Resolutions

It's 2020 and I spent some time over the holiday break reflecting on 2019.  There were many things worth celebrating, but I was disappointed to find that I had let the blog slip away to some degree, and I am starting recommitted to writing it more regularly.  With new beginnings comes the opportunity for recreation.  While the blog had focused on edtech integration in my time as a librarian, I would like it to have a wider focus since I have a new role.

With that idea came a post from my friend Lauren, a special educator in New Orleans, LA.  She posted about her word for 2020 and what she would strive for as an educator.  Being a member of a professional organization allows me to feel empowered by like-minded educators, which is why I felt so inspired by her word: catalyst.  She seeks to be the catalyst for positive change in education.  What a goal!

While I would love to steal her word, when I look up the definition of catalyst, it mentions that it "speeds up the rate of change without being changed itself", which just doesn't fit for me.  I recognize that there is no change that I could be asking or leading for others that would not impact me in some way.  So I need to find my own word.

So I will spend some time reflecting over the next week on my word.  I'm going to pour over some websites related to creating goals:

• Word of the Year
• What's your guiding word for 2020?
• One Word 365

What will your word be?  Share it on the padlet below.  You may choose to share your name as well or leave it off.

ASCD Takeaways

I wanted to share a few resources with you this afternoon. I'm trying to make sure I include something for everyone below.

Math and/or Science - Open Middle

What’s Open Middle?

The name “Open Middle” might sound like a strange name for a website about math problems. However, it references a very specific type of problem we try to encourage here. Most of the problems on this site have:
a “closed beginning” meaning that they all start with the same initial problem.
a “closed end” meaning that they all end with the same answer.
an “open middle” meaning that there are multiple ways to approach and ultimately solve the problem.

Open middle problems generally require a higher Depth of Knowledge than most problems that assess procedural and conceptual understanding. They support the Common Core State Standards and provide students with opportunities for discussing their thinking.

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The Hand Model of the Brain -

When we are in learning brain, we use our prefrontal cortex. When we are in survival brain, we are using our amygdala which controls our emotions. This model shows how we "flip our lid" when we go into survival brain.




ELA and Social Studies - StoryCorps
This website collects stories through interviews of people you might meet walking down the street. The interview and the humanity behind the story are the focus. Right now they are having a Veteran's Day theme.

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GRASP model -
This is a framework for designing project-based learning. By using this, you are designing a task template for students to show their understanding of a concept.


There are five parts to the G.R.A.S.P. model:

Goal – The Goal provides the student with the outcome of the learning experience and the contextual purpose of the experience and product creation.
Role – The Role is meant to provide the student with the position or individual persona that they will become to accomplish the goal of the performance task. The majority of roles found within the tasks provide opportunities for students to complete real-world applications of standards-based content.
Audience – The Audience is the individual(s) who are interested in the findings and products that have been created. These people will make a decision based upon the products and presentations created by the individual(s) assuming the role within the performance task.
Situation – The Situation provides the participants with a contextual background for the task. Students will learn about the real-world application for the performance task
Product – The Products within each task are designed using the multiple intelligences. The products provide various opportunities for students to demonstrate understanding. Based upon each individual learner and/or individual class, the educator can make appropriate instructional decisions for product development.

These five parts come together to form an authentic assessment that includes a(n) essential question to share with students.

Digital Assessment Resources

As I spend a lot of time looking at resources for teachers and practices related to assessment, I have uncovered a few quality resources that not everyone may be using.  This post will discuss digital assessment resources which can be incorporated into your class.

Project-Based Assessment Resources -

• PDE SAS Portal
• Assessing in a PBL Unit
• PBLWorks Gold Standard Project Design (formerly Buck Institute for Education)

Continuous Diagnostic / Check-Ins Based on Standards - 

• IXL
• Edulastic
• Formative

Questioning and Discussion Resources - 

• Cult of Pedagogy's Discussion Techniques
• Teacher.org's Discussion Techniques
• NSRF's Protocols

These resources all are either free or have at least enough free access to make them useful.  Check them out and let me know what you think!

Mindfulness

Yesterday I had a wonderful collaborative meeting after school with our secondary English department.  During that time, we discussed the impacts of technology on how students write, including their planning and execution.  They were in agreement that technology has not been the best influence when it comes to getting students to have an attention to detail in their writing.  This is probably why mindfulness has become such a popular topic in schools.  With that in mind, I'd like to share some resources K-12 related to Mindfulness.

Giulia Forsythe via Flickr

According to UC Berkeley, Mindfulness means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment, through a gentle, nurturing lens.  You can watch the expert Jon Kabat-Zinn discuss it further here.

At the elementary level, we see students get overstimulated and then begin to act out.  At the middle school level, the students are changing physically and emotionally and cannot always tell you what they are feeling.  At the high school level, we have seen students get so stressed and overwhelmed that they shut down.  Mindfulness can assist them in managing their emotions and their stress.  Here are some resources to incorporate it into your daily classroom instruction:

• Mind Yeti - A cute program for elementary with videos and animations
• Calm - shared previously by teachers from Opening Days
• Mindful Schools - perfect for educating yourself more on the topic, including videos and techniques
• PBS Mindfulness Teacher's Guide
• MindUP Resources - an SEL curriculum program that also shares small teacher resources on teaching Mindfulness (from Goldie Hawn's Foundation - who knew?!)
• Still Quiet Place - from Amy Saltzman, practice breathing videos

ISTE highlights

Welcome back!!  The school year is fully under way now and we are all settling back into a routine.  The air is turning crisp and we are redecorating with pumpkins and mums.

Photo by Carrie A. - https://www.flickr.com/photos/27353377@N04/15383799350/

During the summer, Greg, Andrea and I attended the ISTE Conference in Philadelphia, PA.  For our first blog post of the year, I want to highlight a few takeaways that I hope will be useful to you.

LEGENDS OF LEARNING - This website has a free version which will be very useful to science and math teachers.  It is game-based instruction tied to standards.  For science, it uses the Next Generation Science Standards.  At ISTE, we launched cows into the air and measured their distance.

The teacher can customize a playlist of assignments/games for the students according to their need.  More information on the program and how it works can be found here.

E-HALLPASS - Well, you know all about this one, middle and high school teachers.  This system allows us to keep a digital sign out system for students.  For the purpose of keeping tabs on students, it also allows us to limit which students are in the hallway at the same time, place a limit on how many bathroom visits a student can have in a day, and send a pass to a student that needs to see a certain teacher.  In the past, every teacher had a different system and a different amount of consistency.  Now we have one system and we don't have to interrupt your class to figure out where a student might be.

STORY SPEAKER - Google has a lot of lesser-known tools and this is definitely one of them.  With your Google home, you can make a choose your own adventure story.  I do not personally own one of these, but my dad does any my children love to say, "OK GOOGLE PLAY SMOKE ON THE WATER!" and then giggle when I look annoyed.  THAT is why I don't own one.  Anyway, this tool works with a template that your students can edit, and then you can play it back.  This would be very useful for a creative writing class!

LIFE TAGS - Life magazine has used the power of AI to look back on history through its many years of publications.  You can search for a term and see all the photographs with that item in them, from coral reef to hat.  This is a great way to look back on history and could serve as a discussion prompt or resource for research projects.

There are many other subject-specific items to learn about.  I hope if I shared them with you that you have taken a look!  The internet provides us with an endless amount of ideas and resources, but sometimes it can be hard to keep up!

Instructional Strategies

Right now I am reading Understanding by Design Meets Neuroscience by Jay McTighe and Judy Willis.  While it's not a light read, it has a lot of thought-provoking research behind it and ideas and resources and SO MANY ACRONYMS.  Education does not need more acronyms, but these might actually be helpful.  Here's some great takeaways.

Instructional Strategies website - this website has instructional strategies listed by topic and content area.  There's also a big long list, but it's overwhelming.

For The Teachers - this website has instructional strategies categorized by the goals of the task - monitor progress, compare and contrast, adapt content, share opinions.  It also has a great page on Differentiation.

WHERETO - This acronym gets to the heart of a lesson. 
W stands for question words - why, where, what and questions to ask include How will I help students know where we are headed in this lesson?
H stands for hook, or how will you capture the students' attention.  Ask yourself, How can I tap into the brain's natural curiosity to hook learners around this new topic?
E stands for equip, or what learning experiences will equip students to meet performance goals.  Ask yourself, How will I equip students to be able to transfer their learning in performance tasks?
R stands for rethink or revise, such as using formative feedback to garner the mastery and the gaps in their understandings.  Ask yourself, How will I provide helpful feedback to help students improve their products and performances through revision?
E also stands for evaluate.  Ask yourself, How can I encourage students' metacognition by monitoring and self-evaluating their performance?
T stands for tailor, as in how will you personalize the experience for students.  Ask yourself, What connections can we make to what matters to them?
O stands for organize, sequencing the lesson to create maximum efficiency and effectiveness.  Ask yourself, How can I make the lesson flow in a brain-friendly manner?

These are just a few of my takeaways from this book.  There are others, including AMT (acquisition, meaning making, transfer), memory scaffolds, and tips for designing effective rubrics so if you are interested in reading it, please reach out and you can borrow my copy!

What's going on?!

It's the end of April and testing season has begun. So "What's going on?!" seemed like a fitting introduction to this post. Up is down. Down is up. Will we ever make it to June? No worries, we think that EVERY year and we ALWAYS make it!


What's going on in this picture is actually a discussion technique for students posted each week by the New York Times. This is what their website says:

Students

1. After looking closely at the image above (or at the full-size image), think about these three questions:

• What is going on in this picture?

• What do you see that makes you say that?

• What more can you find?

2. Next, join the conversation by clicking on the comment button and posting in the box that opens on the right. (Students 13 and older are invited to comment, although teachers of younger students are welcome to post what their students have to say.)

3. After you have posted, try reading back to see what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting another comment. Use the “Reply” button or the @ symbol to address that student directly.

Each Monday, our collaborator, Visual Thinking Strategies, will facilitate a discussion from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern Time by paraphrasing comments and linking to responses to help students’ understanding go deeper. You might use their responses as models for your own.

4. On Thursday afternoons, we will reveal at the bottom of this post more information about the photo. How does reading the caption and learning its back story help you see the image differently?

This is great for any ELA or history teacher at ANY level to get students talking, making inferences, and talking about their thinking. Science teachers that observation is an important part of the scientific method, so it could be used to teach them to observe the world around them in a systematic way.  You could pose the visible thinking strategies questions to the students. This closely mirrors what we know about teaching students to practice close reading.

Some ideas for its use include:

• Using it as a Monday Google Classroom discussion prompt
• Giving the students the picture and letting them annotate around it
• Having them think-pair-share in partners about what it reminds them of in order to make connections

My favorite picture is this one - What's going on?!

How will you use this resource in your classroom?