The Next Tech Thing: communication

Showing posts with label communication. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 19, 2021

EdPuzzle: Engaging Students in Effective Learning Through Video

Over the past few years prior to the pandemic, a few of our teachers tried out various tools which allowed them to assign students video content to watch and assess what they understood. After some researching and testing at the start of this current school year we added a paid subscription to one such tool: the pro version of EdPuzzle. We figured teachers would want to do this more often during distance learning. As this year draws to a close the numbers show we were correct. Our teachers have created more than 4,300 EdPuzzle video assignments. Over 100 of our teachers have used it more than ten times this year, averaging thirty or more videos uploaded, and almost ten of those teachers have created more than 100 video assignments with EdPuzzle. Recently I met with five teachers to learn more about how they use it to enhance their instruction:

English

High school English teacher David Adams uses EdPuzzle regularly with both his online eleventh grade English students as well as his in person journalism and English classes. David records a 1-5 minute unit overview video, providing students with a framework of the learning ahead—what they will learn and what the assignments will be. He also creates a video for each week’s lesson. With EdPuzzle, David can prevent students from skipping ahead in a video and he adds a question at the end of each video overview to test whether or not they have watched it.

David says that these video overviews are nice because students can get to know him and see his face more, especially the online students. Since starting the regular use of video, he has experienced more online students whom he hadn’t met in person coming up to him and talking with him when they are at school for other in-person classes. He likes the fact that he doesn’t have to re-explain things for absent students—instead they just watch the video and stay caught up versus waiting to talk with him at the next class. This saves both David and his students time. Students can also go back and rewatch videos as needed, which greatly helps support the students’ individual learning needs and prevents them from having to wait to meet to get many of their questions answered. Sometimes he will replay a video on the screen during class (such as a grammar lesson) so students who need to can rewatch it, which frees him up to meet with students.

Math

Fifth grade math e-Learning teacher Grace Mevissen “loves EdPuzzle.” She uses it regularly with her online students. It has allowed her to do more flipped learning this year, posting math mini-lessons for students. Grace can see from the EdPuzzle stats that some students watch the video a day prior, and sometimes encourages them to watch the videos multiple times. She can also see when students haven’t watched a video and/or when they only watch part of it. Grace has found it very beneficial for students to be able to watch the video of a lesson if they missed the live instruction session, which like David mentioned, saves time and keeps students caught up.

Grace likes the library feature in EdPuzzle with premade videos with questions which she can quickly edit as needed rather than having to “reinvent the wheel.” For example, she has found Mr. J’s math videos to be well done and uses this content frequently. Grace’s colleagues Jennifer Hahn and Lisa Lund use EdPuzzle as well to augment their social studies and health curriculum. Sometimes the EdPuzzle quizzes are used as “exit tickets” to formatively assess how well the students understood the lesson. Grace mentioned that in addition to EdPuzzle, she uses a lot of other tools such as Classkick to watch kids’ work in live time and send messages to correct misconceptions. She also has noticed how much more tech savvy students are now, easily able to jump between apps on their iPads.

World Languages

High school Spanish teacher Briana Wilson uses EdPuzzle with both her immersion and regular language classes. It provides a great way for students to hear authentic audio and be able to process at their own speed as they answer questions about what was said. Briana has students listen to a wide variety of topics and asks them questions to keep them engaged, which “automatically increases the active role they have to play as a learner.” EdPuzzle is a great tool to select specific portions of a video, such as one minute of a 15-minute clip. Briana explained that a one minute video with questions will take the students five minutes to watch and re-watch and then answer the questions.

Briana likes being able to import anything from YouTube into EdPuzzle, shorten it to what you really want the students to listen to, and add questions. She and her colleagues use the library to share and edit one another’s video assignments. To accompany a long 450 page novel her Spanish Humanities students are reading, she took clips from specific scenes in the movie so students could compare it with the book. She finds that the students are more motivated to read the next section, as reading a book in a second language can be very tedious. Briana also sets EdPuzzle up so students can see the correct answers, and explains that using it this way is “rewarding for kids to have the validation that they are understanding the content and language”.

Spanish teacher Fred Moreno-Parra also finds the video library in EdPuzzle to be a time saver. He finds videos where students can see and learn the language in context, such as when traveling or learning about holiday traditions. Fred says EdPuzzle is great because he can find, edit, crop and insert questions into YouTube videos and it removes ads. He says this saves him “tons of time” when using a pre-made two minute video rather than having to spend time making his own, and often the videos available look more professional with graphics and animations than what he feels he could produce. Fred finds that the videos are more engaging for students when learning about important and complex but less exciting topics like verb tenses. He has found the EdPuzzle video format helps his students better learn the material.

Related Posts:

Classkick: A Great Tool for Formative Assessment & Feedback
Maximizing Hybrid Learning to Increase Engagement & Relationships
Modifying School in Minnetonka During a Pandemic
A Pandemic as a Catalyst for Technology Integration in Education
Preparing for the (Second) Shift to e-Learning Checklist
Tonka Online High School Starting Year Five with 40+ Courses & 1200+ Students
7 Lessons for Success with Schoology
Six Years with Schoology: Setting Expectations for the Future
Tip #3 for a Successful 1:1 Implementation: Use Schoology as the Classroom Hub
Home Sick? Absent Minnetonka Students Caught Up Before They Return
Setting Seesaw Expectations: Raising the Bar for In-Person and e-Learning
14 Popular Tech Tools to Increase Student Learning & Engagement
Pear Deck in Minnetonka Classrooms- Engaging, Interactive Lessons with Realtime Feedback

Friday, April 9, 2021

Classkick: A Great Tool for Formative Assessment & Feedback

One of the new technology programs we purchased this year during the pandemic to help our students and teachers is Classkick. Classkick allows our teachers to see each of their students' work from their iPads and provide them with feedback. Teachers can upload or create content, lessons and questions which the students work through on their own devices and at their own pace. Teachers can track students's progress in live time and give them instant feedback. Classkick has a free and paid version.

Classkick in Kindergarten

Deephaven Elementary Spanish Immersion Kindergarten teacher Jessica Rojas explained that Classkick allows her students to do activities by themselves. Instead of using small boards to show their thinking, she can show it on the screen and have students explain their answer and thoughts with the whole class. She can give them digital stickers (such as stars or happy faces) while they are writing. She can see if someone has raised a hand to help or check their work. She uses both the self-paced mode and the teacher directed mode. Her Kindergartners can easily log in by entering the class code. Jessica can review it in live time or if necessary, at any time later--having a digital record of students’ work is more convenient than having it on paper.

Jessica did say that she uses a balance of digital and paper based activities. She said the students do really like using technology and are motivated to work when they can use their iPads. She also uses PearDeck, Seesaw and other digital tools. Jessica explained that the advantage of Classkick for the lesson I observed is that she can see all the students’ work at once.

Classkick in PreAlgebra

Sarah Gutierrez, middle school e-Learning math teacher, uses Classkick regularly. Recently when I joined her virtual class students were practicing working on a percent unit. She began class with all 26 students in a Google Meet. The students took notes while watching two videos--one on comparisons and one about percentages/proportions. Then Sarah had students join a Classkick session with eight practice problems. Sarah and the students used the highlighter and digital ink in Classkick to identify the parts of each math problem they needed to work on. Sarah set up each slide to autocorrect so students immediately knew when something was correct/incorrect, as the problem pictured with a red error box. When they had questions, students simply signaled the teacher that they needed help by raising a digital hand, and Sarah would individually look at their problem and work and give them hints and feedback.

One of the things that struck me as I observed Sarah teaching remotely is how much better this method is than the alternative--if students were using paper for this, Sarah wouldn’t be able to see it in live time of course. Students would have to answer a specific question or submit a picture of their work. Through Classkick, the teacher can interact with the students’ work in real time and give immediate and clear feedback.

Sarah called Classkick a “Gamechanger. It gives me an opportunity to see what students are doing live. I know what they actually learned and whether they are participating.” As I was able to see, Classkick made it possible for Sarah to basically remove the barrier of having everyone in separate locations. It was almost as if the class was all together sitting in the same room. Sarah said Classkick is great for teacher collaboration and often shares/receives slide decks such as this one with colleagues.

Classkick in Chemistry

High School Chemistry teacher and Technology Coach Patricia Price uses Classkick regularly with her students, often for formative assessment. Patricia explained that Classkick is better than a paper exit ticket, because she can know how students are doing at the moment versus taking home a stack of paper after school to score and return to students the next day. Additionally, the immediate feedback allows Patricia to determine what content she may need to revisit with the whole class before moving on to other topics, as well as which individual students she may need to connect with for additional support. Patricia uses her iPad to see each student’s screens and can bring up any problem to project to the whole class and discuss.

One time saving trick Patrica showed me was how she can quickly visually scan a row of student Classkick slides to look for the same answer patterns and quickly spot students who got something wrong--for example, if students had to circle answers on one slide, she quickly scans the row to see if everyone’s circles are in the same spot (see picture). Another example is when glancing at a slide with four matching problems, she scans to see if the same four line pattern is drawn. Talk about a great way to give students immediate feedback! Patricia had pre-labeled some digital sticker responses for students to let them know if they had the correct answers or needed to recheck something, which also accelerated the feedback loop.

The students in Patricia’s class echoed their appreciation of Classkick’s immediate feedback. They, too, value the quick response possible and took comfort in knowing immediately how well they are understanding concepts. They liked the fact they could ask questions based on this feedback, too, rather than waiting until the next day. Although they didn’t state it, this quiet, private method for a shy student to ask a question likely results in more comfort doing so than having to raise their hand and ask in front of everyone.

Monday, February 1, 2021

Setting Seesaw Expectations: Raising the Bar for In-Person and e-Learning

We are now in our second year using Seesaw as our as our Learning Management System (LMS) for grade PreK-3 students. We use Schoology as our Learning LMS for grade 4-12 students, and until moving to Seesaw, had used Schoology for grades PreK-3, too. In September 2019 when we introduced Seesaw, adoption took off quickly. I am so thankful we made the change when we did, as just seven months later in March 2020 we were in a great place to more fully utilize Seesaw when all students shifted to e-Learning. The pandemic was a catalyst for technology integration in education, and our use of Seesaw exponentially increased as seen in the stats comparison below from this past fall and a year previous for one of our elementary schools.

Fall 2020 Seesaw Stats for Items Posted Clear Springs Elementary

Fall 2019 Seesaw Stats for Items Posted Clear Springs Elementary

This past fall as school resumed, K-3 students were either in hybrid learning pods at 50% capacity five days a week or at home in 100% e-Learning. In both cases, Seesaw was heavily used. Prior to students returning in the fall in August 2020, we created and introduced Seesaw Expectations for teachers to help bring consistency between classes. We want students (and parents) to easily find content and communication regardless of the teacher. So to do this, we identified the subject color for tags/folders and naming conventions to provide further clarity in structure. We set the expectation for the frequency of announcements. We also encouraged active student engagement and minimum student use of Seesaw as well as set a teacher expectation for providing student feedback.

Setting the bar, so to speak, on Seesaw by identifying these expectations of use helps drive both consistency as well and increase the level of use across the board. It provides administrators and our technology coaches with a guide to follow and goal to encourage teachers. We have found this true as well with our Schoology Expectations introduced five years ago. The expectations are altered as more features in each tool are introduced and teachers, students (and parents) gain more experience using the platform. Other districts have created Seesaw Expectations as well, and we built off of their ideas when creating ours for Minnetonka.

(Open Seesaw Expectations in separate window)

Monday, February 17, 2020

Don’t Miss Out--Visit Top Ranked Minnetonka Schools on April 9!

Don’t miss out! Come see for yourself why thousands of educators from across the country have visited Minnetonka Public Schools over the past 15 years. Experience K-12 learning in action at one of the top ranked school districts in the country. Witness proven programs and gather innovative ideas to take back to your school! Discover best practices for implementing meaningful instruction that will accelerate learning. Register Today!

Visitors can choose to start your visit at an elementary school, middle school or our high school. Specialty programs include Navigators and high potential programs, VANTAGE, Minnetonka Research, Chinese and Spanish language immersion, Tonka Online, athletics and the arts. After your tours at a school, you will transition to our District Service Center for lunch and breakout sessions of your choice. Choose from a wide variety of sessions led by Minnetonka staff to learn how things work behind the scenes. Sessions include innovation, the Teaching and Learning Instructional Framework, coding, Design for Learning, assessment, the curriculum review process, gifted and talented programming, student support services, personalized learning, 1:1 iPads and more. Discover best practices for implementing meaningful instruction that will accelerate learning, have time to ask questions and head back to your own school full of ideas! Additional details about possible sessions to choose from can be found here. Availability is limited in order to keep sessions small. Lunch is provided. Register here!

Learn more about Minnetonka Schools and Technology Integration:

Monday, February 10, 2020

My 20 Minute Ed Talk: Screen Time & Student Well-being

The recording of the 20 minute EDTalk I gave last month in Minneapolis is now available. The talk was titled How to Raise Tech Healthy Kids. I spoke about creating habits that lead to digitally healthy individuals and shared simple tips to help both kids and adults balance the use of technology in our lives. In addition to the video above, there also is an audio recording of it if you'd prefer. After the EDTalk there was an audience Q & A session which you can view below.

Prior to my talk, Erin Walsh from the Spark & Stitch Institute gave a great presentation about Students, Social Media and Mental Health. That recording can be watched below.

Learn more about Achieve Minneapolis EDTalks.

Related posts:

Monday, January 20, 2020

12 Examples of Seesaw Use Taking Off in Minnetonka E-3 Classrooms

Since starting in September, Seesaw use in Minnetonka E-3 classrooms continues to increase each week. Students are creating content documenting learning, teachers are posting activities for students and pushing announcements to parents, and parents are viewing and commenting with their child. An average of about 500 parents per week per school view Seesaw content and leave comments or "Likes" for their student. We have seen very few, if any, other educational technology programs take off so quickly and become so popular.

To support the startup and continued growth of Seesaw, our elementary tech coaches offer monthly Seesaw training and sharing sessions. After an initial teacher training at each school in September they have followed up each month by facilitating a teacher sharing session of ideas and best practices. They communicate these ideas between all sites to spread the knowledge and speed up implementation of the best use of the platform, too. We also have set goals of topics and skills to introduce each month for the remainder of the school year. Technology coaches have attended trainings and presentations both online and in person at last month's state technology conference to learn more. Later this month Minnetonka is hosting a Twin Cities Metro Seesaw User Group meeting to network with other districts and build a community to share ideas.

We have seen some great, creative and innovative uses of Seesaw by our teachers so far. Some of these include:

Students labeling photos they take in science of their sunflower seeds or videos of their crayfish as pictured.
Multiple photos of individual and classroom shots shared with families to help them understand more of what is happening at school.
Students documenting learning, such as a photo of their writing journal pictured above, or recording reading aloud--audio or video--for parents and classmates. This is a great formative assessment for the teacher and gives students an authentic audience. Some teachers are using soft-sided cubes like the one pictured to block out extraneous noise. One teacher had all her students practice being "videographers" for their partner, learning recording tips.
Posting a video explaining how to solve the math skill(s) currently being taught for students to review and to help parents understand how to reinforce and help with homework. Or posting instructions for parents on how to repeat any classroom activity, such as the retelling of the Three Little Pigs pictured.

Teachers posting the "Star Student" of the week in Seesaw for everyone in the class to see and encourage further home discussion.
Sending links and announcements home to parents such as the conference sign up form, book fair links, and other items normally sent home in a class newsletter.
Teachers are working on building class community and helping students learn from mistakes; valuing the process, building understanding, learning how to support each other and handle mistakes.
Posting videos for parent volunteers to watch prior to the day of helping out the class. The parent comes ready to start at a station and does not need to ask the teacher what to do and take time away from the students.
Teachers recording a weekly video for parents rather than sending home a newsletter. Teachers love the fact that they can know through Seesaw when each family viewed something.
Students using the screen recording feature to write Chinese characters so the teacher can see whether or not they are using the correct ink strokes.
Teachers are using Seesaw to post things parents wouldn't typically see such as work in progress, a picture of a math notebook page, and recordings of reading own writing in immersion language.
Reading poems Chatterpix and sharing their work with classmates and parents via Seesaw.

As our teachers continue to become more familiar with Seesaw, they are utilizing the Activity Library and sharing resources with one another across the district and beyond. Seesaw has proven to be an easy to use platform that students, teachers and parents love. It will be fun to see what the second half of the year brings!