Google Apps for Education

This past weekend I spent two days at Charlottesville High School immersed in a Google Apps for Education (GAFE) Summit.  While we are not yet ready to adopt GAFE, I did learn some useful information, particularly surrounding the Chrome browser.

I’ve used Google Docs for years, even before it was Google Docs and was known as Writely.  With Google Docs, now Google Drive, there is really no need for Microsoft Office – as long as you have Internet access.  You can create documents, spreadsheets and presentations, along with drawings and forms that have many uses.  Any of these can be downloaded in Microsoft format.  The best thing, though, is they are automatically saved to your Google Drive account which you can access from any device with Internet access –smartphones, tablets and computers.  These documents can easily be shared with others – fellow teachers can collaborate or simply have a copy.  In GAFE schools the teacher can share a template or other document with their students who then make their own copy and share back with the teacher.  The teacher can then follow progress on the document, even leaving comments for students just as with a paper document.  No need to print anything unless there is a need.

I spent many sessions at the summit learning more about Chrome, one of the fastest browsers.  While I have long been an advocate for Google Apps for Education I was really thinking simply in terms of Docs/Drive, calendar, maps, etc.  I wasn’t thinking along the lines of apps for the Chrome browser.  If you have a Google account and log into Chrome and then switch devices, your Chrome “experience” is the same.  For instance, I tend to use one laptop at school and another at home – I can add apps and extensions to either laptop and they automatically appear when I open the browser on the other laptop.  With the dictionary extension double click on any word on a web page and you will get the definition along with an icon to click to hear the word.  There are plenty of apps, many of which are free and most of which automatically direct you to a webpage.  There are apps for Quizlet, StudyStack and many other flashcard generators.  Want typing practice?  There’s an app for that!  More than one, actually.  There are math game pages, mostly geared towards math facts for elementary students.  Higher level math courses can make use of graphing calculators and equation editors.  Those teachers might also want to look into Geogebra and Sketchometry.  Biodigital Human offers the human body, male or female, in 3D layers.  You turn on/off the skeleton and numerous other systems of the body – lymphatic, muscular, nervous, reproductive, endocrine, digestive, etc.  There are apps and extensions for home, school and business.

While our students don’t have Google accounts, these apps can come in very handy in the classroom as long as you have an account.  Most teachers now have an interactive whiteboard (IWB) of some type, simply display the app and let students interact with it on the IWB.  If you don’t have a Google account (you don’t have to create a Gmail account, you can use your ACPS email account), you will need to create it at home.  Once you have it created you will be able to sign in and use it in the school system.

 

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

Children's Engineering Convention

I went to the Children’s Engineering Convention not knowing what to expect.  A few initial observations: 

·         This was a national convention, with people from all over the U.S., it has doubled in size in the past two years.

·         Mainly elementary teachers attended, this means that the convention on engineering was 85% female, which seemed a bit odd to me, but, it figures.

·         Both sessions I attended started out making a  big distinction between science and technology.  My reaction was—Who cares?  But, the feeling seems to be that teachers must come to appreciate this distinction if they are going to be convinced that engineering and technology need to be included in their instruction.

I had expected to get a blog post per session out of this—giving me eight or so posts by the end of the conference.  However, I was called home suddenly and unexpectedly when we had a little family emergency.  Therefore, I expect this will be the only post directly related to the convention. 

 

You’ve heard a lot about STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.    You might get the impression that a big emphasis is being placed there. International  standards for engineering have been developed, and there are SOLs for Technology.  However, these standards are not tested on the SOL tests, and that means they are typically ignored by teachers.  The convention seems to have been birthed to address this problem.

The term “design brief” was new to me, but perhaps it is already moving into the “buzz word” category.  During the process of becoming certified in technology integration, I stopped using the 1970s term “simulation” and upgraded to the latest jargon-- “PBL” meaning project- or problem-based learning.   In PBL, if the simulation requires engineering to arrive at a solution, then the correct terminology for the assignment itself is “design brief.”  The teachers brief the junior engineers on what it is they have to design.   

To explain this further let me tell you about a session I attended in which the session participants simulated being part of an engineering team.  The facilitator read  us an abridged version of the book The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (English SOL—reading comprehension).  We were informed that we were to build a windmill which was to be a freestanding 60 cm (or more) in height and would withstand the “wind” from a hair dryer.  Our materials included a sheet of paper, 12’ of masking tape, 2 straws, 4 craft sticks (popsicle sticks) and  a small  container of Play dough, and, most importantly, a pinwheel.  For tools we were given a pair of scissors, a ruler and a meter stick. 

The challenge, evaluation criteria, materials and tools are referred to as the “design brief”.  We were then to follow the “technology design loop” or the “design process”—state the problem, brainstorm a solution, create the solution we thought was best, test our solution, and evaluate our solution.    The measuring addresses math SOLs, writing up our experience addresses additional Language Arts SOLs, and plenty of science SOLs are addressed, such as 3.11, investigating renewable sources of energy.  

The assignment clearly brought out the engineer in each of us, our group had a great time solving this problem—yes, I’m pleased to say that our windmill met the height criteria and withstood the wind—not all the groups could say that.  I have always felt that the “Unit Study” approach is the best approach to teaching.  Students from different grade levels could work on this project together if need be.  Again, math, science,  technology, engineering, English, and literature were all involved.  Come to think of it, the story of the boy who harnessed the wind also involves social studies.   What a great way to stir up some enthusiasm for subjects students might otherwise think of as boring.  

I return from the convention with a changed point of view.  Prior to attending I figured I was going because I was asked to go, but, it really didn’t concern me too much, it doesn’t involve computers and computers are my job, right?  Now, I see the value of this type of assignment and figure that if my job description doesn’t  include engineering, well, it should.  During the next couple of weeks I’ve decided to do a good job of something that I had been halfhearted about—probe ware.  ACPS has purchased probe ware—equipment for measuring temperature, light, impact, and I don’t know what all-but, I intend to find out.  You will probably see future posts on my findings, and perhaps I’ll be volunteering to come into your class and demonstrate the use of some of this probe-ware of which you may be only vaguely aware now.   Hands on investigation—I’m inspired now.

 

 

Quizlet--the App

This post is primarily for users of the iPads, OR those who have special ed. students in their rooms and COULD use the iPads.

 For a number of years I’ve been aware of a website called Quizlet.  At  its heart, Quizlet is an interactive, online flashcard site.  Anyone, teacher or student, can enter a set of words and definitions.  Once created this set can be made public, so that anyone can search or browse through the flash cards at Quizlet and drill themselves on those terms using either flash cards, a matching game where one slides the terms and definitions together, a “learning” drill where the term is typed in when the definition is presented, or a “space race” where you type in the term as the definition flies by. 

 As I say, I’ve been aware of that for some years.  Recently I became aware that there is an app for Quizlet.  When I walked past a special ed. room at AES last week I noted two students using the iPads.  The next evening I had a special ed. teacher in my TSIP class, and it hit me….what a perfect app for our special education teachers.  It seems to me that a lot of the job of being a special ed. teacher is to help students remember terms —and the more hands on techniques that can be employed, the better. 

 So, I installed and opened the Quizlet app.  It doesn’t yet do some of the things that can be done on the website—for example you can’t create flashcards.  But, you can search for and go to all the sets made by another teacher.  A teacher at KES put my username in the search window and turned up all the sets of flash cards I’ve created and made public (you have four options as to whom may view your sets).   The app won’t do as much as the website, but the up side of that is that the app has a nice clean look, you get three simple choices—flash cards, matching, or short answer.

 I’ve shown this app to two teachers in the past two days and as a result of their feedback I want to add two additional notes.  I knew that the audio feature was nice, but this was driven home by the KES teacher.  Just like the website, the Quizlet app allows the student to turn on the audio—and let the iPad read them the terms and definitions.  That, she pointed out, is particularly useful for learning sight words.  Today, a teacher here at AES especially liked the ability to print out the terms in sized for flashcards—thus making them available both online and  in hard copy.

 Imagine, if teachers throughout the county all made sets of cards—Mr. X. does third grade social studies, Mrs. Y does third grade science, Miss Z does third grade language arts, and they share their usernames so that they effectively pool their work. Another idea is to name flashcard sets with “SOL” in the title, along with the number and bullet – this makes the set easily searchable. How about going back to the email telling you about this post and contacting other teachers from around the county???  

Voice Translation Apps

A teacher told me the other day how she uses her phone in conferences with Spanish speaking parents.  The parents speak into the smart phone and an app translates things into English.   The teacher speaks into the  phone and the app translates it into Spanish for the parents.  What a great idea.  Think how great that would be for the school secretary.  I don't even have texting on my phone, it is NOT too smart (although smarter than I ever dreamed a phone would be when I was a kid) so I'm not the best one to write this review...we're going to handle this one differently.

I went back to my work area and installed three different free voice translators on my iPad.  I found that the one from Google wouldn't work with our proxy.  One called "Translator with Speech (Free)" didn't really have speech unless you paid $0.99.  A third, called "Translate Voice Free" seems to work great, but you only get about 10 translations per day without pauing $0.99.  --which isn't too much of an obstacle. 

If you have a Smart Phone which works off a satellite rather than the school's network, I'd suggest trying the Google one first, it includes Creole and I'm told it is really good. 

If you use a translator app, would you do us a favor?  Leave a comment below telling which app you use and what its advantages and disadvantages are. 

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.