Math and Learning from Students

I have been struggling this year as a math and science teacher to implement technology as much as possible.  I decided to reevaluate the technology use and find ways to use technology WELL instead of using technology OFTEN.  The reason I say this is I can find a lot of ways to substitute the technology into my instruction for both math and science, but I want create opportunities that lets me learn more about students' understanding, thinking and learning.

Jennie Magiera and Anita Huffman are both guiding forces in my implementation and I look to them often, especially since they both have used technology in the math classroom.  I have followed their sage advice and have set my courses up in Schoology for easy workflow with students.  I have also used Doceri app for students to screencast their thinking with problem solving.  This week, I had students show how to use the partial sums and column addition algorithms.  I LOVE being able to see my students work and solve problems, as well as having the feature of "comments" on the video they upload to give them quick feedback.  In the video below you can see the students makes a mistake but then corrects it!

One area of focus a team of math teachers at my school has been working around is CCSS Standards of Mathematical Practice 1.  The big idea of "does this make sense" and did I explain the "why" problem solving is missing from a majority of students work currently.  I create a rubric to help assess what students are submitting.  But I believe I need to model more explicitly for them these two big ideas.

I am hoping that with modeling, the rubric and more practice my students will continue to grow with their problem solving skills. As I work in each unit of the math curriculum I am finding new ways to implement technology tools in a thoughtful way.

It's in the Way that You use It: ClassDojo

Eric Clapton's song, "It's in the way that you use it" always makes me think of technology use. Although I am sure it wasn't written with that intent, creative interpretation here, I guess. Yet, when I thought of ClassDojo I only saw the negative ways it was shared in classroom and I viewed it as an excuse to not build relationships, to assign points, openly share the "winners and losers" in the classroom.  Which is not the way I work or want my classroom to work.  But I never allowed myself to imagine it being used in other ways.  My teaching partner, Sherly Chavarria, asked me my opinion in which I shared similar to what you read above.  But she had already started to see the tool in a new and different way.  She agreed that she didn't want to use it as a public board of behavior, but valued other areas of the tool and highlighted some of those to me.

I'll admit I was reluctant, but I trust Sherly's judgement and I gave ClassDojo a second look.  What I found is ClassDojo is a system like any other, it can be used for good or for evil, its in the way that you use it.  Jennie Magiera and I have often shared with others how tools considered evil can be used for good ranging from social media to Jennie's instructional videos.  What it comes down to is people see a tool as one thing, but it can be re-imagined into a variety of tools and uses.  I can now see ways ClassDojo can work for me.

Here are some aspects I am excited about:

• Data: The system shows me by class, by student and offers daily or a variety of over time looks at student positive and negative points.  I can see the value of this with students, parents and administrators in conversation as well as data for Special Education services around behaviors.
• Access: Students and parents can log in and see a private view of student information.
  
• Download reports: Download any of the individual or class reports and now they can be shared easily through email.
• Add and delete indicators: I wanted a way to track "behaviors" but also wanted to personalize the items for transitions in hallways, homework completion and other school specific things like our schools Eagle Coins to recognize students.  All easy to add.  If there were indicators I disagree with or don't want they were just as easy to delete.
• Import feature: I see two classrooms of students, I can easily import all my new indicators across classes, great for teachers wanting the same standard but assigned to multiple class lists of students. 
• Mobile: ClassDojo can now be used on a mobile device and you do not need an internet connection to use it.

As always nothing is perfect! As I start to use it this list my grow, but now there is one feature I would love to see added to the ClassDojo features.

What I would ask to be added:

• Multiple Teacher Access: I share my classroom with Special Education co-teachers, I have student teachers in the past, having access for all teachers to one class would be amazing.

Like any tool, its all in the way that you use it. 

PLAY and PLN

After an inspiring PLAYDATE13 teacher created conference in February, the teachers at my school have been continuing the learning in a similar exploration setting. We have committed to a once a month mini-PLAYDATE in which we pick one technology tool to explore together. We started with Twitter and we have established "Twitter Tuesday" with teachers and students tweeting, this month we moved onto book creation.

The group gathered and explore two big ideas in book creation: teacher creation for students and student book creation. We used Meg Wilson's book creation reccommendations to start. All of the paid app book creators were very generous to give codes so our teachers could test out the apps in our session. Teachers spent time working in pairs or groups to explore how these apps and see how they could best be utilized in our classrooms. Here are the results from our exploration. The big winners were Book Creator and Story Creator.



Having a group of teachers learn together has been a refreshing change from our usual staff meetings. The mini-PLAYDATE has a book club feel with a technology slant. It is teacher driven and teacher inspired. We already know that next month we will be looking at movie making. Have you thought about asking teachers to learn together in your school? We would be happy to Google Hangout with other likeminded teachers if you are up for it. Will we see you in April?

Using Flipsnack for Virtual Books

After working with my students using applications like Mental Note to create multimedia science journals I wanted to venture into using the student work to create an e-portfolio for individual student's work using the website Flipsnack. Flipsnack.com allows for any document that is a PDF to be transfer onto the site and combined into a virtual book with selected backgrounds. Each book can be downloaded, emailed, embedded, tweeted or posted to Facebook. I really appreciate all the ways to share the work!

Because almost any iPad app that has email capabilities then has the possibility to be turned into a PDF using the print function, it makes almost anything Flipsnack-able. The flipsnack books are also special because they do not require flash, so even as they are created with a bit of a work around from iPad to computer, they are easily viewed on iPads.

For easy viewing, embed these books to your homepage for your students to view. I also decided to take one project and put all the student work into a project book. This allows for students to see how others attempted and worked on the same project, which could lend well to student getting and giving feedback.

Here are a few key features to making a Flipsnack book:

On the Flipsnack.com site you can easily upload PDF files from both URLs or from files you have saved, even from places like dropbox!



This next section allows you to personalize the book background. I also checked the "merge all documents into one" to have a bit more flow to the book.



Check out my two Flipsnack books I made using some student samples. I really think a cool project would be a class comic book using Kabaam.

Educreations and photo sort

Implementing ipads in the intermediate science classroom has been a great adventure.  I am working on using the ipads daily, but also trying to use them in creative and transformative ways.  Although not something transformative, I think this is a good use of the technology.  My students are working on determining vertebrate groups and classifying.   I decided to create different dropbox folders with different pictures for students to use in a sort and then make a rule about their sort.  I put pictures in the group that were of two different vertebrate groups. We started with "rule" and "not the rule" for example, "gills" and "no gills" as the sorts went on, students were trying to find characteristics of vertebrate groups.

Students went to the Educreations application and started a new project.  Under the photo icon students can select Dropbox.  I have my ipads all connected to the class Dropbox account.  Students followed the folders until they reached the sort folder I directed them to open.  I labeled the sorts with generic numbers to not give any information about the characteristics of the animals in the sort. I put from ten to fifteen pictures in each folder.

Students then selected each image and resized it to fit on the page.  Once they have all the images downloaded students were free to examine the photos and find a common characteristic to create two groups.  We would do multiple sorts and students would use the apple tv to share their sort and characteristic.  Often they would create a rule around color, where the animals live, what they may eat, if they are large or not, but eventually a student would find the desired group, or I would create either the rule and ask them to sort or share a sort and ask the students to find my rule. 

Once students figured out the group and the label, we then tried to find characteristics that were true for each group.  Some of these were obvious like all fish live underwater, but others were pointed out and then observed by students, like all reptiles have scales.  Having the students be able to view some of the observable traits using pictures made the learning easier for students and gave multiple examples of a feature.

For some of my more advanced students I would have them use the web search feature to find another animal that falls into the group.  Another idea that my thought partner, Jennie Magiera, added to bring up the level of thinking, was to have students narrate their metacognition about how they are sorting and what they are thinking about as they grouped pictures.

Mystery Skype

Students were able to mystery skype with another science classroom in Huron, Ohio.  The students did well at their task, speaking, locating the class and using social media to connect with students in another classroom.  This was the first mystery skype we have done this year and it was successful for the following reasons:

• Using Langwitches Blog for great assessment and planning information
• Assigning jobs to students: questioners, answerers, greeter, partners: edmodo and map teams
• Practicing with questions that would be given in the "real" skype
• Practicing finding mystery locations with our questions

Silvia Tolisano's website host great ideas for digital learning, but her Skype resources were really helpful for me to execute a plan for my students and make sure the call was meaningful to our digital learning.  After we assigned jobs, read over the class questions, it was time to practice!  This step was really helpful for the students to practice both answering questions, using the questions, and working with a partner to narrow down the location of the classroom.  Two teachers skyped in from down the hall and created a "mystery" location for the students to work on.  The students teamed up as partners, one person had the skitch app open to the U.S. map and used the annotation tool to cross of states that were not the mystery location based on the questions and answers.  We also practiced answering the questions the class would ask us the following day.  (Sending the questions between teachers before hand is extremely helpful!) The partners on edmodo were able to share what the team was doing on the class backchannel.  This teamwork allowed students to work together and also share ideas if another team was not on the right track via edmodo.

When we skyped with the class on the actual mystery skype, the plan and practice the day before paid off.  The students were able to work comfortably with the map and edmodo and also had practice at being "on screen" for the Skype call.  They were able to locate the state after all the questioned were asked and they felt successful in the task.  After the skype we used edmodo again to backchannel our learning and ideas.  These became the tweets we composed to share our mystery Skype with a larger audience.

We are looking forward to connecting with other classrooms around the country through Skype! 

Multimedia Science Journal

My students have used traditional science notebooks in class for most of the year to write lab reports and to keep track of concepts and notes from experiments.  I decided to try an interactive iPad app for the last unit of study.  Mental note is a note taking application that allows for graph paper or lined paper and also has features like sound recording and the ability to add photos.  I like using the app for students because I have shared devices between three students per device and it has a tagging feature so that students could tag their work and find it easily.  The mental note application as a science notebook allows features past a traditional notebook, although I would love to see that addition of video and also the ability to move pictures once placed in the document.  The students can easily email the mental note to me for feedback purposes and also add it to a Dropbox folder to share with other students.  I will present more in depth on my use of mental note at the Chicago Public Schools iPad Academy.

See the work below for the student lab about solar cell investigations: