My First Twitter Experience

My first experience chatting on twitter was a bit overwhelming. I was extremely nervous about accidentally posting an uninformed comment for all to see.  I found myself looking for a friendly face and found one in Craig Kemp at #whatisschool. When I followed him he immediately welcomed me with a personal message! On his twitter feed (?) I found two very helpful items. One was a user-friendly introduction to twitter:

http://mrkempnz.com/2015/02/5-tips-for-managing-a-fast-paced-twitter-chat.html?utm_content=bufferea921&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

The other told about a collaborative learning project called Mystery Skype. You partner with a mystery classroom and compete with each other (using yes/no questions) to figure out each other’s location. This project incorporates many ELL checklist items.  When you go to the site, they have a great video that provides a sense of this project. I’d love to find a way to fit this in at the end of the school year.

http://mrkempnz.com/2014/11/what-is-mystery-skype-8-steps-to-get-started.html

This twitter experience and my experience incorporating new apps and learning activities in my classroom make it apparent that teachers have a responsibility to keep up with technology and continually find new ways to use it in instruction and learning.  I’m also appreciating how time-consuming and challenging this task is. 

As much as I’ve enjoyed learning about new apps and starting to implement them in instruction and learning; I’ve been frustrated at how long it takes me to understand them deeply enough to include them in our lessons.  I don’t want to be tripping over technology while I get the students up and running.  However, I don’t always have a deep enough understanding of the technology to anticipate all the “bumps in the road” before instructing.

So…some of the many questions rolling around in my head are:

How will teachers who don’t have the benefit of professional development (like this course) and opportunities to collaborate with other teachers keep up?  How will curriculum and professional development change to make teachers more effective and competent in technology integration? How can we leverage technology integration ideas by grade-level or subject matter so teachers aren’t reinventing the wheel?

Preparing Students for the 21st Century

The part of the article that explains ways to use the Internet Workshop Model to support reading comprehension gave me an idea for adding a dimension to independent reading centers. My ELL Level 1 students have "technology menus" for their independent work. Their menus give them options for independent work each week. Some of these options include reading texts on Reading A-Z and News-o-Matic (an app I learned about as part of this course). Both of these reading apps have comprehension questions for the students to answer after they read the texts. I check to see how they are doing on the quizes, but I don't follow up unless I see a problem.  To enhance this, I could have students choose one article or text they read each week and share a fact they learned; give a summary of their favorite story; make text to self or text to text connections, or complete and share a learning activity based on the comprehension or vocabulary strategy we are focusing on that week. 

This is not a new concept or really based on technology.  However, being deliberate about taking time to allow the students to discuss their independent reading/listening centers makes a lot of sense in a Level 1 class. So much of the discussion topics seem to be dictated by me based on our thematic unit or on the texts we are reading. This gives students an opportunity to share something they read that interested them.



On another note - I used a socrative quiz to review some NeSA vocabulary terms this week. Here's a video of a team consisting of an ELL Level 1 student and an ELL Level 3 student using this app. I created the first set of questions, but they are working to create more review questions.

Seesaw - Free Tech 4 Teachers - Creation and TPAK

The app I want to focus on this week is Seesaw.  It has so much potential for helping students create, collaborate and share using the iPad.

I plan to start small, so I have time to learn more about it and so students are successful early on.

The Seesaw support area has clear, manageable ideas for introductory lessons.

Three Tips for Introducing Seesaw to Students

http://help.seesaw.me/hc/en-us/articles/203730305-3-Tips-for-Introducing-Seesaw-to-Students

They even have a presentation you can use to introduce this app to students.

http://help.seesaw.me/hc/en-us/articles/203009589-Student-Intro-Presentation-w-Downloads-

This week, I plan to introduce this to my Level 1 ELL students as part of our unit on learning about emotions.  TPAK will inform this lesson planning as it evolves because I intend to allow open-ended interactions. This unit on emotions will transition into including our feelings and “showing/not telling” them in our personal narrative writing. 

I’m sure we’ll find many alternative ways to use this app in our classroom. Some of the benefits of using this app include that it:

-       Allows another way to represent subject matter

-       Provides multiple opportunities for language rehearsal

-       Provides opportunities for students to interact with their peers

-       Can be used as a formative assessment

-       Allows students, teachers and parents to monitor student progress

-       Provides a platform for communicating with parents via emails and/or parent-teacher conferences.

Some future ideas for using this include:

-       Having it as a station when students complete work

-       Having 2^nd graders share their animal research report (I need to get better at finding/adding photos so students can do this efficiently.)

-       Sharing with parents or with the ELL students’ classmates in their general education classrooms.

If any of you have used this in your classroom, I 'd be very interested to know how it went.