Google Apps for Education Day 2

Day two started off with Richard DeVaul, who works with Google's Project X (their secret projects)! He gave us some insight into the idea of Moonshot - making the impossible, possible. The idea in education right now is to try and fix things, make it better, but DeVaul's idea is to tear it down and start over. Our system is not working and "fixing" it isn't going to work because we are on the wrong track. We look at the world as having problems that are too big to fix, but that is because we are looking at it all wrong. We need to look at everything as having a solution, even if it seems impossible. In school it is bad if a student fails at something, but that is the wrong attitude. Failure is a learning process, you get data from it. As long as you fail quickly, repeatedly, and efficiently, you are doing trial and error. You are learning what doesn't work. It reminded me of Thomas Edison finding so many ways to not to build a light bulb. Each time he learned something new about what doesn't work, so you can come up with another way that might work. If you fail the right way, you generate new results and support learning. The most important thing about failure though, is that you keep trying. By continuing to try after failing you are learning the most important lesson - persistence. As a system, we have taught students the opposite of this, so we need to model this. We need to model failure! I think I do this well, especially since I've gotten the Chromebooks. When a lesson goes south I apologize to the students and we make adjustments and try again. I tell the students I make mistakes and it's not bad if we learn from them. An entire classroom full of Moonshot Thinkers may not be possible right now, but he challenged us to try to create 10 per year. I think that is a possible goal.

Since I have the Chromebooks now I want to go paperless next year, or as close to it as I can get. The main idea with this is to stay organized, figure out a system of folders through Drive. You can have students peer review through comments on Docs and there is even a way for teachers to add voice comments. When something is finish if you "publish" it it takes out all the comments and makes it look pretty. The idea was shared that if a student did not get an A, they were required to fix it and then their score was averaged. In Drive some nice features are that you can see when a student was working on the paper (did they wait til the night before to start?) and you can use some scripts like Doctopus to "embargo" or take rights away when assignments are due so they can't work on it anymore.

I made a Google Voice number! I am excited to be more available to parents and students in their level, being able to text when necessary and at times more convenient for them, even if I'm not in my classroom. A bonus is that everything is logged into the account online so you can go back into it and review conversations if necessary. I can imagine this being a way of showing evidence of parent contact as well. With this number you can call, text, and email to and/or from the number.

The presentation on 20% time turned into a mix of that and student blogging. The 20% time was pretty basic of what it is, but I was thinking of the idea of an "I wonder" project where at the beginning of a unit students come up with a question about the unit based on the introduction activity. They can use Preferred Activity Time and outside time to find the answer if needed. Students will need to make a presentation explaining their question, the answer, and how they got to that answer. This is still an idea in the works, but it is something.

With the blogging there was some discussion over open blogging and kidblogger to make it closed from the public. The key to it is when you start you start small. In 5 minutes, they should have 3 sentences, then up to a paragraph and so on. I can see this being a way for student to reflect on their work, talk from the perspective of someone from the time period we are currently discussing.

Google Apps For Education Summit Day 1

I was lucky enough to got the the Google Apps for Education Summit a couple weeks ago and it was exactly what I needed to revamp and amp up for this coming year! Dan Russell was the keynote day one and he was mind blowing by discussing the idea of literacy and how it is not just knowing how "to read and write" because there are so many other kinds of literacy and depending on how fast you write (or type) will change the speed at which you can think, which accelerates the chances of you getting an answer right or wrong. There are so many types of literacy because there are so many types of language, including math and HTML. He went as far as to say you have to be "literate about being literate," which was so insightful to me because a lot of times students are just going through the motions and sure, they are literate, but do they understand they are literate and what that means as a whole? With Common Core coming, I think this will become more obvious, but you need to have a skill set and know when to use the right one to read, write, answer questions, and do functions within a specific domain where that skill set is the one required. Processing through all the ones you have and being aware of which one to use is a whole other type of literacy. This was an amazing way to start the conference as it already had me on my toes.

Next a little intro to edmodo and how well it works with Google Drive... I will be trying this out in the coming year, so look out for posts related to that later.

Through my IEASC program I've been learning more and more about student ePortfolios and I love the idea. I think I will have students create a Google Site and use that for their showing off their Performance Tasks and blogs throughout the year. The main idea here was to have the students take it as their own. If you are too strict with guidelines and don't let them personalize it there is no buy in, but you need buy in for them to be effective. When I did the travel commercials last year a lot of students wanted their videos showcased because they were so proud of them. That is what you want from students. The school this presenter was from actually buys a domain with the student's name as a senior gift to them so they can take their portfolio with them. They start it in elementary school, so it really is an all around portfolio that represents them. I think this is amazing. Some examples he shared with us:
www.kristopherredman.com - Junior in High School, presenting since early high school, already offered a job with TechSmith
www.kazmediaservices.com he wants to show media because that is what he wants to do as a career. He had a difficult name, so he asked for a special circumstance domain name.

I learned about Flubaroo at a recent conference, but this presentation discussed Doctopus. Both of these are scripts you can use with Google Drive. The main discussion was making things easier with Form, Sites, and Scripts. This is something that if they work in harmony, will make a teachers life much more easy because it is more organized automatically, less hand grading, and communication is clear between you, students, and parents. One of my goals this year is to keep up better on my Google Site, which will be a necessity since my students will get their assignments from it. Last year I was emailing out all the assignments, which was very tedious and time consuming. I think this will work better.

As my last session of the day I got to talk Chromebooks with someone that has been implementing them for over a year and working out a lot of the problems I faced in the month I had them last year. Don't get me wrong, I love the Chromebooks, but we had wireless issues, Java issues, app issues, and then there is the classroom management piece that goes along with it all. One of the big issues that I am worried about is the idea of building class culture. I think one of the things I do well is to build connections with students, but in front of computers they feel more individual, less connected to the class. This was the cubical feeling I got from the students last year. I think this is where I need to use some of the techniques from the blended and online course I'm taking in the IEASC program.

This was a filled day of learning, but also questions. That is the hard part. You have to take everything away and say how am I going to use this. I am still working on that part, but the school year is approaching, so it is time to get started!

WeVideo MIddle East Travel Commercial

I have forever meant to write this blog post to share my experiences with WeVideo, but the school year ended and I floated away from everything. So overall the students were in groups and given a Middle Eastern country. They were given eight demographics and told to collect information on all countries. In the past students would make a travel brochure on a country, but this year they made a commercial about their county. They used WeVideo collaboratively, which worked out great for some groups, but others had a lot of issues with the videos not syncing. I think the site still has some work to do as it is still a new project Google is working on, but it is the only real internet based movie maker, so it worked. I gave the students a rubric to work with, which I thought was simple to follow. Here is a link to the Rubric. When students turned in their video they also had to reflect on their own work and grade themselves and their group and give reasons for the group. I always find that students are very hard on themselves. I give an optional comment box at the end where a lot of students said they worked hard and hoped I liked the video, that the assignment was hard, but they liked it, some told me that they really disliked the project because they are bad with computers, and so on.

Even if students dislike a project, I like that they are honest enough with me to say it. They know I will not take it personally and it will not effect their grade positively or negatively. I work hard to build that relationship with my students because I think it is important. One student's comment really hit me hard though,"There is no way anyone could legitimately get an A on this commercial, give the rubric, the time limit, and amount of knowledge on the computer. Terrible activity when not given enough time." I was shocked when I read this because 1. I had no idea the student felt this way 2. I completely disagreed with the student. I struggled with how to respond, but I knew I needed to. I wrote a long email that turned into me defending my decisions and thought that was not the best choice and maybe he was not the only one to feel this way, so the next class period I asked students if they were confused or scared by the rubric. It was a resounding yes! I realized that what I meant by he rubric was not being understood. I pulled up the rubric and we discussed section by section the meaning of everything. After that they told me they felt relieved. I went through this process with every class, including the one the student that brought this to my attention was in. He did not say anything to me or ask any questions, but I did not want to call him out, so at that point I let it go. I apologized to all the classes for any misunderstanding or undue stress that the rubric had caused. Now that they understood the grading better, they were excited to see their scores, and other students' videos!

I made a spreadsheet of all the videos, which can be found here. I made them into QR Codes and put them around campus like a scavenger hunt and the plan was to have students review each others' commercials, but there was so much traffic to them that the district cut access thinking that there was something inappropriate in the site. This was unfortunate, but students used their personal data plans to view commercials and got a buzz going on around campus about them, which was very exciting for me.

Sorry about the length of this post, but a lot happened in the two weeks we spent on this assignment that I thought needed to be shared. I will definitely do this activity again, but with all rubrics I will explain verbally what is meant and make sure everyone understands we are not shooting for TV ready the first time out of the gate.