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“Tell It! Tag It! Share It!” exhorted the #TxEdTuesday Twitter chat organizers. The goal? To capture and share what great things are happening in Texas K-12 public schools. Share it with whom? Legislators at the Texas Capitol Building in Austin, Texas, of course! Your motivation, however, may be a little more simple. Your desire may be simply to celebrate the awesome teaching and learning happening in your classroom, your school, and/or your district. In this blog entry, let’s explore three ways to achieve the mission of #TxEdTuesday with free tools you have on your mobile phone.
Note: This is another in an ongoing series on productivity tools for leaders and do-ers. Check back often to see more!
A Framework for Showcasing Success in Schools
Let’s take a look at the framework suggested by #TxEdTuesday and adapt it for our use in our own school or organization.
- TELL IT
- See: Tell the great things happening in your schools. Use pictures and videos.
- Adapt: Use pictures, video, and audio you capture via interviews, snapshots, and vidcasts with students and teachers.
- TAG IT
- See: Tag your TX reps and senators. Use #TxEdTuesday
- Adapt: Use the school hashtag when tweeting/Facebooking, and share that hashtag on all print publications, including t-shirts and baseball caps. Share the school hashtag at PTA meetings. Help people see the hashtag and understand they don’t need a Twitter account in order to follow it.
- SHARE IT
- See: Re-tweet and share stories from other great public schools.
- Adapt: Encourage all campus staff, news organizations (in tandem with your district public relations team) to re-share tweets with the hashtag. Use Tweetdeck to quickly schedule tweets throughout the day featuring great content!
We can easily adapt this model for use in our schools. Even better, students, parents, and teachers can adapt the model. Let’s explore how.
#1 – Tell It!
Remember show-and-tell in school? I do. I was always a bit nervous about what to share with others in front of the class. The pressure of the audience kept my presentations short and to the point. Brevity in virtual show-and-tell efforts remains a welcome guideline to keep in mind. Here are some tips:
- Use your mobile phone’s camera app to capture pictures and video clips. You probably use this already for personal stuff; take advantage of the native camera app for school success, too. If you want more sophisticated tools, read this blog entry featuring iOS and Android apps with photo tips.
- Use Shadow Puppet EDU (iOS) or StoryMaker 2 (Android) to arrange your photos and videos. These apps allows you to add audio narration and background music, if you want. Keep it peppy and upbeat.
- Set up a free blog like Dr. Tim Tyson did for Mabry Middle School that allows you to create an archive of all the great stories you’re sharing.
- Create infographics using free, web-based tools featuring your school. Or ask students to create them!
Want to get more sophisticated? Consider one of these digital storytelling apps!
#2 – Tag It!
Go global with your sharing, and your school community will get the message. Aim just for your community, and you will certainly go unheard and unseen. And that would be a shame given the great things students and staff are about. Nothing is so exciting as seeing an international or national retweet of something your students are doing. In addition to inviting others to share using the campus hashtag, here are some quick tips:
- Keep your hashtag short and to the point. Use Twitter Search to make sure your hashtag hasn’t been used by others.
- Keep tweets brief: “Check out my students’ writing! #mycampusname” with a picture of student writing.
- Check out the Participate.com chat hashtags and add one or two that will illustrate points. If your students are engaged in #coding or #STEM, then be sure to add the pound symbol (#) in front of those words.
#3 – Share It!
“I have other things to do every day. I just don’t have time to hunt down and showcase what students and staff are doing!” Be careful you don’t fall into the “I don’t have time!” trap and despair. Seeking and showcasing spectacular student work isn’t just your mission. Every staff member, student, and parent is responsible. Invite them to join you. Model appropriate hashtag usage. Consider these tips:
- Take pictures throughout the day or week, then arrange them into a slideshow with music (easy to do with ShadowPuppet EDU on iOS). This will be shared as a video.
- When including videos, post them to your school’s YouTube channel (use YouTube Capture app on iOS to make that easy), a Seesaw class blog, or Shadow Puppet EDU site if possible.
- Only have time once a week? Take pictures from the previous week, then use Tweetdeck to schedule them in advance, one or two per day. This can eliminate the pressure of always being “on” with social media.
Showcase Your School
In his book, Digital Leadership, Eric Scheninger shares the story of Dr. Spike Cook. Dr. Cook moved from printed newsletters sent home several times a week to a regularly-updated online blog. Blog entries featured images, video, text, and more. These blog entries make it easy to share content and create a digital archive organized in reverse chronological order. You need only update the blog once a week, but capturing and showcasing amazing learning at your school, well, that’s a rewarding venture for leaders and do-ers!
Need help showcasing your school’s work? Ask a TCEA Director of Professional Development to help you get started! Reach out to Dr. Bruce Ellis (@drbruceellis or via email to bellis@tcea.org) or fill out a logistics form.
Find Out More
Want to learn other ways to save time and be more productive at work? Attend the Productivity Tools for Administrators on Thursday, June 15, 2017 in Austin. The one-day learning experience is guaranteed to provide you a wealth of hands-on activities to ensure you walk away with the tips and techniques you need to do more in less time. Register here.
that the option to access the Google Play Store on your Chromebook is enabled in the dashboard. You can check your Chromebook by going to Settings. Scroll down until you see the Google Play Store (beta) section. If the option is greyed out, then you’ll need to bake a batch of cookies to take to the domain administrator and ask if they can enable the feature. (Giving cookies increases the chances of having this feature enabled by 64 percent.) If you log in with your personal Google account on the Chromebook, you’ll notice that it is already enabled. But you do NOT want to use your personal account with your students and other teachers. For safety reasons, you always want to use your district account, even if that means bribing the domain administrator or waiting a few days for it to be enabled. 
Once the option to enable is made available, you’ll be able to enable it in Settings and manage Android preferences (similar to if you were setting Android preferences on an Android phone or tablet).
Yippee! You have it enabled. So where it it? Click on the Launcher icon which, by default, is the icon on the bottom left on the shelf. You will now see the Play Store (beta) icon. This beta Play Store is currently a stipped down version of the Play Store you would see if you accessed it through the browser. And yes, you will need to use the beta Play Store to install Android apps. When accessing the store via the browser, your Chromebook will not be an option in the dropdown list of compatible devices. Once you click on the beta store, you will recognize the various categories to help you narrow down what type of app you are looking for. If the developers have not completely finished updating the app in question, it may be available as a beta version. When I spot checked several of the Android apps I have on my phone, almost all were available and ready in the Play Store. You might even find that some app developers have made their product available as a Chrome app (that you install via the Web Store) and an Android app (that you install via the beta Play Store). Either way, once installed, they will appear in your launcher window.
Autodesk SketchBook – Whether it is illustrating, diagramming, or sketchnoting, you’ll find this to be a simple app to use. When done, save the image to your Chromebook.
Trello – More than just a to-do list app, Trello can help you keep track of projects. You can work alone or collaboratively with classmates to keep track of project-based learning activities.
Trading Cards – This isn’t your traditional trading card maker. Templates provided include fictional person, real person, fictional place, real place, object, event, and vocabulary. Once you enter information on the front and back of the card, you can share it as a photo to your photo gallery.
Pic Collage – Share your message with pictures! Pic Collage lets you start by selecting your photos and then adding them to a grid with templates (start with a themed background) or freestyle (begin with a blank slate and add to it). You can also easily add text and search for photos on the internet to add to your collage.
Diamante Poem – This type of poem is in the shape of a diamond. Each line uses specific types of words (adjectives, -ing words, etc.). What makes it especially nice is that it doesn’t have to rhyme. This app has some examples to illustrate how to write a diamante poem, and it leads you through creating your poem step by step. When you’re finished, you can save the poem as an image to your photo gallery. 
Acrostic Poem – Think of a word and then write a word or phrase for each letter in the word. This app will lead you through creating an acrostic poem and even helps you brainstorm words. Acrostic poems are often used when students write their name vertically and then write out adjectives going across that describe them, but the uses are endless. 
Haiku Poem – This app makes writing this Japanese-style poetry super simple. Walking you through the steps of brainstorming words and phrases and making note of the syllables, you’ll find that constructing one is easy and can be very profound. 
Poems By Heart from Penguin Classics – This well-crafted app introduces students to a wide variety of poetry. Even without the premium downloads, the free ones supplied each come with audio that highlights the lines as the poem is read with inflection. Students can record themselves reading the poem and even earn poetry points by memorizing them. 
POETRY from The Poetry Foundation – Let students encounter a wide variety of poetry in this app. They can discover titles by spinning the category wheels (emotions and events) or by searching for a specific author in the index. Poems that have audio are indicated with a small speaker icon, great for extra support for struggling readers/writers as well as students who may benefit from hearing it read aloud. 
