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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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3 Tools for Virtual Learning

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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 which students progress through a Google Slideshow at their own pace. Like traditional slides, each slide can contain text, images, links, and embedded videos. In Pear Deck, interactions can be added to slides for students including:
  • Text Response
  • Number Response
  • Multiple Choice
  • Drawing 
  • Draggable
Teachers can monitor student responses in real time.

Screencastify

Screencastify can be used to create screen recordings with or without live audio. These recordings are saved to Google Drive and can be downloaded or shared via link.
Screencastify is great for teachers looking to create tutorials or short lessons.
Screencastify is also great for students looking to create in order to share their learning. 



Flipgrid

Flipgrid is a free video creation and submission platform that can be designed for many purposes. These include, but are not limited to
  • Student submissions private to student and teacher
  • Student submissions that can be viewed by classmates
  • Students submissions that can be viewed and replied to by classmates
These videos can serve many purposes including assignment submissions, discussion topics, and reflections.Student created videos can be shared beyond Flipgrid via web link or downloaded.







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