presentations, most-likely slidedecks. 

Sitting in that room, it was quickly clear to me that the students were not just doing slidedecks. For starters, there was a buzz in the room with excited students ready to share. They were at their desks, ready to take notes about the book reports. The teacher began by just stepping back and letting the first student take control of the computer. The green flag was dropped and the students were off!

After only about six student presentations, I witnessed Google Slides, Prezi, MovieMaker, PowerPoint, iMovie, Videoscribe, PowToons, Scratch animations, YouTube and more. Students were citing resources from Pixabay, Wikipedia, Flickr and either making or using copyright-free music in their presentations. Final products were shared on the classroom wiki, from a YouTube link of their movie or on another web-hosted site. 

I was impressed by the products that they created, but walked away with permission to share because of what I heard in conversations. "This is fun watching everybody's presentations. You get to how everybody was creative." Students asked questions about the content and about the technical aspects of the presentation. "Does PowToons have any online tutorials?" one student asked. 

Let's put some light on Ms Cole for a second. Her conversations often included, "How did you do that?" and "I don't know what that is. Could you teach us later?" The classroom was a learning environment where students were free to evaluate and choose the technology that best helped them demonstrate their content. There was a criteria for 'must use technology', but Ms Cole let them use their experience over the year so far and their natural techno-curiosity to become engaged in their learning at an electric level.

The teacher had a large part in getting students to this point. The project requirements included a storyboard of some kind to help plan their product and were held to a firm deadline. Students were asked by their peers, "How long did that take you?" Each student was able to give a good estimate and explanation. "It took me 6 hours one weekend," said one movie maker, "because I was learning new software. Next time it will take me much less time." The teacher regularly posts assignments in her classroom wiki and students started the year by typing work into the wiki or providing links to their Google Apps content. The technology had become a natural extension to the classroom learning process.

There were hindrances. The classroom is not a one-to-one class and has some of the oldest hardware at the school. Students didn't have training on their online tools and had to problem-solve things. (For example, Google Slides won't let you play a song throughout the presentation, so the student played the song in one tab before starting the presentation in a different tab!) Often seen as a huge disadvantage is that she was working with 4th grade students who had to learn to access the district servers and Google products without email or on-campus technology support. Yes, these were 4th graders! 

The students had become content creators with the encouragement from the teacher. She admits to the students that she is just as much a learner as they are and that the classroom community must learn together and help each other. Ms Cole doesn't claim to be the biggest technology guru in the state, but her students are benefitting from her willingness to try new things and allowing her students the creative opportunities that keep them coming to school enthusiastic about learning. I very much enjoyed these presentations and the student enthusiasm in the room.

What could your next step be to transform your classroom into a more student-centered learning environment? Are you already there? What could you share with peers that could help them in their next steps? 

Register For Summer Technology Training!

The technology training calendar for Summer 2015 is filled with great opportunities for continued education. There are still many open seats and we’d like to get the word out before school is but a memory.  Please pass this one to all of your dearest AISD teacher friends! 

The easiest way to register for these trainings is to access HCP in the AISD Cloud.  Click the Professional Development tab. Type the section# of the class you wish to register for and click search.  Click the name of the Course to find the sections listed along the left margin of the course page. Click the section you want and then click the Register button. See? It’s that easy!  

Please email itsgroup@austinisd.org if you have any questions about the training sessions listed below.

June 16 - Use Web 2.0 for Authentic Student Engagement Session #77365

June 22 - Computer Science- Coding 101 #77118

June 23 - Web Literacy Section #77148

June 24 - Web Literacy  Section #77148

July 7 -    Edmodo  Section #77122

July 9 -   Coding 101  Section #77119

July 15 - Web Literacy  Section# 77149

July 21 - First 12 Days Using Technology Session #77411

July 22 - First 12 Days Using Technology Session #77412

July 22 - Edmodo Training Section # 77123

July 23 - Brainpop Training Section # 77124

July 27 - Use Web2.0 for Authentic Student Engagement Session #77366

July 28 - Getting Google Going In Your Classroom Session #77409

July 29 - Getting Google Going In Your Classroom Session #77410

Aug 4 -   Google Classroom: The Math Classroom Session #77358

Aug 5 -   Google Classroom: The Writing Classroom Session #77407

Public Domain Pictures

Student digital products often contain some form of image.  Many teachers are still using the, "If it is on Google Images, you can use it" method of providing images.  This would be a great time for teaching good digital citizenship!

There are many places you can find free and legal images from the public domain.  With barely any extra effort, students can use these resources to find high quality photography and make the strong effort to follow the rules about using found images online.  Public domain photos can be found in a number of places, but I saw this video today that shared a few great ones as well as how to use them.

Give this a good look and share with your teachers who are doing digital products!


Video: Richard Byrne - School Library Journal
 
What photo sources have you used in class?  Are there tips you would share with a new teacher about how you managed that part of your lesson; free classroom-ID'ed accounts, teacher-collected photo banks, citing the photos used?

iPad Training With Science Teachers

I was asked to bring a special splash of iPad use to a group of Science teachers in AISD this Friday. The big goal for our just-under two hours together was for them to get their hands on the iPad and use it like students would use it in the classroom. Our focus will be to capture images, edit the images on the iPad, and share their work back with the teacher on a shared storage space online. The 'students' would then be able to access that same work using their laptop computer for further review or extended work.

The teachers will be playing the role of students as they try to identify the mystery trees in the school yard, research their findings via QR codes, edit their photos and post them online.  They will be using iPad apps: Skitch, DropBox, Scan, and hopefully PuppetPals.  All of the apps are free.

Teachers will be using this lesson plan outline:
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1ZNefF4UMLmadCKUPoRyc4vYWRHw6bgEzt_kUDXhYZ5U


Flickr.com Creative Commons Photo Credit

Collaborating with Google Docs

Google Docs is gaining wider acceptance as a tool that students can use, but managing the work that students create still has a way to go for many teachers.  One of the biggest strengths of Google Docs is that it is a fantastic collaboration tool for the classroom.

In the video below, I quickly show how students can take any document and share it with other students.  Students can edit the same document simultaneously from anywhere.  Students can see previous revisions of the work and restore an old version if something went terribly wrong during a late night editing session.

Teachers can share with any student by using their studentlogin@stu.austinisd.org account.  Because the district connects the class roster system to Google Groups, the teacher can also share a document with the entire class by using just one class account.  Class account ID's start with the campus number, the teacher's E#, and the class period, followed by the special @crs.austinisd.org subdomain.

Sharing documents is easy and can allow for much less paper flowing across the classroom.

How would you use the Share button with your students? How do you have student collaborate on documents?

Sharing Google Docs With Your Class

Many users quickly learn to share documents via a users email address, but teachers in the Austin ISD Google domain can also very easily share documents with the entire class or single students.

When you are ready to share a document, click the Share button as you normally would in Google Docs. In the 'Add people' box, start typing the name of the person you wish to share the document with.

In the picture above, we typed 'john' and a list of names that contain 'john' automatically populate the share box. It is very important that our users carefully look at the domain after the @ sign before selecting a name.  The subdomain 'stu.austinisd.org' is only for students.  So, johnsmith@austinisd.org would be a teacher while johnsmith@stu.austinisd.org could only be a student.  Before sharing sensitive documents with other teachers, please check the address fully.

Another subdomain that we have is the 'crs.austinisd.org' domain that is reserved for class groups. Students accounts are automatically added into a crs group by the class scheduling system. Teachers do not need to create these group or manage the movement of students between classes or schools.

In this picture, we see that two different addresses have been selected to share this document with.  The first is a class account. These follow the format,  
CampusCode/Teacher'sE#/Period#@crs.austinisd.org .  Like the other addresses, the crs addresses will autopopulate as you type in this box.

You also have the ability to attach a message with this sharing process.  From this same picture, we see a teacher giving editing rights to an entire class and a specific student.  Students can use the Google 'File- Make a copy' menu to make their own editable copy that they can then save to a collection that the teacher has created for all students in that class.  Collections can be shared in the exact same way as above to help manage student document sharing with the teacher.

How would you use document sharing in your classroom?  Share!

Easy Publishing - Posterous.com

One of the hassles of putting your work on a website is learning how to set it up and then having to go to the site to post on it.  There are some great tools out there to minimize the hassles, like the blogs out there that let you update your posts just by sending an email. Well, Posterous.com goes one step farther, er, or easier.

I've had a Posterous account for a number of years and missed one major advantage to Posterous.  The first-time user can start their Posterous account, simply by emailing posterous@posterous.com from the email account they wish to use.  The resulting reply email has already begun the setup process and you are technically a couple of click away from immediate posting!  The video below gives a great demo for Posterous.



Once it is setup, you can simply email your text, picture, document, or video to your Posterous email account and it will get published on your site.  You can still edit and manage the post from your Posterous management page, but you don't have to.

Also, cross-posting is a breeze.  Posterous allows you to connect to your blogs, Twitter, or Facebook accounts and auto post to them from your single Posterous posting. Very easy!

Why Posterous for the classroom? Your main Posterous webpage is organized as a blog. You could have the student of the week send an email at the end (or beginning) of the day to post the day's agenda or assignment list. Since you can post via email, sharing iPad creations via an app's Share via Email options can make sharing iPad products easy without having to setup network printing or filesharing on the iPads.

How would YOU use Posterous in the classroom?  Would love to hear from you.

Paperslide Videos! Easy Way To Use Tech AND Show Learning!

This was one of my favorite Discovery Educator Network (DEN) sessions that I've attended over my many years teaching. The DEN likes to put teachers in the students' shoes sometimes and making Paperslide videos was a fun activity, engaging activity, only took 20 minutes before we were sharing, and was totally centered around a specific teaching objective.


Paper Slide Video: Solids, Liquids and Gasses from Heather Hurley on Vimeo.

Basically, Paperslide Videos are nothing more than sheets of papers that slide under the view of a recording camera. It's all done in one take, with no editing. It could be a nice way to introduce Powerpoint in that you aren't having students just jam 150 words on to a page, but they must rely on visual literacy to depict the lines from the song or their spoken lecture.  There are no faces or names in the video, so the product could go immediately onto the class blog/wiki to be shared with other students and parents. But best of all, the students are rehearsing and creating the pictures, which means in order to teach the objective, they must learn it first.

Dr. Lodge McCammon, (with the Friday Institute out of NC State University),  brings this to teachers quite frequently and he works extensively with the fine people of Discovery Education. He actually uses Paperslide Videos to explain the concept (the top video) and how to make one.

What can you do with Paperslide Videos? Some teachers use them just to capture a teacher or student-directed lecture video.  That is a great first step through the door, but another very engaging product is to make a Paperslide Video to illustrate a song.  Dr. Lodge has a lot of songs already on Discovery Education (search 'lodge' and media type 'song' to find 45 tunes organized by standard/subject/etc) or visit his other blog.

Check out what Mr. C's class did with "On The Numberline" in one class period with his Austin ISD students.

Lastly, excellent teacher in the DEN, Heather Hurley, shared a Paperslide they did on States of Matter that uses one of Lodge's songs! She used a video-sharing site, Vimeo, to share this with her colleagues and parents.  I embedded this video at the top of this post to catch your attention!

Now, the same songs can also be used in a very kinesthetic environment by having students act out the lyrics instead of drawing them.  While not a Paperslide video, the same concepts apply and the time for the product is still maintained within part of a class period.  Check out how students showed the Order of Operations in this music video.

Create your own Paperslide Videos!!   Leave a comment below with a link to one your class made. We'd love to see it.  

Taking Pictures in the Classroom! pt 3

In this last part of the series, I wanted to share some different avenues and alternatives for sharing instructional photography with students in the classroom. There is no way to cover every option, so this will hopefully open the door for greater discussion and sharing.

First off, we've discussed taking photos and getting them onto a local network. What can we do with those photos? One uniform tool that all Macs and Windows computers have in AISD is MS Powerpoint. Students can access the teacher's folder containing the photos and insert a photo onto a Powerpoint slide.  A simple criteria could be to point out 4 concepts from the lesson by drawing a line arrow to them, adding text that describes them, and saving it back to the server. Slides could be combined into one class presentation or students can take turns adding a new slide to the teacher's presentation.  Either way, the software is already on the computer, the draw tools are simple, and the students have a quick and easy way to demonstrate comprehension of the instructional goals that day.

The other computer-based idea that is often over-looked is the use of the Comic Life application available on all Mac and Windows computers. (Granted, you have have to install it, but both students and teachers have the ability to do that through district network-install tools. Ask your campus technology leadership for more information about that.)  Comic Life will access your network-saved photos and let you create graphic documents that use text, engaging graphics, and your photos to tell a story or demonstrate a point. Comic Life also can access your webcam and take the pictures directly from the camera into your Comic.

The internet includes many sites that allow you to upload something to it, edit the media, and then either save it back to your computer or publish it for public viewing.  These interactive sites make up much of the Web2.0 environment. (Web1.0 was considered the mostly access-and-view web and less interactive.) The benefit to most Web2.0 sites is that they are platform independent. I should be able to do the same thing on that site regardless of the type of computer I am using. (The recent exceptions are mobile devices that don't have Adobe Flash capabilities.)

One such Web2.0 site that works well for classroom photography is Picnik.com. Students can simply go to the site, upload a picture from their computer, edit it with filters/stickers/text/etc, and then save it back to their computer.  The great thing about Picnik is that it requires no login or account to be created. Simply upload, edit, and save back to your computer.  The graphic tools are easy to use and the creative aspects are truly engaging.

A great site for sharing photos is Posterous.com, now called Posterous Spaces. This site is great for sharing and discussing photos, docs, or other media with a class. The recent update to their services gives you a greater ability to share only with certain people, even people who don't have a Posterous Spaces account. Cell phone users can share a photo to the class site by emailing the photo and a thought-provoking comment to your Posterous email account and it's instantly up for classroom discussion.

Mobile devices also present some interesting options for using photography during instruction. There are apps for both Android and iOS that allow you to take a picture, edit and then share it with others.  I presented one such app, PhotoPad for iOS, during a recent Intel Webinar on Mobile Apps in the Classroom. (The teacher discussion can be found online!) PhotoPad gets extra credit from me because it uses the photos on the iPad, lets you draw on them, and then I could email the photo out to be shared. Combining that with Posterous makes graphic representations of classroom instruction easily shared with others for discussion. (Here's a silly example.)

This list could go on for days!  I know there will be future posts about the classroom webcam used with instruction, but this just gets us started.

Do you have experience using the camera during classroom instruction? What camera did you use? What software or website did you find helpful?

Taking Pictures in the Classroom! pt 1

One of my favorite tools in the classroom is the camera.  Whether it is a document camera, digital camera or camera phone, the ability to capture learning as it happens makes it possible to draw on that experience any number of times afterward.  In AISD, most classrooms have multiple avenues to take advantage of cameras during instruction.

Dude, Where's My Camera? For starters, nearly every classroom has a digital camera since every classroom has a teacher with a laptop. District-issued teacher laptops all have webcams above the monitor. Every campus also has quite a large number of student netbooks that also have webcams installed.

One of my favorite classroom instruments is the normal digital camera. I'm a fan of the Canon Elph Powershots because of the connecting to almost any computer without adding drivers and because of the high quality still and video shots you can get for not too much money.  Many teachers in AISD have access to a Canon digital camera, but forget that it also takes video!

While we are covering small and relatively inexpensive devices, there has been a growth in the desire for smart-devices in the classroom. More classrooms have camera-enabled iPod Touches, iPads, and a few Android tablets as well.

Don't forget the other camera in almost every room, the cell phone camera! It's easy to whip that out and take a quick photo or video of an instructional sample that you wish to share. More schools across the country are starting to relax the 'no cell phone' rules for students (a , b). Instead of banning them because they could be misused, they are putting them into instructional practice and modeling appropriate phone behavior for students.  Students are using phones to complete quick online quizzes, post questions to the class website, perform quick internet research, or even share photographed examples of the curricular concept that day.

The use of document cameras in the classroom is finally starting to mature from the 'digital overhead' use to being a live demonstration and media capture tool. Almost two-thirds of classrooms in all of our schools have doc cams already attached to a projector.  Many other schools have realized the instructional use and purchased more with their own budgets. The Lumens D265C has been the district standard since the creation of the Innovation Stations, but just about every document camera on the market now provides you with the ability to capture still or video images.


What is your favorite classroom camera resource?
The next post in this series will look at software that can be used to get photos from camera to computer.
Photo credit:  http://www.dvguru.com/media/2005/12/Cell_Phone_Camera.jpg

Differentiated Instruction

Dennis Grice is an award-winning educator out of Southern California who champions technology for the classroom. He shared a blog post recently about differentiated instruction, providing a different view of how we can see our students AND teachers. It's worth the time to read it here at the beginning of the year.

As educators, we have to remember that our students learn in many different ways and we are tasked with meeting those needs all year. Technology use in the classroom must also bear the weight of differentiation since not all of our students (or teachers) have the same level of technology experience.  It is incumbent upon us to not avoid authentic opportunities for technology integration because all of our students won't be fearless with the new concept, but we can use our junior Steve Jobs in the classroom to help us scaffold a lesson so we can have that experience.

How can we provide a range of technology instruction in the classroom?

• Pre-teach a small group of your techno-fearless students a particular skill that will be used during a lesson. They can help provide leadership in small groups when you can't be everywhere at once.
• Use Science-lab procedures when working in small groups. Assign four different roles in the group that rotate for the next project.  Techno-reluctant students can observe and learn skills while still being an active part of the project.
• Just as we sometimes provide a rich assortment of student product materials for certain lessons, we can provide the opportunity for students to use technology tools that meet their capacity for showing excellence.  Some students may just be showing minimal proficiency with MS Word document creation while another may use Publisher to show the same lesson outcome.  Teacher-provided photo banks can help beginners focus on the content rather than the search for the perfect photo online, while other student may have the opportunity to take their original photos for the same exercise. 
• An beginning-level user may start a project with a teacher-provided template while a student who has a deeper understanding may be able to create their own document from scratch with more freedom.

There are just a few ideas. What ways have you found to provide multiple levels of instruction using technology in your class?   What tools do you think provide a good opportunity to differentiate during a particular lesson?

We look forward to continuing this discussion this year.