Thing 18: Student Assessment & Feedback Tools

Remindchat- I have been looking for a way to communicate with parents and students outside of school that does not involve giving out my personal information including phone number. Over the last few years, I have been giving out my cell phone number to parents to keep contact with them. I have found a lot of success in it because parents seem to respond better to text messages as opposed to phone calls. The downfall is that I receive calls and texts at all times of days and night which can be difficult when I have responsibilities that I have to take care of with my family. As I was looking through the app., I found that you can set "office hours" so you will only receive messages during the hours that you set up when you make the account. In the beginning of the year, I tired to use an app but was unsuccessful because the parents had to download it and use a class code and I was only able to get 1 parent to sign up even after sending weekly flyers home for the first 2 months of school. This app. is different and better because you can send an invite right to the parents phone and they can just click a button to join the class. I am hoping this will allow me to have 100% participation from parents. Many parents are working during the day and cannot answer phone calls. This app. would allow me to communicate with parents during the day who cannot answer the phone. Parents can read and answer at their convenience. This app. would also be beneficial when it comes to documentation. It keeps track of all of the conversations back and forth so it takes the "he said, she said" out of the mix. When you go on the website, you can quickly print or email the conversations that you have had with each individual parent throughout the year. This documentation can be used as evidence during meetings for parents, students, administrators, and even helpful for RTI, IEP, retention and much more. Another benefit of this is that it shows when a message has been viewed. Once it has been viewed, a parent cannot say they are unaware of whatever message that was sent. Being able to send message to parents guarantees that they will receive it. By 6th grade, very few students are willingly sharing letter, especially negative ones, with their parents. Using this app., I can ensure that parents are in the loop and I can even reach out to them and let them know something is coming home so that they can ask their child for it and it does not get "lost" in their book bag. I am looking forward to testing this out with my students for the rest of this year and implementing it starting first thing in September with my new class!

Thing 15: BreakoutEDU

I think that I spent the most time on this website than any other website in both Cool Tool sessions. It was so much fun to play around and use those critical thinking skills. I think this would be a lot of fin for kids but also challenging. Kids love to solve puzzles, but I think they give up too easily and do not know how to use critical thinking skills. I think this is a great way to improve those critical thinking skills and to get kids out of the habit of giving up so easily.

I definitely would start off using this website as a whole group lesson. I would have the class come up and we were work through one together. After that, we can talk strategy and how to find clues. When I feel like the students are starting to understand the website, I will have them try it in groups of 3. I feel like it would be important for students to work in small groups at first because I do not want my students to work alone and get frustrated and give up. Students find critical thinking activities difficult and easily give up on them. I am hoping that working in small groups will help keep the students motivated and not want to give up so easily. When creating small groups, I would want to pick the groups so I can create heterogeneous groups so students at different levels can work together and be successful. This will also get students working with classmates that they might not normally with with, since I made the groupings, and help improve the social skills of the students in my classroom. Eventually when my students begin to start feeling more comfortable with the website, I would want them to start working alone. When students begin working on this website independently, I will make sure that I start off with easier tasks and when they become more comfortable and then slowly increase the difficult of the assignments.

I am looking forward to trying this out in class! I am planning on introducing it as a whole group next week during Common Core testing. I think it is a fun and exciting change in routine that would be motivating after taking a grueling test. Students probably will not even know that they are learning while they do it!

Thing 24: Google Drawings

I choose to explore Google Drawings. I didn't even know that it existed. I decided to start basic and create a motivational poster for the class. That was so easy!!! I loved how user friendly it is and how there are so many options on it. The one thing that came to mind is graphic organizers!!! We do so many graphic organizers in class, that it would be great for students to create their own on the computer as opposed to using the one that I have provided for them on paper. As a 6th grade teacher, I try to start getting my students to become more independent when it comes to organizing information. I try to get my students to begin to choose which graphic organizer would work best for them. Google drawings would be perfect for that because students can both choose their own graphic organizer and then create their own!
There are many other ways I might use Google Drawings in my classroom. It could be something as simple as an "All About Me" poster in the beginning of the year all the way to creating a new cover page for a book they read. There are so many ways I could tie in Google Drawings to reading and writing lessons. I am looking forward to implementing some of these ideas in my future lessons and reporting back to let you know how they go!

Thing 30: DIY You Pick

http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/interactives/timeline_2/

I decided to do a project in my class for Black History month where my students were to choose a African American king or Queen and they were to write an encyclopedia entry and create a timeline with 10 events in it. Since I have been doing this PD, I decided to bring technology into it and discover a new way (for me) to create a digital timeline. I did some research and found the above website. This website was super easy to use, kid friendly, free, and the kids LOVED using it.

Before sharing the timeline with the class, I decided to create my own not only as a model, but also to explore the website. I found it really easy to figure out. One thing that liked about it is that there were not a ton of options when it came to creating the timeline. There was no choices when it comes to font or color so I do not have to worry about my students spending too much time on the "fluff" part of their project.

After  I created my model, I introduced the timeline website to my students. They were so excited to use it and really motivated to finish the rough draft of their project so that they could move on to the fun part of it! I had the students make a practice timeline together as a class so I could show them all how it worked at the same time. This was an independent project so all students would be working at different paces so I thought it would be important to introduce it at the same time.

Due to time constraints, I was not able to use all parts of the website. One part I am excited to use in the future is the part when you can upload photos. I think that would be very motivating and exciting for students to add to their timeline. I hope that later in the year we will have the opportunity to create another timeline so they they can upload pictures to go along with their timeline.

I am very excited I started this PD because it pushed me to use technology that I might not have used before. This project showed me that integrating technology in my lessons makes projects more exciting and meaningful and kids are more excited when it comes to learning .