Timelines Apps & Student Engagement

By Kim Miklusak

Traditionally I have had my AP English Language students create a timeline for the plot of Slaughterhouse-Five.  The book is written out of chronological order as the main character, Billy, is "unstuck" in time.  Students often struggle with this fact; not only do they frequently have difficulty seeing the events in order, but they also have difficulty partnering up events to analyze why Kurt Vonnegut would structure his novel this way.  After the students brainstormed their timelines, we would create one master timeline on the board and use it as a jumping off point for broader discussions and clarifications.

I wanted to try this same technique on the iPad; however, I was debating with myself whether this was simply a matter of substitution of iPad over paper.  I ultimately decided to go ahead with it and see what else I could do with it.  What I ended up finding is that the individual yet public nature of the assignment helped students to more personally connect with the ultimate goals.

On the suggestion of my coworker Kristen Guth, I had my students download the RWT Timeline app.  It is free and very easy to use; I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to work with timelines in class.  Students could organize their timeline by event, add short and long descriptions, and add pictures if they wanted.   It was interesting to hear students work through the timeline with their partners.  They engaged in debates on placement of events, which led to them making individual connections between relationships.

Student sample

In the end I had students upload their timeline into a Schoology Media Album, so everyone in class could review them.  We then shared them on the screen and discussed the differences between one timeline and another.  While I can't claim that it's completely transforming through technology, I'm still happy with the way it turned out and the increase in individual student engagement.

Multiply Learning with #EG1to1!

By Kim Miklusak and Linda Ashida

The other day on Twitter someone shared the idea of what if every teacher tweeted one idea or moment from class every day.  Imagine the community building, the collaborative experiences, and the instructional sharing that could go on if each of us could do that!  Think how much we could learn from and be inspired by one another!

As we move to full 1:1 implementation at Elk Grove next year, the Collab Lab is encouraging staff to Tweet resources and examples of learning in their classrooms using the hashtag EG1to1.  The use of the hashtag will allow us to easily search and curate all of these tweets, and we will multiply our opportunities to learn from one another. For example, just today several teachers tweeted out strategies, student samples, and experiences from their classrooms! The use of the hashtag also gives us an opportunity to share and build our connections with parents and communities beyond our school. We're looking forward to continuing to build this momentum for next year.

We enjoy seeing student Tweets, too, about the ways they they are learning with iPads, like this one today from Gillian Guerra. We'll encourage their use of the hashtag EG1to1 as well!

Interactive Activities with Notability

Posted by Linda Ashida

We would like to give a big shout out to Katie Owen, Special Education teacher, for facilitating this week's 8th hour Peer Learning Group and inspiring this post.  Katie shared a variety of interactive language arts activities that she has created for her Strategies for Learning class using the apps Notability and Flashcards+. After Katie's demonstration, our group enjoyed brainstorming the many way we could adapt the activities in our own classes; we discussed applications for varied disciplines and varied levels.

In this post we will highlight some creative ways that Katie uses Notability with her students.

Instead of simply writing and annotating documents, Katie also wanted her students to be able to manipulate words and phrases, to do varied vocabulary, categorizing, and writing activities.  Prior to her 1:1 days, Katie recalls the "old-fashioned" manipulative word-sort and sentence-sort activities where either she or her students would spend SO much time cutting out the words to prepare the activities.  Collecting and organizing all of the word and sentence pieces was also time consuming.

After transitioning to a 1:1 classroom, it ocurred to Katie that her students could do the same manipulative activities using Notability. She could do this by posting documents in Schoology in as Notes, instead of PDFs. That way, students could still write on and annotate the documents, just as they could with PDFs, but the .note format would also give them the ability to manipulate words or phrases using the scissors function; they could easily be "cut" and moved around the document into category boxes, or organized in a series, etc. They could also modify or make corrections on documents using the eraser function.  

Before sharing some specific examples from Katie's classes, we'll first share the steps that she uses to upload each activity to Schoology in "Note" format:

1. Create a PDF document on her laptop and open it in Notability on her iPad; OR, create a document right in Notability on her iPad. 
2. Option: Annotate the document with additional instructions, or examples.
3. From her iPad: Email the document to herself as a "note" from Notability.
4. On her laptop: Open email and download the document (now in .note format) to her desktop.
5. Upload the .note document to Schoology Resource folder.
6. Move the .note document to Schoology Course Page for student access.

The sequence of  visuals below show how to choose the Note format and move it to the Schoology Resource folder:

And now, some specific examples from Katie's classes.

1)  Word sort/categorization activity:

Katie created this document in Notability, emailed it to herself, opened it on her laptop, and then uploaded it to Schoology.  Students open the document in Notability and then manipulate the words to categorize them. You can see on the Note that the students choose the "scissors" in the top menu bar, circle the word to "cut" it, and then move it over into the correct category.

2) Cloze Activity:

Katie started with this document in PDF format.  From her laptop she emailed it to herself and then opened it on her iPad in Notability.  In Notability she wrote the words in the word bank in blue.  She emailed it to back to herself as a Note.  She then opened it on her laptop and uploaded it to Schoology.  Students open the activity in Notability.  Once again, they use the scissors to "cut" the words in the word bank and move them to the correct blank.


 

3)  Sentence structure / Sentence corrections:

To prepare this activity, Katie used the same steps to prepare it as she did with the Cloze activity above.  Katie annotated the sentences on a PDF document in Notability, emailed it to herself as a Note, and the uploaded it to Schoology.  The students open the document in Notability and then use the eraser in the top menu bar to erase and correct Katie's annotations.

4)  Modeling annotations with "I do, We do, You do" color-coding:

Katie has embedded in all of her classes a strong routine of modeling for her students.  The "I do" activities, those that the teacher models, are always coded with the color red in the instructions box. The "we do" activities, those that the students do together with the teacher, are coded in yellow.  The "You do", activities, those that the teacher directs the students to do on their own, are coded in green.  In the example on the right, you will see that the first section has instructions coded with red, and has annotations that Katie completed as a model for the students.  The next section's instructions are in yellow, so the students move on to do annotations with the teacher's guidance.  The final step would be for the students to do their own annotations without guidance, and those instructions would be in green.  You can see an example of that above.  Notice that the sentence correction activity instructions are in green, so that is an activity that the students were prepared to do on their own, after modeling, and guided practice from the teacher.



Katie also shared examples of interactive activities that her students enjoy using the Flashcards+ app.  We'll save those examples for a future post. After Katie's demonstrations, we brainstormed applications for our World Language, English Social Science and Math classes.  Have Katie's activities inspired ideas for your own classes?  Please share your ideas in the comments below.

And, if you are a teacher at EGHS and you'd like to try these activities with your classes, stop by and see us in the Collab Lab! We'd love to brainstorm ideas and help you create activities for your own classes!