Digital Storytelling (Thing 36)

This final thing was difficult for me! Even with all of the things that we have learned this summer, I would still rather write a reflection than use the digital storytelling programs that are available because I think that my frustration with the technology is still a stumbling block for me getting my message across.

That being said, I am proud of what I put together in Animoto. Their program is beautiful and simple, and that's exactly what I need, which is why I chose it. I know there are a few places where the narration gets ahead of the pictures, but I think you'll still get it. I am proud that I was able to look for and find the answer to my question about how to include a voiceover track instead of using another program that I liked less but had a more obvious voice track (it was actually pretty easy but did take a few steps - this article was super helpful).

I hope this conveys my feelings about the class accurately. Overall, I think it was a worthwhile experience, but not everything I did was successful. I won't be overhauling my philosophy of education or changing everything I do as a result of what I have learned, but I will be more open to technological advances if they can help the process of teaching and learning.

I have loved learning alongside you all! This blog will remain active as I try to hold myself accountable for updating some of my teaching practices, so if you ever have a spare minute (ha!), please come by. Have a great year!

The TPACK Framework and Adaptive Learning (Thing 35)

The TPACK Framework

In order to understand the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework, I had to first understand Lee Shulman's "pedagogical content knowledge" idea. This article is about science teachers, but it explains the nature of Shulman's work generally before going into specifics about the science curriculum. He believed that teachers needed to be well-versed in both pedagogy and their content area, which is a balance that seems logical and necessary to me, but perhaps it was not always that way. This quotation from the article sums it up well:

"Pedagogical content knowledge is a type of knowledge that is unique to teachers, and is based on the manner in which teachers relate their pedagogical knowledge (what they know about teaching) to their subject matter knowledge (what they know about what they teach). It is the integration or the synthesis of teachers' pedagogical knowledge and their subject matter knowledge that comprises pedagogical content knowledge."  

So, it's not enough to to know how to teach, and it's not enough to know about your content area: teachers have to know both of those things. For example, authors know how to read and write, but they might not know how to teach people about how to do them - they are missing the pedagogy. Conversely, someone might be an expert on John Dewey or Carleton Washburne, but they might not have the information about a subject to teach - they are missing the content knowledge. This blog has a great visual to explain:

TPACK takes that idea one step further by including technology: it's an update to Shulman's idea. Not only should teachers have pedagogical and content knowledge, they should also have technological knowledge. That technological knowledge should include pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge as well: WHY should we include technology, and HOW are we going to do that? We need to know how to use technology, how to teach it to the students, and why it makes sense to include the technology in our lessons and habits. Below is an image that explains this from http://www.tpack.org/:

Reproduced by permission of the publisher, © 2012 by tpack.org

Honestly, I'm sure I've heard of Lee Shulman before (my undergraduate program was very focused on pedagogy), and I absolutely agree with his idea, but I didn't remember that it was him who coined the phrase until I started researching the TPACK framework. And I had never heard of the TPACK framework until I saw it on the list of hot topics in education provided for us, but it makes total sense to me. This is a belief I have held since the push for technology incorporation started in earnest about five years ago: there is nothing wrong with updating our teaching methods to incorporate new technology as long as it is not a distraction and actually improves our methods and students' understanding. 

The part that I like the most about this TPACK method is that it includes both pedagogical and content knowledge for the technology aspect. It is so important for us to keep in mind why we are incorporating technology and what it can bring it our students, NOT to do it just for the sake of including something new and shiny in our lessons. This article does a great job of linking the technology to the five areas of language arts instruction; it's from this website that shows how the TPACK model applies to several different subject areas.

Here is a video by Common Sense Media that explains TPACK in the classroom. There are also a few more below; not all of them are flashy, but they all do a good job of showing examples of the framework or defining the problem. They all also include the fact that the dotted circle around the framework that is labeled "context" needs to be taken seriously: this looks different based on different situations.

Adaptive Learning

I had no idea what adaptive learning was before I saw the definition; this is one of the phrases that comes up a lot in ed tech conversations, but it didn't meaning anything to me because I didn't have any examples of it in real life. EdSurge.com defines "adaptive learning" like this:

"Adaptive learning is an education technology that can respond to a student's interactions in real-time by automatically providing the student with individual support."

I think that some of the assessments we give or used to (maybe the STAR?) are adaptive. I know that the website FreeRice.com is adaptive because it gives you easier or more difficult questions based on how many questions you answer correctly or incorrectly in a row. I use FreeRice in my classroom occasionally, and the kids like it - I think part of it is that it responds to their current level of vocabulary and challenges them appropriately based on that.

So, I am familiar with the concept of adaptive learning even though I didn't know the phrase. I think this happens a lot in education, especially today, because there seem to be a lot of "buzzwords" that people glom on to when discussing education, particularly when it comes to the integration of technology. For example, I didn't know the TPACK model, but it was exactly what I have been exploring in the class and in my own teaching.

Adaptive learning, just like TPACK, is not just about including more technology in your lesson for the sake of including technology. This article details the roadblocks and misconceptions around adaptive learning as well as how we can overcome them. One of the most important points about understanding adaptive learning is that it isn't just about giving different questions if a student gets an answer right or wrong, so my earlier comment about FreeRice might have only been half right. Mary Cullinane, quoted in the article linked earlier in this paragraph, explains it like this:

"True adaptivity isn't just about understanding that the kid got the question wrong, but why the kid got the question wrong." 

Again, this seems intuitive. It doesn't help if you know that a student missed questions 1,4, and 7; it only helps if you know what skills were assessed in those questions and why the student is struggling with those skills. So adaptive learning is not just about a program that changes the difficulty of questions based on what a student gets right or wrong. It is about understanding what students are getting right and wrong and about how technology can help us address those skills that the students are not quite getting. It is about giving feedback to both students and teachers in real time so both parties can understand what is not understood and why, so it necessarily informs our teaching and learning.

Here's a video from Pearson (they make money off of educational technology, so consider the source) that explains it in a slightly creepy way but makes a good point about data.

Here's Donald Clark explaining how adaptive learning algorithms are already affecting our life experiences. It's clear and concise, and ever since my year at the University of Edinburgh, I've been a sucker for a Scottish accent teaching me something! :)

 

Here's a "Knewton Knerd" explaining the differences between personalized, differentiated, and adaptive. Again, they're a company selling products, so consider the source.

There are lots more videos about both TPACK and adaptive learning available online, and I trust your Googling skills, so you can find them on your own. :)

The future of K-12 education is definitely going to be affected by both the TPACK framework and adaptive learning. Already, both of them are playing bigger roles every year in classrooms across the country. I love the TPACK framework because it makes me think about what technology I'm including in the classroom and why, and I like adaptive learning because it pushes me to think about what each individual student needs and how I can address those needs. It seems like these two ideas are essential to teaching in the 21st century.

Breakout EDU (Thing 34)

Today I played a Breakout EDU game during the team leader/department chair meeting and I LOVED IT! I don't think I would have understood the point of the game nearly as well if I had just read about it and watched the videos; the experience of living the game was so much better. Accidental good timing is the best.  :)

We did the Faculty Meeting game, and although I'm not the greatest at puzzles, riddles, or any game that requires more sustained attention than Frozen Free Fall (seriously, it and its derivatives are my favorite games right now), I really enjoyed it. It was challenging enough to hold my interest but not so hard that it made me want to give up. It also helped that I was playing with colleagues and friends that I already knew and trusted and that one or two of them were excellent gamers and could lead our group effectively. We finished with 21 minutes to spare and didn't even have to use any hints! It worked really well for its intended purpose, which was to get us to work together and solve the problems collaboratively.

Other games available on the website are more content-centered (although they all require that people work together to solve the problems). I looked at one that was based on The Outsiders since that's one of the only whole-class novels I teach. It seemed simple enough that the kids could do it but challenging enough that they would have to work together and access their knowledge of the book as well as their problem-solving skills. I would probably actually use this in my classroom if I had the box!

 I didn't enjoy making up the game as much as playing it. As I said before, I don't enjoy games like this usually, so writing the game was a chore. I only did half of the steps so you could get a sense of where it was going, but I might finish it and submit it; now it's like a personal challenge. Plus, I love free t-shirts! It's a game about different parts of speech.

I played a few of the easier digital games but didn't get into them as much as I did the one we played in real life today. I could see these being easier to implement in the classroom, though, especially because they don't need a group or extra equipment and the students could do them if they finished an activity early. I think they would get into it because most of my students seem to like puzzles. This is one of the rare things that could work equally well with teachers and students, and I look forward to seeing how I can use this resource with both my students and colleagues.

Ed Leaders Network (Thing 33)

I'm pretty into the Ed Leaders Network (ELN) (@EdLeadersNet)! I watched a video on flipping my classroom, which I have always wanted to do (well, "always" since I attended the presentation that Emily, Jesse, and John did about how the science department has been using the model at one of our institute days) but have never seemed to actually implement. I DID do a video about compound-complex sentences that I had my students watch before I taught it - which I think is at least partially flipping! - but I haven't really committed to it even though it seemed to go over well. I also created a Schoology quiz on the materials so I would have an idea of where the kids were after the video but before class, and it was super helpful to have the information; it also wasn't as time-consuming as I thought it would be. One of the things that the presenter, Shannon Holden (@newteacherhelp), said that helped me was that you shouldn't start trying to flip everything immediately: try doing it once a week. I think I can do that!

The video wasn't available for embedding because I think you have to be a member of ELN to view it, but here are some pretty cute but also informational YouTube videos on the topic. Two of them were created by PowToon, and although I didn't love that program, this is a great example of what is possible with it. The animation didn't take away from the information, which was the problem with the video I created earlier in this course. The first video is just an overview of what flipping a classroom looks like; the second is geared toward parents; the third is about potential hurdles to flipping a classroom (shoutout to Edutopia (@edutopia) for having a great series on flipping!).

Atomic Learning (Thing 32)

I have never used Atomic Learning before, so I have no other experiences with which to compare this one. However, I will say that starting my experience with Atomic Learning with that 21st Century Skills Assessment was not very pleasant. It was a moderately long quiz, but it seemed so much longer than 40 questions because there was no progress bar on it, so I had no idea how quickly (or slowly) I was going through it! For me, knowing how long something is going to take me or how many questions I'll have to answer is an important part of pacing myself. Also, while the results at the end of the quiz told me my overall score, how it broke down into percentages, and which questions I missed, it did not tell me the correct answers to the questions I answered incorrectly. I was disappointed by this because I don't think it's a good model of one of the standards (reflection and re-assessment). I would have liked to know what the right answer was and why. I did look for topics that would help me with my worst categories, but without knowing which answers I selected and which were incorrect (I definitely didn't remember what I put), they were not very useful.

As with most of the websites, programs, and apps we have worked with during this course, there are helpful resources here if you know where to look. When I selected my top three areas of interest, there were a lot of courses that I had to sift through before I got to any that were helpful. When I filtered by issue in the second task, though, that brought me some good information. I chose "Increasing Student Engagement" and found the "YouMatter: Mattering IS the Agenda" course. The only part of it that was unlocked was the introductory video, but that part was interesting. On one hand, it seems kind of unbelievable that teachers wouldn't know about reaching the students emotionally and paying attention to them before trying to teach the material, and some of the video was sort of cheesy. On the other hand, it's an important reminder to us that we are teaching the students, not the material, and I really liked the idea of starting with the staff before asking them to do it with the students. More and more often, I think teachers find themselves unappreciated, and it wouldn't take long to start to remedy that. After all, we can't take care of the kids if we can't take care of ourselves.

In the third task, I searched for reading, writing, and vocabulary. I found this course on collaborative writing with Google Docs that I really liked because it addressed both how to use Google Docs AND parts of the writing process. It is essential to me that any integration of technology into the classroom does not overshadow the skills I need to teach. In other words, the focus of the lesson should be on the writing process and collaboration, not on how Google Docs works. Of course, teaching how Google Docs works is important for online collaboration, but if it overshadows the teaching of how writing works, it's not worth it.

The other courses I found were about challenging advanced readers and using Snapchat in education. The first came up when I searched "reading," which made sense to me, but the second came up when I searched "vocabulary." I was intrigued. Snapchat has only ever caused problems for me as a teacher, so I have never thought of incorporating it into the classroom. I'm skeptical about answering questions "in real time" as described in the video because I think it's another thing that I would have to remember to do outside of school hours (not to mention the complication of having to have my school iPad with me at all times since I wouldn't use it on my phone), and I don't know how many of the kids would actually use it. But I LOVED the idea of the kids taking snaps of objects and labeling them with their Spanish names (the vocabulary connection). 

I can definitely see assigning that Google Docs collaborative writing resource to the kids before we start using Docs in our writing - that would be super helpful. The other courses I viewed were geared toward teachers, so obviously I wouldn't use those. I'll come back to this resource and see what other student-geared courses I could use in my classroom. I'm not sure how teachers would feel about having Atomic Learning assignments tailored to assessment results. If you mean standardized assessments that we have not written, I don't think it would go over well. In my mind, it would be one more step toward the computerization of learning. After all, if you have courses the students watch individually, tests they take individually, and then assignments that a computer generates that they work on individually, where is the teacher's role? 

I understand that we should be working to use technology to streamline the parts of learning that students can and should do on their own, but I don't think that making everything automated is the answer. Students need to collaborate, bounce ideas off of each other, receive feedback from a real person...I'm uncomfortable with the idea of the automatic, online loop. If the assignments come as a result of assessments that we wrote and feel were implemented with fidelity, then I think there's potential for that. It could save time and differentiate the assignments so there would be more time for teachers to work with students individually or in smaller groups. To my mind, that is the goal of educational technology: to help make individualized learning more possible. 

Exploring Learning Gizmos (Thing 31)

I'll be honest with you: I spent about 10 minutes with ExploreLearning. I just don't have the inclination or the time to spend more than that on something that has absolutely no connection to the class I teach (other than perhaps being helpful when students get to choose their own research topics for their information writing projects). The simulations that I saw were pretty cool, and I like the idea of ready-made experiences for the students; I'm also very glad that this service exists for my math and science colleagues.

The Gizmos that I added to my "36 Things" class are screen-shotted below. I chose the ones that interested me personally because even though I don't teach math or science, I am still very interested in learning about them; I usually do Teri's math bell-ringers to stay sharp!

The advantages to online simulations were outlined in the intro video below, and I agree with most of them. I'm starting to grow weary (well, I've been weary, but I am re-weary since so much of my summer has been spent with online learning) of the idea that education has to be a "show" we put on for the kids because I think that we should be able to do our jobs just as well without the technology. I realize that since I teach reading and writing (and all of the other skills associated with those things), my curriculum is perhaps easier to do with low-tech experiences. I know that simulations can and do help enormously in the teaching of complex, abstract concepts in math and science, and I think they're great for that. I just want us to remember that we don't NEED, and I would go so far as to say that we SHOULDN'T need, fancy technology to engage our students.

It would be great if ExploreLearning could add more language arts simulations. I had to choose math or science when I went to activate my account, and I don't teach either of those. I found this website as well as this one that have interactive language arts games, but they're not really like the simulations on ExploreLearning, and I'm not sure if they really bring anything different to the learning. For example, other than typing instead of writing, there is no change to the lesson on story cubes. I wonder if there is really any application in language arts for simulations or if we are trying to force technology in where it doesn't belong in this particular case.

Discovery Education (Thing 30)

I really enjoyed exploring Discovery Education! I wasn't such a fan of some of the different ways I had to find materials, but I'm glad that the materials are there and that our district has a subscription to it. The quality of materials is overall higher than the quality of other comparable services and certainly better than what I would find by simply Googling key words for the lessons I'm teaching. I like the variety of articles, videos, and writing prompts, and I'm sure that I haven't even scratched the surface of what is there.

If I put in the time (and I'll have to!) I think I can organize the materials here into something that I can use. I started adding some content just to get the feel for how it worked, and I like the "QuickList" feature because you can just check the materials you like without having to worry about where it's being stored until later. Then, you can go back and organize the materials (that's the QuickList on the bottom bar). This feels a lot like when I first learned to use Google Drive (and I still lose stuff there!).

The video that I found in the "Streaming Plus" section was about Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and how it fit into the genre of science fiction. I looked for things that I could use literally on the first day of class and didn't find anything that set the right tone, but I think I could use this definitely in the first week of eighth grade. My students read a science fiction book of their choice during the summer between seventh and eighth grade, so I always start with science fiction for my first literary unit. 

I watched several videos before selecting this one; most of them have the same "packaged" quality that I don't particularly like in educational materials (for one thing, they seem a little condescending), but for the most part, the content was pretty good. I think my students could learn from these, and I like that they have examples from literature that I don't teach because it exposes the kids to more authors and texts. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is a great book!

In the "Spotlight on Strategies" section, I chose the Six Word Story and Reading Between The Lines. I was intrigued by the Six Word Story because while I have had the students work with Six Word Memoirs before, I've never used it as a summarization technique. I like this strategy because it has good scaffolding in that it starts with images and then moves to short articles to summarize; it also has a sharing and comparing element at the end. 

These are the famous six words that supposedly started the whole "six word" movement:

https://www.tes.com/lessons/w3CmpJZmycWXeA/six-word-memoirs

I also stumbled across this website with more examples that are great.

The Reading Between The Lines was a little different than I thought it was going to be; I thought it was going to be more about inferring directly, but instead, the students are supposed to put the story or article into Wordle and then use their word cloud to see what are the main ideas. It's a neat idea and one that I would never would have thought of on my own! Plus, I love Wordle (except that it's apparently blocked on Chrome?).

For my final exploration on Discovery Education, I built a board that has resources about the different types of sentences. I tried for several minutes to get an embed code for the board, but I couldn't find one, so here is the link to the board. I agree with Emily that I don't like that you have to be logged in to view the board, but I guess that's what you get with a paid subscription service. Here are some screenshots too:

I like that there are a variety of materials built into the board, but again, I have to agree with Emily that I don't like that you can't use YouTube videos. I've come to rely on them through this course and in other areas of my teaching, but it just means that I'll need to watch more of the content on Discovery Education itself. I thought it was particularly cool that I could add documents right next to the videos and reminders; a small thing that I don't like is that you can't rename documents! Sometimes I name my documents weird things like "actual real copy of handout 45" and that helps me but not the kids.  :)

I don't think the board will be super helpful in my classroom because I already use Schoology to add videos and documents in content-specific folders - the board does look nicer, though, so maybe I'll try it. I think the easiest thing to incorporate will be strategies that I found since they're usable instantly and transferrable to several different lessons I can already think of. It's always good to learn about the resources we have in our district, though, because if they're available, I should use them! 

K-12 Online Conference: PD in Your PJs (Thing 29)

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a fan of anything that meets the following two conditions: 

1. It does not required me to get dressed in "real clothes."

2. It is free.

This week's "thing" met both of those requirements, and I also think it was a helpful resource that I will return to in the future. The K-12 Online Conference is a wealth of information, almost to the point of being overwhelming, but it's organized really easily and intuitively, and it was easy to find sessions that appealed to me. The summaries of each session and the supporting materials were helpful in choosing the sessions, and I like how each of them are sub-categorized into larger groups like "Overcoming Obstacles" and "Stories of Connection."

My first session was titled "Social Annotations: Collaborative Online Reading" from the 2015 "Stories of Connection" category. Here is the link to that page. A lot of things about just the title appealed to me. I want to continue to find ways to make my curriculum more social and inclusive; I have to teach annotation, but I don't want the notes to just live in the book; I like the idea of moving at least some of the reading online; I want my students to work together and with a larger audience. 

This PD session included three online annotation tools: Hypothes.is, NowComment, and LitGenius/BetaGenius. Paul Allison (@paulallison), the presenter, took the audience through the use of each of these tools, and I have to say that I am inspired to try at least one of them. I think NowComment might be the easiest to implement right away because it has several features that we try to incorporate into annotation already: clicking on the comment takes you right to the section that is being annotated; comments can be threaded so discussions are organic and each comment follows logically from the next; and you can sort comments by type (usually length - a sentence or a paragraph, for example). This is not to say that the other annotation tools didn't have these or similar things, just that NowComment seemed the most useable. 

One of the participants in this session also mentioned that he had used online annotation to start a conversation the next day about the reading. I liked this idea a lot because it showed that the online annotation wasn't meant to replace real-time discussion, just supplement it, and I'll definitely use it this year. When kids participate in this online annotation, it means that when they enter the classroom, they have already read the material AND thought about it enough to offer comments. This means they are coming into the discussion with at least partially developed ideas, and perhaps even having responded to a peer's comment, which should mean that they will feel more comfortable voicing those ideas in a discussion.

Another participant mentioned that we should remember that all of us, at some level, are still learning to read. This is a wonderful reminder for me! Given difficult enough material, everyone is a struggling reader, and he reminded me to remind my students that the difficulty and confusion should be seen as productive rather than something to be feared. I love this.

Paul ended by reminding us to "invite students to respond to the voices in their heads as well as the author's and generate a dialogue between these" and that students need to "learn to respond in ways that invited possible future readers to engage with them." He "keeps grounded in the pedagogy of annotation but uses multimodal tools (images, video, voice, hyperlinks) as well as writing." This session was a great one for me to view because it built on the things I learned at the Scholastic Reading Summit about independent reading being an avenue to teach some of the skills we are required to include. The availability of different texts at varying levels of content and complexity and the online tools are a great combination for teaching reading.

The second session that I chose was not as helpful to me but still had some good points. It was called "Meeting Parents and Students Where They Are" from the 2015 "Overcoming Obstacles" category. Here is a link to that page. I chose this session because I would like to make more of an effort to include parents in things going on in class beyond just emailing updates a few times a month (or trimester). 

   

This PD session was about using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Flipboard to communicate with parents and students. There were a few things that I found helpful, such as the idea to make a class page or closed group on Facebook for parents to join and how to create your own Flipboard as an online magazine, but overall, there was not much new here. Perhaps I could have chosen better since I'm familiar with most of these social networking tools, but it was a good reminder for me to review the district's policy on what we can and cannot post regarding students online. I would love to have a class Instagram or Twitter, but they sometimes are less interesting without pictures. I've always assumed that we weren't allowed to post pictures of the students, so I should look into that. 

Josh Allen (@j_allen), the presenter, ended by talking about If This, Then That (IFTTT) and the "recipes" you can create in it to post to multiple social media accounts easily. That was really cool - I know it's been one of the "stretch" activities for this course before, but I never really looked into it. It seemed a natural part of this session, and if I can get more than one class account up and running, it will be very helpful.

Overall, I liked the fact that I could choose the sessions based on what I thought would work well in my own classroom. I loved that I could do it at home at my own pace, and I like that everything from every past conference is stored online. I'll definitely try to attend this year's conference!

P.S. I saw this session and decided against watching it because I think there will be a lot of crossover from this course to Dr. Rodgers' session, but I'm including it here because I think it will be a good reference and I'd like to revisit it.

   

Google Forms & Flubaroo, Socrative, Kahoot, and Padlet (Things 25-28)

Formative assessment and I have a complicated relationship. On one hand, I love it for the information it provides me and my students and for the fact that it keeps me updated on their progress in a much quicker, more easily accessible way than summative assessments do. On the other hand, I sometimes get overwhelmed by the management of formative assessments and feel guilty that I don't do them often enough or use the information quickly enough after I get it.

I think I need to revisit how and why I use formative assessment, and I also need to expand my definition of what formative assessment actually is. I mentioned on the Padlet response that my definition in practice can be quite narrow: I think of formative assessment as exit slips. Because of that, I end up with hundreds of little slips of paper (Post-its, index cards, scraps of reused paper, or, if I'm really organized, an actual typed and copied handout) that have good information on them but get lost in the shuffle of the rest of the paper in my classroom after I have glanced through them. If I am more deliberate about what I ask for in formative assessments and if I can use some of these tools, I think I will be able to use the information I get much more successfully this year. Here is a clip of one of my favorite educational leaders, Rick Wormeli (@rickwormeli2), talking about formative and summative assessments.

I created a Google Form about sentence types and enabled Flubaroo (@Flubaroo) to grade it for me. I don't think this gives me better or quicker data than using the Schoology (@Schoology) quizzes, which also grade automatically, so I probably won't use Flubaroo too much. I can see that this would be helpful if I were using Google Classroom because then everything would be in one place, but since we already use Schoology as our learning management system, I like everything to be there. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Flubaroo; I love the idea, but I think it would be an extra thing for me to manage. Feel free to take the quiz if you would like to! 

(Please take one moment to appreciate the fact that I had to manually adjust the size of this form in the embed code and I figured it out and IT WORKED. #progress)



I was already familiar with Socrative (@Socrative) since I used it in graduate school (and I also did my Google Hangout On Air about how to use Socrative. That being said, I still struggled with creating an exit slip that wasn't pre-populated and ended up making a quiz instead and saving it as an exit slip - more problem-solving on the fly! (It seems like a long time ago that I said one of my biggest issues would be seeing roadblocks as opportunities; I still struggle with this, but I HAVE learned to look for answers to my questions and try several things before throwing up my hands in disgust. Again...#progress. :) )

I like Socrative a lot because it is easy, quick, and does not require any additional hardware or software since all the kids already have iPads. I think this is formative assessment at its best because it gives you immediate feedback and it is easy to see exactly where your class is on any given concept. I also like the reports that can be generated after students are finished with the quizzes. I will have to do more work to create exit slips or quizzes that are specific to the content of my class, but the pre-populated ones are also useful, which is a rare find for me. My room number is T6DOMEWS if you would like to take my quiz on Things 1-28. 

I know that several of my colleagues use Kahoot (@GetKahoot), and I have actually administered a few of them while subbing for other teachers in the building. My Adventures kids were also really into them! They are super easy to write and I love the fact that there are literally millions of them that are available for immediate use. Not all of them are useful, though, and there are a lot to sort through, but I'd rather have that problem than have too few resources! 

The few times that I've used Kahoot in the classroom while subbing, the students seemed really into it and liked the immediate feedback when each question ended; they also liked that they could see who was winning after each question because they liked the competition. I could see a lot of potential with Kahoot because as the teacher, I could also see how many of the kids got a question right or wrong as well as which kid got the question right or wrong. I was a little worried that they wouldn't want the other kids to see that they were wrong, but the students didn't seem concerned about that. This would be great for literary factual recall questions or a quick check at the end of a lesson to see who got it on the first try and who didn't. The only thing I'm not sure about it whether or not the results save; Flubaroo and Socrative are good for that, and I don't know if Kahoot does it or not.

Finally, Padlet (@padlet). I love you, Padlet! My first experience with Padlet was not good, though, because it was at a district-wide institute day and had literally hundreds of people adding to the same one, which got really overwhelming really quickly. However, now that I have used it on a smaller scale and created one of my own, I am in love with it. I went to the Scholastic Reading Summit (@Scholastic, @ScholasticTeach, #readingsummit) this summer and got so much inspiration about independent reading AND technology, and one of the best things I learned about was using Padlet with students to share independent reading suggestions and responses. 

In the past, I've had students share their independent reading books verbally and I've kept a list of them, which I then added to Schoology and MAYBE three or four kids would refer to when they needed new independent reading books. However, with Padlet, the kids can add to the list whenever they want and access it easily from their iPads or phones. It's available for Apple or Android and free, which is my favorite price. I think I'm going to have the students put it on their iPads and use it as much as possible for brainstorming - we could do it with independent reading books, selecting quotes for essays (which I do on Schoology discussions now), topics for research projects, and so many other things! Another great thing about this is that it's not limited to just one class, so if I wanted to do a cross-curricular exploration with another teacher, that would be really easy.

Please share your favorite books with me!

Created with Padlet

This was one of the only weeks of this course where I felt that each "thing" I did was useful. Although I liked some more than others and felt that some would be easier to implement in my current classroom than others, none of them were overly flashy or difficult to learn, which means that none of them will stand in the way of the skills or practice the kids need to do. It also means that none of them will be difficult for me to teach the kids (if they're not already familiar with them - they usually are!). I will be implementing the use of Padlet on the first day of school - literally - to collect their summer reading titles and get started on the culture of reading in our classroom!

Some of these tools have applicability outside of the classroom and formative assessment. As I mentioned, I've used Padlet in professional development (as a student, not the presenter). It was a good way to get feedback, but I think it needed to be more organized (the grid view would have helped). I can see using Socrative in a department or faculty meeting to collect responses because you can have open-ended questions, but Flubaroo and Kahoot seem like strictly classroom tools. I would love to hear about other uses!

When I was looking around for other examples of formative assessment in the classroom, I came across this blog that included the rubric below (it's bigger on the post). I really like the idea of using basic rubrics like these because they are not content-specific, and they encourage reflection. Since this is supposed to be for formative assessments, the number is not the grade on the assignment because the assignment is not graded. I need to remind myself that I should not be assigning work because I need the numbers in my gradebook. I need to be okay with much more feedback that is not linked to grades because the grades on the summative assessments will come if the feedback on the formative assessments is timely and focused. One of my biggest concerns is that students are far too focused on the grades they get rather than the learning that takes place. Maybe more formative assessments and feedback will help with that.