Tip #4- Make Full Use of the iPad as a Formative Assessment Tool

Watch a two minute video about this.

Tip #4 for a Successful 1:1 iPad Implementation is make full use of the iPad as a formative assessment tool. Research from John Hattie (Visible Learning, 2008) points to overwhelming effectiveness that meaningful feedback helps students be more successful and helps teachers better inform future instruction.  Helping teachers understand the multiple ways to use the iPad as an efficient tool to provide formative assessments is a great way to increase effective use of 1:1 devices in schools. Using tools like Google Forms, Socrative, and Padlet (Wallwisher), Kahoot, Poll Everywhere, and many others, teachers are able to collect real time feedback about student understanding and then customize instruction based on that feedback. Teachers continually find innovative ways to provide feedback to the student work in ways that are faster and more efficient than collecting paper, such as using Schoology and TurnItIn to annotate students' assignments and even provide audio feedback.

Before 1:1 iPads, teachers had to rely on quizzes or paper exit slips that were time-consuming to evaluate, which meant that meaningful feedback to students was often delayed by a day or more.  The iPad has been the tool that provides access for students to complete this feedback before, during, and after class. After 1:1 iPads, quizzes and exit polls can be instantly assessed and then used to inform teaching that day or the next.  Plus, all students’ voices can be heard and accounted for when an electronic collection tool is used.  Compared to the traditional method of having students raise their hands to speak and only hearing from one or two individuals, the increased accountability placed on each student and the knowledge gain for the teacher about each of their students is invaluable.

An easy, quick way to get teachers started with simple, electronic formative assessment is to have them make a short three question Google Form with a field for students’ names, a question where students select their hour of class (if the teacher has multiple sections of the same course) and a text box that simply asks, “What is your answer?”  This form can be used repeatedly throughout a class daily to gather the responses of students to any question asked, whether the prompt is displayed on a screen, written on the board, or just stated aloud. There is no need for the teacher to continually edit the form and change the text of the question.  To further speed up the ease of having students open this form up, teachers can have students open the link to the form in Safari, then simply add the page as an icon app to their home screen and title it appropriately, such as “Science Form.”

Here's another great example of using the iPad for formative assessment: teachers can give more immediate feedback to students' topic sentences or thesis statements by collecting them via a Google form, then use FormEmailer to add comments and email them to the student.  This allows the teacher to provide customized feedback to students in an efficient paperless environment. Some teachers have also collected these statements or other items such as lab results or short answers to questions on a collective Google spreadsheet, which has the added benefit of being seen by everyone. The feedback doesn't have to come from just the teacher, either, allowing for more input and reflection by all students, rather than just between one student and the teacher.

There are many other ways to efficiently give more formative assessments and feedback in class and even save time grading.  Besides apps like Socrative, Minnetonka teachers also use Skyward and Schoology assessments online and use the automatically scored multiple choice, matching and true/false items to guide teaching and learning. These testing features even allow for inserted pictures, open-ended responses, randomized questions and teacher comments on student responses. The Schoology app as well as TurnItIn both provide the teacher with an easy, efficient way to annotate students' assignments and even provide audio feedback, all without paper. Getting teachers to harness any or all of these great tools on an iPad is a great way to increase the effectiveness of your 1:1 program.

To learn more about Minnetonka Public Schools iPad Program, check out tinyurl.com/iPadTonka

Tenth Annual Minnetonka Technology Site Visit a Success!

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Watch a video overview

Last week, 150 educators from the Midwest toured Minnetonka Public Schools to see how teachers accelerate learning with technology.  They had the opportunity to see technology integration firsthand in PreK-12 grade classrooms, witness proven programs, and gather innovative ideas from our teachers, administrators, students, and technology staff to take back to their own school. The full program agenda is like a digital treasure chest of links to all of the resources, handouts, and presentations from event.  I'd encourage you to look through it!  You will likely find all sorts of valuable information that you can use even if you weren't on site.  You can also search #TonkaTech on Twitter.

Some photos of visitors touring Minnetonka classrooms.  See more. 

Wednesday, March 4, was our tour day.  Visitors chose two of four school tours, seeing one in the morning and the other in the afternoon.  They werwe able to explore technology in all subject areas, including Chinese and Spanish Language immersion, early childhood, special education, Tonka Online, Tonka<codes>, and the arts.  At the secondary level, they experienced Minnetonka's digital learning cycle for a 1:1 iPad program (recognized as a 2013-15 Apple Distinguished Program) and also toured our Vantage facilities. Classroom visits and mini-sessions provided direct interaction with teachers and students.  We bused visitors between sites and enjoyed a lunch all together during which our Superintendent and Executive Director of Technology spoke.  Sponsors helped cover the costs and and provided some nice raffle prizes for attendees.  Check out the full program agenda, including details about each classroom stop.

On Thursday, March 5, visitors took an in depth dive into the behind the scenes details, spending the day attending a wide variety of small group sessions led by Minnetonka instructional technology staff, teacher leaders, District administrators, and Technology Department staff to learn how things work behind the scenes, from the planning to the professional development.  We shared the best practices and tips and tricks we have learned for implementing meaningful technology integration that will accelerate learning.  The morning keynote, Minnetonka Innovates, was given by Assistant Superintendent Eric Schneider, and provided visitors with an overview of how Minnetonka's crowd-sourced, grassroots innovation process works and keeps us continually improving.  Be sure to look through the full program agenda to access all of the presentations and content from each breakout session.  Over lunch attendees were with District staff members for Q & A.  Once again, sponsors helped cover the costs and and provided some nice raffle prizes for attendees.  

Fourth Annual Summer Technology Institute June 17-18

I hope you will recruit your staff to present at and attend our Fourth Annual Summer Technology Institute June 17-18, as well at the entire week of learning June 15-18 at our Summer Leadership Institute.  Thomas Murray, Digital Learning Director at Alliance for Excellent Education and founder of #EdTechChat, will keynote on June 18.  Greg Kulowiec and Beth Holland from EdTechTeacher will lead AppSmashing and Elementary iPad workshops on June 17 and breakout sessions on June 18.  Minnesota TIES staff will also lead preconference and breakout sessions, plus all the other presenters and attendees will make this year’s conference a great event!  The conference will encompass all ed tech- Google, Schoology, Chromebooks, Moodle, iPads, and much more!  Register today!

Minnesota Trends in Social Media, Cyberbullying, and Digital Citizenship

For the past eight years I have had the privilege to speak about digital citizenship and cyber safety to tens of thousands of secondary students and parents in over 70 public and private school districts across Minnesota. I have shared the important message of using technology in healthy and appropriate ways by addressing current issues such as the latest apps, cyber bullying, inappropriate material, and digital footprints.  I am able to take vacation time off from my job in Minnetonka to do this. More info about my presentations is online. 

One of the things I do during my student presentations is to use PollEverywhere to engage the student audience by answering questions through text messaging. Their answers to multiple choice or yes/no questions are displayed instantly on the screen for all to see, and then we discuss the results. Most often, about a half to three fourths of the students in the audience choose to participate (not everyone has a cellphone/texting, I suppose some feel it's not anonymous, while others may be "too cool" to do this).  Recently I decided to export the polls into a report to see the cumulative results from the students' answers so far this year. Some of the questions I've recently changed, so not all of these polls have the same number of students responding.  The graphs below show the answers of 1,247-4,956 students grades 6-12 polled statewide.

One interesting trend over the years has been to see the rise and fall of Facebook in popularity. When I started giving these presentations years ago, I was talking about a site called MySpace with students (remember that?).  I saw the rise of Facebook a few years later.  Recently, now that Mom, Grandma, and teachers have signed up for Facebook, the students are quickly leaving for other tools like Instagram and Vine.  

Other trends I notice are that older high school students are not the quickest adopters; I see more grade 8-10 students begin using the latest tools and applications faster than their older classmates.  I also have noticed a delay in the adoption of the newer trending tools that seems to increase the farther away from the Twin Cities metro area the school is located.  Below are answers to the question, "Which three of these tools do you use the most?"

Another trend I'm seeing is an increase in the occurrence of cyber bullying statewide each year.  On the past round of the Minnesota State Student Survey last taken by students in 2013, 79-92% of students reported having never been cyber bullied in the past 30 days:

When I started asking that exact same question this year, only 59% of students now report never having been cyber bullied: 

I think with the growing number of students with cellphones and smartphones at even younger ages than ever before, cyber bullying is on the rise and should be a topic that is continually addressed by both schools and families, even though it seems like the media coverage has moved past this topic. We need to help students realize how quickly things can be posted, forwarded, and kept through technology, and how difficult it is to remove/take something back:  

We need to help them to think first before they post, and only post and digitize things they would be comfortable with everyone seeing, including Grandma:

We can help them understand these thing through continual dialog and reminders. We need to help them be safe as they use technology and do the right thing.  We can help them to create a positive online presence and digital footprint so they have the best future possible!  

Here's a link to the handout of the top tips I give parents and staff at my presentations which you are welcome to use and share. 

Minnetonka's Technology Belief Statements

Our Instructional Technology Staff, Secondary Principals and Media Specialists, Director of Technology and Assistant Superintendent for Instruction spent a day together last spring reviewing our iPad program and planning for the future. This day turned out to be extremely valuable. If we hadn't scheduled the time to make it happen, I'm sure we wouldn't have been able to carve out the time to get as much done during our monthly meeting of 90 minutes. Having a whole day to focus on our secondary iPad 1:1 implementation with extended time to talk through our next steps allowed us to reflectively take a philosophical look at things.  

One of the results of this time was the drafting of our belief statements below. I am fortunate to work with some excellent writers who did a wonderful job crafting each of these statements. We discussed and fine tuned these and found the process to be extremely beneficial. These have helped us to decide how to focus our energies and efforts in our use of instructional technology. We have continued to revisit these statements throughout this school year. We welcome your ideas and thoughts about these belief statements. I would also encourage you to go through a similar process with your own team:

Minnetonka’s instructional model is built on the Charlotte Danielson framework and includes, among other key instructional strategies, an emphasis on the integration of personal technologies in the classroom.  The following set of beliefs represents the District’s vision for this integration.

1. We believe...effective use of technology will lead to the development of learners who approach problems more creatively, think more critically, collaborate more skillfully, and communicate with higher levels of precision.

2. We believe…high-level utilization of personal technologies is the new expectation for our students’ preparedness and success in higher education, careers, and life.

3. We believe...technology should be integrated in classrooms in the service of learning, not as an end in itself, and that effective utilization in the classroom makes the device virtually invisible.

4. We believe...effective use of technology leads to higher levels of personalized learning for both students and for teachers, and includes a sense of empathy for all stakeholders as well as human-centered design.

5. We believe...effective use of technology leads to increased efficiencies of time and resources (paperless classrooms, crowdsourcing, collaborative tools, etc.)

6. We believe...teaching with personal technologies creates a more student-centered and differentiated learning environment while also dramatically increasing the potential for real-time or just-in-time learning.  

7. We believe...fluency with current personal technologies is directly related to success with future technological developments.

8. We believe...it is our moral obligation to transform our current instructional practices to align with our stated belief that our students’ future success will depend on their ability to harness new and emerging technologies.

9. We believe...effective management of a digital environment requires a proactive approach to digital citizenship as well as regular communication and feedback on the user experience within that environment.

10. We believe...leaders must model effective use of the personal technologies that teachers are using in the classroom and should be transparent about their leadership journey.

11. We believe...teacher-leadership in the area of technology integration is an essential element of our collective success and efficacy.

Tonka Teacher Talks at ETT San Diego iPad Summit

Last week five Minnetonka 1:1 iPad secondary teachers shared their best practices, favorite ideas, and tips for iPad integration in their curricular area at the Ed Tech Teacher iPad Summit in San Diego.  Our presentation was entitled Tonka Teacher Talks.  Each teacher presented for ten minutes on how they used technology in their 1:1 iPad classrooms in science, art, math, and social studies. We are fortunate in Minnetonka to have so many great teachers, and these educators shared great things to attendees at our session.  

The five teachers presenting were Kim Hoehne, AP Physics Instructor, Angie Kallman, Middle School Math Teacher, Jennifer Morcomb, 7th Grade Life Science Teacher, Gina Nelson, Middle School Social Studies Teacher, and Emily Swagel, Middle School Visual Arts Teacher.  As you look through the presentation, I think you will agree that they are doing some amazing things with their students.  These teachers' experiences range from a half year of teaching with 1:1 iPads to three and a half years.  Each of these teachers continuously seeks out new ways to create meaningful learning opportunities for their students with technology.  They are creating lessons and activities that harness the power of the iPad and enhance learning for their students.

You can view the slideshow presentation below.  More info about our 1:1 iPad Program can be found here.

Accelerating Learning in Music Classes with Technology

Students in our schools are fortunate to be in a 1:1 iPad environment, where tablets allow technology integration to occur in all subject areas. Handwriting, annotating, scribbling notes in margins, sketching out ideas and drawing pictures are important components to learning, manipulating content, and creation of connections and new ideas. The iPad has provided us with multiple ways to do this.

For example, in our music classes students are using the iPad to enhance and accelerate their learning.  In this video footage recorded last week, middle school band students are annotating their music while their teacher, Paul Rosen, plays a song.  Students were to mark up their music as they heard errors he purposely made while playing.  They can then learn from these markings and annotations to prevent making the same errors when they played the music themselves.

Music students in band, choir, and orchestra regularly mark up their music on their iPad. They also use it in many other ways for their music studies.  Students can accessing recordings teachers have made and posted to Schoology as well as listen to recordings of the entire band/choir/orchestra with which they can play and practice along, making practice time at home more effective.  Students no longer repeatedly practice playing or singing a part incorrectly. 

The iPad is also used for assessments. Teachers have their students record themselves playing or singing a piece and submit this audio/video recording electronically to their instructor with their iPad to Schoology.  The instructor can provide each individual with specific feedback, either written, typed, or audio or video recorded, and post their rubrics in Schoology.

A teacher recently pointed out to me how much additional instructional time this creates for students.  Prior to 1:1 devices, the instructor would take days, sometimes weeks, to pull each student individually for playing/singing tests while the rest of the students had idle time or used the class as a study hour.  Now class time can be spent more productively, increasing the number of instructional days possible in the curriculum.  I have heard world language teachers speak of the same benefits and time gains when they have students record assessments outside of class.

Both music and world language teachers have also mentioned that students will often repeatedly re-record these assessments until they know they have it nearly perfect.  This was something that never was possible with the once and done performance assessments done in class for the teacher.  Repeated practice and self correction improves and increases the learning.  

There are a number of apps that students in our music program use on their iPads.  They can compose and write music with apps like Finale SongBook, Garageband, SmartMusic, and Virtuoso Piano. They can tune their instruments at home with insTuner Lite, something my son has done with his viola.  And they can use an app like Pro Metronome to work on their timing and rhythm. 

To learn more about Minnetonka’s 1:1 iPad program, check out tinyurl.com/iPadTonka, which includes more videos of our students and teachers using iPads.

The Teenage Brain +Dementia of the Preoccupied

I listened to a great podcast last week on NPR's Fresh Air. Terry Gross, the host, interviewed neurologist Dr. Frances Jensen, author of the recently published book The Teenage Brain.  The podcast was entitled, Why Teens Are Impulsive, Addiction-Prone And Should Protect Their Brains.  As both an educator and parent, I found the interview fascinating and enlightening, and would encourage you to listen to it or read the transcript.  Her insight and findings about "learning and multitasking, stress and memory, sleep, addiction, and decision-making" (quote source) are important to understand.

Dr. Jensen explains how the prefrontal cortex of a teens' brain is one of the last areas to develop and become fully connected (myelinated).  This is the area of your brain where decisions are made, where we have our impulse control, and where adults are able to use self control and think twice about risky behavior.  It's no wonder that teens make decisions that can seem senseless to adults. 

She also explains how teens can learn very quickly as connections are being made. This has benefits in education of course, but can also be problematic, especially when drugs or alcohol are involved.  These substances can be especially addictive in teens during the important formative time in their development.  Stress can also be problematic to a teen's brain development, altering how connections are made.  This can lead to increased issues with depression in adulthood.

Dementia of the Preoccupied

Toward the end of the interview, no longer talking about the teenage brain, the host asks Dr. Jensen about her own brain.  Specifically, what she has noticed happening lately, and I was especially intrigued by a term she coined, "Dementia of the Preoccupied."  

"But in a way to explain my own shortcomings in my life with so many things coming at me in one direction - having to switch modes from clinical to basic research to patients to administration, like, you know, on an hourly basis, just so much is coming at me. And you do - things fall through the cracks... So I just have now decided to call it the dementia of the preoccupied because I refuse to think that I'm actually becoming demented - that I just know it's all environmental... I think we're not dwelling on tasks long enough to consolidate our memories, frankly."

She goes on to explain that research is being done to find the "optimal age for this sort of distracted learning" and it is your mid-to-late-30s. After that it plateaus.  I know I was going somewhere with this, but I'm 42 and can't recall what exactly it was...

She ends the interview mentioning that today's medical students can't possibly memorize everything, and so medical schools are beginning to teach their students "how to access information" and the skills of "scanning" and "validating information sources and knowing where to go when." Fortunately these skills are the some of the same ones we are talking about in education: information and media literacy.  Again, I'm sure there was more I meant to write but, well, you know...