I learned so much this year, and I had the opportunity to present as well. Presenting for Michigan Virtual was an amazing chance to show teachers/advisers/principals the kinds of technology we use on a daily basis to make learning better for all. My co-presenters and I talked about building relationships and personalizing learning for all students using technology (slides can be found at Michigan Virtual). Other than presenting, 4 sessions really stood out to me.
Critique, Conferencing, and Feedback
In this session I learned a lot about how I can structure my feedback in order for my students to grow and learn from it. The structure mentioned that I liked the most is the SE2R structure. SE2R stands for Summarize, Explain, Redirect, and Resubmit. I think this one translates the best to the online classroom format as it can all be done virtually. I was already using some of these parts in my feedback before but now it is nice to have a clear picture of what every piece of feedback should look like going forward.
The other awesome thing I got from this session is this amazing video about the power of critique. I wish I had seen this before! The example features elementary children but I think the message can span across all grades.
Reach and Teach ALL
This was a great Google for Education session that walked through a ton of different tech tools for differentiation.
Differentiation by Readiness
Trivia games (Quizizz/kahoot challenge for asynchronous review), grouping and stations, review videos, picture notes/fill in the blank notes
SS: current events, timelines, Blabberize for historical figures
Desmos– created for math but can be blank for other subjects
Edit Google Drawings
You Can Do It! Visual Notetaking with Sketchnotes
In this session I learned about creating visual, flowing notes that allow me to write down the most essential points and not feel like I have to write down every little thing a presenter says. I have always liked the idea of doing this but it seemed so daunting until this presenter broke everything down into parts and showed us how it is okay to start with the basics and then add some elements in later when you have more time. I will definitely be using this strategy at future conferences!
Here is a quick Sketchnotes Basics:
Overall MACUL 19 was AMAZING and I hope I get to go again next year!
I’m not talking about actual camping, I’m talking about an awesome day of professional development!
This was my first opportunity to experience Michigan Virtual’s Day Camp and I have to say…. It was amazing! I learned so much and left very inspired to continue making my classroom the best possible place for my students.
Keynote
So first off, the keynote was Michael Bonner! You might have seen him on Ellen, because he is a very passionate and inspiring teacher.
The biggest thing I learned from this keynote is the power of self reflection and that it is okay to stop and say, this isn’t working. I realized that it is okay to try new teaching techniques (even the ones that scare me a little) and it is okay if they don’t go amazingly well. The important thing is that I see what is working and what isn’t and am constantly attempting to improve my craft.
Thinking Prompts
The other big thing I took away from this awesome day of professional development is the idea of including thinking prompts in my classes more. I have started adding thinking prompts to my announcements as well as having some some prompts ready to respond to student’s discussion posts that will help further their thinking.
Here is an example of a thinking prompt I added in my Personal Finance class announcements:
These are just two of the things that I learned from Day Camp, because everything I learned would take 50 blog posts! Overall it was an amazing opportunity and I am so glad that I got to experience it.
If I had to name one thing that I could do a lot better at, it would be communicating with parents. I don’t communicate with parents very often but I have been working on increasing that and I have a new idea of what I will do this summer to increase it even more.
Good Calls (or emails) Home
I put an event in my calendar to remind me to send a good email home to the parents of one student from each of my classes every Friday afternoon. Good notes home is something that I used to do a lot in the Face-To-Face classroom. I was in the art room so often times the students that were doing really well in my class were not doing so great in their other classes. So, I always tried to send good notes home to parents that probably don’t get these types of notes very often. Now I look for students that have done well on recent tests or assignments, or students that have recently started turning in a lot of assignments and getting caught up in the class.
Remind
This summer I am going to give Remind a try. I set up Remind pages for my summer classes and created an infographic that explains what Remind is, why they should join, and how to register for our class. Below is what it will look like!
*You can click on the image to see it bigger
I hope that with these positive emails home and the use of Remind I can have a more productive relationship with the parents of my students! And I think that this will also make communicating with students and mentors easier as well!
I may have borrowed my title from Michigan Virtual’s awesome presence at MACUL, but it really describes how I feel about the conference! I learned SO many amazing things there that I am implementing in my classes now. I came out of that experience refreshed and inspired to continue to help all of my students learn! Here are some of the things I am doing post-MACUL/Spring Synergy!
Twitter
I went to an awesome session about using twitter in the classroom (thanks @jasonaxelbowman) and I was inspired to start using class hashtags to share additional information with my students. I invited them to follow me on twitter and use the class hashtag to share class related material or exciting (school appropriate) news they would like to share! Here is the info:
@Ms_LGraham
#MVArchaeology
#MVArtApp
#MVFilmStudy
Getting to know my students more
I am now sending out at least 5 messages per class a day just asking students how they are doing and asking if they need help with anything. I am hoping this will open up even more conversations between my students and me.
I was also inspired to do a padlet that is personal, fun, and class related! I know, how did I do that all in one thing??? Well for my film studies classes I asked students to share a “Memorable Movie Moment” from their favorite film. Side note – I also discovered that you can set your padlet so that you have to approve all posts before they show up, which was necessary for this one since I had students including video clips. This is a super amazing feature that I did not know before this conference!
Changing the way I give feedback
I was inspired by a presentation at Spring Synergy to prioritize my feedback and make sure that I am spending the most time on vital assignments (papers and formative assignments where I can help before the student strays too far from the learning goals).
Reinforcing lessons with outside material
I was completely inspired by the awesome session of a panel of teachers, Carrie Moeggenberg, Garth Trask, David Theune, Mark Wells, Mark Schlaudt, and Erik Cliff. They presented a great session called “We Thought, We Inspired, We Created” that really made me see that I was only reaching the “middle” students in my courses, I wasn’t providing enough material to challenge high performing students and I wasn’t providing enough material to scaffold learning for struggling students. They spoke a lot about “cloning yourself” as in taking videos of yourself to help reach these other group of students. I am starting to not only take videos of myself like mentioned but also using outside sources that are meant to help with differentiating material for students. The main sources I use and would recommend is Khan academy, Crash Course, and Front Row Ed. Everything in Khan Academy and Front Row Ed is completely geared toward K-12 learning, but Crash Course is not so previewing all Crash Course videos is a must!
Effective feedback is essential to student growth and understanding. I had a student that decided to wait until the last minute to do ALL of the class assignments (I’m sure we all have a few of these) the biggest issue for me wasn’t getting all of that grading dumped on me at the last semester, it is that I had to keep making the same correction in all of his assignments. All of those lost points could have been avoided if he had read the comments and addressed the issues on his first assignment before turning in all of the others. This would have allowed him to score higher on a lot of assignments, and grading would have been a lot less of a headache for me. I think that this case specifically shows why feedback is so important. We are here to steer students in the right direction, but they need to allow us the time to do that.
In my opinion, feedback is most effective when it has a positive tone, and when it is conversation based. I like to offer my opinion on a subject (especially if it is an opinion-based discussion assignment) and then I ask them, “What do you think?” or I give them a more specific question to get them thinking about the original prompt in a more detailed manner. I think that this is an approach that allows students to come to their own conclusion about something, rather than telling them their answer is incorrect and just giving them the correct answer.
Feedback as an example:
The other role that feedback plays, besides working on actual content, is that it provides an example of appropriate constructive feedback to students that might not learn this anywhere else. For example, students can see how to respectfully disagree with someone in a place where tone can easily be construed as offensive. I think that as online educators we are not only teaching students class material, but also how to operate in the online world, which is essential seeing that our world/economy is constantly becoming more and more digitally based.
Overall, I think that effective feedback is extremely important, WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Last week’s Webinar was AMAZING! I learned so much from my colleagues at Michigan Virtual that I ended up with a huge list of things to try!
The first thing that I tried was something suggested by my fellow iEducator Lauren Nalepa. She showed that on her announcements for er Digital Imaging class (a class that I am teaching for the first time this semester) she posts GIMP tutorial videos on her weekly announcements. So that is what I did this week!
Students are at the point in the semester for this class where they are working on their individual final portfolios. Because of this, there are not lessons that students are given specific to each week anymore. And I have see quite a few portfolio assignments using text. So I wanted to show students that more could be done than just plain old text in their assignments. And so this week, I shared the video below on creating a paint dripping effect on text. I also look forward to continuing to inspire my students with a new GIMP tutorial video each week. Thank you for the inspiration, Lauren Nalepa!
*Image below is a hyperlink to the video I shared with my students this week.
I have found that my students give a huge variety of responses in discussion boards. I have see responses this semester that range from “noice” to long, detailed paragraphs that ask constructive questions with the intent of furthering the conversation. Because of this huge range, I want to work on figuring out strategies to bring up the students that are giving one or two word responses to using full sentences and really contributing to the class discussions. One way that I am working on doing this, is providing students with great examples, not only ones that I have written, but ones by fellow classmates as well.
I have this one student in my Criminology class that always writes these extremely detailed responses. So I sent her a message and asked her permission to share some of these responses with my other students to give them an example of a student going above and beyond for the assignment.
I then used this student’s example to create an infographic to post in all of my classes. I am hoping that this will help some students see the kinds of things they should be including in their own discussion board responses.
I am extremely proud of my Criminology students so far! This is the discussion prompt that I will be discussing in this post:
“Imagine you have a magic wand and you can immediately change a society to your liking. What acts, that are currently deviant, do you decide are no longer deviant? What are, that are currently illegal, do you make perfectly legal and okay? Or you could do the reverse and make something become deviant or illegal that used to be accepted. ”
So that is the question that students had to answer, as well as comment on two other posts. And I was amazed at the respectful and professional language all of my students used! Many students talked about the legalization of marijuana. Some argued for legalization, and some said that it should be completely illegal no matter what someone is using it for. When I first saw these posts I thought that they were going to be a problem for the class atmosphere. But, students debated respectfully back and forth and both sides backed up their opinions with facts and outside resources.
I think the thing that made the difference in this situation was language. Had students been arguing using slang or “because weed is cool” as an argument, it would have been an issue. But, my students were all using academic language and arguing using actual facts. This is something that I praised my students for when I saw it, and I have confidence that they will continue to argue respectfully in the future!
