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reflection

The First Month of School

by Diana Benner August 21, 2024

written by Diana Benner

The first month of school is a critical time for both teachers and students. It’s a time for establishing routines, building relationships, and setting the tone for the rest of the year. Whether you’re a seasoned educator or a new teacher, the first month lays the foundation for a successful school year. Here are some tips to keep in mind during these first few weeks.

Build Strong Relationships

The first month is all about getting to know your students and letting them get to know you. Building strong relationships is key to creating a positive classroom environment where students feel valued and respected. Take time to learn about your students’ interests, strengths, and challenges. Use icebreakers like “Two Truths and a Lie” or “Human Bingo” to break the ice.

For older students, try a “Speed Friending” activity to help them learn more about each other. To do this, have students stand in two lines facing each other, or sit across from each other. Each student should face another student. Ask questions that can help students learn more about each other. For example, you could ask students, If they could go anywhere in the world, where would they go? After asking a question, allow each pair of students to take turns answering.

Establish Clear Routines and Expectations

Image of a clip board that lists the 8 tips for the first month of school. — Image by Author based on template by Holly Krueger

Consistency is crucial in the classroom, especially in the early weeks of school. Establish clear routines and expectations so that students understand what is required of them. In fact, you can involve your students in the process by asking them to brainstorm ideas for their own classroom expectations. Be sure to create visual aids for classroom expectations, like posters that you can hang around your room. Refer to them often and spend time teaching and reinforcing them daily.

Create a Welcoming Classroom Environment

Your classroom should be a welcoming space where students feel comfortable and valued. Setup your classroom to be inviting. You could decorate your classroom with student work. Create a cozy reading space with pillows and a small rug or create a calming corner where students can relax when feeling overwhelmed. Display a “Welcome to Our Class” banner and add personal touches like photos of your students engaged in learning activities.

Assess Student’s Prior Knowledge

The beginning of the year is a great time to assess your students’ prior knowledge and skills. Use formative assessments or informal discussions to gauge where each student is academically. This information will help you adapt your instruction to meet your student’s needs. By understanding what students already know and can do, you can adjust your teaching to build on their existing knowledge and skills. For example, for reading, use a “Book Tasting” activity where students sample different genres and levels of books. In math, try a “Problem of the Day” challenge to assess various skills. In addition, using writing prompts that reveal students’ interests and abilities.

Plan for Differentiation

After you have accessed your student’s prior knowledge, take that information and start planning to differentiate your instruction. Your students will enter your classroom with a wide range of abilities. Identify students who may need additional support or those who may require more challenging work. According to “A Practical Guide to Planning for Intentional Differentiation,” differentiation is a three-pronged approach. It involves differentiating content, process, and product. This will help ensure that all students can succeed at their own pace.

Communicate with Parents and Guardians

Open your lines of communication with parents and guardians early in the school year. Send a welcome letter or email outlining your expectations and classroom policies. Mention how they can support their child’s learning at home. There are a variety of digital tools, such as Remind, Google Forms, and more that you can use to help facilitate this process. Prior to using these tools, check with your district’s communications and/or technology department to see if they have a subscription to a paid tool that they would prefer you to use. The district-provided tool may have additional features that you can use. Remember that regular communication builds trust and ensures that everyone is on the same page regarding student progress and any challenges that may arise.

Reflect and Adjust

As you progress through the first month, take time to reflect on what’s working well and what might need adjustment. Through self-reflection, we can have those “aha moments” leading us to make improvements. Be flexible and willing to change based on the needs of your students. Continuous reflection and adjustment are key to a successful and dynamic classroom.

Take Care of Yourself

The first month can be intense, so it’s important to take care of yourself, as well. Set realistic goals, take breaks when needed, and reach out to your colleagues for support. A well-rested and energized teacher is better equipped to support their students.

By focusing on these strategies during the first month of school, you’ll lay a strong foundation for a successful and fulfilling year ahead. Remember, the time you invest in building relationships, establishing routines, and understanding your students’ needs will pay off throughout the school year.

August 21, 2024 0 comment

Micro-Reflections: Crafting Reflections in the Moment

by Miguel Guhlin June 1, 2023

written by Miguel Guhlin

How do you reflect on your daily work? Reflection can be a bit daunting. After a long day’s work, you may stagger home, plop on the couch, and pass out. You know reflecting on your day is important, but waiting until the day’s end is too hard.

What Are the Benefits of Reflection?

Reflecting on what you do, what you learn, or what you fail to do or learn, remains critical. The benefits of reflection include:

Engaging in a thoughtful relationship with life
Becoming active and awakening to one’s lived experiences
Gaining insights from asking oneself tough questions, resulting in a more active rather than a passive, non-reflective state

What’s more, reflective practice allows teachers to:

Move from experiencing a lesson to understanding what happened and why
Challenge the underlying principles and beliefs that define the way that you work
Adapt in a quicker manner to sudden change
Improve the way you learn and do work
Be authentic and honest about growth, success, and failure

Some suggest that the process of education is about cultivating a reflective practice. You could adapt Mark Twain’s famous quote about reading to reflect in this way:

“An educated person who does not reflect has no advantage over the person who lacks an education yet engages in daily reflection.”

Self-Judgment and Reflection

Research indicates that when students do a few specific things, they can speed up growth. John Hattie refers to Self-Judgment and Reflection as having an effect size of 0.75. This is a bit better than Reciprocal Teaching (d=0.74).

The Visible Learning MetaX database describes this introspective strategy in this way:

Self-judgement is a critical component of independent, self- directed learning. Students can often over- or underestimate their own capabilities. Teachers should cultivate in students the ability to apply standards to their own work. Researchers have pressed the importance of a student’s ability to do the following: 1) reflect on her work; 2) discern its relationship to established standards, and 3) make self-judgements.

Two strategies anyone can use include cultivating metacognition and devising short quizzes. That is, thinking about thinking and quizzing yourself about what you’ve learned.

What Are Micro-Reflections?

As I get older, I’m always on the lookout to reflect along the way. This is a far better approach than waiting until the end of the day. I call these reflections about experiences along the way “micro-reflections.” How do you engage in micro-reflections?

To assist in developing micro-reflections, I carry a small notebook with me. In it, I will share what I’ve learned and what my first impressions and beliefs are about it. Let’s take a look at one approach to reflecting.

Get a copy of all images shown via Google Slides. Inspired by The Actiope Model. Learn more online.

Adopt a Process

This process below starts with you. It is always about you when you are reflecting. You learn how to own your actions, and what actions are not yours. In the end, you can only change yourself and learn from others, whether they intended to teach or not. You can get started reflecting with this one-pager. Let’s walk through each part together.

Inventory Beliefs, Emotions, and Biases

Once I encounter new information or knowledge, I interrupt my reaction. I ask myself how I see that reaction affected by my own emotional state and biases. This helps me inventory my biases, a critical first reaction to new knowledge or ideas. This is valuable because I’m often irritated when encountering an idea because it often runs contrary to what I already know. My goal is to shed the irritation and focus on the new idea to understand it better.

Impact on Actions

Then, I write down what the impact of that knowledge or idea might be on my space or my sphere of influence.

Impact on the World

This penultimate step is tough, because it requires me to ask what am I prepared to do to change the world. Some days, I’m not prepared, or I’m only prepared to do something small – like write a blog entry or chat with a colleague.

Wrapping It Up

This is the tough part, and it may be a few hours or days before I come back to do this. Making up a quiz about what you’ve learned can help you remember it. Make up the quiz when the information is fresh, then let it sit for a day or two. When you take the multiple choice quiz later, it will help you retrieve the information in your head.

Using the Reflection Heuristic

The idea behind this reflection heuristic is simple. It’s essentially a formula for reflecting. After a while, it gets easier to do because you do it every day. With micro-reflections, you get to go through the process several times a day.

People ask me, “How do you write about so much?” My answer is that I take a look at the notes I write first, then follow this process to share one thing I have learned. In a short time, you can amass a lot of ideas, write a reflection, and then a week or month later, reflect on your original reflection. This makes it fun to discover, “How have I grown (or not) relevant to this piece of information that was wonderful enough to write down?”

Give it a try.

June 1, 2023 0 comment

Educational Research Good Teaching

The Self-Directed Learner: Embracing Self-Judgment and Reflection

by Miguel Guhlin January 22, 2022

written by Miguel Guhlin

Want to encourage attributes of independent, self-directed learning? Then you will want to cultivate in your students an attitude and practice of reflection. Their ability to reflect on their work and measure progress towards standards is critical. In this blog entry, you will learn about some research on the power of reflection.

Pull the Curtain of Mystery Back for Reflection

“What worked? What didn’t? How could I do it better next time?” Those three questions were the sum of my early attempts at reflection. But I didn’t get to deeper questions until later in my career.

Reflection is something I didn’t know much about as an educator. It was not a practice I encouraged students to engage in. As a writing teacher, my goal was to get students into peer conferencing to ask tough questions that would result in revisions and re-organization of pieces.

Now, research shows that when students do a few specific things, they have the potential to speed their own growth. John Hattie refers to Self-judgment and Reflection as having an effect size of 0.75. This is a bit better than Reciprocal Teaching (d=0.74). The Visible Learning MetaX database describes this introspective strategy in this way:

Self-judgement is a critical component of independent, self- directed learning. Students can often over- or underestimate their own capabilities. Teachers should cultivate in students the ability to apply standards to their own work.

Researchers have pressed the importance of a student’s ability to do the following:

1) reflect on her work; 2) discern its relationship to established standards, and 3) make self-judgements.

But how can students engage in self-judgment and reflection? What strategies might they use and how can teachers support them?

Clarifying Strategies

Meta-analyses suggest two strategies to model for students. Those strategies include:

Cultivate metacognitive knowledge instruction in students
Use self-developed tests

As you may know, metacognition is “the process of thinking about thinking.” It involves “reflecting on personal habits, knowledge, and approaches to learning” (source). Self-developed tests involve students crafting their own low-stakes quizzes or assessments.

Let’s take a look at some specific approaches you can use.

Approach #1: Confusion Spotlight

Strategy: Metacognition

Ask students to reflect on what they were learning that day. For any area that seems unclear or confusing, ask them to shine a spotlight on it. They can jot these ideas down in a notebook, put them on a post it or index card, or type them into a digital document, and then turn them in.

Marine, Tales from a Very Busy Teacher, suggests using self-assessment bins:

Students turn in their work into one of these bins depending on their level of understanding. It does take a lot of positive culture building, as well as trust, to help students feel comfortable when turning in their work to these bins.

After the first few weeks of school, students know the system and feel confident when turning in their work. It also makes grading a lot easier, as well as pulling students back for small group reteach or extension.

As you can see, Marine relies on the cards to structure reteach groups or get ideas for lesson extensions.

Approach #2: Chalk Talk Activity

Strategy: Metacognition

A silent activity, the Chalk Talk fosters thoughtful contemplation among students. Goals include reflecting on a question or ideas, commenting, and solving problems. Use this approach with a traditional chalkboard, whiteboard, or digital equivalent.

Chalk Talk includes a four step process:

1. Explain that Chalk Talk is a silent activity (no speaking at all). Students learn they can:

Write comments on others’ ideas

Draw connecting lines from comment to another’s idea, or

Respond to questions.

2. Facilitator writes a question on board, then circles it. (See some sample questions below.)

3. All students have a way of writing on the “Chalk Board.”

4. The facilitator can interact by circling other interesting ideas. You can also invite comments and questions or reflections by drawing additional circles around student ideas.

This is a great activity for students to do alone. You can also adapt it for small groups. One student may serve as the “recorder” sharing insights from their team. You can do it in isolation or with a collaborative tool. Collective, class-wide experiences are also engaging.

Finally, there are many electronic or online whiteboard solutions you can use. Three to consider include:

You can also rely on a graphic organizer/semantic mapping tool. Those might include solutions such as Google Drawings, yED Live, or Bubbl.us. Each allows for student collaboration.

Approach #3: Capacity Matrix

Strategy: Metacognition

Use a capacity matrix that outlines key learning targets from the lesson. Right after the lesson begins, ask students to gauge their current knowledge. You can do this with a fist to five Jamboard or use a paper document.

Get fist to five Jamboard template

Marine, Tales from a Very Busy Teacher, shares her insights. She recommends creating learning target cards. Her goal is to make learning targets as visible as possible. As you might suppose, this combines with the powerful Teacher Clarity strategy that focuses students on understanding the learning goal(s).

“…self-assessment tickets help students self reflect and self regulate while they’re learning. I call them “Learning Target Tickets” with my students. They’re pretty simple to use and be used for any lesson, in any content area” (source).

Marine offers these tips for using the learning target tickets:

After the engagement activity or attention grabber, state the learning goal.
Ask students to write it down on their tickets. Then they can self-assess their level of learning in the “before lesson” column. This is a capacity matrix. I like Marine’s innovation of before lesson/after lesson/teacher analysis. Those rows are something worth incorporating in classroom practice.
When the lesson ends, ask students to rate their grasp of the new content in the after lesson column.
Ask students to write a short reflection on the lesson.

Afterwards, ask students to share their biggest growth area or reflection. These could be text-based like what Marine makes available to buy. Or you could mix it up a bit with audio (e.g. Vocaroo, Mote), or video (e.g. Flipgrid) options.

Approach #4: Interrogate Your Process

Strategy: Metacognition

Interrogating your process results in valuable information. It can also be painful to try to work through it without external questions. That’s important, though, because you need to be self-judgmental. That is, you need to measure your process against an external standard. Rubrics are helpful for this. So are questions that students can ask themselves.

Here are a few metacognitive questions with that aim in mind. Consider these below, an excerpt of the complete list:

What process did you go through to produce this piece?
What problems did you encounter while you were working on this piece? How did you solve them?
What resources did you use while working on this piece? Which ones were especially helpful? Which ones would you use again?
Did you meet your standards? Did your goals for this product change?
In what ways did your work meet (and not meet) the standards for this assignment?

You can find more in this longer question set.

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Approach #5: Pupil, Test Thyself

Strategy: Self-Developed Tests

This final approach to fostering self-judgment and reflection includes student-created assessments. There are a multitude of digital tools you can make available to your students.

Since I have addressed this in other blog entries, I won’t do more than point you to some of them below:

Give these approaches a try when fostering reflection and self-judgment in your classroom. The gains are worth the effort for students.

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January 22, 2022 0 comment

Science

Twig Create: A Tool for Science Reflections

by Miguel Guhlin November 19, 2021

written by Miguel Guhlin

“Digital storytelling empowers students to show their understanding of content,” says Dr. Bruce Ellis. Imagine if you could use it for science learning. In my previous blog entry, I shared how important it is for students to do the following on a regular basis in science:

Observe phenomena, experiment, and then take notes.
Have students revise their notes and clarify vocabulary.
Reflect about the material, asking original questions and sharing what they have learned.

In this blog entry, I’d like to introduce you to a new digital storytelling tool that students can use for reflection. Before I share about the digital tool, let’s explore why it’s needed.

Why Reflect?

Do students understand what their learning means for them as individuals? Jack Mezirow says that this is quite important. Reflections we value are critical for everyone, not only students. Mezirow says:

A defining condition of being human is that we have to understand the meaning of our experience.

How do we scaffold that understanding opportunity (reflection) for our students? Arthurs L. Costa and Bena Kallick write that we enhance reflection when we:

Ponder our learning with others
Link current experience to previous learning (a.k.a. scaffolding)
Draw forth cognitive and emotional information from several sources
Act upon and process information, synthesizing and evaluating data
Apply what we’ve learned to novel situations or contexts (source: Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind)

As a blogger, reflecting on how ideas strange to me connect to my own prior experience are powerful. I gain a deeper understanding of new learning, more so than when I just read. The benefits of student reflection on learning are more affective than cognitive. It also aids with metacognition.

What about reflection in science class? This phased model assists students in learning vital science practices:

Source: Basir, M.A. (2019). Learning about science practices:
Concurrent reflection on classroom investigations and scientific works.
Innovations is Science Teacher Education, 4(2).

A Model for Reflection

As you can see in the diagram above, there are various suggested phases of reflecting for science. You can also find a model to follow when engaging in reflection.

To make it easier for you to adapt for your own use, please find a Google Doc template linked for you:

twig create

Now let’s take a look at a new tool.

Introducing Twig Create

Twig Create makes it easy to create videos for free. It is available to teachers, giving them access to stock video clips that include curated content. To these videos, teachers and students can add text, music, and voiceovers. See more features online, along with pricing for schools.

Twig Create is a student-centered multimedia-creation experience. It encourages students to unleash their creativity. Twig Create combines easy-to-use video editing tools and activities. These activities align to core content areas. Twig Create promotes agency, creativity, and inquiry in all students.

Terrific Twig Create Creations

Curious about some of the exciting work students are engaging in? Here’s one example from a grade 4-6 teacher, Hayley Thomas. The video below shows a student reflection for sixth grade science:

Find more examples online at the Twig Create website. Students can use Twig Create to summarize and share their learning, as shown in these videos. This digital tool combines the reflection process with the power of digital storytelling and is a strategic way to help students better master and retain scientific content.

November 19, 2021 0 comment

Professional Learning

Planning Now for Engaging Staff Development Later

by Dr. Bruce Ellis May 31, 2021

written by Dr. Bruce Ellis

Before you know it, August will be here and staff development sessions will be in full swing as the new school year begins. Planning now is a must for making sure that you have all the best strategies and tools put together to help your teachers start the year with confidence. To help in that process, here are three tools you might consider integrating into your training for deeper, more engaged learning.

Brainstormer for Staff Development

Getting teachers engaged in discussions during staff development is sometimes challenging. One way to ensure that they engage is to build buy-in to the topic/concept that is being discussed in the training. Brainstormer helps you do just that. Sometimes it is easy to dismiss free tools because they fall short of creating amazement. But that’s not true for Brainstormer. Besides just brainstorming, which is a helpful onramp to any discussion, the free site allows teachers to upvote the topics/ideas that have been shared. This is a great way to build consensus.

If you were teaching with Google between 2008 and 2015, you may have come across the Google tool Moderator. Moderator was relinquished to the Google Graveyard leaving teachers in a lurch to accomplish both brainstorming AND voting in one tool. Fortunately, Brainstormer has come along and is much more intuitive for both teachers and students.

Mote

Giving feedback, whether it is to other teachers or to students, is so helpful in improving the quality of a product. That product could be a teacher skill used in the classroom or a student activity that helps students develop and demonstrate skills. But feedback can be difficult. I’m great at giving detailed, meaningful feedback when I’m starting to grade, but my comments become shorter and more succinct (i.e. less robust and meaningful) the further down the stack of grading I go. If a students is assessed earlier in the stack, she gets the benefit of more attention from me while, unfortunately, the last students assessed get a few short bullet points…maybe.

This is where Mote shines brightly! This freemium tool allows you to easily give audio feedback comments to students. The free version allows up to 30 seconds of recorded comments while the paid versions give 60 or 90 seconds, depending on the plan you choose. There is no limit to the number of “motes” you can give. Mote lets you use your voice to leave comments in Google Docs, Classroom, Slides, and Gmail. You can even add verbal comments to any web page using Motepad. Once you add the Chrome extension, you’ll be ready to start sharing your verbal comments!

This tool may seem a little clunky at first since it doesn’t allow you to listen to the mote INSIDE the document itself. Instead, each mote is provided via a shortened URL that opens in a new tab, thus taking you or your students out of the environment (Docs, Classroom, Slides, etc.) that you happen to be in at the moment to listen to the audio. If you can look past this unfortunate feature, you’ll find Mote a great tool to use as you share audio feedback, instructions, comments, and ideas with others.

FutureMe

During training, it is always best practice to ask teachers how they would apply what they have learned when they are back in their classrooms, the benefits of applying that information, and where they can find more information or support if they hit any barriers in the process.

Using FutureMe is a great way to help do just that. Have teachers to go the website and schedule an email to go out sometime in the future, at least seven days from now, but could be a month or so. Give them this outline of questions/statements to share with their future selves:

What is the topic/concept/strategy that you learned about today?
Share the gist of the learning that took place.
What are two benefits to you and/or your students to be gained by implementing the topic/concept/strategy?
Share if you had an “aha” moment today and what it was.
Where can you go for help – who can you call, website to visit, district resource, etc.?

Have them think of the letter to their future selves as a sales letter telling them about today’s learning. Try to have them recapture the freshness of the learning, any excitement or fun that occurred, or relevant insights that they might need reminding of later on.

You don’t need a login for the FutureMe website. It is a freemium service, so if it is something that you decide to use often for yourself, you might look in to the benefits of what the upgraded plans offer.

Let TCEA Help with Staff Development

I would be remiss if I didn’t share a gentle reminder that TCEA is happy to provide top-notch, hands-on learning for your educators. We can offer face-to-face training tailored to meet your specific needs, self-paced online training that is convenient for busy educators, and various conferences that allow like-minded, tech-loving teachers and administrators to get together in well-designed learning events. If you would like to find out how we can help meet your specific needs, feel free to contact me at your convenience. You can reach me at bellis@tcea.org.

May 31, 2021 0 comment

Podcasts Social-Emotional Learning

Social and Emotional Learning at the End of the Year | Podcast Ep. 84

by Andrew Roush May 14, 2021

written by Andrew Roush

This week, TCEA’s Dr. Bruce Ellis talks about different ways to provide inspiration and maintain positive relationships with students at the end of a challenging school year.

Extra credit

Check out the 2021 Elementary Technology Conference.

Learn more about the 2022 TCEA Convention & Exposition.

Send your questions and ideas about future episodes to podcast@tcea.org.

Facebook: facebook.com/tcea.org/

Twitter: @TCEA

Instagram: tcea_org

Pinterest: tceaorg

Music by Vibe Tracks

May 14, 2021 0 comment

Good Teaching iOS Tips and Tricks Professional Learning Web 2.0 Tool

bulb Digital Portfolio Offers Free Premium Accounts

by Lori Gracey September 2, 2019

written by Lori Gracey

As a professional educator, it’s a good idea to keep a portfolio of your best work. This can be a powerful tool for reflection on individual growth or a way to showcase your strengths when applying for a new position. But what’s the best tool to use for your portfolio? An old-time favorite was just announced as being free for all teachers, which makes it an even better resource.

bulb Digital Portfolios

bulb announced last week that their premium account, bulb+, normally valued at $30/year, is now free to teachers. With the free account, teachers can:

Create personal collections, curriculum, and resources.
Track professional development and display badges and credentials earned.
Establish professional learning plans to meet goals and standards.

There’s even a free iOS app that you can use with your free account to document fabulous lessons or strong student work. And, starting now, bulb will provide additional features for teachers:

Use and create templates.
Embed audio and rich media files.
Gather comments and feedback.
Showcase work in presentation mode.

To get started, simply create your free account here.

bulb for Students

Students can create a free bulb account to capture ideas, express knowledge, and display skills to get the most out of college, career, and life. The regular account is free for them, but the premium account is $3/month.

Other Reasons to Love bulb

bulb is ad-free, complies with global data privacy and security policies, and doesn’t sell user information to third parties. It has the ability to integrate with most LMS or SIS systems, including Microsoft Office 365, Google, Canvas, Schoology and Blackboard and partners with Clever and ClassLink to provide single sign-on functionality. They also have an excellent blog with great ideas and resources for using the tool.

What do you have to lose?

September 2, 2019 2 comments

Good Teaching Google Tips and Tricks

Differentiate Instruction with Google Docs

by Diana Benner May 30, 2019

written by Diana Benner

Google Docs offers so many options for educators to differentiate instruction. We know that one size doesn’t fit all in education; therefore, it’s crucial that we give each of our learners different ways to acquire content, process ideas, and demonstrate their understanding. Let’s explore ways in which Google Docs can help support a differentiated classroom.

Allow for Choice

This sample Geology Choice Board – This sample Geology choice board is a form of differentiated learning that provides multiple learning options for students. If you want to know how to create a choice board, check out the Creating a Choice Board for your Classroom blog entry.
Choose Your Own Adventure – Choose Your Own Adventure is a great way to allow for choice and differentiate for the multiple skill levels of your students. In this blog entry, Eric Curts explains how to create a Choose Your Own Adventure story with Google Docs.
RAFT Assignment – This RAFT Assignment Google Doc is a great way to incorporate choice into the classroom. The RAFT (Role, Audience, Format, Topic) strategy can serve as a motivator by giving students a choice, appealing to their interest and learning profiles, and adapting to student’s readiness levels.

Give Extra Help

Hint Cards– You might have some students who need an extra hint on class work. Hint cards can be created in Google Docs and shared with either individual students or groups of students. Another great thing about hint cards is that they can also be used as an anchor activity for other students who create the hints, rather than the teacher.
Task Cards – In a differentiated classroom, students may work on varied versions of the same task or even on different tasks during the same length of time. Task cards are an effective means of giving directions to individuals or groups with varied work. Read the Differentiation with Google Digital Task Cards blog entry for more ways to create task cards with Google.
Weekly Assignment Sheet – Assignments in your classroom may vary by student. Therefore, creating individual or group weekly assignments sheets is a good way to differentiate. These assignment sheets can be created in Google Docs and then shared.

Offer Various Assessments

Choice Boards– Choice boards can also be used for assessment near the completion of a unit. Students get a sense of ownership when they are allowed to choose. Further, they become more engaged with an assessment when they know that they’ve picked it themselves. The fact that they chose it reflects their interest, and it also places them in a mindset of success.
Lesson Reflection – Exit tickets are a great way to see if your students understood the lesson. This allows students to reflect about how they felt about the unit.

As you can see, Google Docs is a great way to differentiate in the classroom. If you have additional ideas for differentiating, please share those in the comments below.

May 30, 2019 5 comments

guide signs with japanese writing on them

Good Teaching Professional Learning

Five Guideposts for Making Learning Connections

by Miguel Guhlin November 13, 2018

written by Miguel Guhlin

How do you connect your own learning with others? One way that I create learning connections involves blogging. It translates into reflecting on my own efforts and setting loose learning goals. These flexible goals allow me to learn at my own pace as I move forward towards measurable growth. But I did not always approach learning this way. It began when I decided to blog for a global audience. In this blog entry, let’s explore what it means to be a learner in a hyper-connected world.

ISTE Standards for Educators: Learner

Though there are seven ISTE standards for Educators, the Learner begins with you. It puts the focus on you and how you can learn from others. The how involves taking specific steps that make you a student. In this way, you, as learner, are able to leverage technology to improve student learning. Here’s how you do that:

Set personal, professional learning goals to explore.
Apply pedagogical approaches that technology makes possible.
Reflect on the effectiveness of these tech-enhanced, pedagogical approaches.
Pursue professional interests.
Create and be an active participant in local and global learning networks.
Stay current with research that supports student learning outcomes.

Wondering how to start your journey? Let’s walk through a road map of steps to start.

Guidepost #1 – Set Professional Learning Goals

Not sure where to begin, where to sink your shovel in? Your goals need to be flexible and reflect who you are and where you are in your career. Teachers have to be able to set their learning goals before beginning any training cycle. For early to mid-career educators, learning goals tend towards curriculum and instruction. For late-career educators, extra-curricular tasks and innovations are more relevant (source).

From a coaching perspective, assist others in this process. Help them set meaningful goals and clarify steps to achieving those goals. Learn more about coaching others in setting goals.

Action Steps: Get a coach that can assist you in setting learning goals. Pick three technology-enhanced actions that you can start with.

Guidepost #2 – Apply Pedagogy That Technology Makes Possible

Making learning and collaboration at a distance serves as one example of this type. Dr. Judi Harris (September, 1998) described activity structures as design tools. These tools assist teachers in using the internet to achieve curriculum-related learning goals. Dr. Bernie Dodge and Tom March (1995) employed activity formats in the same way. In 2017, Lisa Highfill, Kelly Hilton, and Sarah Landis came together and their work resulted in inquiry-based learning and self-paced student-centric opportunities known as hyperdocs. From subject samplers to hyperdocs, technology-enhanced pedagogy has been around for many years. These approaches are inquiry-based, collaborative, and involve self-directed learning. Project-based, or problem-based, students must solve a problem using materials at hand.

Use Dr. Chris Moersch’s H.E.A.T. observational framework to describe students’ efforts. In the best ways, students engage in:

Learning or questioning at evaluating/creating levels of Bloom’s
Collaborating to define the task, the process. The solution extends beyond the classroom walls.
Creating a product with a real-world purpose beyond the classroom that impacts students

Projects and technology work well together. Well-implemented PBL develops students’ critical thinking skills, improves long-term retention of content learned. What’s more, it increases students’ and teachers’ satisfaction with learning experiences (source). How does the teacher gauge success?

Action Step: Embrace PBL, design thinking, engineering design process, or the 5E Model. Then blend in simple technologies where appropriate. Don’t be afraid to try DIY activities.

Did You Know?

A team of trained professionals is available to perform a technology audit. Whatever size your district is, our educational auditors can help. They will provide insights that can help you grow. TCEA is a non-profit association. The cost of the audit will be less than if a commercial entity did it for you. The team of TCEA Technology Auditors is ready to assist you. Make contact now.

Guidepost #3 – Reflect on Success

The HEAT observational framework provides some insight. In activity-rich environments like classrooms, approaches may not impact learning. That is why reflecting on an activity remains important. In these projects, students self-select technology. When designing lessons, teachers can use this simple reflection-on-action checklist:

Did students use tech to create something and then test to see if it worked? (Rapid prototyping)
How did students use technology to focus their work, how they went about it? Did students use technology to collaborate on a solution extending beyond the classroom?
When did students engage in a real-world, real-life problem solving opportunity?

Whether it’s a blog, an audiolog, or vidcast, make the effort to reflect on teaching and learning. Assume the stance of a community member peering into your classroom. What would they see? Without this reflection, we miss the power of transformation. Dr. Wilson and Dr. Alaniz suggest reflection must be active and persistent. How persistent is your reflection?

Action Step: Use a blog to keep track of your reflections. Share what you expected to see and what you observed. Explore the gap between the two.

Guidepost #4 – Be a Global Connector

Ready to get started with social media? You may have a Twitter or Facebook account. How do you move into the role of being a global connector with a worldwide reach? Embrace the power of ideas and change in your life. Find ideas that align to your efforts. Apply new concepts to your work. Share that online via a blog, audiolog, or vidcast. It’s that simple. You build your professional learning network (PLN) one step at a time, one person at a time.

Action Step: Connect with others online, pursuing your professional interests as an educator. Become a hashtag hero. Accept the #OBSERVEME challenge. Start a district Twitter chat. Make connections beyond your current experience.

Guidepost #5 – Curate Content for Yourself and Others

Are you ready to keep up to date with research on what works and what doesn’t in the classroom? You need to make it easy to keep up with learning new things. Building a global professional learning network is step one. Step two involves finding a way to manage the torrent of data and ideas coming at you. To do that, learn to curate content in ways that make sharing it easy.

Action Step: Adopt a content curation tool you can use to save and organize online content any way you want. Learn to automate sharing of content. Align your social media to your learning needs.

References

Feature image. Available online

November 13, 2018 0 comment

Web 2.0 Tool

Another Great Tool Bites the Dust

by Lori Gracey May 1, 2018

written by Lori Gracey

It’s been a hard day for me today. I learned that one of my favorite free educational tools is going away. Effective June 16, the backchannel resource TodaysMeet will be gone.

I’ve used TodaysMeet for years and really loved it. It is a very simple tool to use, but one that can make a huge difference in the classroom with students or in a professional development workshop with adult learners. TodaysMeet provides an online backchannel for discussions. Its greatest power lies in allowing those too shy or afraid to join in the conversation and to help everyone reflect and learn together.

Are There Backchannel Replacements for TodaysMeet?

Luckily, there are a few other free tools that can help to fill the void left by TodaysMeet’s ending.

AnswerGarden lets you post a question or topic for discussion. Then, as responses are entered, it shows the most frequent responses, similar to word clouds. You can use either the web version or the iPad app.

Chatzy is not as pretty as other response tools, but it gets the job done. It creates a private chat room that you invite users into via their email. No registration is required.

Padlet is a golden oldie, but it’s still got value. Its look is very familiar to even the youngest of students and it’s definitely simple to use.

Leslie Fisher (@lesliefisher) recommends Slido in this blog post. Slido is a polling tool that can automatically put the results from open-ended questions into a word cloud. It is pretty inexpensive with a teacher plan that is just $75/year for an unlimited number of polls.

Backchannel Chat may be my new favorite. According to its website, it is “a class discussion tool that was designed from the ground up to support teachers.” It includes a profanity filter and doesn’t contain advertising. No student personal information is required. And there is an app available for both Android and iOS. The free version limits you to 30 concurrent students and one room, which is probably enough for most of us. There is also a Classroom version for just $15/year (very reasonable, in my opinion) which includes a few more nice features such as the ability to attach files, 50 concurrent students, and unlimited rooms.

I think I’ll try and use TodaysMeet a few more times before it goes away, just as a farewell. How are you providing the opportunity for student voice in your classroom?

This blog was updated with additional content on May 23, 2018.

May 1, 2018 0 comment

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