12 Virtual Field Trips You Don't Want To Miss! – Create-abilities Schools are so lucky these days. We have millions of dollars to use, para-educators in every classroom, the most up to date technology and full parent support. Wait....I'm being told that none of what I just typed is true. Hmmm... so now what? If you were like my school, money was tight, parental support was limited, and technology was a foreign word. Because of tight funds and the inability to fly my students across the country to view some of the things we learn about, I really liked the idea of virtual field trips. The 7 Wonders of the World: panoramic views that you can click and drag for 360 degree views. Google Art Collections: Google has taken 1,000's of art pieces from 17 museums around the world and compiled them into one place. Google Sky: A really fun one! Smithsonian: Museum of Natural History: I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the Smithsonian Museums! Inside the White House: A fun way to look inside the White House. The First Thanksgiving by Scholastic: A timely one for this time of year.
5 TCEA Presentations You Need to See! 5 TCEA Presentations You Need to See! I have five TCEA Presentations that I want to share with you this week! I have had the privilege of presenting at many conferences over the last several years. I enjoy connecting with educators face-to-face and sharing ideas. Earlier this month, I presented at the TCEA convention. I shared five presentations at TCEA this year, and they are loaded with ideas, tips, tricks, freebies and more, and I have embedded each one of my presentations on this page for you. – Shake Up Learning with Google Keep – 18 Challenges for Teachers in 2018 – 10+ Things You Didn’t Know Google Slides Could Do! – Dynamic Learning with G Suite – Go BEYOND with Dynamic Learning Did you know I share a lot of my presentations on Shake Up Learning? I know it is not quite the same as being there in person, but I try to make my slides so that anyone can get the gist and grab a few ideas. Don’t miss out on all the other TCEA resources and ideas shared. 18 Challenges for Teachers in 2018
Know Students Better: 17 Tools for Formative Assessment — Learning in Hand When teachers know their students well, they can build strong connections that lead to better learning. Knowing students’ interests, strengths, and weaknesses help teachers tailor learning experiences for their students. Formative assessment involves the teacher collecting information about what students know, don’t know, and want to learn. This information takes many forms, including observations, exit tickets, discussions, games, and quizzes. These kinds of informal assessments can also help teachers get to know their students as learners and as people. There is a very wide variety of digital formative assessment tools that can be used for free (often charging for extra features). One of the biggest advantages to using these kinds of tools is that they give every student in a class a voice.
8 Things To Look For In Today's Classroom - 8 Things To Look For In Today’s Classroom by TeachThought Staff What are the kinds of things you should look for in today’s classroom? The common response often begins and ends with technology, but as we’ve discussed often, it’s not about the technology. We’ve added some related tools or opportunities for further reading to each item. 1. Students should learn from others and then share their learning. See also: 13 Different Tools To Help Students Find Their Voice 2. Strength-based learning. 3. Everyone (teachers, administrators, students) should write about and reflect on what is being learned. See also: Helping Students Reflect On Their Learning 4. Example: Build a hovercraft from a YouTube video. 5. Ask questions and challenge what you see. See also: 25 Resources For Critical Thinking 6. Give students tough challenges and let them find innovative solutions. See also: A Diagram Of 21st Century Pedagogy 7. Important that students know how to do this. 8. 8 Things To Look For In Today’s Classroom
Push My Thinking: TPACK or SAMR or ? – ED TECH COACHING **Update 4/26/14: I LOVE the responses to this post; they made me consider a lot of different ways of looking at TPACK and SAMR, and really stretched my thinking. If you read this post, also read the comments- and check out the links that some people have included!I’m going to preface this post by saying that I think both TPACK and SAMR are incredibly useful frameworks- and I use them a lot in my work with education technology. While I don’t want to completely discount either framework in this post, I do want to start a discussion- and explain why I am currently not finding them completely effective in my work with teachers. TPACK looks at the collaboration between technology, pedagogy, and content and argues that teachers need knowledge of all three. Now, for SAMR. The approach that I think is more effective with teachers is: “you’re trying to do Y- and here’s how X can make you more efficient or effective (through increased access, better organization, more automation, etc.)”.
Top Tips, Tools, and Techniques for Easy Formative Assessment A secret to great teaching is to understand what students know. I’ve had times when one or two students begged me to move on because what I was teaching was “so easy” or they were “bored. When I did, I would discover that the rest of the class did not master the material and I had moved on too quickly! We all struggle to know what students know “in the moment” so we can adjust our teaching. Formative assessment gives us the ability to quiz every single student in the class. I would go so far to say that formative assessment is one of the greatest gifts of education technology to the classroom. My question is why more teachers don’t use these tools. Here’s how I saved time using these tools. Let’s dive deeper into formative assessment in today’s show! Easy Grading Gradecam – Today’s Sponsor Formative assessment options can save you time. If you visit Gradecam from this blog post, you can get a 60-day free trial. Show Notes: What is formative assessment? Who is Tony Vincent?
Control Alt Achieve: 4 Fun Literacy Activities with Google Docs Google Docs is a great word processor, but is much more than just that. Although we can certainly use it to type up a report, take notes, or write a story, we can also get creative with the features and functions built into the program to make some fun learning activities. Recently I did a video training webinar where I took a look at four creative ways to use regular Google Docs features in new fun ways to practice and develop literacy skills. The highlighting tool for the activity "Improve Reading Comprehension with Google Docs Black Out"The special characters tool for the activity "Emoji Learning Activities with Google Docs"The word count tool for the activity "Have Students Write Better by Writing Less with Google Docs"The header tool and hyperlink tool for the activity "Choose Your Own Adventure Stories with Google Docs" See below for the full 1-hour training video, as well as resources, ideas, and templates for each of the four activities.Training Video (1 hour)
8 Examples of Transforming Lessons Through the SAMR Cycle The SAMR Model for integrating technology into teaching, developed by Dr. Ruben Puentedura, has gained a good deal of exposure in recent years. “SAMR” is an acronym that stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition. The SAMR model provides a technique for moving through degrees of technology adoption to find more meaningful uses of technology in teaching and move away from simply using “tech for tech’s sake”. We recently discussed the SAMR model during an Academic Technology Work Group meeting at The College of Westchester. Following are 8 examples of the SAMR process, each taking an example of a typical classroom exercise that does not use technology and walking it through each phase of SAMR. The goal of this exercise was to help me (and readers) better understand the SAMR model, and to really see how lessons and assessments can be transformed while considering the benefits of evolving them through these stages. Lesson: Writing a Short Paper Lesson: Art/Painting
Examples of Formative Assessment When incorporated into classroom practice, the formative assessment process provides information needed to adjust teaching and learning while they are still happening. The process serves as practice for the student and a check for understanding during the learning process. The formative assessment process guides teachers in making decisions about future instruction. Here are a few examples that may be used in the classroom during the formative assessment process to collect evidence of student learning. Observations Questioning Discussion Exit/Admit Slips Learning/Response Logs Graphic Organizers Peer/Self Assessments Practice Presentations Visual Representations Kinesthetic Assessments Individual Whiteboards Laundry Day Four Corners Constructive Quizzes Think Pair Share Appointment Clock eHow: Types of Formative Assessment
A Big List of 50 Must-Try Online Teaching Tools Having a database of useful online teaching tools is a great practice for every teacher. After all, you can’t do everything on your own and there are many developers out there who want to help you. The tools below were made for educators—and in many cases by educators—to help them with many aspects of classroom teaching. Now we bring them to you. 8 Teaching Tools for Lesson Planning Lesson planning can be tough, so why not make it easier? 10 Teaching Tools for Assessment Effective assessment means a student has a task or activity that gives them the chance to receive quality feedback from themselves, peers or the teacher to enhance and support their learning. 6 Teaching Tools for Classroom Gaming Gaming in the classroom is a popular practice with many a modern teacher. 8 Teaching Tools for Coding STEM learning is really starting to cement its place in education, and with good reason. 9 Teaching Tools for Flipped Learning 9 Teaching Tools for Collaboration
making SAMR work for us – …have laptop, will travel Technology, when integrated into the curriculum, revolutionizes the learning process. Teachers who recognize computers as problem-solving tools change the way they teach. They move from a behavioral approach to a more constructivist approach.From edutopia.org The Background Info: I think to fully understand some of the things that I will talk about in this post, I need to give you a quick rundown of the current setup we have going at my school. This year our school is going through a WASC accredidation and, if you have ever been part of any sort of accredidation process, you know how time-intesive they can be. Integration: Now that you have a better understanding of where my school is at and where we are going, I can dive into my vision for technology integration and how I think it can work for my (future) classroom and the classrooms all around my school. I decided to try a new approach, and I hope I have better success with this one. Assessment: Are students engaged?
Teaching Content Curation and 20 Resources to Help You Do It - InformED At St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, Dr. Corinne Weisgerber is teaching a class on social and interactive media. In addition to building a Personal Learning Network of online mentors and experts they can use to supplement their Google searches, her students are required to “curate” the information they gather for projects the same way a museum curator would curate an art exhibit. “I told them they would need to comb through the resources received through their PLN to discover the significant and relevant, bundle those ideas together, contextualise them for their audience, repackage them and share them through a social media platform,” says Weisgerber. “In essence, I tasked students with creating the ultimate resource on a particular topic and to share it with the world.” Weisgerber also mentioned that the project has been, without a doubt, one of her most rewarding to grade. It also provides us with a potential way to measure creativity. But Weisgerber is ahead of the curve.
Evaluating Technology Use in the Classroom Evaluating the use of technology in a classroom environment is not something most administrators are trained to do. It is easy to walk into a classroom and see that every student is using a computer, but how do you really assess if and what type of learning is taking place? In the past, I have had administrators tell me “I walked into the teacher’s room and all the students were on laptops.” As though just the site of students working on laptops meant they were engaged in the learning process. I have been trying to wrap my head around a simple way for administrators to evaluate the use of technology in the classroom (a thank you to Dennis Harter who got me thinking about this). When most administrators evaluate teachers during the evaluation process, they have some sort of check sheet they are working from either mental or as part of a school’s evaluation process. I remembered a Marc Prensky article in Edutopia in which he talks about the typical process of technology adoption: