Lit and Tech

If you use Zoom with your students keep reading. If you use, or want to use breakout rooms with your students in Zoom, this post is for you. This works best if your students login to Zoom using their school accounts. It can also work if they created personal Zoom accounts. For safety, your best bet is requiring students to login to Zoom with their school accounts. The second best option is to require them to create Zoom accounts using a personal email and then you use a form to collect those email addresses. Either way you should know the email address of anyone you are expecting to join your class Zoom session. (See #1 in the screen shot.) The Fun Part: Breakout Rooms Zomming with 36 students is nice for direct instruction, but for actual conversation and collaboration, break out rooms are essential. In my classroom, I almost never group students randomly, but the prospect of having to click 36 different check boxes to assign students to groups intentionally was daunting and time

NBCT: My Experience with Component 2: YA ELA

Assembling Component 2 Considering National Boards? I recommend the process, but you should know what you are getting into. Start early and get organized. In the spring of 2016 I began pursuing National Board Certification for teaching. I know eventually someone will ask me for my thoughts and advice about that process, so I'll capture them now while the experience is fresh. Because I teach 9th grade, and previously taught middle school for ten years, I decided to do my NBCT in the area of Young Adolescent ELA. (Yes, I also taught 11th grade for six years, but that was a while ago.) Though some do it in one year, I'm taking two years to complete my NBCT. Last summer, at a small local conference, I stumbled into a conversation about National Boards and happened to find out that my County Office of Education sponsored a support program. I was just in time to sign up. Through that program I got early advice and support to help me understand expectations and deadlines. The

Turning SAMR into TECH: What models are good for

Image created by Dr. Ruben Puentedura, Ph.D. http://www.hippasus.com/rrpweblog/ SAMR, developed by Ruben Puentedura, is one model for examining the evolution of tech integration in classrooms. It focuses on the type of work students are doing and how much that work deviates from traditional classroom practices. In a sense, it measures the future against the past. This four minute video is great if you would like to hear him explain it in his own words. I like the SAMR model and I think it does what models are supposed to do, it get us talking and thinking about the work going on in our classrooms. This graphic shows the progression of a teacher's thinking with a bit of humor too. As a model though, I think SAMR has some issues we need to talk and think about more. This is my list of concerns. For further exploration: It privileges the modification and redefinition stages such that good teaching without tech is marginalized. Even after five years of 1:1 I still have

Group Creator: Group Students Fast, but Not Random

I want to have my students work in groups and with partners as often as possible, but the process of making their groups or choosing their partners took me a long time. I kept looking for a digital solution that would speed up the process for me, but I could never find one with the features I wanted. Then I figured out how to make a group creator that works for me and I'm also sharing it with you. My Group Creator runs in a Google Spreadsheet. (Don't panic, it comes with directions.) After you add your class roster and sort by a score you put in, you can click on the different tabs across the bottom to see the different groups students should be in. The tabs include both homogeneous and heterogeneous groups of six, groups of four, and partners. Directions Page Click this image or any other to see it larger. Roster Page On the roster tab replace the sample names with your own students. Then add a score that you can use to rank your students, a recent quiz gra

Differentiation with Branching Google Forms

Branching Google Forms are a fantastic way to differentiate assessment and reflection in my classroom. Linear forms are great, but not every student follows the same path. Branching forms allow me to account for their differences in pacing, and outcomes. Let me share an example. Back in the fall, my students were working on projects related to novels they had just read in small groups. Early on in their progress I wanted an overview of how they were doing. Some students were still in the very beginning planning stages, some were almost done, and some were ready to submit their work and move on. I teach a de-tracked 9th grade English class. My students are always all over the place. Enter the branching form. It allowed me to ask my students where they were in their process and then differentiate their next questions based on that answer. Students who were still getting started needed to respond to questions that would help them plan. Students who had already finished were ready for