Skip to main content

Let Flexibility Lead To Alignment

By
  In my previous school district, I was the only teacher teaching a physics course with set, district-wide learning outcomes. These same outcomes were also taught in physics classrooms at the other high school in our district. But at our school, I was one of the 2 physics teachers. The other teacher taught the AP-level physics courses. So, in many ways, I had opportunities to incorporate strategies I believed were best for learners and that I found worked best for them without being seen as out of alignment with anyone in our building. My amazing friend and one of my teaching philosophy goddesses, Katie Novak, stated the following misconception about alignment: All teachers must deliver instruction in the exact same way. True alignment, she says, is about shared goals, rigor, and outcomes. Thank you, Katie! Katie has taught me to truly believe that learner variability is the rule, not the exception. I encourage you to take 10 minutes to listen to Katie Novak explain it in the ...
Post a Comment

Google Keep On Task

Image
By


As we embark on our passion projects, I wanted to find a way to keep up to date on what my students were up to.  Last year, I had students create task boards using Trello.  While it was helpful in 1:1 conversations, the downfall for me as an educator was the amount of time it took to go into each board to see where students were at efficiently.  Now that Google Keep is a part of G Suite, I've decided to leverage it as a tool.

I use Keep everyday in my life as a task list an note taking tool, but I never used it in my classroom with my students.  The ability to share and label notes makes it quite powerful.  So how am I using it?

Today, I had students create a task list in their Google Keep and share it with me.




I then added a label to all task lists from the same class and archived the list so they wouldn't be in my home Keep page.



During class, I had students begin adding projects tasks to their lists.  Now when I go to that label page in Keep, I can keep up with all of my students in that block.



I like that this is a quick one page look at what students have done and have yet to do.  Items can be rearranged in lists. So, I'll be making sure my students keep them in order with the current task at the top of the list.  I realize it does not provide as much depth as a Trello board would, but I'll see how this tradeoff of detail for timeliness works in the long run.

I look forward to seeing how this works for keeping up with classes of 30 students with 30 different projects. Of course it will only be useful if the students use it.  So, I hope to make it part of our project routine.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Twitter Cards for Blogger

By
So, I’ve been seeing people with beautiful Twitter Cards in my Twitter Stream. They make it clear that there is a web page to visit and give a quick preview of what would be found. Something like the one below: I’ve been wondering how to get one of the cards to appear when I tweet out a link to my latest blog post.  Since I use Blogger, there is not a simple button to click to turn this on.  I had to find a way to paste new code into the HTML code of my blog.  It took some searching from multiple sites to get a completely functional.   This site though was quite helpful.  But, I’d like to walk you through my process and hopefully it helps a few out. There are a few types of Twitter Cards.  Two that at most frequently see are the basic summary card and the summary card with large image.  Below you can see the layout of each, but realize that they both have the same content pieces. This is going to look like a lot ...
13 comments
Read more

Pear Deck, Quizlet, GimKit Appsmash

By
As a part of March Madness, my students did a EdTech Tournament bracket. The finals were between Gimkit and Pear Deck. Pear Deck won, but my students love both tools.  So when someone asked me if I ever thought of an appsmash between the two, I had to try something out. This is a triple app smash that links Pear Deck to Gimkit using Quizlet. The appsmash uses student generated explanations, definitions, and visuals to create a GimKit. If you are not familiar with Pear Deck Vocabulary it allows students collaborate in the creation of flashcards from a list of predetermined terms or concepts. These flashcards are have both a written and visual component. For all the details on Pear Deck Vocabulary, I’d recommend heading over to Getting Started with Flashcard Factory. If you are not familiar with Gimkit . It is a formative quiz game that allows students to work at questions at their own pace while competing against their classmates. In addition, participants can go to an in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Personalized Learning Tasks and Roles

By
Yesterday, I read a great post by Jim Rickabaugh dealing with the roles of learner and teacher in a personalized learning environment by looking at tasks . The roles were set up on a continuum. This article timed perfectly with a reflection on part of Students at the Center by Allison Zmuda and Bena Kallick on idea generation and task development I had in mind. These two works are the focus of my reflection here. I think a key misunderstand teachers have when it comes to digging into personalizing learning is that for planning purposes, we no longer begin with standards but with student desires.  I believe like all good instruction, we need to start with the standards.  Think about it, standards are what we want all learners to know and be able to do as a result of passing through our educational system. That is why it is essential that we make sure that standards are representative of what we believe is important for learners to be informed and productive in th...
1 comment
Read more