In today's Digital Tool Tuesday, I thought it would be beneficial not to bombard you with another new tool after you just had a day of learning about a lot of tools, so let's talk for a minute about our awesome staff and the great PD we had Monday. A spark. That's all it takes for someone's curiosity to burst into a roaring fire, a determination to learn something, try something new. Hopefully, you experienced a spark in one of your PD sessions on Monday. Monday provided us with some amazing sessions. I love two things about days like Monday: 1. I love that our district/administration acknowledges how talented our staff is and allows us to share what we know; and 2. I love the willingness that our WRMS staff has to learn new things! The sessions that I was in were full of teachers fully engaged and truly wanting to learn new things to implement in their classrooms. In fact, I know teachers were already using Dasan's Beekast in their rooms today! It's that willingness to learn that we must make sure we transfer over to our students.
If you need any resources from your sessions, or you are curious about a session you were unable to attend, go to our Sept. 25th PD website and go to the specific session you are looking for. I am still adding resources to the site as they come in, so if you don't see something added yet, check back in a couple of days and it may be there. You can access resources from Monday afternoon on the Classroom Instruction that Works website as well. Jeff will be adding resources there as we go through the training. I am hoping that the Aurasma app will be added to the iPads soon so that teachers can start using it with students. Additionally, if you are interested in using virtual reality in your classroom, I have six headsets that you can check out to use. I would be happy to help with either in your classrooms! You guys truly are the best staff around, and you make this job of mine so amazing. I am so fortunate to get to work with all of you!
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This week's Digital Tool Tuesday is on Let's Recap. If you were in Classroom Instruction that Works training at the beginning of the year, you may remember FlipGrid. Let's Recap is a lot like FlipGrid, but it has a few features that set it apart. Let's Recap is a digital tool that allows students to engage in reflection and discussion via videos and typed responses. The thing I like best about Let's Recap is the ability to create classes, or "queues," as they call them. That way, you can have each hour in a different queue and the videos are not dumped all in one place. This would make for better organization for grading. The free version of Flipgrid only gives you one "grid" to use for your whole student load.
In Let's Recap, students can type in responses to questions that you pose, or they can post video responses. You can have students share their video just with the teacher or with the whole class. You also can have up to 10 questions in a post for students to respond to. If you wanted, they could do a video response for every question! Let's Recap has Google Classroom integration, which is always a plus! Having students post videos as reflections or discussion is a great way to get them thinking about the topics you are covering in class, and Let's Recap and FlipGrid both provide an easy way for teachers to do so. Want to use Let's Recap or FlipGrid in class, but need some help? Let me know! In lieu of Digital Tool Tuesday this week, I wanted to post about a tool that is much more important than any digital tool I could give you: our minds. As we are getting into the school year, many of you may be feeling frustrated with some of your students. Why aren't they doing their work? Why won't they try harder? To get to the root of these problems, we can look at growth mindset. Carol Dweck developed the idea of growth mindset years ago, but it particularly resonates with education today as we strive for college and career readiness. In her research, Dweck discovered that "students who believed their intelligence could be developed (a growth mindset) outperformed those who believed their intelligence was fixed (a fixed mindset)." The idea is that we can nurture intelligence and it can grow, rather than it being something that we are born with and never changes. I love the infographic below from Gobrain.com. It shows the challenge we face as educators. How can we get students to move from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset? I can think of a lot of my former students who would fit under the fixed mindset category. It was hard to figure out what to do to help them. Admittedly, there is no one answer to this problem. My blog post is not meant to give everyone a solution tied up in a nice bow. Rather, I want to foster thinking about motivation and students. So what steps can we take? For starters, Dweck emphasizes that we as educators need to strive to have a growth mindset. If we don't, our students will struggle to get there as well. She goes on to stress that we can't use fixed-mindedness as a label, either. Doing so may consciously or subconsciously prohibit us from helping those students learn. We also need to make students think about thinking. Metacognition needs to be a part of their learning process. Additionally, we need to work on students' grit. This has been a buzzword for a while now, but for a refresher, Angela Lee Duckworth's TED Talk below explains the importance of grit and the growth mindset. Growth mindset is more of a process than a character trait or an aha moment. It is something at which we need to work. Dweck notes it is important to realize we all have a bit of both mindsets within us, and we just need to acknowledge the fixed mindset and continue striving for the growth mindset. How can you foster growth mindset in your students? Works Cited
Dweck, Carol. "Carol Dweck Revisits the 'Growth Mindset.'" Education Week. Editorial Projects in Education, 22 Sept. 2015, http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/09/23/carol-dweck-revisits- the-growth-mindset.html. Accessed 12 Sept. 2017. Happy Digital Tool Tuesday, Wednesday Edition! Let's face it, most of us think today is Tuesday, anyway, right? Today's tool is Quizizz. If you have never used Quizizz before, you may have used its mom and dad, Kahoot and Quizlet (if you haven't, fear not, resident tech guru Whitney will be presenting on Kahoot at our Sept. PD day!). These tools are not affiliated with each other, but are very similar. So why, you may ask, would you want to use Quizizz if Kahoot and Quizlet are working just fine for you? Let me explain! Quizizz is great for fun, interactive reviews of material, just like Kahoot and Quizlet. One of the big differences is that you can assign a Quizizz quiz as "homework" and then you can integrate it with your Google Classroom. This allows students to review the material at home, not just in class, like Quizlet, but it is still using the fun platform like Kahoot does, marrying the best of the Kahoot and Quizlet worlds. In addition, students can see the answer choices on their devices, whereas with Kahoot they only see shapes that coordinate with what is on the teacher's board. This may be better for students who have processing delays and cannot hang with their peers during Kahoot because it takes them longer to figure out the answers. You still get the data after the quiz. And, Math and science teachers, they even have a character map where you can put in Greek symbols, superscripts, subscripts, etc. The setup and design is similar to Kahoot. One thing I really like is that you can preview the student side of things on half the screen while seeing what your half looks like as the teacher. The quizzes also use memes throughout, which makes learning fun for students. Need help getting started? Let me know how I can help, or visit the Resources page of Quizizz! |
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