Back when I was a classroom teacher, I rearranged the furniture in my classroom regularly, looking for that perfect arrangement. Now that I teach in a computer lab with desktop computers, moving the furniture is out of the question. Maybe that is why I keep changing lesson plan books.
Other than sub plans, I haven’t kept a paper plan book in longer than I can remember. Maybe never since student teaching. For major planning I use an Understanding by Design inspired Word document. However, for weekly plans for each of my 15 classes, I keep shifting what I use.
First I used Word. Tried Exel, then went back to Word. Then One Note became available and I loved using that. Moving between classes was so smooth. The first year I used it I made a tab for 2008-09 and made each teacher a page within that tab.
I was excited the next year when during my team planning with the classroom teachers, I found I had to reorganize the notebook. For 2009-2010 each teacher had their own tab and the plans and other supporting documents such as rubrics, worksheets, etc., were separate pages within that tab.
I loved how that worked, except I could only check it on a Windows computer. That meant I kept lugging my work laptop home each night so I could work on my lesson plans.
At some point during last year our school acquired its own Google Apps. In the interest of learning its quirks and strengths, I switched my plans from One Note to Google Docs. The advantages were I could work on my plans on any computer with internet access. I could even check them on my iphone. I was surprised at how often I did look them up on my phone.
However, I didn’t love this format. Having been copied over from One Note there must have been stray bits of code that I could never find but they made some of the tables behave poorly. Now I know I should have exported each from One Note to Word, then uploaded them to into Google Docs.
I also had significant lag and denial of access problems. This was good in that I raised a ticket on it with our IT Help and one of the engineers fixed it by changing some network settings. I was glad to have that problem identified and fixed before large numbers of our users began using the platform. Even with these problems fixed, I still didn’t love this option. It felt clunky despite its advantages.
This fall, I decided to return to One Note. I now had a little Lenovo S10-3 netbook running Window 7. It had One Note on it which was going to make my life much easier. I have everything set up with my lesson plans stored in a One Note notebook in Sharepoint so I could access them at work or at home.
Unfortunately, it isn’t playing well with the netbook. Sections keep getting corrupted. They work fine on any computer at work, but on the netbook they quit syncing. Of course, it happens the most to the sections I use the most. Not handy.
Today as I stared in dismay as my lesson plan notebook began corrupting on the netbook, I felt like I was back at square one, needing to lug my work laptop home when my lovely Mac was already there. Then lateral thinking kicked in an I thought of another idea. Why not use Evernote?
In case you haven’t heard of it, Evernote is a collection of software and services that allows users to collect, sort, tag and annotate notes and other miscellaneous information. – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evernote
Evernote comes in many versions. You can have a free account or one with an annual fee with more features and more storage. You can use it on the web by logging into their site. You can also download their free desktop app which can work offline but syncs with the web one when it can get online. There are also mobile versions.
All of these versions sync. This means I can access my Evernote notebooks at work on any computer there either through the web or by downloading the desktop app. Then, when at home I can access it on my Mac. I also have the free iphone app and it has worked well on there.
I have had an Evernote account for a few years. Like One Note, I have a number of separate notebooks within it. This summer, as part of an AppSumo deal, I was able to purchase a one year subscription to the pro version of Evernote and a number of other online apps for the same price as the Evernote subscription usually costs so I jumped in.
One of the premium features in Evernote is the ability to have your notes on your phone. With the free account, you must be connected to the internet to access your notes. Now I have all my notes on my phone all the time.
Another feature is the ability to import Office files. Since I already had lessons started in One Note, I used One Note’s Send to Microsoft Word feature. After I had done this with the plans for each class, I emailed them to myself so I could work on my Mac instead of the netbook with its smaller screen. If I already had Evernote on my netbook, I could have eliminated the email step.
I just made all of these changes today so I can’t tell you if this is THE solution. I am already finding things to like about it. One nice feature in Evernote is tags. In addition to tagging each page with lessons2010, I also tagged them with their grade level + 2010. For example, 3rd2010. Now I can quickly find just my third grade classes and copy information between them when they happen to be doing something similar.
I also accessed them on my iPhone. Because the lesson plans have tables, they are stored as rich text and cannot be edited on the iphone. However, I am able to view them just fine. I was in a similar position when the plans were in Google Docs.
I think I will miss having a tab for each teacher. I haven’t yet figured out how I will keep rubrics and other items with the lesson plans. I can think of a number of options. I did have to put numbers in front of the teacher names (e.g. 01., 02., 03.) to force the plans to be arranged in the order of my classes rather than alphabetically by teacher name.
I will update you later on how this works out. In the mean time, if you have a digital lesson plan book, please tell me what you are using and how well you like it. I need to get back to those lesson plans I was working on two hours ago.
I don’t want this to become a blog of other people’s videos, but this one is too good to not share. I haven’t read any of Daniel Pink’s books, but I have had the good fortune to listen to him give a lecture on his book, A Whole New Mind which is an inspiration for any teacher.
Now he’s posted on YouTube this amazing animation of his new book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Its concepts run contrary to standard concepts of both economics and motivation. However, they are not new. A decade ago Alfie Kohn was making some of these points in his book Punished by Rewards.
As compelling as the message was the media in this video. It feed into my recent fascination with the power of infographics. This animation is part video, part mind-map. As the video finished my first thoughts were…
- I want the camera to zoom all the way out like a Prezi so I can see the big picture.
- I have a much better understanding from this than I would have received from a Powerpoint with the same information.
In regards to that second thought, I want to know WHY it was more effective. Part of it was literally seeing the lines drawn between connecting ideas. Part of it was the iconic nature of the drawings, and the combination of text, graphics and narration. Is that all? I’m not certain.
Do you find this type of presentation more effective that a good Powerpoint or Keynote? Why? Please leave a comment to let me know your ideas.
(Thank you to Kim Cofino for this find as well. See why I have such love for my PLN?)Wow! This video is well-made and documents one school’s journey from traditional portfolios to digital ones. Thanks you for another tweet by Kim Cofino via Chad Bates for steering me towards it.
Short Portfolio Project Movie – narrated from Lawson Journalism on Vimeo.
I was a long-time subscriber to Edutopia but the magazine arrived back in Minnesota and I was living in S.E. Asia. Summer was too short to read all the periodicals waiting for me when I arrived home, so I didn’t really understand what an amazing resource Edutopia is.
This past month, following links posted by my PLN on Twitter, I discovered their Schools that Work section of their website, as you can see in my previous post. Today I followed a tweet from Kim Cofino.
Kim Cofino on Twitter
That article and the accompany video were useful, showing me how one elementary school has built in different sorts of collaborative planning meetings.
Having now found two different sets of using tech integration articles on the Edutopia site, I wished I had some way to keep on top of their tech integration videos. While reading the comments to that post, I found out that there is. Enter iTunes U!
I suspect that readers of this blog are familiar with Apple’s iTunes software. However, they may not have taken the time to explore the iTunes U section. Or, like me, they may have explored it in the past and not found much for elementary teachers and their students.
Fortunately for me, I’ve found two great resources on their in the past month. The first is an Edutopia tech integration subscription. It is free and can show up in your iTunes just like other podcasts. These are video podcasts that you can watch on your computer or on your pod if it is the type that plays video.
The other great resource is a real find if you use the California Edition of the elementary FOSS science kits. At this time, the kits still have their teacher preparation videos which help teachers prepare to teach the modules. They are especially helpful when you are trying to set up an experiment for the first time. Unfortunately, these videos are in VHS format and FOSS does not yet provide them in DVD format. Starting next year, we will no longer have VHS tape players in our school since they are now extremely difficult to buy and maintain here in Singapore. The videos are viewable on the FOSS website as Flash videos. However, teachers wanted to be able to download the videos. The website is not designed to allow you to easily do this, and most teachers don’t know how to capture a flash video. The good news is that FOSS is adding these videos to iTunes U. We could not find them by searching the iTunes store, but there is a link on each video page on the FOSS website that brings you to that same video in iTunes U. FOSS does not yet have all of the videos online, but you can see which ones are by visiting this page in iTunes U.
What iTunes U finds are you using? Please leave me a comment and tell me about them.
One of the many great practices I observed at the American School of Bombay during ASB Unplugged 2010, was differentiation in action. One method of differentiating was allowing students to choose how they shared their learning. Sometimes they had to choose from a number of different tools (e.g. a presentation, a poster or a written report.) Other times they could choose any tool they wanted. In one class different students choose a skit, a flash animation, and a clay model to explain what they knew about cell structures.
I’ve been thinking about how to help my staff do more of that. At this time, based on how our curriculum was previously developed, units tend to have a single type of product to show learning, such as a rainforest Powerpoint or a biography research paper.
Opening up the end product has a number of challenges. Some products take longer than others, so it may be even more difficult to have students finish within the same amount of time. It is challenging to create a rubric that allows for many different types of end products so it could lead to lower quality products. There are management issues when some students require technology to work on the project and others need paint and others are needing places to move around for a skit. There is also the teacher’s comfort level with having children doing different products.
This video on the Edutopia website doesn’t address all of those issues, but it does show powerful differentiation in practice.
Yep. This graphic comes from a site that advertises online PD programs, but the facts on it jibe with what I’ve heard on Scientific American Frontiers and other podcasts and the sources are listed at the end.
While I find the information on it unsettling, I am saving it to add to my arsenal of graphics. I know the power of graphics like this over written text. I know I want to help my students create this type of thing so that they can be effective communicators. I think they would find this an interesting vehicle to share their learning, and it could easily be embedded in a blog or wiki. I haven’t figured out more than that.
Are you creating this type of graphic with your students? What are you using to create it? I hate using Photoshop with children. It needs so much configuring to play nicely. I haven’t played with Glogster, could it do it? We could actually do it in Word if we had a source for whatever graphics we need. Right now some of my students are making digital scrapbook pages using photos from their class photo gallery. Some of the pages are attractive keepsakes – and the rest are good lessons in layering, color choice, and other graphic design basics.
I need to think more about this. How would you make this type of graphic with 8-11-year olds?
Via: Online PhD Programs
In any case, I’m going to go use an anti-bacterial wipe on my phone!
I greatly appreciate all the comments on my earlier post and on Twitter regarding protocols for student usernames. I brought your collective wisdom to a meeting of the other tech coordinators and our director of IT. We had another good conversation as we tried to find a way get graduation year into the username, since that would allow us to manage student accounts as groups in platforms such as Edublogs which does not have any tools for grouping users.
We knew we needed to get the graduation year on the front of the username, since that would allow us to sort users or search by that. We realized that using just the last two digits would suffice. Unfortunately, with a school as large as ours, gradyearlastname was not going to be a unique identifier, there would be duplicates.
Middle and high school teachers have been HUGE fans of our current lastnameID# protocol since it made it easier for them to identify students from username in Blackboard, Sharepoint, Google Docs, etc. However, gradyearlastnameID# was getting ridiculously long and more challenging to implement. We even looked at changing the admission’s office procedure so that ID number rather than being consecutive would have the graduation year built into it. After much discussion we decided that ID number was the one thing that has never changed over the years, and for now, we didn’t have a compelling enough reason to mess with it, given all the problems we could foresee if it were mucked up.
In the end, our decision came down to this…
- The Tech Advisory Council was comfortable with letting students retain their blogs, Google Docs for Education, and other accounts after graduation. The blogs, wikis and other parts of their web presence will still be bound by our acceptable use policy, so we can delete the accounts and their products if they violate that policy. Otherwise, since our Google Docs and Edublogs accounts allow us unlimited users, we will let them persist, which means we don’t need a way to weed out accounts when students leave or graduate.
- Using student last names for middle and high school students seemed to make sense, although we could make a case for keeping middle school students using first names, we decided that since they receive their own Edublog, Google Docs and Powerschool accounts in sixth grade, it would be most useful for the students if those same accounts followed them through high school.
- Since we are not deleting online accounts, it is less of a problem for students to blog in elementary school and then switch to a new blog in grade 6. They can link to the old blog.
Based on all of that, we are sticking with our original plan for next year, which is middle and high school students using lastnamestudentID# and intermediate students using firstnamestudentID#. I’d like to say that we were completely comfortable with this decision, but we were not. Niggling in the back of our brains was the feeling that in the future, we were going to regret not finding a way to work in graduation year. For now, the reasons to do so just weren’t compelling enough to overcome the problems it created. In a few years, you can all say, “We told you so!”
In case you haven’t stumbled across these already, share this photo set with your students as you discuss the volcanic eruption, how a volcano in northern Europe can ground planes around the world, weather patterns, etc.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/04/icelands_disruptive_volcano.html
and more pictures: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/04/more_from_eyjafjallajokull.html
And here’s a cool Flickr image of the same volcano…
Volcano Audience in Iceland by Sverrir Thor
Our three-year edtech strategic plan was ratified by the board earlier this year. Now that it is in place, we are moving ahead to make anytime, anywhere learning more feasible. Part of our strategy to accomplish this is to move more of what we do into the cloud.
When I arrived four years ago, we already had Blackboard and made Outlook Web Access available to staff. Two years ago we added Sharepoint. This year we began using our own Google Docs for Education account with some students and staff.
In the past few months we have purchased corporate Wikispaces.net and a campus subscription to Edublogs. I am trying to write up the SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) for both. I keep getting stuck at the same point with both, so I hope you can help me think it through.
While I’ve been at my school, student usernames have evolved over time. When I first arrived, we used the child’s first initial followed by their last name. This sounds good, but in an Asian school with many duplicate names, this did not work well.
Next we switched to using ID number as username. This was somewhat successful. It is a challenge for younger students to remember the number, but it was workable. However, as we started to use Google Docs and other online tools we realized that it was inconvenient to not be able to tell who a student was from their username. Seeing that you received an email or were asked to share a document with 936618 isn’t very useful. Their active directory account could have a different username than these other accounts, but it would be best if students have one username for all school accounts.
The next year we switched to using last name followed by student ID. This seemed like the perfect solution, especially for middle and high school where teachers have 150-200 students. Those teachers were delighted.
It was more challenging in the elementary school. A surprising number of third graders cannot spell their last name. Those with long names often made mistakes. Memorizing their ID number was a challenge for many. However, we soldiered on and it was working until we started using more Web 2.0 applications.
The problem with web 2.0 apps was that we often ended up having both the child’s first and last name appear together online. In the elementary school, our policy is that students’ work and photos may appear online with their first names as part of school projects. With the student username containing their last name, and children often forgetting and using first names in their posts and comments, we were violating our own policy and Best Practice as stated on many Internet safety sites.
We talked around and around on the idea of changing usernames to first name followed by student I.D. We love the idea for elementary students. Students know how to spell their first names, and for a classroom teacher, even if they have a few students with the same first name, it would be easy to remember their ID numbers to tell them apart online.
Middle and High school teachers were strongly opposed to the idea. Given the large number of students they work with, they find it much more convenient to use last names for student identification. Other problems arose around nickname versus official first name. Many of our students, especially Korean students, use a nickname at school. For example, in their passport a child’s first name may be Su Fang but at school she may have always gone by Clara. This leads to confusion and discomfort.
We cannot use nickname instead of first name because many of our systems talk with each other by means of scripts. For example, Blackbaud and Powerschool exchange information and using nickname leads to duplicate accounts and other problems.
To get around these problems, we came up with the idea of using first name followed by student I.D. in the elementary school, and then switching to last name student ID in middle and high school. This could work. Since some of our high school students already have a Google Docs for Education account, they won’t need to change over to a new account. However, it means that any accounts children have in elementary school go away as they enter middle school. In Edublogs, deleting a child’s account deletes their blog as well. Likewise, they’d lose their Wikispaces and other accounts.
This also doesn’t help us with account deletion. Ideally, when a student graduates, we want an easy way to find their account and delete it. To do that, we would need to have their graduation year as part of their account. For platforms such as Google Docs, that means it would need to be part of their username. However, if we combine graduation year with student first or last name, we will end up with more than one child having the same username. If we try something such as graduation year followed by first or last name followed by ID number, it will be so long students won’t be able to type it correctly.
It seems we will need to make compromises, but we aren’t sure which will be the most workable. How does your school deal with this dilemma?
Photo by Scott McLeod used under a Creative Commons licensed.
This term I was planning on teaching three optional staff tech integration workshops around the theme of tech tool for writing. I posted a survey on my blog requesting suggestions and I received really useful responses.
Here is a HUGE thank you to all who responded. Not only did I use many of the suggestions in my workshops, but I have now used a number of them with students. I am pleased to be able to share them with others now.
I was going to summarize the responses, but I found them more powerful in the writers’ own words. I have reformatted their responses, added links, and made minor revisions to the responses to improve readability.
Maggie Hos-McGrane
I am teaching in Switzerland at the International School of Zug and Luzern. My blog is: http://transformingtechnology.blogspot.com/
- All our Grade 5 students blog.
- One class uses Wikispaces to host a book club where students comment on what they are reading in their Literature Circles.
- All Grade 5s used Bitstrips for their peace and conflict unit.
- All Grade 4s have used VoiceThread to comment on belief systems.
- One class of Grade 5 used VoiceThread to comment on their peace pictures.
- All Grade 5s used either OurStory or Xtimeline to write about tech advances over time. They are just about to start using XtraNormal (though we are having problems and might change to GoAnimate) to write about life changes/ life phases.
- One Grade 4 class used Google Earth to write about how the landscape affects people.
- Grade 2s used ZimmerTwins to write about healthy lifestyles.
Mister Norris
ISSH, Tokyo
Here are a few tools that I would use if I was teaching writing in my class:
- Mind Node – Free mind mapping software for Macs. Great to plan writing sessions before they start.
- Etherpad.com – Online, real time colaberative wordprocessor. Children could write parts of a story together, write notes together at the same time, edit work, etc. The possibilities are endless! I love this website! [Editor Note: Etherpad has since been acquired by Google. The creators of Etherpad have a new site: www.teachwith.me with very similar features.]
- Audacity – Free recording software. The children could make voice notes and come back to these when they start the writing process.
These are just a few off the top of my head, I look forward to see what everyone else contributes.
Dorothy
Auckland, New Zealand
These were done with primary school kids:
- Blogging – we have our projects researched and the results from the least 2 years i.e. the impact on student achievement outcomes for writing, are huge
- Podcasting – writing the scripts, digital storytelling through animation – again writing the scripts.
Pam Darling
Shawnee Mission School District Shawnee Mission, KS (Kansas City area) I am a technology application trainer for all staff.
- Inspiration and/or Kidspiration to show the process of writing
sangambayard-c-m.com
I am a full day Kindergarten teacher with 20 students, with a very wide range of abilities. So far, I have used the interactive Whiteboard in my classroom as a resource to increase letter/sound recognition as a prelude to beginning writing. I have also just begun to have my student’s use the laptop as a step toward writing by recognizing beginning sounds in Kidpix. We are just moving to the point of sounding out entire words to help with our sentence writing in journals. I would like to be able to have them create journal entries on the laptops, complete with illustrations, which we could then print and post in our classroom.
I welcome ongoing suggestions on this topic. I greatly appreciate learning from the visitors to my blog.
Photo Credits
60/365 – Finishing homework by Jez Page
