Quick, Easy and Educational Ways to Visit Websites with Students

You've found the perfect website to (explain mitosis / learn about adobe's amazing thermal properties / etc.). Unfortunately, when the students file into the computer lab or pick up their iPads they can't get the web address right. Here are some strategies and tools for eliminating this problem:

1) QR Codes: It seems like every blog post includes some reference to QR codes. They're fantastic and if you don't know how to use them, you can learn all about them here (#1 explains how to use them for accessing websites efficiently). Take note: you need a tablet, phone or some other device with a camera and the right software. Desktops, laptops, ultrabooks and other computers don't usually have the ability to scan a QR code. That brings us to...

2) URL Shorteners: If you've ever used Twitter to follow Naomi Harm or Edutopia, you've probably noticed that the links are really short and kind of unusual. They usually end in things like ".ly" instead of ".com." That's because Tweeters use a URL shortener to economize their 140 characters. The value of a URL shortener is that it turns www.website123.com/index/subindex/documents/doc19/ref=7%8# into a far more manageable goo.gl/ABC123. There are many different URL shorteners, but I prefer goo.gl, since I use GMail, Google Drive and many other parts of the Google suite. Simply copy the URL of whatever website you want your students to visit, paste it on the goo.gl page, hit "shorten url" and write it on the whiteboard for your students to copy. This is the perfect solution for when you visit the computer lab.

3) Learn to use a Search Engine: It's really important for students (and everybody) to learn how to use a search engine effectively. One of my favorite ways to reinforce the skill is to find a webpage that I want them to visit, put it up on the digital projector and have them use their own search engine skills to find it. You can adjust this activity to suit your students abilities. If they're advanced search engine users they already know to type in the title of the page, a line of text in quotation marks, or the publishing date. For novice students who need more support you can write "Site: USA TODAY"; "Article Title: Stocks Soar..."; "Date Published" and other useful information onto the board. Maybe your students are somewhere between advanced and novice. In that case, close read the webpage as a group and ask them to point out useful traits and information.

4) HTML to PDF Conversion: Sometimes you want students to access a fantastic (but online) chart, article or picture during a field trip or a nature walk, but there's no internet. Maybe you found a great webpage, but there are a million distracting ads. Perhaps you've found the perfect article for a professional development seminar, but don't want to make lots of paper copies. If any of those situations are familiar to you, then the HTML to PDF converter will be very helpful. These converters can be found with a simple internet search and they allow you to enter the web address of a site, hit convert, download as a PDF and share with students and colleagues. My favorite is http://pdfmyurl.com/ because it loads quickly and has a clean user interface. It takes less than a minute to complete this process and when you're finished students can mark up their documents anywhere using Notability.

Complex Texts and Technology

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and 1-to1 initiatives are, in my opinion, positive changes. However, it's sometimes difficult to know which way is up with these two major changes taking place concurrently.

One of the major changes of the CCSS is the move towards complex texts and literacy skills. Instead of having students read one leveled text after another, the students will read more difficult, high-quality texts. While this change receives the most attention from administrators and Language Arts teachers it is important to remember that reading and writing skills should be developed in all content areas.

When it comes to reading complex texts, technology can be a great ally to teachers and students. Today's post focuses on some free technologies that can be used to make reading fun (and assessment easy).

Notability: If you don't have this app, go and buy it. It is hands-down the best deal in educational apps. It's the Cadillac of note taking apps and it works seamlessly with Google Drive, Dropbox, PDFs and many other formats (regrettably, not Kindle). Anyways, it's awesome for close reading a text (there are tons of good PDFs out there and you can always make your own) and annotating because it allows students to do everything they would with paper. They can underline, highlight, add sticky notes, draw charts, and add pictures. Let's put those features into context.

This quarter we are reading Crispin: Cross of Lead and it's the story of a recently orphaned peasant in medieval England. It's a fantastic piece of historical fiction and explores the complicated (and completely unfair) social and political structure. One of the book's minor's characters, John Ball, was a real person and was executed for his role in the 1381 Peasants' Revolt. To help students understand the connection between Crispin and the Peasant's Revolt, we read this PDF about the revolt. So, what did we do with these two texts and Notability?

• Text-to-text connections:  There were lots of connections to be made between Crispin  and the PDF. Students could photograph sections from the book that were connected and place those photographs right into the PDF. Sometimes there wasn't a single passage that connected to the PDF, and then they could add sticky notes and text boxes to explain the connections. 
• Shared our Ideas: Because Notability is such a well-connected app, students could share their annotations with me and with their classmates at a central location. In this case, it was a communal Google Drive folder.

What else could we do?

• Text-to-world connections: We've talked about the social, economic and political structure of Medieval England as it relates to Crispin. Students used information from the text to determine where various characters would fall on a a social pyramid. The PDF references many different people and groups and these too could be placed on a social hierarchy. These in turn could be compared to other social, political, and economic structures.
• Cause and Effect: There were several causes of the Peasants' Revolt, first and foremost was the mistreatment and oppression of peasants by the upper classes and nobility. The iniquity is central to Crispin's plot and the book is set four years before the revolt, so students could easily make cause-and-effect connections using the PDF to study effects and Crispin and the PDF to study causes.

Grid Lens: Grid Lens is an app that allows the user to construct a photo collage by adding photographs to various frames. This app can be used in a variety of ways. For example, graphing out the beginning, middle and end of a story. Photographing important text features, like thesis statements, titles, sub-headings, graphs, maps and pictures. It can also be used by students to highlight what they believe are the most important parts of a text. By using the zoom and screenshot or camera features, students can select the three, four, five, etc. most important paragraphs or sentences from a text. Then they can use Grid Shot to easily put the images together and share it with the teacher. Summarizing is an important skill, and being able to point out the most important parts of a text can be tedious, dull work. However, we all know that good readers look back on a text and ask, "what do I need to take away from this article." With Grid Shot they can put this all together and then email it to their teachers. It isn't glamorous, but it's an easy way for students to say, "this is what stood out to me."

Using Google Presentations as a Textbook

The most valuable aspect of a 1:1 program is the technologies ability to assist with differentiation. iPads and Chromebooks allow for a dynamic learning experience that can change and react to the student's needs. As time goes by this capability is going to become more sophisticated, but that's a topic for another time.

One of my favorite ways to customize the learning to student's various needs is to use Google Presentation (it's like Powerpoint) to create an interactive textbook. The interactivity isn't fancy; there aren't any ancient Roman artifacts  that can be manipulated in three-dimensions. What it does do is allow students to work at their own speed and, in most cases, learn in a variety of ways (read it, hear it, watch it, share it, etc.). Using Google Presentation means that students can access this material from any web-connected device and I can make changes to it depending on student needs. If students don't understand the difference between a subject and object it is very easy to add another page of examples, link to another website, embed a video, or post on a classroom discussion board.most importantly, it answers the easy questions (what's an adjective, etc.) and frees me up to work 1-on-1 and in small groups to improve the difficult things (voice, word choice, etc.).

Here are some examples. As you look through them you will notice there are some websites I link frequently. For instance, TodaysMeet.com gets used almost every week as a formative learning assessment. There are often links to Purdue's Online Writing Lab or other websites that might help reinforce a concept.

Unit 1: Science Fiction
Week 1 and 2: Complete Sentences
https://docs.google.com/a/spooner.k12.wi.us/presentation/d/1pD69ymQI_1ZkY2MIhJqPjF_MR6JuGGNmw-eSkDBMoK4/edit#slide=id.g10483fe87_0135
Week 3 and 4: Building Science Fiction
https://docs.google.com/a/spooner.k12.wi.us/presentation/d/1fYqDtkYk4RStqhLwoc4cd3Ftj6vzmpHFPTM91lCfCNE/edit#slide=id.g106c04f09_053

Week 5 & 6: We reviewed some concepts from 1-4, took a field trip on Friday, and got caught up on missing work. Look for Week 7 & 8 soon!

Week 7 & 8: Creating Your Science Fiction Story: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1eUo7iEV4GOUPALrqN7dkFcwRKAwlV3_HogvaPbqUtl8/edit?usp=sharing

Unit 2: Business World
Slideshow 1: https://docs.google.com/a/spooner.k12.wi.us/presentation/d/1LZ-98WOJ-hvJ_TBp--7A6mF0zi-S8NrCIlv9eMLV3ec/edit?pli=1#slide=id.p

Unit 3: Medieval Europe
Etymology Project: https://docs.google.com/a/spooner.k12.wi.us/presentation/d/1NJGMrwT_H37qh8HwK4HVi_fVY4h9CxtPgxFAe13SQEY/edit#slide=id.g2b5f71dbf_111  

Similes and Metaphors: https://docs.google.com/a/spooner.k12.wi.us/presentation/d/1XSWLs89VyP49UFzrJhzyBF6RxZHl_FX_wo-zC9gnny4/edit#slide=id.g1c7b6216c_015 

Imagery: https://docs.google.com/a/spooner.k12.wi.us/presentation/d/11W1l-j9s6AW4WlFPFBQdQNojuKC0j1ljO4MYI-ItlOc/edit#slide=id.g2c2e2072e_011

GapMinder and Interdisciplinary Learning: Language Arts, Social Studies, Science and Math

I teach Language Arts, but Social Studies is my favorite subject to teach. However, if I "ran the zoo" there would be no subjects, because in life we're always using skills from one subject in tandem with skills from another. For this reason, I am always looking for ways to bring other subjects into Language Arts.

Gapminder: Gapminder is an extremely user-friendly data visualization program. It gives the user world-wide data sets on everything from nuclear energy to life expectancy, and a very easy-to-use interface for representing and even animating the data. Want to see how population and carbon emissions have changed over time? Select those data sets from the drop down menu and press play. How you use it depends on what you're teaching and your students capabilities.

• Can You Explain That? Have students put one data set on the X-axis and another on the Y-axis. You could assign them a data set or let them choose their own. In either case, challenge them to provide an explanation for what they see. This could prompt a discussion about causality and correlation. Is there a relationship between the number of cars and the number of traffic fatalities? Why is it so high in some countries? Math, reasoning, writing and research skills are all marshaled with this activity.
• Where's the Data? In some cases, there's no data from a country. Why don't we know the average income of a North Korean?

Behavior Data and Google Forms

Data is an essential part of teaching, and we all have a grade book for keeping track of who is passing and failing. Many of us also collect data on behavior.  Paperwork and carbon-copy forms are the weak link in my behavioral management and behavior grades. That's why I use Google Forms! A Google form allows for faster, more accurate records and better access.

On a computer, using Google Drive, you can build a survey with questions that pertain to the behavior. That's a screen shot of mine. In my class students are given a green card for good behavior and a red card for bad behavior. They put what they think they were doing wrong on the card and then put it on a large graph with an "X" axis for Respect and a "Y" axis for Responsibility. Their name does not go on the card, but it does go into this Google Survey, along with their hour number.

This behavioral data can be accessed from anywhere. An IEP meeting, team meeting, parent/teacher conference, and at home. If your entire grade-level or school has a discipline system it could be shared across an entire school, with every teacher contributing and accessing data at a central location. The data can be used to determine when students are most likely to act up. Are they misbehaving because it's at the end of the day? Or are they misbehaving only in male teachers' classes? Why is this student so well behaved in Mr. J's class? Maybe Mr. J has figured out how to reach this student. There's a new kid coming to our school, who has an excellent behavior record and could be trusted to show this student around? These kinds of insights are invaluable.

This page has been added to the home screen of my iPad and bookmarked on my computer. It can be accessed and completed in about 15 seconds. When it comes time to do behavior grades, the spread sheet is opened up, ordered by Period Number and grades are handed out based on the data. If a parent calls to ask about their child's behavior grade I can tell them specifically what they did to earn the grade.

One note of caution: Google has very good security and with a good password your data should be safe, but there's no guarantee. If possible try to limit the personally identifiable information in your forms to avoid running afoul of  FERPA.

If you have any questions on exactly how to construct a Google Form or suggestions on what to do, please share them below as a "Comment."

Dragon Dictation in Language Arts

Dragon Dictation is a free app that turns speech into type. So instead of typing you can talk to the iPad and it will type the whole thing up to the best of its abilities, and it is fairly capable. In the classroom, this can be an invaluable app for students who have trouble writing as fast as they think, or for students who don't have the faintest idea how to spell a word. It's hard to use a dictionary if you're unaware of the silent "p" in "pterodactyl" or the "f" sound created by a "ph."

Teaching with Memes

That's a Meme! You've probably seen them before, but you may not have considered their potential for teaching. Students love memes; they're a quick, trendy form of expression,  and easy to make. You can use a website like Meme Generator or an app like Memematic, but be warned that schools often block meme websites, and with good reason. Some memes have adult language, and that's why I strongly recommend Memematic. It has the popular backgrounds, but none of them are captioned.

While most meme websites allow you to create your own backgrounds, some of the existing memes are the best. You may not realize it, but most popular memes have rules. For example, a proper Yoda meme places the subject and verb at the end of the sentence. The Ducreux meme replaces rap lyrics with grandiose vocabulary. Advice Mallard provides useful advice and Philosoraptor asks deep questions.

Yoda and Ducreux are the two memes I've used the most.

My first unit in Language Arts is a science-fiction one, but at the start of the year it's important to do some review and get an idea of where students are and what they remember. We start with complete sentences; structure; and subject, object and verb. Then, the students read this great article by Grammar Girl and learn about how subject, verb and object are used by us and Yoda. Then, they hop on Memematic and construct a Yoda meme. The meme must go object, subject, verb and end with a period. This assesses their ability to acquire knowledge from text and to use subject, object and verb to construct a complete sentence.

The week after Yoda, students reviewed parts of speech and one of the less well-known parts of speech is the interjection. An interjection is a statement that lacks grammar and is added purely to convey emotion. There's a popular Star Trek meme in which Captain Picard is celebrating an epic win. I posted the picture on my Edmodo page and we held a photo captioning contest. To qualify your submission had to have an interjection. "Yes! They just gave me forty hours on the holodeck," was the winning entry, followed closely by, "Hallelujah, my warp rash cleared up."

Ducreux is usually used with rap songs, but many times (my class included) it is used on any song. Students use a thesaurus to change their favorite lyrics into something way more complicated. In the process they're exposed to the practically infinite supply of synonyms and the concept of forgotten, archaic words.

Another popular meme that we've probably all seen is the "What society thinks I do...What I really do," and it's a collection of 2-6 pictures showing the different ways people look at the same subject. Reading a piece of fiction where different characters are seeing things in very different ways? Make a meme for it! Examining the the Founding Father's different views on Federalism? Make a meme for it!

Lastly, you can make your own memes! Find a picture of George Washington or King George and try to think of rules for what they would say. Choose an element from the periodic table. The only limit is your imagination! The fact that it is a meme will really bring up student enthusiasm and it takes only minutes to create a meme. It's a very quick form of assessment.