Beyond Integration

Richland Two purchases full student and teacher subscriptions to WeVideo, a cloud-based online video editing software.  You may be thinking video editing doesn’t quite work in your content area if you don’t teach a computer-related content but that’s not the case at all!  Check out five ways you and your students can use WeVideo in your classroom.  Remember, to login and access your full subscription mode, just click “Log In with Google” and sign in with your Richland 2 email account. Teachers, make your lecture digital!   Simply turn on WeVideo’s screen capture feature, present your slide deck on your device, and begin talking!  Give your lecture exactly how you would in class - no need to even worry about sounding perfect (after all, we all make mistakes when we are teaching ‘live’ in front of our kids).  The power of this strategy comes in after producing your video because kids can watch the video multiple times at their own pace,  access t...

Source: http://dailyutahchronicle.com/2015/11/29/a-brief-history-of-memes-and-how-theyre-destroying-our-political-culture/ Everybody loves a good meme.  From teachers to students, these days memes provide a lot of entertainment.  Have you ever thought about assigning memes as student work, though?  Asking kids to make and share memes could get us further in the engagement battle and really the kids are doing much more than creating memes.  See some examples below: My Favorite Mistake Meme So often teachers spend tons of time reviewing student work and providing feedback only to have it be ignored by the kids.  What if you asked students to meme their favorite mistakes?  This would force them to review the work and the feedback, and if you as a teacher only identified where the mistake was rather than what the mistake was, it could force them to do some focused error analysis.  Teachers can then anonymously share memes that addre...

See part 1 here . Learning from online text Routine reading of subject specific text is always an important part of content delivery.  Online reading, however, has its challenges.  Luckily, there are plenty of supports you can provide students to ensure they engage deeply with the text. Reading in Google Docs If you’ve assigned a Google Docs reading, ask the students to engage with the text by using the highlighter tool to identify important information (you may scaffold it further by telling them to look for topic sentences, evidence, details).  Then, students can share texts with one another and review each other’s highlights.  Students can add comments to analyze why their peer highlighted a certain portion of text or compare a peer’s highlights to their own to determine if the correct information was selected. If students highlight in black, you can create a “reverse highlight” effect.  Tell students to black out extra, irrelevant information to ...

I think all educators would agree that making real-world connections to the content we teach in the classroom enhances the experience for students.  But how can we always know what the kids are interested in?  We can listen to the kids’ small talk or try to pick up what we can from the news but sometimes that just doesn’t cut it.  I know I for one eventually just gave up and made a fool of myself not knowing what the kids were preoccupied with but it is always a better strategy to integrate their interests into the learning. So how can technology help with that? Enter Google Trends ( trends.google.com ).  Scrolling down the page shows you what the population is searching for and will even break the data down into regional interests.   Once you find a search term to explore, clicking it reveals related search items along with news articles that may be great for prompting lessons or discussions in the classroom. Perhaps this quick, relative...

Technology is one of the best tools for allowing teachers to successful differentiate.  It can streamline the process in distributing different work to different students and using artificial intelligence, technology platforms can even create personalized learning pathways to supplement the classroom instruction kids receive. Khan Academy knows this and that’s why they offer amazing, free resources to support anytime, anywhere access to high-quality learning materials.  Teachers have been using Khan Academy to provide extra support to students, a different perspective to teaching a topic through utilizing their instructional videos, and the practice problems for years.  Khan Academy also offers two options, one for younger and one for older students, that allow highly personalized pathways for learning through the use of MAP and SAT/ACT scores. Khan Academy Mappers https://www.khanacademy.org/mappers This learning pathway generates personalized video and ...

When I taught biology, I frequently assigned articles for my students to read. .  Using a variety of texts beyond the adopted textbook helped make the subject more accessible for my students because I was able to choose topics that were far more engaging than the typical informational text found in the heavy and dense biology book.  I would circulate the room as they read, hoping to ascertain a smidge of what they were thinking as they read - such a futile strategy.  Eventually, we developed some reading codes they were to use as they read so that I could peak into the margins of the article and catch a glimpse of their annotations.  Figuring out how to quickly extract the common themes in their annotations was hard, though, when working with 30 or more students reading at varying paces. This is an opportunity where the right technology can really benefit the students and the teacher.  Using a tool like Prism , the teacher is able to assign highlighter colors ...

Here at BeyondIntegration we’ve been spending over a year sharing ideas for technology integration in Richland Two classrooms.  We also, however, want to honor and share the significant uses of technology we see teachers implement regularly.  We will begin sharing a series called Teacher Spotlights.  You can find all posts in the Teacher Spotlight series by clicking the tag on the right side of the blog. Teacher: Alesha Love, high school math School: Ridge View High School (where she graduated from as well!) Showcase of technology integration use: On the day before an assessment in Ms. Love’s foundations in Algebra class, Ms. Love worked to engage students in reflecting on their understanding of various learning objectives to be assessed and provide support for students who had gaps in their knowledge. The app Ms. Love chose for this task was quizzizz.com.  This isn’t your average quiz site but rather a gamified version of questions to engage an...

Previously we shared some ideas for using Google Sheets and Orange Slice Docs rubric to make the process of giving feedback faster for teachers.  Today we are sharing some ways to provide feedback easily using two tools you may already have incorporated into your regular classroom practice. Many teachers use Google Classroom to collect assignments from students.  It certainly helps teachers reduce the amount of papers they carry around and the commenting features within the Google apps makes giving students guidance in their working document very easy.   Still, when you’re working with 30 students per class, the time it takes to open each student’s document and waiting for it to load can add up!  As a result, Google Classroom has released a grading panel that makes navigating through each kid’s document quicker for teachers and the included comment bank makes providing feedback to frequent mistakes a breeze.  Watch this tutorial for more infor...

Google does a great job of responding to feedback on its apps and regularly updating platforms to reflect user requests.  This fall, Google redesigned some key features of Google Classroom, a commonly used learning management tool in our district.  This blog post will provide the reader with some resources highlighting the major changes to Google Classroom as well as highlight some tried and true tips for distributing and collecting work using the tool.   Key feature updates, as outlined in Google’s blog , are as follows: New Classwork page —Teachers and students have a new Classwork page. Teachers can post assignments and questions on the page, as well as group them into modules with the topics feature.  This means that the stream page is the best place for announcements and posts that are not related to a specific assignment. Teachers and students will likely spend most of their time in the classwork tab. New grading tool in Classroom —Teachers ...

Recently we read a blog post from Corwin Connect entitled “Six Reasons Why You Need an Instructional Coach .” We thought the article was great and began applying the concepts to our teachers. As we thought through the value of our technology coaches, we developed our own reasons why we believe you need your technology coach (TLC). Technology, including updates to current apps and newly released apps, increases at an amazing rate. With all your time spent on the work of teaching, it is hard to stay on top of the latest technological possibilities. Your TLC may know of just the perfect app to meet your instructional needs. Coaches are in and out of classrooms all the time. They know the amazing work of your colleagues and can help you imagine the possibilities by looking to your own colleagues for inspiration. Teaching can be an isolated profession and it is hard for teachers to observe one another but coaches have the great privilege of seeing many teachers work to provide le...

For teachers new to a learning environment with access to a lot of technology, it can be overwhelming to decide where and how to start with your technology integration.  The technology integration team created a digital starter kit in order to give teachers a list of powerful, vetted technology tools.   The digital starter kit is organized into categories based on teacher use in the classroom.   Of course some tools are flexible enough to be used in multiple methods by both teachers and students.  This simply provides a comfortable launch point for educators. All recommendations are either paid for by Richland 2 or require no paid account of any sort.

Screencasting in the classroom is often suggested as a first-step for teachers looking to turn previously created powerpoints or slides presentations into a stand-alone lesson that students can engage with anytime, anywhere, and alone. Basically, screencasting is a process that records a user’s screen and allows the opportunity for a narrator to voice-over or annotate. Though screencasting is a great option for teacher content creation, this post is going to push the envelope and suggest that teachers assign the creation of a screencast as student work.  In primary grades, students can screencast and record their reading of a text and teachers can assess the student’s skill level with certain vocabulary words and other measures of fluency. In math, students can be provided with a fully solved math problem and then narrate the mathematical reasoning that made the solution possible. Or, students can be assigned a problem to completely solve digitally (on a Google Slides show...

This is the last post in our 3 post series on using technology for differentiation.  See the previous two posts here: Differentiating with Technology: Content Differentiating with Technology: Process The last category that is typically explored with technology is differentiating the product .  This is the method that teachers use to be able to determine “did the students get it? ”  Wiggins and McTighe (2005) remind us that it is not that students can acquire knowledge alone - the true measure of learning is about what students can do with their knowledge.  This is where product and differentiation really shine. Differentiation can easily be done by allowing students to choose a method to demonstrate their knowledge.  This differentiation based on student interest is made effective and efficient with the use of technology.  Does it matter to the teacher if the student chooses to use Google Slides or a WeVideo?  Can the same understanding be ...

In December we blogged about the possibilities that technology offers to the practice of differentiation.  Differentiation is typically broken down into 3 realms: content, process, and product.  Content was covered in this post from December 14th.  The information shared here will develop the ideas regarding using technology to allow for opportunities for differentiating the process . When we think about the instructional process, we are really focusing in on student readiness level, learning preferences, and aptitudes along with the activities used to engage the students and allow for mastery of the content.    Technology allows for teachers to support different student readiness quite easily.  Resources can be provided privately and seamlessly to students via a learning management system or even via email that adjusts the path of learning for student readiness.   Differentiating Video Learning Many videos have transcripts available. ...