A new year brings lots of new opportunities for educators to renew their passion for education. There are some great local opportunities for teachers to meet with other dedicated educators, get some new ideas for the classroom, and add some inspiration back into their work day.
Below is a list of local (to Northern California) conferences that I have attended in the past, or will be attending/presenting at this year. Many of these conferences included workshops on how to integrate technology into your curriculum (which is a very important part of CCSS). There are beginner to advanced sessions on using technology, so don't be afraid if you are just starting to look into how to integrate tech into your teaching. There are also many workshops about great teaching and learning, that can be used with or without technology.
Learn how to integrate Google Apps for Education in your classes. I attended the one this past summer at Sequoia High School and it was great! There are a lot of session choices to attend.
CUE conferences and great... you get to learn about different ways to integrate technology into your class, breakfast and lunch is included, and the day always ends with a great raffle.
This is a free conference where the purpose is for you to play with different technologies or apps so that you are comfortable using them in your classes. (Playdate stands for People Learning and Asking Y: Digital Age Teacher Exploration.)
CUE Rockstar camps are a lot of fun. Each session is two hours long, so you really get a chance to try out what you are learning with the support of the faculty. There are long breakfasts and lunches where you get to network and continue you learning with the other participants. The locations of the camps allow you to explore some great areas of California and are an extra bonus "vacation". Here is a blog post I wrote when I attended a Rockstar Camp this summer. And here is another one written by the creator of the Rockstar Camps.
This is another free event where the educators develop the schedule for the day in the morning. It is a great way to meet other passionate educators and discuss topics that interest you.
Today I got to experience CUE Rockstar from a different perspective. Kevin Brookhouser invited me to present with him in his Class Polling without Clickers session. I have been using Socrative this school year in both my biology and AVID classes for quizzes, reviews, and for quick checks for understanding. I also shared another tool, Infuse Learning, which is similar to Socrative, but allows the students to write/draw answers. In the two sessions, I got to share what I had learned and done, but I also learned quite a bit from Kevin and the other participants as we discussed ways we would use the tools with our students. To start the session, Kevin told a story which demonstrated how people can have biases about information and what they know when others share or provide information. In the classroom, this happens all the time when students are asked questions. Many times one student raises their hand, and that student provides the correct answer. Everyone else thinks, "oh, yeah, that's what I thought", when they didn't really know the answer. Maybe they would have gotten to that answer, but didn't get a chance to process it or really decide on the answer themselves. That is where clickers come in. Clickers allow all students to have their own voice. But clickers are expensive, and really can only allow students to answer multiple choice or true false answers. As technology is advancing, and smart phones are getting more affordable, many students now bring smart phones or other mobile devices, like iPods, to class. These devices can be used as clickers, with the right website or apps. Poll Everywhere Kevin shared how he uses Poll Everywhere and Google Forms to poll his students. Poll Everywhere allows teachers to ask one question at a time. They can be multiple choice or short answers. The answers can be shown on the board in real time, and the multiple choice answers are shown in a bar graph. Students can text or tweet in answers, or they can use an internet browser to respond. Kevin gave examples of using Poll Everywhere to answer questions as he went over a poem and the concept of paradox. He also shared how he had used it for students to write sentences using vocabulary words. All the sentences show up on the screen and students can discuss if they are correct or why they wrote them in that way. I definitely will use this ideas as my AVID students study their SAT vocabulary or when my biology students practice writing arguments and claims from their readings. Google Forms Next, Kevin showed us a great example of using google forms. He created a peer grading rubric where students fill out the form for each presenter as they practice their presentations. They provide feedback so their peers can make improvements before their final speech. I have used a similar form for grading a class project, but I love having the students help their peers by giving suggestions on how they can improve their presentation. Something that I shared is how I took the info that the students entered in the form, which is really hard to read in the spreadsheet, and I organized it by mail merging the data into a document. I made a google doc that looked like a written out grading rubric, and then used the Autocrat script take the spreadsheet data and put it in the right spots on the document. Autocrat then emails out the doc to the students so they get that feedback. Socrative Next, I shared Socrative and Infuse Learning. I have been using Socrative with my class for quick reviews and small quizzes on and off last school year. I have written a post about it where you can learn how to use it. Today, when sharing the site/app, I learned something new that I am very excited about.
When giving students a Short Answer - Single Question Activity, a teacher will ask students some sort of question. It could be a comparison of mitosis and meiosis, a thesis statement for an essay prompt, or some other higher level question. Students answers will show up anonymously on the teacher's screen. This can be projected out to the class.
After all of the answers are up, the teacher can have the students discuss why they chose their answer and try to persuade the others that their answer is correct. This would be a great way for students to teach each other the content.
Then you can choose to have the students vote on the answer again to show what they now believe is the correct answer. Hopefully you will see more correct answers. This is what it looks like after they vote.
I think that this will be a great way to have students discuss what they know and it will provide them a way to have a structured academic conversation where higher level thinking will take place. Infuse Learning Next, I shared Infuse Learning. I hadn't used this in class with my students yet - I didn't want to try out too many tech tools at once, and Socrative was working for us. The big different with Infuse Learning is that students can draw answers. This would be awesome for math problems, science drawings, imagery in English classes, etc. We learned that it was tough to draw using a laptop, but those on tablets had an easier time. Some comparisons of Socrative and Infuse Learning, is Infuse Learning does not have an app, it is internet based. On a mobile device, it seemed to work best using the Chrome Browser. Also, in Socrative, teachers can name their room number, I named my "Hero". In Infuse Learning, you can't name the room number, and it changes each time you use the website. That might be confusing for the students. On the right are some sample drawings that the participants drew using Infuse Learning. I think that this will be a great tool in my iPad classroom. Shared Resources After we demoed the resources the participants had time to play with the different polling systems. They were tasked with creating a lesson that used one of the polls. Then there was a lesson sharing time at the end of the session. All the teachers had great and creative ideas on how they would use these tools. During the sessions, we had a lot of great conversations and I learned about some other resources and tools. One was Tag Crowd. Tag crowd creates a wordle type image - but the words are all in straight lines instead of bunched up together. I think this would be much easier for English Learners or students with reading difficulties to look at. I also learned about Canned Response - a Gmail lab where you can create canned response emails. The example shared was an email to send to students in response to an email they sent you telling you that they are sick. I think that will really help save some time. We also talked about Google Voice and how French students recorded conversations that were sent to the teacher's voicemail to listen to later. This will make the process of recording themselves much easier, because it automatically gets sent. If using other apps, students must save it, then cut/paste and email the link to the teacher.
Thank You The last three days have been a gold mine of resources, tools, and conversations with great educators to add to my PLN. I have learned so much and have made many good connections with people who are so willing to share and support other educators. All of the presenters went above and beyond. During the morning breakfast time and lunch they always shared what they knew. They had mini sessions at lunch to get educators on twitter, shared how to take good mobile device photos, how to create google forms, or gave a minecraft introduction. And they had spent the time to prep and prepare for amazing sessions. Thank you so much for a great three days. I will definitely be back next year and hope to convince others at my school site to attend with me. (I tried unsuccessfully this year.) And thank you so much Kevin for inviting me to present with you. It was a great experience and I learned a lot today from you and the participants in the two sessions. I am sad CUE Rockstar is over, but I have something to look forward to for next summer! If you are reading this, make sure you sign up for CUE Rockstar Tahoe next year. :)
Today was another great day at the CUE Rockstar Conference. I am exhausted! And a little afraid.... Today is only day two of a full ten straight days of PD! What was I thinking? I just couldn't turn down CUE Rockstar, then the GAFE Summit at Sequoia HS (in my district), a presummit workshop, and three days at the Academy of Sciences learning about NGSS. I have been looking forward to these workshops all summer. But I know I will definitely need a break afterwards. Song Parodies The first session I chose today was Diane Main'sGarageBand Karaoke: Song and Video Parodies to Spice Up Your Teaching. I have always been pretty shy, am not comfortable in front of a crowd, and have a terrible fear of singing. So you are probably wondering why on Earth I would choose this workshop. I assign a project each December where my students create "Biology Carols" to review for their final exams. Students choose a holiday song and re-write the lyrics to teach one of the different standards we have gone over that semester. I collect all the songs and put them in a song book for my students. This is a homework assignment, but in class, on one of our review days, students read through each of the songs. They must fix any errors in the content and add any extra information in the margins that was not included. It is a fun way for the students to review and gets them in the holiday spirit. I have offered extra credit to any students who record the song. I have never had any way for the students to do this before in my class. Now that I have a class set of iPads, my students can actually record their biology carols. I wanted to learn how to use Garage Band and how to actually create the parody. Diane has some great instructions on her webpage and some fun examples. We went over all the steps to creating a parody, from choosing a song and topic, writing the parody, to recording it in GarageBand, to adding in a "video" to go with the song. There were four people in the class and we chose to work together to create one song. Mary Berelson, a 1st grade teacher, wanted to teach her students about bees. It was fun coming up with a song and lyrics - we chose the John Denver song Annie's Song. When writing our lyrics, we used a website called Word Hippo to help us find words that rhyme, are similar, opposite, etc. Thanks Jen Roberts for sharing this cool website with the class. Here is our final song and our lyrics:
Update 7/11/13: Mary created a powerpoint to go with the song to make it a music video. I have added it here. Thanks Mary!
The class was a lot of fun, I enjoyed the process. I'm still not a fan of singing... but I learned how to go through the whole process and use Garage Band. My next step is to compare the iOS version of Garage Band to the Mac Version which we used in class. I also need to see how to get the karaoke background songs onto the iPads, when the students aren't able to purchase songs on the school's iPads. I am excited to have a tool to allow my students to record their Biology Carols.
Interactive Flip Videos For my second workshop, I went to Kevin Brookhouser'sFlip Your Classroom with Presentations, Screencasts, and Interactive You Tube Videos. I have been flipping my classroom for a year and was very intrigued on how to make the videos interactive. I had watched the sample videos on the session's webpage and knew I had to learn how to do this. Kevin showed us a bunch of examples of interactive flipped You Tube videos and then led us through making an example. (English teachers, you will love his grammar videos!) There were two ways we could do this - the video could include the teaching of content and then there would be a quiz at the end OR the video could start with a question and if a student answers it incorrectly, they would get a review of the content We chose to start out with the question first. We created two google presentations, the first included the question and the correct answer. The second presentation included the wrong answer, an explanation of the content, and then try again. We quickly recorded two screencasts, one for each presentation, using quicktime and uploaded both of them to You Tube. We then added in annotations. We used the spotlight to box in our answer choices where the student would click, and linked it to the right spot in the right video. I worked with Karen Wessel and we created a video quizzing students about mitochondria and chloroplasts. We plan to use this as a fun review after we teach our students about cell organelles. Here is our video:
**Note: YouTube was being a little uncooperative today - hopefully all the spotlight links are working correctly now. They were a little "jumpy" this afternoon.
I love how the YouTube annotations allows the flipped videos to really be interactive. The students had to really think during the videos and couldn't just passively watch them. I definitely want to use this in my class this year. One small problem... when these annotated videos are viewed on an iPad, the annotations don't work. :( Since I am planning on having my students watch these videos during class time, as I am flipping using the asynchronous flip mastery model, my students won't be able to watch these interactive videos on the iPads. Hopefully YouTube will make some changes so that the annotations will work on mobile devices.
Dinner Not officially a session... but I was able to have dinner with three great educators - Josh Harris, Scott McMillan, and Lisa McMillan. We talked about what we have learned in our different sessions, shared technology we used in our classes, and just had a great time getting to know each other. I have learned a lot from not just the presenters, but from conversations with all the participants in the sessions, people sitting at the same table at lunch, and from people walking through the hall. Thank you everyone for being so willing to share. I love going to conferences where the educators truly want to be there and share the same views on education as I do - where student learning comes first.
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