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Thank You for 20 Years.

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After 20 years of teaching at Brookfield Central, I am saying goodbye. Although I spent the majority of that time in the physics classroom alongside my learners. That changed for my last 18 weeks. I ended up in a place similar to where I started, teaching chemistry and biology. So, rather than dealing with juniors and seniors at the end of their high school careers, I was in classrooms with freshmen and sophomores still trying to find their place. At the same time, I was learning and teaching a set curriculum I hadn't taught in over a decade. So, we were learning. But, of course, I already knew the content.  The point of this post is to take a step back, take in, and share the gratitude from the last students I had in my 20 years at Brookfield Central High School through the cards and notes they made for me on my last day with them.  I don't take many yay me moments. But after 20 years, I think I'll soak this one in.
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SLIDE over DOCS

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Ever since Google Docs came into my world, I've used it to create many templates for my learners. From labs to reflection documents, I've used it as my default go to. As I've tried to allow learners more choice in their demonstration of mastery of outcomes, I haven't changed my use of docs as a lab template. I hope to change that this year.

To do that, I've decided to design all lab templates as slides.  The hope is that this simple change will allow them more how they choose to present their learning. How does this simple change do that?
  • Clarifies organization of the document by putting separate ideas on different slides
  • Create a blank canvas for student creation on each slide
  • Use speaker notes for instructions/prompts without disrupting flow of student ideas or as a space for more detailed explanation of student thoughts
  • Allows students to more easily add multiple forms of media
    • Create drawings
    • Images
    • Tables
    • Videos from Drive or YouTube
  • Easily annotate images due to layered nature of Google Slides
So that's just the creation of the slides themselves.  Once created, students can take it further in how the slides are presented. 
  • Students could submit the slideshow as if it were a document demonstrating learning.
  • Students could be asked to present their work in typical slide show fashion. In this case, they don't have to necessarily write out all of their thoughts in the slides. This presentation could be done to peers of just the instructor.
  • Apps like Explain Everything or Screencastify could be used to import the slideshow so that learners can provide voice over to highlight their learning. 
Simply put, Slides offer so many more options to add multiple representations easily to a single document. Why limit your learners to one path when slides opens up more opportunities?

Here's a very simple comparison of the document template of the first lab we'll be doing this year to the slide template.

This is the doc version of the buggy lab.  In this format all submissions would look like this with spaces filled in.



The slide version of the template has the majority of the prompts hidden in the speaker notes to force students to format their own responses in the method they choose.

To view the information in the speaker notes, click on the gear and open the speaker notes.

Comments

  1. Jill McLeanJuly 26, 2019 at 7:18 PM

    I've been considering trying something like this out with my physics classes, but I'm wondering how you have students incorporate equations into their work. When they use a Google Doc, they can use the editor.

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