Add some fun to regular storytelling and go digital, collaboratively. Start a new Google Slides project and insert the Digital Storytelling Guide photo on the first slide.
Go to the URL of your slides and go towards the end where it says edit followed by some more characters. Delete from the word edit till the end. Now copy the edited URL and send link to your students via email. This will force them to make copies so that your original Google Slides project won't be edited. Please see the two pictures below that illustrates these tips:
After doing all of the above, the students can start their collaborative Digital Storytelling activity by referring to the guide you pasted on the first slide. Have fun!
With the emerging need of using educational technology in classrooms today, we must to teach our students the importance of being a good and responsible digital citizen. Digital citizenship actually pertains to everyone who uses technology. It stresses the importance of using technology in an appropriate, ethical and responsible manner. There are so many great visuals out there to show the traits of a good digital citizen, I have several in my classroom, one set takes up an entire wall! I wanted something catchy and straight to the point. With students, we need to keep it simple and direct to the point with great visuals to catch their attention and make it stick. I found a great one that uses the acronym THINK. It's simple, not too wordy and uses a word all students know well. I recreated it, putting in my personal touches. Please feel free to use it in your classrooms if you find it useful.
I created this using Notepad+. It was inspired by a photo shared by my PLN on G+ about parts of a paragraph using a hamburger. I took it a step further and placed the parts of a paragraph on actual writing paper that students can relate to better. Added a visual as well where we normally ask students to draw the important scene of their writing piece. In teaching students, visuals are a great way to help them "picture" what you want them to do. Feel free to use it in teaching writing.
Shared this in other SM platforms and friends requested for personalization to suit their level of students more. The following 2 samples will be used by my friend, a MS English teacher in NYC. For friends and PLN, would gladly personalize it for you/your students, just contact me.
If you use a lot of tech to collaborate with your students, you probably share with them a lot of links. Nothing is more unsightly than a link that is 2 lines long and is composed of numbers, letters and characters that don't mean a thing. Here's an awesome site that lets you not only shorten your link but personalise as well to make links more relatable/relevant to your students. Let's get started...
Go to gg.gg and here's where your browser will take you to.
Paste the link you wish to shorten here and click on Customise Link.
Personalise the link, using a name your students will be able to identify quickly. If you share a lot of websites for research, you can name them site1, site2...or for shared docs, you can name them docplants, docanimals, docrainforest etc. Then click on Shorten URL.
Voila...here's your personalised link! Just click on Copy Shortened Link and you are ready to paste and share this with your students.
Teaching the curriculum is what they teach us in college. Getting those lessons across to our students in a meaningful way that will leave an impact is something we learn through experiences with our students...@DJCE57
Teaching the different communities to my 3rd grade students...I get all eyes on me for the first five minutes, then one starts to stare into space, the other starts to doodle, another fidgets with something on his desk...we have all been in this scene at least once in our teaching life. To get their attention back, fast, I told them a personal story regarding my experience in a suburban community, a funny one. There you go...I got all eyes back on me, I got their undivided attention.
I just opened up a little about myself and that meant a lot to my students. They laughed when they realised, 'hey, my teacher is human too' or 'my teacher is like me'. I was no longer the teacher who lived at school => "I saw you at the mall yesterday, what were your doing there? Wow! I thought you just stayed in school" (with eyes beaming, smiling from ear to ear). When you become relatable to students, when they see you in a different light, they start to put their walls down and become more comfortable with you. 'The Teacher' is no longer from an arms length, you have let them in on your personal life, they, in turn, will let you in on their world.
I can remember year after year, when I get each new batch of 3rd graders that I had to learn the latest in toys, games, movies, etc. Yup, I researched and learned about them all -
Pokemon, Digimon, Ben 10, crystal bubbles that will grow over time in water, Chinese garter, jackstones, pick up sticks... I can go on and on...these things didn't matter to me but they meant the world to my students and that's what counts. The second I suggest adding Pokemon in their journal drawing section, eyes lit up. The time I shared my own cup of crystal bubbles, the excited chatter spread across the room. The moment I showed them a trick or two in playing Chinese jackstones, awe and admiration was evident on their faces. I connected with each and every one of my students, in their language, and that, made a world of a difference in our classroom learning environment. Because I took the time out to get to know each one of them, they took their time out to listen to me, I earned their respect. They wanted me to teach them....and I did.
All these amazing experiences with my students have taught me life lessons that they never teach us in college. They made my teaching experience richer, more meaningful and most memorable. I have a book full of these memories in my memory bank, intact with details as if they happened just yesterday. Why have these teachable moments remained with me after all these years? Why can I remember student names and a story or two about them? How can I possibly remember each teaching modification I made for each of my students? It's because I taught each and every one of them in the way they needed to learn and I did so with my heart. I didn't keep them in learning boxes, I gave each of my students a voice, after all, it's their learning. I may have the most expensive textbooks, the coolest & latest gadgets, or the most fun filled activities...but its those lessons I taught with the heart that made a difference and impact in my students' learning.
As I have mentioned in previous "take aways", Google Docs, Slides, Drawings and Sheets now lets you search and insert an image straight from the app. This feature works best for students as the images they select have already been preselected and approved by sources like Creative Commons, Wikipedia, etc. Once you have selected an image you wish to insert, the link of its source is visible at the left hand corner and if you right click on it, you may copy and paste on the image to link its' source. I learned all these cool tricks from the workshop given by +Sean Thompson. Let's get started.
Go to Insert and click on Image.
Search for an image and make your selection. Note the link to source of image comes out on the left bottom corner.
Right click on your mouse and copy link address, the source of image. Click on the blue button, to Select and insert image to your slide.
After inserting image, go to Insert and click on Link.
Paste link here and click on the blue button, Apply.
Here's the cited source of your image. When clicked, it will take you to the website where the image was taken from.
Do you create documents, posters, collages etc.? Then it's probably a good idea to put your mark/stamp on it. If you have your own logo, you can further personalise it by adding your signature/initials on it. Furthermore, this tip n' trick will surely help in checking those digital documents submitted by your students, put your personalised watermark in to save time in noting the assignments you have checked. I have previously created my own watermark/personalised logo and here's a how-to insert your signature. First up, write your signature/initial on a blank sheet of paper and lets get started...
Open the your logo (usually a jpeg or png) format. Preview will open this on your Mac and it will look like this.
Click on the Toolbox icon and click on Create Signature.
Click on Camera and get your paper ready where you wrote your signature/initial. Put your initialed paper in front of the camera and Click Here to Begin.
Once camera is on, hold your initialed paper still till it captures your signature.
Your captured signature will appear on the screen. Click on Done if you are happy with what the camera has captured.
You may now drag the signature onto your logo. As you can see on the logo, I have previously placed my initial on it. You may resize and change the color as well by clicking on the black square.
Below are some more samples I created to give you ideas on signature/initials placement.
Have you ever shared really long documents with your students or colleagues and struggle scrolling back to the top? Even better, after students or colleagues read your really long document you may want them to: go back to a particular section of your document so you can further emphasise the key message of your doc or have your students or colleagues go "Back to Top" so that they may refer back to sections of your document to help them with the next activity. This 'take away #5' was part of +Davis Apas' talk on "Google Docs in It's New Skin".
Place your cursor on the title/heading of the paragraph you want them to refer back to. Click on Bookmark under insert.
Click on Link.
Go to the portion where you want students to go 'Back to Top' or to a particular paragraph. Type 'Back to Top' or 'Back to Paragraph 1' or 'Back to (name of paragraph/section)'. Then click on Link under Insert.
This will pop up, now click on Bookmarks.
Click on the link you bookmarked at the beginning.
Finally, click on Apply.
You will now see the once black and still font in blue, underlined and once you hover over it, you will be shown the link to click that will take you back to your bookmarked section.
As a child, I was thrilled each time my mom told me I can go visit her school and classroom. I would excitedly pretend to have students while writing on the board or get tickled putting checkmarks on my moms' students' math drills. I was destined to teach...
Twenty one years ago, just like any new teacher then, I firmly grasped textbooks in my hands. They were my bible. I stuck to the curriculum to the tee, giving math drills with a hundred items for 5 minutes and lessening the time each day. I was ecstatic when my best student scored a perfect hundred in 50 seconds, no one has ever beat her record! Teaching spelling routinely - pretest, definitions, post test was another traditional activity I did weekly. Were these traditional methods effective then? Most definitely, 20 some years ago...
About 10 years into teaching 3rd grade Homeroom, I started noticing changes. Instead of having that usual 1 child that stood out in class as he needed more of my attention, I started having 2, 3, 4... Moreover, it was not merely my extra attention they needed as well, they needed me to modify my lessons, they needed me to find different ways to explain the lessons to them. I would join in on the complaints in the teachers lounge about how so much more 'difficult' students are these days. "I was able to do spelling sentences and definitions for 20-25 words before...now I can only do 15-20"; "I used to be able to get my students to write 6-8 sentence paragraphs and write 4-6 paragraphs per book report...now I'm lucky if I can get them to write 3-4 sentences, complete ones at that!"; and "we used to be able to do math drills with 100 items, now we do 5-10 at a time" are just some of the common comments I was hearing more frequently at the teachers' lounge.
This made me reflect upon my teaching. What's going on with these students? Something is missing here...is it them or is it me? This got me started on tweaking the lessons here and there. Putting in more game based activities, interactive lessons, and more hands on learning experiences. For students with more specific needs: I let Student A type up his stories because he would clam up otherwise or give me the usual "nothing" after being asked what he did on his 3 week Christmas vacation; I quiz Student B orally, otherwise she would sit on the floor for 2 hours to get through a 15 minute test (with additional prodding and calling out her name 10 times); for Student C, I let him draw his scene first for his story, and let him choose his own topic, due to his excitement about the extremely detailed scene he just drew, he is just overflowing with ideas to write his story. I can go on and on with the little tweaks I did here and there over the years. Was it more work? YES. Did it frustrate me in having to do 20 mini lessons instead of just doing one? YES. Did it leave me exhausted at the end of the day? YES. But most importantly, was I now teaching these students more effectively that they no longer stood out as the "usual 3-5 difficult students"? The answer is a resounding YES...and that's all that matters in the end.
We now live in a world where a 'one size fits all' no longer works. Future jobs that await the next generation require more creativity, thinking outside the box, driven young boys and girls who want to make a difference and stand out in the crowd. So why do we keep on forcing them inside the box that no longer serves their growing needs? Why do we continue to make 20 copies of the same worksheet? Instead, let's try to see the best in each and everyone of our students. Let's believe that someday, each and every one of them will make it in the real world, each in his own time. Every one of my former Grade 3 students have made it in this big, harsh world. Each and everyone of them make me so proud, and yes, even those "difficult' students made it as editors (trust me, way back in 3rd grade, some of their writing made me cry, it was like pulling teeth, a very painful activity some 10-15 years ago) for famous fashion magazines, teachers in Ivy League schools, doctors, entrepreneurs... Twenty, fifteen or ten years ago, I may not have believed in those "difficult students", I may have wondered how will they ever make it through school, but each and every one of them have proven me wrong...it's a good thing I didn't give up on them...it's a good thing I believed in them. Each one is unique. Each and everyone of them has a voice that just wants to be heard saying, "let me be ME".
Below are some great tools to further enhance your Flipped Classroom that +Lee Webster presented on at the summit. Just click on the titles of each tool, it's the link to take you directly to the site or Chrome Web Store extension.
Turn your chosen video into a truly interactive lesson with this tool. Edpuzzle lets you crop videos, add your own voice to sections of the videos you want to highlight to students and embed quizzes at anytime.
Movenote is another Chrome Web Store extension that lets you take any content from a source of your choice and video record alongside that content to further illustrate the points you want to share with your students. Check out what Movenote is all about...
Feature of Movenote
And if you think what has been shared above isn't enough...the last picture illustrates what Movenote can also help you do in your flipped classrooms...
Snagit by TechSmith is a great Chrome Web Store extension that lets you take screenshots or screen recordings of anything on your screen. Best part is they may be easily shared with your students.
