Students as Class Bloggers

Last school year, I finally dipped my toes in with students blogging about class activities. It was a tiny step, only a few student posts, but enough to reveal the benefits of this practice. As a middle school math teacher, I look for ways to balance hands-on experiences with collaboration and meaningful technology integration. Inviting students to blog about classroom activities did all of this and more. I believe student blogging also gave students a sense of ownership in the classroom, with my website, and it provided an opportunity for students to write for an authentic audience. It's a practice I plan to continue to develop in the upcoming school year.

What I Did Last Year
My first venture into students as class bloggers was in asking students to write about our class experiences participating in the Hour of Code. In this particular case, I asked for a volunteer, she wrote a wonderful piece, and I posted it on our class website home page. It was an exercise in student choice for her and challenged her to capture the event in writing to share with others. Small steps.

More effectively, I combined student blogging with a hands-on activity exploring volume. I am always snapping pictures of what we are doing in class. Less often, I post the pictures. Another goal for this year - post more images of the process of learning. With the images from our hands-on volume activity, I created a short post on my website, simply asking, "What's going on here?" I then invited all students to write a blog post describing what students were doing in the images and connecting it to our learning about volume. This was optional for students, but quite a few participated. I included a link to a Google Form in my post so that students could easily submit their writing. In this instance, I was the one who selected which posts I would then include on the website to accompany the images. I looked for posts that accurately described the activity, connected it with content vocabulary and demonstrated understanding of the concepts being explored in the activity. As I read through the posts, it was clear that writing the posts was an excellent way for students to further solidify their understanding AND for me to assess their understanding of the concepts.

What I Will Do Differently This Year
I think posting images of learning in progress was a great way to engage students and to give them a starting point for their writing. This year, I will ask ALL students to write about the learning activities rather than making it optional. Why waste an opportunity to write about math? Secondly, I will provide a simple rubric for the blog posts so that all students understand what they are being asked to do. Third, instead of me choosing the post that best describes the learning, I want to involve students in the process of assessing the submitted posts and selecting which ones will be posted to our class website. When I think of the layers and levels of learning in this process I wonder why I have not been doing this already!

• Students are learning in the hands-on experiences
• Students are working with a partner and talking about content
• Students recall their learning when viewing images and being challenged to describe in the blog post
• Students, in assessing submitted posts, are then evaluating each post for accurate and effective descriptions of the learning concepts

While many elements of this process are straightforward, the biggest challenge that I foresee is developing procedures/logistics for students to analyze submitted posts. The first time we try this process, we will do whole class analysis of several mock posts to make sure that all are clear on the criteria for assessment. Possibly combining the students into groups, having each assess a certain number of posts and choose the one that best describes the activity and content. Lots of opportunities for collaboration, for justifying thinking and making arguments for why one piece is more successful than another.

This entire process increases ownership in learning, builds the classroom community and provides an authentic audience for student writing. Stay tuned for details on how this goes!

Button Navigation in the New Google Sites

The New Google Sites makes creating an alternate navigation scheme even easier than before. In just a few steps, you can transform the navigation on your site from top or side to one that operates totally on button navigation.

First things first.

• Use Google Drawings - an open canvas for creating graphics - to create your button images.
• Download each image as a png file.

Second.

• From your New Google Site, insert the png image and resize as needed.
• With the image selected, click on the hyperlink icon.
• All pages in your site will be listed.
• Choose which page you want this button to open.

Lastly.

From the Pages panel in Sites, use the More Options menu (3 dots) to hide the page from navigation.

Preview your site and click the button to open the page.

Interactive Drawings with Google Apps

The Google Drawings app does not get the attention it deserves! As far as Google Apps go, it has the most free form of any of them, allowing text, objects, images, graphics, hyperlinks, layering and more. By combining the flexible layout with hyperlinks, you can easily create interactive drawings. When shared as View Only, these can become powerful resources in the classroom.

• Teachers can create resources sets by embedding hyperlinks in graphic organizers or images. Link to other Google docs and other website.
• Students can create interactive drawings to showcase their own learning.
• Interactive drawings can provide alternate navigation schemes in Google Sites.

Squishy Solving

I don't know how this has happened but Squishy Circuits have just come into my awareness! What a great tool for exploring circuit building -- and so many ties to middle school math! Thanks AnnMarie Thomas and Squishy Circuits for laying out the math so clearly in your videos.

I'm excited to order a starter kit and start playing with possibilities for my 7th graders. Just in this quick video it's easy to see the direct connections between circuit building and

• solving equations
• direct proportion
• inverse proportion
• understanding decimals

Lots of opportunities for students to design, test, improve! It seems like this tool offers a low/variable entry point -- which looks great for me as a teacher getting started with making things in the classroom, and is good for students who may not see themselves as makers. Plenty of room to play and create with ample opportunity to grow in complexity as their understanding of circuits increases.

A Dependency on Being Taught

Another strong quote from Stager and Martinez, articulated so simply, and so true:

"We seek to liberate learners from their dependency on being taught."

So often teachers (and when I say teachers I include myself) feel frustrated by students' lack of initiative, their desire to be told exactly what to do, their need for each step to take. By middle school, students often have deeply ingrained habits that are byproducts of the educational system that we live in. Attempting to adopt a project-based learning approach can bring frustrations and challenges not only for teachers but for students as well. It is possible that throughout students' educational careers they may have had little opportunity to choose their own path, to explore a new topic or tool, to make choices. To make choices -- it sounds like such a small thing, but all too often school is about being told what to do and doing it. Not about making choices. When confronted with the opportunity to make choices about their own learning, students may feel lost and ill equipped to proceed.

What can we do as teachers to "liberate learners from their dependency on being taught"? In truth, we teachers often find ourselves in the same rut, wanting to know exactly what is expected. And I suppose that's human. Maybe asking repeatedly about details of what's expected is simply our way, and students' ways, of testing the waters. Of making sure that we are really free to choose.

Teachers know the goal -- we want students to be able to think for themselves, to develop a plan, not simply follow a plan. To identify what's important in writing an essay or blog post, in creating a website, in creating a video. Not simply to check items off on a rubric. So where do we begin?

How do we provide that freedom for student voice and choice while at the same time making sure students learn what they will be tested on at year end? What prior experiences will students have with voice and choice in their learning? Knowing that we "have standards to teach," how much do we plan for them versus letting them plan? How much voice and choice is "good" at the start of the year? Too much could be overwhelming to all involved, too little could have long lasting effects.

In some ways, math and English are very versatile. Math as a tool for understanding the world around us can be applied widely. Writing and communication skills can be applied to anything as well. Maybe the task of the teacher is not so much in selecting a topic for study, but in crafting the broader question that engages students in applying particular skills to better understand the topic and share their learning.

Importance of Community

It's in teaching teachers that I am reminded of the strength and value of building community within a group of learners. Attempting to design learning experiences without time for individuals to talk, to create, to share and to solve problems together results in less learning... not only that, it's just not fun. I am finally reading Invent to Learn by Gary Stager and Sylvia Martinez -- an excellent read by the way -- and a statement they made about affective skills resonated strongly with me:

"...affective skills should be byproducts of meaningful learning experiences."

It resonated strongly because so many times we incorporate ice breakers and team-building exercises that are separate from what we are learning in class. This reinforces a separation between "school" learning and social experiences. By designing learning experiences that include opportunities for students to work together, to take risks together and to problem solve together, we allow our students to share moments of curiosity, moments of vulnerability and moments of accomplishment. When these feelings and experiences are connected with the content, we are developing their self-efficacy, their ability to persevere, their willingness to take risks in service of learning and their ability to support each other in that learning.
Food for thought as I begin work in a new school with new students.

Day 3: Observation Area for Improvement

When someone comes to my room to observe, I want them to walk away knowing that my students were doing rigorous work, thinking deeply about material in such a way as to make it their own, and communicating ideas comfortably with their classmates. I am working this year to increase the frequency and depth of my student-centered activities -- trying to stay away from lecture/notes in exchange for exploration in small groups/partners and structured reflection/processing of these explorations.
As I write this, it occurs to me that an observer will really need to be up and moving around the room to appreciate a truly student-centered lesson. In addition to developing and implementing the exploration lesson, I will need to invite observers to move around the room and talk to students about their work. I have not typically done this. Usually I take the position that I should pretend that the observer is not there.
I have a lot of growing to do in this area. With certain topics in math it is certainly easier to give notes and work practice problems. I have always done student exploration lessons but they have been less frequent than the lectures. I would like to flip this -- to have exploration and student discussion be the norm and lectures/notes be rare. It takes a different kind of preparation, and a lot more anticipation of student response. Yet already, even in these barely three weeks of school, I can see that the exploratory work we are doing, the modeling, the partner work, is allowing me to move around the room even more, to offer more one-on-one help, and to develop a better understanding of where each of my students are. What I want to improve on is my ability to anticipate student road blocks or speed bumps in these types of lessons and to be more prepared at offering the different supports they may need to move through the exploration.
I think it will also be helpful to get students used to talking to others, from outside the classroom, about the work they are doing. I can provide opportunities for this by inviting various faculty/staff into my room to see what we are doing and asking them to walk around and ask questions. Providing additional structured opportunities for students to teach other students will be helpful for them as well. I love the idea that Alan November shared at ISTE about the math teacher (sorry I do not remember his name!) who has his students create instructional videos that are added to a digital/online library that is viewed by tens of thousands of people. This is definitely something that is in my plans for the year, especially once our chromebooks arrive!