Create - Annotate - Publish!

Written by Linda Ashida

"Create - Annotate - Publish" is the framework that Ben Friesen from EdTech Team used in the workshop on Student Engagement that he presented to District 214's ITF / DTC team.  For each category Ben demonstrated several apps and gave participants time to try them out.  This blog post will highlight a few of our favorite apps from the workshop.

Create:  

Turn learning over to the students!  Encourage them to use apps that engage them in creating to demonstrate their  learning:

  

Paper by 53:
A great app to do visual notetaking or sketchnoting.  Make thinking visible and demonstrate your learning!  If you are interested in learning more about sketchnoting, and uses for this app, check out this previous Collab Blog post on Sketchnoting.

Vidra:
Last week our Teaming on Tuesday professional learning day focused on AdobeVoice.  Vidra is another presentation tool,similar to Adobe Voice, that it is "user-friendly" and a great tool for students to create presentations with their voice and photos to demonstrate their learning.


Green Screen with Do Ink:
Give students the opportunity to unleash their creativity, have fun, and demonstrate their learning with this green screen app!

Annotate:
Help students dig deeper and analyze the learning they create!

Notability:

Notability is a versatile app that students can use for notetaking, presenting, and also annotating.  Students can use Notability to annotate work they create to engage in the metacognitive process of reflecting on their learning and demonstrating it to others.

Thinglink:

Thinglink is a great interactive app that students can use for presentations, but also to annotate to reflect their learning.  Ben shared this blog post that gives great ideas for creating Thinglinks.  Check it out!

Publish:

One of my favorite quotes from the workshop was, "What if student work were published instead of just ending up in the "wire basket" for just the teacher to see?"

Publishing can have a tremendous impact on student learning.  If students know they are publishing for an audience beyond their teacher, it raises the bar for them to reflect more deeply on their learning before they share it.  Furthermore, publishing creates an opportunity for students to receive more feedback on their work.

Publishing can done on very open social media forums, but to control the audience more, apps such as Schoology and Seesaw offer great options. Students can publish their work to just the peers in their class. Those classmates can share comments and offer feedback. Furthermore, the published examples can serve as models of work to inspire improved learning.

Schoology:

Schoology Media Albums are a great way to publish student work, just to members of the class.

Seesaw:  Seesaw is a great app to create archives of student work, and to give students the opportunity to do peer review.  It is a great app to curate artifacts of student learning.

This post highlights just some of our favorite apps from the workshop. We hope you will be inspired to try at least one of them.  If you would like support, please contact us in the Collab Lab.  We would love to play and learn with you!  And, if you have examples of your own experience with these apps, please share with us!

To conclude, we'd like to give a big shout out to Ben Friesen and the EdTech Team for inspiring our D214 team in our professional learning and our collaborative learning with our students!

Interactive vocab review

by Kirsten Fletcher

I heard some great ideas this week from my colleagues about creative ways to review vocabulary.

Mindy Perkins - APUSH
Mindy Perkins was looking for a quick way to review vocabulary in AP US History without creating a mountain of little vocabulary flashcards. Here's what she came up with.

She created 2 grids of vocabulary that will be on the final exam. Students seated in groups of 4. They were seated across from their partner and next to their opponent. The opponents shared an iPad and opened one of the vocabulary grids in Notability. Their partners opened the other grid on their iPad. Person A from Team 1 started by giving a clue for one of the vocabulary terms on their grid. If their partner guessed the term correctly, they colored in the word in their chosen color. If not, Person A from Team 2 gave a clue. They continued until someone guessed the word. Then Person B from each team gave clues. At the end, they simply counted up the number of boxes in their color to determine who won.

Student B game board

Mindy said that as they played, the students were engaged, excited, and on task. Since it was a student-led game, she had the time to correct definitions and clarify terms as she walked around. When the game was finished, she had students pull out their vocabulary lists and highlight any words that their group struggled to define. This allowed students to reflect on their learning in order to study more efficiently for the assessment.


Cliff Darnall - Japanese
I saw Cliff Darnall cutting apart cards with pictures for a vocabulary game that he plays, and he graciously invited me to observe his class in action. Cliff credits this idea to the 2012 ACTFL Teacher of the Year, Mr. Yo Azama of North Salinas High School in California.

The purpose of this activity is to have students using new vocabulary in context so they practice grammar structures while learning new vocabulary. To start, Cliff has students practice a model sentence that he projects on the screen.

Then, he divides his students into small groups. Each student has a vocabulary card with a picture or clue on one side and the vocabulary word on the other. The students stand in a circle holding their cards so the picture / clue is facing out and they can see the word.

Vocabulary card

At the beginning of the activity, the teacher sets a timer for 30 seconds. One student starts by reading the model sentence and substituting in their own vocabulary word, then the word of another student. For example, the sentence might read "I like Geography, but I don't understand Chemistry". The second student then says the sentence with their word first and another student's word. The conversation continues around the circle until the timer rings. The student who is still talking when the timer goes off is out. For the next turn, the timer is shorter (maybe 20 seconds) and so on until there is one winner left.

As I observed Cliff's class doing this activity, he modified it slightly for his students. Since he had extra cards he asked the student who was "out" to pick up a new vocab card and continue practicing. This particular class was not overly competitive, so they responded well to this change. Also, after a few minutes, he had groups swap cards so that they practiced more vocabulary. When he did this, he switched the prompt also.

For World Languages, this activity has a lot of advantages. Not only are students learning new vocabulary, but they are repeating sentence structures (without the boredom that sometimes accompanies rote repetition) and they are constantly practicing pronunciation and interpersonal speaking skills. Hot Potato is very guided. To use this in other subject areas, a teacher may have to adapt the activity to include definitions or sentence starters.

Check out how engaged Cliff's students are during this Hot Potato Vocab Activity !

To Read or Not to Read? Can Shakespeare fit in a Standards-Based English Curriculum?

By Kristen Guth

Recently I have been involved in a lot of conversations about Standards-Based Grading and what that looks like in an English class. These meaningful conversations have also forced me to ask myself a lot of difficult questions. If I am working to implement SBG, does that imply that I should only be teaching skills and not the content? Is the text we are selecting an appropriate vehicle for helping students access, learn, and master the skills? Can the average, non-AP student practice and demonstrate mastery of reading skills while reading Shakespeare?

In having these conversations with colleagues and friends, I have discovered that many schools have removed Shakespeare from their English courses, at least at the regular level. This realization makes me incredibly sad for those students and those teachers. Not only will those students be missing out on the cultural relevancy of Shakespeare’s works, but they are also missing an amazing opportunity to see that reading skills are the necessary key to unlocking and appreciating the true meaning of a text.

We are currently reading Macbeth in my Sophomore World Literature & Composition classes, and I believe that it has been an amazing text to use for a skills-based curriculum. Because the text is difficult and the comprehension does not come easy, students are forced to closely analyze the language, literary devices, word choice, themes, etc. in order to have any real understanding of the play. 

One of my colleagues, Matt Snow, shared with me an entirely skills-based scene analysis activity that he uses at the honors level. Students are required to read for conflict, sequence of events, cause and effect, key quotes, literary terms, symbols, themes, inferences, and predictions. The first time I showed it to my regular students, they were pretty scared. Even though we had practiced all of these skills with other texts, they thought there was no way they could possibly be successful when the same practice was applied to such a difficult text. I am not going to lie, it was not easy for them. I had to do a lot of facilitating and guiding the first time through, but I have gradually been able to pull away and put all of the responsibility on the kids. They really had to work together with their groups and grind through some of the tougher questions, but it was amazing to watch. By repeating this practice with several parts of the play, their mastery of the skills has grown in conjunction with their mastery of the content.

I have rarely seen students as proud of their work as they were with this skills-based activity, and it provided me with some really clear formative feedback on their reading skills. More importantly, it gave my students such a great sense of accomplishment knowing that they could use their reading skills to tackle the subtleties, nuances, and deeper meanings of a text that they could not even begin to comprehend on the first read. There is a reason that Shakespeare has been read in English classes for so long, and I think his plays definitely still have a place in a Standards-Based Grading curriculum. 

Student Samples: 

       

 









For an additional blog post about teaching Shakespeare through graphic novels, check out this post!

Pre-Reading

By Mark Heintz

In human geography the students are learning about population density and distribution. After going through several days of effects of populations density, the students did an in-depth look at Bangladesh and the effects of population density.  The lesson included an article on the effects of population density on Bangladesh.  Almost all of my students have never heard of Bangladesh. The make the article more approachable, I inundated them with images, maps, videos, and discussions that built their background knowledge.

I first gave them the location of Bangladesh and its relative size to the USA.

Then, I gave them a map of Bangladesh. The class discussed the impact of the water on the population.  

After looking at the maps, the students watched a three minute video clip on the population growth and water problems associated with the rapid population increase. Finally, the students looked at several images of Dhaka. Again, the class discussed the visuals.  

The process took thirty minutes.  The students read and annotated the article.   It was great! The students were engaged the entire time they read. The post reading discussion was high level and their comprehension was fantastic! It just shows the power of building their understanding before they read. 

  

  

Peer Observation: Round 2 (Post 4/4)

Period 7
We had two visitors join us this period: Cliff Darnall and Courtney Lavand.  Though unplanned, the theme of our Period 7 observations was activating background knowledge.  In both Lindsey Bucciarelli's Human Geography class and Señora Carmen Ruiz-Bergman's AP Spanish class, we observed numerous methods of brainstorming to initiate discussions.

In Human Geography, we saw students developing lists in Notability of why people migrate.  There are the "Pushes" and "Pulls" of why people leave home or come to a desired land/country.  Students also took a matching quiz on Schoology to ensure student understanding of these various push/pull factors.  Then, students watched a 5 minute video clip summarizing the situation in Syria.  After the video, students were going to work on a Jigsaw in pairs to explore the different elements of migration.

        

In AP Spanish, we observed students exploring the facts of Halloween vs. Día de los muertos.  Students were watching a video describing some of the rituals of both celebrations and then were going to write a persuasive essay where they had to choose one day to celebrate.  

Following the observations, we discussed the different methods both teachers used to activate students' background knowledge on the subject manners.  We also talked about the use of Schoology and Notability to record (both written and verbal) student learning.

Period 8
Matt Bohnenkamp joined our group for observing Sr. Burrier-Sanchis and Lindsey Bucciarelli.  

In Sr. Burrier-Sanchis's AP Spanish Literature class, they were discussing the novel Into the Beautiful North.  Students were discussing various adjectives that they could use to describe the novel.  Following the quick discussion in pairs, Sr. Burrier-Sanchis showed students the website wordreference.com to use as a thesaurus for multiple languages.  

Observations in both classes sparked great brainstorming sessions about scaffolding and other connections on the CollabLab's dry erase wall!  Stop on down to check it out and add more ideas!

Notability Workshop with Tech Staff

By: Rachel Barry

On Tuesday, the tech staff at Elk Grove High School attended a mini-workshop to learn how students use Notability.  As many students come to the Help Desk for help with technical issues, the technology staff wanted to see how students were using this app and to then learn how to address some of the common issues that students have with the app.  Here is a summary of the some of the features discussed.  

Organization
Many times students come to the Help Desk to ask for help finding a document.  Many times it is because the student doesn't have folders set up in Notability.  It is easy to organize and color-code in order to accurate sort your documents.  First, click on the "+" sign at the very top left of the screen.  

The confusing part for students is the difference between a "subject" and a "divider".  You will first want to set up DIVIDERS.  This is different than what your mind would normally believe.  The dividers are what the students would name their courses such as "Geometry" or "Biology".  Then, the SUBJECTS are for individual units, standards, or methods of sectioning off materials within a course.  Here is a sample of how a student can gradually add units as they are working in a class:

Exporting a Document
Most times students export a document, they will be submitting an assignment to Schoology.  To do so, students will click on the export button in the top left.

Then, they will click the "Share" button at the very bottom of the dropdown options.  

In most cases, the student will want to export the file as a .pdf.  If they want to share it as a note, they can change this by clicking on the arrow next to .pdf and select "Note".  Next, they will click on "Share Note".  They will select Schoology as the app to export to.

Within Schoology, students will follow the prompts to submit the file to the appropriate course and assignment.  

Additional Features
In the workshop, the tech staff also learned how to annotate, highlight, add text boxes, cut & paste, add pictures, and add audio to a note.  Most students navigate these features with ease, but the tech staff found it helpful to explore the capabilities and uses of Notability.

If you would like additional help in using Notability or have any resources to share about ways you have used it, please stop by the Collab Lab!

Notability Learning Labs

by Katie Winstead and the DTC Team

Today the Collab Lab had its doors open every period for a cool, new concept: Learning Labs. After meeting with staff members during the Peer Observation Day, the school saw a need to have specific days devoted to learning different instructional techniques. Today’s Learning Labs were devoted to learning more about Notability.

Even teachers who regularly use Notability stopped in to learn different ways to engage students through interactive notes. For example, we discussed “Katie’s technique” where we share a note with our students and they have the capability to use the scissors in Notability to move words or drawings around, change the color or size, and generally manipulate documents to categorize, sort, etc.

We also discussed the idea of audio notes: students can brainstorm and write as they plan out essays, for example.

In math classes, students have been using the audio function to talk about how they are solving problems to make learning visible. Students can also push out their documents as "Notes" so that teachers can open up the editable file and either write or speak back to the students!

Overall, it was a very successful day and the teachers at Elk Grove are looking forward to many more Learning Labs to come!

Multiplying Learning

by Katie Winstead

Yesterday we had a very special opportunity to do some cool things at Elk Grove High School. Normally on Thursday mornings, educators have time between 7:40-9:00am to meet with PLTs. Yesterday, as Linda described in her previous blog post, we had a "Late, Late Start" which allowed us to have an extra hour of time to learn together!

With this extra time, we decided to get everyone together from some staff-led professional development. The morning started off with a wide variety of Spark Sessions - from mastery learning and peer tutoring, to modeling and scaffolding for learners of all types in a variety of settings. We learned about how these ideas impacted learning and, in some cases, the technology used to make the impact even greater. Each Spark Session was 3-5 minutes - and one session was even live on Periscope!

From there, staff members had the opportunity to learn more about the different Spark Sessions by meeting the presenter and colleagues in different rooms for an informal Learning Lab. It was great to see all the ideas being passed around. The presenters did a great job sparking interest (which then inspired everyone to join a room of their choosing) and then the entire staff was able to talk about different ways to implement the ideas and further ways to improve them.

Colleagues gathering to talk about Visible Learning.

One session I went to was with Adam Clayton, who talked about how important it is to increase language skills in math classes. He wanted to make learning visible by having students talk about their reasoning while solving math problems. To do this, he used Schoology to push out example problems that students opened in Notability. Once in Notability, students then recorded themselves talking about the problems while they solved them (see image below). These recording and notes can then be turned back into Schoology by sharing it as a note (a strategy I thought of last year - to find out more click here).

The most amazing thing about the session was that one teacher posed a question:

If I wanted to respond and write back to the student, could I then send the note to them with my voice and notes added?

Nobody really knew.. I suggested possibly sending it back in an email, but a second later Kim told us that you can drop back assignments to students in Schoology, so why not a note? Next thing you know everyone is playing around in Notability and sure enough - it worked! We practiced adding on additional audio recordings in Notability while drawing - that worked as well! It was amazing to see everyone working together to come up with a great new idea and multiplying learning. I learned something great that I would never have known if we hadn't had all those resources in one room together. So thank you to all my amazing colleagues for the great learning opportunity!

We would love to hear about your experiences with Spark Sessions, the Learning Labs, or any cool professional development opportunities you have been a part of and why they were so enjoyable =)

Sketchnoting and Visual Notetaking

Written by Linda Ashida

In the last few months I have come across Tweets and Blog posts that incorporate Sketchnoting as a way to capture, reflect on, and share learning.

Take this Sketchnote by Sylvia Duckworth on the SAMR Model for example:

 I have read and heard about the SAMR model often, yet this Sketchnote really helps the concept "stick" in my brain.  It confirms, for me, the impact of dual-coding in learning.

As teachers, Sketchnoting can be a great way to take notes, document and share our own learning.  For example, I have enjoyed using my Notability app at professional conferences to take visual notes, with varied colors, embedded photos and annotations. Students can use sketchnoting to demonstrate and share their learning as well; student sketchnotes could serve as a form of assessment.

Since most students at Elk Grove have the Notability app, they are already equipped to begin experimenting with sketchnoting.  But they could also choose from other free apps such as Paper 53, Adobe Ideas, or Brushes.  It would be interesting to offer students a choice of these apps and then the class could review and decide their top choices.

For more information on the "What, How, and Why" of Sketchnoting, check out the resources below:

• Top iPad Apps for Sketchnoting and Visual Notetaking 
• Sketchnotes by Sylvia Duckworth
• Sketchnoting for Learning 
• Sketchnote Army
• How to Create Sketchnotes on the iPad

Do you have examples of how you or your students have used Sketchnoting?  We'd love to hear from you!  Please share in the comments below!

Creative Demonstration of Learning: Stop Motion Videos!

Posted by Linda Ashida

One of the things I enjoy most in my role as Innovative Technology Facilitator is visiting classrooms and seeing the creative ways that teachers are impacting student learning in our 1:1 classrooms. Inevitably, I learn and I am inspired, and I have the opportunity to share the strategies I see with others.

Today's post will highlight one of my recent classroom visits to Quinn Loch's Biology class and the creative way he used technology to assess his students' understanding of mitosis. Instead of using a traditional assessment, Quinn had his students use the app Stop Motion Studio, to create videos of this cell cycle process.

After a very brief introduction to the lesson, the students downloaded the app, a free app,  and got to work. The app required very little instruction on Quinn's part; students seemed to intuitively know how to navigate the process.

After downloading the app, the students visited the supply table and decided which of the following props they wanted to use to recreate the process of mitosis: Play Doh, pipe cleaners, chalk, yarn, string, paper clips, magic markers, labels, colored paper.

From there, the students went to work. Collaborating with their partners, they reviewed their notes in Notability, they talked through all of the key steps and vocabulary of mitosis, and planned how they would represent each step with their props.

 You can see a great example of their collaboration in the following video:

Quinn acted as the facilitator, circulating from group to group to clarify steps, encourage the students and offer feedback. It was fun to watch how each group worked differently, but ultimately demonstrated their knowledge in a unique and creative way. 

Check out  a couple of their final products below!

Do you have creative ways you have had your students demonstrate their learning?  We'd love to hear from you!

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!