Friday, April 16, 2021

Parenting in the Digital Age: Finding a Healthy Balance Webinar Recording (60 minutes)


On April 27 I joined Mathew Meyers once again to discuss parenting in the digital age.  Mathew and I have held three previous talks over the past four years (recordings linked below). He is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist at Traverse Counseling & Consulting, GBC. I have great respect for Matt and always learn a lot from our conversations about parenting and maintaining a healthy balance with technology. The hour webinar recording is above. This was the advertised description:
 
TikTok, Snapchat, Fortnite, YouTube and more ... Technology is a big part of our kids’ world! Keeping up can be challenging, but a positive and well-informed approach can have a big impact on a child’s future and habits. Learn how to help kids develop a balanced and healthy use of technology from an early age and keep this up through the secondary school years and beyond.

Get tips and ideas for parenting and understand the significant role you play in helping your kids be responsible and safe in today’s high-tech world. Numerous ideas and free resources will be shared, and time for Q & A will be provided. 

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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.

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