Classroom or Edmodo

In the past I pushed to get teachers to adopt the use of Edmodo.  However, with the migration to Google accounts I chose not to actively recommend Edmodo this year.  Not only can Google Drive files be shared, they can be edited collaboratively.  In addition, at the end of school year 2014 Google was testing a beta version of a management site dubbed Google Classroom.  (Rather than calling it a classroom management system, or even a content management system, let's just call it a Google Drive management system.)

At the start of the year I figured teachers might feel a bit overwhelmed if I tried to get them to adopt booth Google Mail, Google Drive, Google Docs AND Google Classroom.  As a result, I mentioned Google Classroom to very few teachers.

In spite of all of the above  Emily Martin (AHS) made use of Edmodo this year, and Matt Gillis (CHS/CES) used Google Classroom.  So, I thought I'd ask the two of them to briefly describe their experiences with these sites and give teachers a chance to consider them for next year.

Here are some remarks directly from Emily ....

Generally, I will use Edmodo with my upper-level Spanish classes. I give them a situation, and they have to provide a comment. For example, I provided a question in Spanish from a Spanish advice column. Students had to use a particular verb tense that we were reviewing to provide an answer for that question. Then, we discussed phrases such as “I agree,” “That is a good idea,” “I disagree,” etc., and how to explain why. Then, they had to comment on another students´ comment, similar to a blog. I have also used Edmodo as a tool on which students can save Power Point presentations if they do not have a flash drive, or for peer-editing: Students may share sentences that they have written, and then comment upon grammatical errors in other students´ sentences. Then, I comment about whether or not it is correct.
Immediately my students enjoyed the set-up of Edmodo. It is easy to log into, and the fact that it looks like Facebook makes it attractive to them. They seemed disappointed that it does not have all of the Facebook features like “friending” their classmates, but this was the main complaint. It also seems to motivate them to write in Spanish. I have noticed that they may not write in perfect Spanish on Edmodo, but they try with what they know, and they use Spanish more frequently than they do during a normal lesson. In fact, sometimes I do not even have to remind them to use Spanish – it is almost as if they immediately know that they need to use it on Edmodo, and they love to send funny and sarcastic Spanish messages to one another! I love to read their comments.
Overall, I give Edmodo a very good review, and I would recommend it to any teacher who would like to use it as an interactive slightly conversational tool, especially if you struggle with getting all of your students to participate during oral discussions in the classroom.

and here is what Matt had to say about google classroom:

 I've used Google Classroom with my 7th Grade Chorus class, who did a research project on a favorite pop star. It was very easy to set up an assignment for them and set a due date. Since the 7th graders have Chromebooks and Google accounts, it took very little time to get them set up and working. Once they started working, I could monitor their progress from Google account, and I could give each student personalized feedback. Now that they have turned in their projects, I can give them a grade and return it to them. I distribute the assignment and rubric, they do their research, type their notes, create their slide presentation, and get their grade all without using a single sheet of paper.

I'm in a situation where my classroom gets used by others, and at certain times of the year I have to  hold class in different places throughout the school. The flexibility of being able to work on their projects anywhere without the hassle of walking around to each computer with a flash drive was an absolute God-send. There are other apps that can be integrated with Google Classroom to create a rubric and tally a score on the assignment as well. I haven't yet explored those options, because they seem pretty difficult to work with. I will just stick with Classroom for now.
Although Google Classroom just recently came out of Beta testing, I really like the features it has so far. I look forward to what new features will be added to classroom as time goes on.

The big advantage of google classroom is that it integrates well with Google drive --its'strong point is managing the flow of files. It also allows students to use a single log in  Edmodo, on the other hand, is aimed more at classroom management.  The difference can be seen by looking at some of classroom's limitations. According to Alice Keeler, Classroom will not:

Google Classroom does not handle course enrollments like you would find in an LMS or CMS.  Google Classroom does not have a gradebook.  Google Classroom does not track student participation. While students can comment in Google Classroom, there are not discussion boards.Google Classroom does not integrate quizzing features....Google Classroom does not allow teachers to create content within the system. Instead, teachers link to content they build in other places such as Google Docs.  Google Classroom assignments can not be organized into modules or units.

This is not to say that Alice Keeler doesn't think highly of Classroom, after all, she states,  "Since it is from Google, it integrates with Google Drive in amazing ways." and offers a list of 50 things you can do with classroom. In essence, Classroom allows you to set up an environment to both distribute and collect assignments. She offers an entire collection of posts on the use of Google Classroom.

You might consider adopting one of these two in the fall, however,  before making a decision, I'd recommend that you wait until August or September to do so because Google Classroom is evolving as I write and some of the things listed as limitations above, may have be available this fall.

Kidblog in the Classroom

Guest Blogging this week are Candi Conner and Casey Gillikin.  In my travels I learned that they had began this year to use blogs in their fifth grade classrooms at Metompkin Elementary School.  I asked if they woiuld be willing to write a Treasure Chest Post about this experience and they promptly produced the piece below.  My comments are added in italics.

     At the beginning of the year we decided that we wanted to use technology in our classrooms in a way that engaged the students and made it easier for us to share information as teachers. We created blogs with the intention of giving resources to students and parents and getting feedback from our students. We also wanted the students to learn how to use technology in an appropriate way. We use our kidblogs to post links to websites we like for different subjects, to give project rubrics, to allow students to write their writing pieces, and for editing in writing. (Teachers can give grades and comments to individual students which only they can view.) Students may ask questions to us or the other students and may upload anything they create. This allows for parents to see the products that their child creates at school and to feel like they have a sense of what is going on in the classroom. With technology being all around us we feel that the blog has made students more accountable for what they say and do which has taught them online etiquette. We approve every comment made on the blog before it is posted. The students simply log in with their name and password and get to work. Throughout the year we have thought of many ways to incorporate the blog for the years to come. The link below is to one of our blogs.
www.kidblog.org/msgillikinsclass

If you click on the link above, rather than reading through their student's postings, you'll learn how secure this site is.  Ms. Conner and Ms. Gillikin have their site set up so that only class members and their parents can view what has been posted.  Their are many security settings a teacher may chose between.

Kid's Reaction: Students love anything technology and anything that they can call their own so the blog increases student engagement immediately. It also is a great way to decrease the student excuse of, "I lost it" because anything can be posted. When students are able to login to their own space of the blog the quality of work that you receive changes. They know that their peers can see what they are working on and they feel more of a responsibility.

 Also, by having a classroom blog you as a teacher will begin to feel more comfortable with technology and branch out to other forms. The blog is great because you can use it as little or as much as you want. It's very easy which is important for the hectic life of a teacher! Students also like easy and if they can have all their materials and expectations in one place they can focus on what really matters.
   
To set up a blog site for your class, simple create an account at kidblog.org.
If you'd like help or suggestions on ways to use a blog, see your friendly neighborhood ITRT

Tagxedo

I found an interesting site, Tagxedo.com and it is very similar to Wordle—which most of you should be familiar with. The site provides a place for you to enter text and in a matter of seconds it turns this text into a “word cloud”—suitable for a poster or for use with an LCD projector. You can enter words by typing them in directly, by copying and pasting, by entering a web address, by entering a word in a search box and doing an online search, from Twitter (well, not while at school), or by uploading a text file (you cannot use a .doc or .docx file, it MUST be a .txt or .text file). Then you can choose the shape the words will be arranged in, the color theme, the font and even the orientation of the words. Click on submit and seconds later a visually appealing word cloud is created. With or without an account the site is easy to use and fairly intuitive. Users must remember to save a file they want to upload as a text file; it also could become more difficult if you wanted to create your own shape to paste the words on. However, even a technophobe ought to be able to handle this one. Here is an interesting observation about reviews on Tagxedo: Jason Tomaszewski at educationalworld.com agrees with all that I’ve said above, however, he adds:

Tagxedo only earns a 3-star rating due to limited applicability to the classroom. Sure, it’s pretty cool to see your words form a picture, but other than that, there really isn’t a lesson to be learned.

In stark contrast, Hardy Leung, writing in teachersfirst gives this massive list of ideas for applying Tagxedo to the classroom: Th

is is a terrific visual tool to share on an interactive whiteboard or projector. In primary grades. Enter a group of related words into the text box, such as sight words, words with the same spelling cluster, or vocabulary terms. Then have students roll over the words to read them aloud as they pop out (only works in the ONLINE version of the clouds). Paste in a passage or URL for a political speech to visualize the politician's "message." Analyze advertising propaganda by visualizing the language used in TV or print ads. Create word clouds of historical texts of inauguration speeches as time capsules of the issues of the day. Use this site as a way to help students see and memorize terms and important vocabulary, especially visual learners. Use it also when writing poetry or reading passages of great literature to "see" themes and motifs of repeated words and images. Have students paste in their own writing to spot repeated (and monotonous) language when teaching lessons on word choice. Students will be surprised to see what words appear to be dominant. ESL and ELL students will eagerly use this site since word order will no longer be a problem for them. Have students work in groups to create word posters of vocabulary words with related meanings, such as different ways to say "walk" or "said" and decorate your classroom with these visual reminders of the richness of language. Use themes and shapes that coordinate with the word cloud (for example, use a bird shape when creating a cloud about flight or a heart when interpreting a love poem. Consider using a word cloud as a first week of school activity where students discuss summer vacation or what they did over the summer. As a first day activity, students could also make a cloud with words about themselves, then have classmates guess which cloud matches which person.

So, which type of teacher are you, the one who offhandedly rejects Tagxedo as not applicable, or the one whose fruitful imagination sees endless possibilities? For myself, I see one very obvious way I’d use it in a classroom. At Tagxedo’s home page—which looks like this:

 

I simply typed “Al Kaline” in the search box. Al Kaline was one of the heroes of my boyhood—an all-star right fielder for the Detroit Tigers from 1953-1974. In a matter of seconds, Tagxedo produced the following:

What a great anticipatory set this would be. Now it might say “Detroit” rather than Baltimore, but I, for one, immediately remember that Baltimore was Detroit’s biggest rival during the Earl Weaver/Mayo Smith years (sorry, I realize that while reminiscing I’ve lost most of you). Getting back to my point, if students just researched the relation of each of the prominent words to Al Kaline, they would have a very good picture of the significance of Al Kaline—what a great way to introduce virtually any topic. Here is a similar example, this time by searching “Gettysburg Address” and then changing the shape and color scheme:

 

  So, my final word on the matter is that in its most basic form, Tagxedo is a very useful tool which is elegantly easy to use. Since no account is needed to create a Tagxedo it is easy for students to create one to put in a report or presentation.

Digital Story Telling Across the Globe

Once upon a time, when I first became an ITRT, I had a foreign language teacher ask me about setting up Email pen pals. Due to a number of factors, I was unable to make that happen at that time. However, last year, as part of my effort to become certified in technology integration, I had to prove that I “develop and model cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with colleagues and students of other cultures using digital-age communication and collaboration tools.” So, I returned to the Email pen pal concept (knowing that some of the obstacles had been removed) and proposed to Donna McAvene (AHS) that we attempt to find Spanish speaking pen pals for her Spanish learners. When we began to investigate further, it looked like Epals.com would be just the site to use to make Epal connections.

We soon found that the Epals site suggested various projects for the students to work on as they exchanged notes with their Internet pen pals. A series of step by step lesson plans, and links to samples accompanied these suggested projects.

We “advertised” Mrs. McAvene’s class as wanting to create and exchange digital stories. Eventually, we contacted a teacher listed in Epals as having a class in Spain. Susan Degler, it turned out, had not had good experiences with one on one exchanges. When she had tried that in the past, she always had some of her students who wound up being paired with “pals” who turned out to be duds—didn’t respond. Therefore, Susan suggested a many to many exchange.

To facilitate this, Susan set up two linked websites and invited two other classes—one in Arkansas and one in Saskatchewan, Canada. One site was a Wiki—a site where students could go and easily comment to one another and discuss the progress they were making on the digital stories. (click here to view this site) Additionally, they were free to ask about each other’s favorite music, the school day, fashion, or whatever. They were also free to discuss this in the language of their choice—although Mrs. McAvene discouraged the use of tools such as Google Translate—and preferred to personally monitor the student’s use of Spanish. At the conclusion of the project students used this site to ask one another questions that were prompted by the videos they had viewed (those made by other students).

The other site was created at weebly.com, which bills itself as “the easiest way to create a website.” Only the teachers could create pages and enter content on the Weebly site. It was here that we uploaded and posted the finished videos. Unfortunately, after writing this review, our year of "pro" status expired and the vast majority of the videos I posted are no longer available (unless we want to start paying). You can still click here to view this site, but you willo only see two of our videos.

Now, I’m more in tune to the technology standards that were taught through this project than I am to the Spanish standards. However, the Spanish related objectives should be immediately apparent to foreign language teachers. First, the students had opportunity to try out their Spanish, both written and verbal, on some “genuine Spanish speakers”, second, they had opportunity to learn about the culture of a Spanish speaking country—Spain itself. This objective figures prominently in the State’s standards for teaching Spanish.

As to the technological aspects of the project, Mrs. McAvene had produced class videos in the past, but, this was her first attempt at having multiple students produce videos. I was for having the students work in groups of two or three, but, Mrs. McAvene wanted to have each student fully responsible for creating a video. I think this turned out to be a wise decision, in the end, very few of the students failed to produce a work, and no one could hide behind the hard work of someone else.

We were somewhat apprehensive about how this would go. We needlessly worried over decisions like; should we make the hundred dollar flip cameras available for students to take home? As it turned out, no student even asked us about that. They each had access to a digital camera or at least a phone that could take pictures. My primary role came in figuring out how to get the pictures off the phones and in to editable formats and then uploading the finished videos for the students.

To prepare the students for editing the videos I simply turned on the LCD projector and opened up the editing software already on the computer. A students who was already familiar with the basics sat down at the teacher laptop and I gave him instructions such as “Okay, now add a transition, now add a title page, etc.” Ten minutes later the students in the class felt confident that they were up to the task, and they were eager to start. We also found a couple of Internet video production sites--Animoto -and Stupfelix where the students set up accounts and pretty much figure things out as they went. They chose themes, and background music, etc. They also added Title pages, subtitles, and credits without any apparent difficulty. Some simply sent me the embed code right from these sites. Now this may get a bit tricky for anyone who is perhaps inspired to try a similar project. That’s what ITRTs are for, to help you wade through the deep waters of embed code and such—don’t sweat it, let one of us help you.

That’s really what I’m getting at here. Any of the ITRTs would be delighted to help a teacher with a project similar to this one. From this experience I learned not to sweat the particulars of how students are going to get pictures or make video clips—that was easier than anticipated. I’d also be inclined to spend less time preparing the class for the project and allow more time for reflection (and exchanges with their foreign counterparts) upon completing of the videos.

If I've interested you in doing a project similar to this one, do not hesitate to contact your friendly, local ITRT.

Fun, Quick Technology Projects from BigHugeLabs

A teacher at NHS showed this to me, and it is worth passing along.  BigHugeLabs has a wealth of tools available that could be used to help teachers create fun technology projects with their kids.  How about having students create a magazine cover summarizing their last Science unit?  Or maybe they could make up "trading cards" for famous Virginians.  There are tools to create lolcats and motivator posters, as well as jigsaw puzzles and movie posters.  Here is a quick Trading Card that I made just for this blog post:

Of course, anything can be added at the bottom of the card. There are many tools available on the BigHugeLabs website.  Take a look, and do something inspiring with your students!

http://bighugelabs.com/