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Showing posts from March, 2020

EdCamp Still Rules

  Looking Back at 10 years of EdCamps Oh how the time flies, EdCamp Madison is turning 10 this year!  It will be held Saturday, February 3rd at Sun Prairie West High School. Which can be found at 2850 Ironwood Drive in Sun Prairie Wisconsin from 8:30 am - 3:00 pm.  Get more information and register here: https://sites.google.com/sunprairieschools.org/edcampmadwi/home   I will always remember sitting in my first EdCamp opening session at the very first EdCamp Madison and having no clue what I was in for. So, I’d like to take this space to go over some of the basic rules of EdCamp. No One Will Pitch It for You EdCamps are unconferences. By this I mean that they have a blank slate of sessions for the day. There may be a few predetermined sessions, but ultimately the session topics are determined by attendees during the pitch & plan session that opens the day. If an idea gets pitched there will be a session on it. If a topic doesn’t get pitched, there won’t be a session on it. So, it i

Standards Presentations Using Flipgrid

Summative assessment can be a bit tricky in distance learning when relying on traditional pencil and paper test. One of the assessment options I have allowed students to use in the past was an evidence presentation in which they created a 1 on 1 presentation demonstrating their mastery of the unit standards by presenting artifacts from the unit. I'm trying something similar with my students as we wrap up our momentum unit. This unit was done completely via distance learning. We had several different activities and I made sure that students had opportunities to cover our main 4 science skill outcomes as they related to momentum. I can plan and carry out investigations I can analyze and interpret data I can use mathematics and computational thinking I can construct explanations The goal for the summative assessment is for them to provide evidence for each of these 4 outcomes. I didn't want the technology to be the barrier. So, I choose Flipgrid which is a very simpl

3 Tools for Virtual Learning

This week my building principal gave me the opportunity to provide virtual PD for our district on 3 tools that I think are great for supporting virtual learning: Pear Deck, Scientifically, and Flipgrid. I created informational slide decks and recorded one of the webinars I did for each of the three tools. I won't go one much more, but wanted to make these resources available to all. If you have any questions about the tools feel free to reach out to me on twitter @mo_physics or email at mohammam@elmbrookschools.org Please note that these webinar videos were the first presentations I've ever done using Google Hangouts Meet so please forgive the informal nature of the presentations. They are the raw video from the session. I could easily have spent hours making them perfect, but I figured the true purpose was not aesthetic perfection but timelessness of the information. Pear Deck Use Student Paced mode to provide asynchronous instruction or formative assessment in

Virtual Learning Days

My school district will be out next week to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Over these days students will be assigned virtual learning assignments to be completed at home with the assistance of their Chromebooks. I'm designing a series of daily activities for my students using a number of resources. I just wanted to do a quick share and provide some 1 minute videos just in case you were interested in trying these tools out. Pear Deck I will be providing guided content instruction and videos through the use of student paced Pear Decks. These are Google Slide decks with added interactivity via the Pear Deck for Slides add-on . Some slides have videos embedded and others have the ability for students to respond to prompts. In student paced mode, students join the deck via a link and progress at their own pace. The teacher is then able to view their progress and responses to prompts in real time. To learn more about using Pear Deck for virtual learning, check out this post b