Marty Cryer
Modeling fluency in technology and transfering to new technologies
This is a standard that is a little difficult to show and much easier to explain. So often we find a resource that seems just about perfect for what we are doing. We use it for a while and discover it is no longer quite so perfect. In the meantime, new ideas and resources have come along that are similar to what we have been using, but are tweaked in just the right way to be even better. The three resources I have outlined below are examples of how moving from one to another made a great idea even better.
Powerpoint to Google
For years I was a fan of Powerpoint. I created lessons for 6th grade science, 2nd grade math, my own college courses and more. I had heard of Google Presentation, but for a long time didn't give it much thought.
Then I needed to create a slkideshow I could share with a number of students at the same time. They needed to all use it at the same time, but be in different places within the presentation. I didn't want to email a copy to each of them, so I gave Google a try.I have never looked back.
My students were reading George's Marvelous Medicine for book clubs and I had a lot of resources and tasks for them to do as they read. This presentation was and easy solution.
Since it is so much like Poerpoint, navigating and creating the presentation was relatively easy. There are a few glitches that are different, but in the year since I really compared it to Powerpoint, I have forgotten what they were, so they evidently were not all that important.
The advantage to using Presentation over Powerpoint is the collaborative feature. By simply inviting another student to sahre the document, they can work on it synchronously or asynchronously.
This came in especially handy when I had students who wanted to create a Jeopardy game for the book Frindle. We tried using Jeopardy Labs, but they could not all work on it at the same time. I found a Google Presentation Jeopardy template, set it up for them, shared it and they were off and running!
Google Forms for All
When my school district began using Google apps I knew that Google forms could be used to make simple surveys, but I never thought about how they could me as a classroom teacher. After attending a seminar about using Google forms for more than data collection I was sold and began looking at different ways to use these forms to assess my students. I knew they loved using computers, so I figured I could sneak in an assessment without them even realizing that is what it was.
I created several forms for a variety of uses. One asked students to solve mental math problems and identify which strategy they used while another asked them to identify the subject and predicate in several sentences as a follow up to a lesson and internet activities about sentences and fragments.
In their STEM class I showed the teacher how to set up a form for students to report their findings in an experiment so we could look at the set of class data. These were all experiments of a sort to see what the reaction my students would have.
At first students were very excited and thought the activities were neat. However, there were a number of technical problems because of the ancient hardware we were using and they became somewhat frustrated and disillusioned. I still feel there is a lot of value with using these forms for assessment purposes and will be continuing to create and evaluate new ideas as they arise.
From Bubbles to Popples
I am a big fan of mind mapping for all sort of purposes. Students create them to map their reading, to show connections between math concepts and as a way to present links to research projects for the whole class.
When I first started using mind maps I used Bubbl.us. It is an excellent resource and allows for a lot of flexibility. As I had students begin to create them, however, I ran into difficulty with collaborating. It was difficult for students to share a map, and once it was shared there was no way to know who created which parts. Additionally, there were a lot of gadgets that kept my students entertained, but off task.
I went in search of something else. A number of new options had been created in the meantime, but most were even more difficult for young children to use. Then I found Popplet.
Popplet's goal is to keep this mind mapping tool very simple. So far they have done a great job. Creating a popple is as simple as a double click, Connecting them is just a matter of dragging a handle to another popple.
It was the collaboration piece I found to be especially simple. By clicking on share students just enter the user name or email address of the person with whom they are sharing and the work is done. What is especially nice is that work can be done synchronously and each person's work is labeled with their name. This makes assessment and evaluation much easier.
An additional feature to Popplet is the ability to add comments to a popple. This was especially useful when my students were mapping the book Frindle. I was having difficulty getting them to really discuss their reading and thought having them map it might help. We had mapped a couple of read alouds, so they were familiar with what it looked like, but I planned some time to explain how to get started. Boy wasw I surprised!
Once they had their usernames and passwords, they were off and running! The only teaching I needed to do was to explain the importance of adding comments only to add something valuable to the conversation.
Now that I have used popples successfully, I likely will never go back to bubbles.