Helpful Websites for Teachers

In the Podcast below, I list a few of my favorite websites that I use all the time as a teacher! Feel free to check them out, if you have any websites you enjoy using please list them in the comments below!

   
Record and upload audio >>

Teaching Young Readers to Navigate a Digital Story When Rules Keep Changing

Javorsky, K., & Trainin, G. (2014). Teaching Young Readers to Navigate a Digital Story When Rules Keep Changing. Reading Teacher, 67(8), 606-618. doi:10.1002/trtr.1259

This article provides great insights on the use of digital story applications with young readers versus traditional paper book stories. The authors of this article conducted a study of digital story apps and their differences as well as strategies to teach young readers on how to navigate these differences. The study findings suggests that young readers need to master book handling skills and the use of print features present in paper books first before mastering them in digital stories.

                The article suggests creating a classroom culture of openness to change. With technology ever changing in the world we live in, it is important to teach students to adapt and be willing to seek changes. Digital story applications vary in icons and narrative features. It’s important to provide a think-aloud and demonstrate to students how to navigate their way through digital stories prior to exposing them independently. It’s also important to teach young readers the importance of following along with narrative features, whether it is through highlighted text or a single word highlighted. Teaching students the basics of turning pages and interacting with text is also important.

                An important take-away I had from this article is to teach students the process of reading a digital story. There are many benefits to digital stories including providing students with opportunities to listen to stories independently and increase their vocabulary through highlighted audio text. The article highlights the importance of walking students through the process of opening the app, selecting the correct narrative icon, demonstrating tracking highlighted text, and turning pages. While reading this article, I thought of how to apply this to my teaching and I would project the digital story on the SmartBoard in my classroom so I could easily display the story and icons. I could then easily walk my students through a think-aloud on the process and showcase more than one kind of digital story. By doing this, my students will become more open to exploring and initiating icons across different digital story applications.

How to Create a Board on Pinterest

Interested in creating a Pinterest Board? Check out this Screencast on how to create a board and pin your 1st pin!

ClassDojo Goes Beyond Behavioral Rewards and into “Growth Mindset”

ClassDojo Goes Beyond Behavioral Rewards and into 'Growth Mindset'. (2016). Curriculum Review, 56(1), 5.

ClassDojo is a free communication app designed for in the classroom. It has been designed to help teachers manage classroom behaviors through fun monster characters. It also connects teachers, parents, and students who use it to share photos, videos, and messages through the school day. The makers of ClassDojo recently started offering short video lessons on “growth mindset” featuring the same monster cartoon characters.

 According to the article, “The growth mindset originated from Stanford University psychologist, Carol Dwek, who found that children are more likely to succeed if they believe that intelligence is developed through hard work and effort rather than something fixed at birth.” The ClassDojo Company worked directly with Dweck’s lab at Stanford to ensure that videos and lessons they offer are in line with “growth mindset” research. It’s also provided a link for the researchers directly into the classroom. The article also includes a testimony from a first grade teacher in Florida and the successes her classroom has had from viewing the growth mindset videos. She stated that, soon the children started following behaviors modeled by the characters. Her students would watch videos where the characters would work through problems such as trying and failing and it would show her students how to respond.

I currently use ClassDojo in an after school program, The Hub Project. All of the teachers in the after school program use ClassDojo to log attendance and as a behavior rewards program. ClassDojo has many wonderful resources that we use to connect to students and parents. Parents are given access codes at the beginning of the program and they can log in and see their child’s behavior during the Hub program. Parents can also directly message teachers through the App so classroom communication is seamless. ClassDojo can also be used for behavior tracking and reports. Teachers have the ability to create a donut graph or spreadsheet with the data. The data is then able to be printed and added to students’ files.  The growth mindset videos also tie in perfectly with our District’s professional development on Eric Jensen’s Teaching with Poverty in Mind. As a District we are working to change brains and growth mindset. ClassDojo’s growth mindset videos are perfect for teaching kids about perseverance, gratitude, and empathy. They also teach students about the power of YET and the magic of making mistakes. I would highly recommend ClassDojo to elementary and middle school teachers as well as after school program teachers as a classroom behavior rewards system, parent/home connection, as well as resources for growth mindset. 

5 Ways Teachers Are Opening Up the World to Special Education Through Technology

Meyer, L. (2016). 5 Ways Teachers are Opening Up the World to Special Education Through Technology. T H E Journal, 43(2), 6-8

On September 17^th, 2015, Global Collaboration Day, students with special needs from Sweden, Germany, Finland, South Africa, and the United States were able to share videos with each other introducing themselves and their schools. This event was planned by their special education teachers who met at a conference. The event was called the SMARTee Project. The students used SMART Amp technology to collaborate online and to teach each other about their local cultural traditions and events. The article then goes on to tell about different online global collaboration projects and how these projects are having a successful impact on students with special needs.

As the article states, teachers who work with special needs students are finding that technology can not only broaden their student’s experiences but engage them in learning, help them retain information, improve their socialization, and boost their self-esteem. I agree completely with this statement as a special education teacher myself. This article goes on to tell about the successes students have experienced with having discovered online global collaboration projects. Students who struggle with verbal communication and face-to-face socialization are feeling more engaged in conversations and the learning process through these online classrooms. The article gives a few different examples of global collaboration projects such as: the Summer Math Photo Challenge, where students post photos to illustrate weekly math concepts and the Global read aloud, where students around the world read the same book and connect online. There were many more examples of global collaborative projects in this article. The article also provides a source of free online educational resources, The Global Virtual Classroom.

I love the idea of students being able to collaborate and engage in conversations with students of varying cultural backgrounds. The article discusses the successes students feel with being able to express themselves clearly through picture clues and text translations. The article also gives an alternative, to use Twitter. Prior to this class, I had a Twitter account but wasn’t sure how to use it and I definitely didn’t know how to use in my classroom. After the experience I’ve had with Twitter, our classroom discussions, and this article- I would be interested in trying a global collaborative project on Twitter. I would be especially interested in doing a book club, where students read the same book and then respond to peers through a blog or twitter account. The possibilities are endless with technology!

Future Ready Framework and the 9 Gears

In reflection of the Future Ready Framework, I was very pleased that personalized student learning is at the center of the gears. As a special education teacher everything I do is personalized to student learning. I often create my own curriculum and lessons to best meet the needs of my students. Also, as a special education teacher I have a unique role of seeing students year after year. I have the privilege of watching children grow year to year and see their interests change. Annual Review season is my favorite time of year when I get to reflect with parents on how much their child has grown and changed through the course of one year. We often reminisce on their child’s growth through the years. An example that comes to mind is when I had a kindergarten student who loved Spiderman; anyway that I could incorporate Spiderman into the lesson was a win for this child. We would do everything from counting spiders to reading sight words on spider webs, anyway that I could incorporate his favorite things into the instruction it made the lesson a 100x more engaging for him. With personalized student learning as the center, it’s closely related to the gear that is most important to me, Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment.

Future ready Schools defines the following elements for this gear as:

·         21^st Century Skills/Deeper Learning

·         Personalized Learning

·         Collaborative, Relevant, and Applied Learning

·         Leveraging Technology

·         Assessment- Analytics Inform Instruction

The two elements that are the most important to me are personalized learning and collaborative, relevant, and applied learning. As previously stated, personalized learning is the name of the game for my position. I’m constantly creating personalized materials and instruction to best support my students. I’m also continuously demonstrating the relevance of what we’re doing to everyday life. I would love to incorporate personalized learning through technology into my classroom. The difficulty for this in my classroom is inconsistent internet connection. Often our tech is in need of updates or has difficulty connecting to the Wifi. This can be extremely frustrating. The article states, the need of access to devices and high-speed networks and broadband both at school and beyond. This is definitely a need for our school as we continue to move forward into the future. 

“What is one time saving tech-nique you have found or learned?”

David Progue was very knowledgeable and entertaining to listen to in his Ted! I very much enjoyed listening to his Ted Talk about the 10 top time-saving tech tips. I also enjoyed his statement in the beginning about how no one is really taught how to use technology, we’re just given computers and expected to learn.  A lot of the tips he shared are tips that I have found out for myself through playing around on my computer. I’m positive my students have also taken time to explore and could teach me a trick or two on time-saving tips. I would like to share this list of time-saving tips with my students. I think if they haven’t already discovered them, they would thoroughly enjoy using them, especially the text replacing tip.

The tip that I found to be most useful was tip #10, how to black out a PowerPoint or Keynote slide. Often when presenting information, your audience whether its students or colleagues are more focused on the slides behind you then on you and the information you are presenting. I thought his tip to press the letter B to blackout the screen was a good tip. You can temporarily black out the screen when you need your audience to focus their attention on you and then double click B again to resume the slideshow.

                A time saving tech-nique that I found on my own is to export PowerPoint slides into a PDF to allow for easier download and printing. I often create my own materials for class using Microsoft PowerPoint but when I select print, it will only print horizontally, often cutting off half of my project. I’m sure there is a way to fix this; I just haven’t found it yet! So in the meantime, I just select export to PDF and save to my desktop. I am then able to open the PDF and print the page as I had intended to. This was a little trick that saved me many trips to the copier only to discover that only half of my page printed. If anyone has any other suggestions on how to change printer settings in PowerPoint, I’d love to hear them!