Student Digital Portfolios (Using New Google Sites)

Why digital portfolios?

As the end of our first trimester draws to an end, it's a great time to reflect. We build in times for reflection throughout the whole year of course, but with the end of a grading period comes time for more formal thinking about our learning process. As teachers we are thinking about report cards and making conference schedules. Conferences are student-led in our sixth grade which does not happen without a lot of teacher guidance and support. The main tool for our students through this reflection process is creating student digital portfolios. We set them up now in the Fall of sixth grade and add to them throughout this year. In seventh and eighth grade, the process continues with students sometimes adding on to the original sixth grade site or redesigning a portfolio for each each. It's their choice. By the end of our middle school program in the eighth grade, they will have a body of work to look back on along with reflections and goals through the years.

Google Sites' new update makes it easier than ever!

I am so excited by the new Google sites update. It is sleek and so user friendly. This year's group of sixth graders have taken to it like ducks to water. The themes are simple yet easy on the eyes. This frees up the students to focus less on playing with the font styles and colors with more emphasis on their work choices and reflections. I love it! If you haven't seen it yet or had time to play with its features, check out this introduction on Youtube. Also, here's a handy "cheat sheet" by the wonderful Jennifer Judkins.

Digital portfolio process:

My Digital Portfolio Model's Home Page

Preparation:

* I started by first setting up my own example portfolio. It helped me guide my students by going through the process myself as well as served as a model for them throughout the process.
* Set up an assignment sheet. We use Schoology, but here's a Google doc version of my assignment sheet with rubric and help links that students had access too.

In Class with Students:

1. Introduce the idea to classes and brainstorm a list on the board of what we did in each class over
the trimester. This takes time but it helps them realize what they've learned and how much they have accomplished in just one trimester. It also helps to have them write a trimester reflection in their notebooks as a "bell-wringer"/warm up. The prompt can be a simple: How has this trimester gone so far for you?
2. Show my example digital portfolio and explain the requirements. I gave students an overview of how the website builder works (modeling with my own portfolios) but didn't go into detail. I've found that many can't take it all in visually in these early stages and tune out to long explanations of tech features until they actually need them. So I opted not to show the whole how-to video of features but to link a video for students who needed it to use as they needed it. About a quarter of students opted to view this first while many wanted to jump in first for some hands on experience.
3. Students had three and 1/2 class periods to build their pages. I gave a few quick tips at the

beginning of each class and referred them back to the requirements.
4. On the last page building day, students choose partners and we peer edited with this sheet to see what still needed to be completed.
4. After they were "done" building, I went through and evaluated each digital portfolio providing my feedback of what could be improved for each student.
5. Students had time to address concerns and redo parts to make them better (and earn back points). Those that were still having trouble after the recheck were asked to come in for an extra help session at lunch.
6. We'll write speeches in our Language Arts time next week, practice in small groups, and then present them to parts at student-led conferences.

It's not an easy process, but by the end students have a digital portfolio that they can be really proud to show their families. It also helps shape the culture of learning at our school in which work is not just to be seen by teachers once and then forgotten. Instead, work is displayed digitally, revisited, and hopefully remembered.

Classroom Icebreaker 2.0

Icebreakers are often "once and done" by nature. However, what if we could use icebreakers to create an experience that sets the tone for our classroom interactions and creates more lasting connections to others?

Icebreakers are a necessary beginning of the year activity for students throughout the grade levels. The challenge as teachers is to make them engaging without being embarrassing those who aren't quite ready to step out of their comfort zone (as Jennifer Gonzalez of Cult of Pedagogy blog has wonderfully pointed out on her list of terrific icebreakers). After all, it is only the first days of middle school for our sixth graders and that can be really scary for many of us. We all want to make a good impression while warming up to the group. When discussing ideas for this year with my teaching partners, I remembered an icebreaker from years ago used by Naturebridge while at a teacher camp in Marin Headlands. Outdoor instructors really are THE best at this sort of interactive game. We classroom teachers can learn so much from them, but I digress. . .

With all these things in mind, my teaching partners and I collaborated and came up with a very cool icebreaker that is engaging having students up and talking to each other while setting up peer pairs (a new spin on the handy "Classroom Appointments" many teachers use). Classroom appointments is a strategy in which students pair up with several different students so that no two are working together all of the time throughout the year. It normally utilizes a clock motif that teachers call out to indicate which partner to join up with (For example, "Ok, class, now it's time to meet with your 10 o'clock appointment partner to read your drafts.") It enables teachers to quickly mix up the class and students to have a chance to work with many more people than they otherwise would while streamlining the whole find a partner process for the year. Check out the link in this paragraph for more information on this terrific strategy from another teacher blogger.

So, enter our Icebreaker 2.0 that mixes in the classroom appoints concept with a mingle style icebreaker. For our middle school students, we are referring to it as "Mingle Buddies." We'll instruct students to get up and find a new person in the room in each of the four rounds below (image at right is the slip they will each take with them to record). We're planning on breaking our mingling into three days to spread out the fun.

DAY ONE

[Student Sheet to record and store for use throughout the year.]

Round 1: Go find one other person of your choice and give him/her a High Five. That is your High Five buddy. Introduce yourself if you don't know him/her or catch up with what they've been doing lately if you do know him/her. Ask the question "What's your high five buddy's favorite school subject?" and write the response. Give each other one more high five.

Round 2: Find one person who was born in the same birth month. It must be a new person--not the same as round 1 person. Make up a secret handshake that includes a fist bump with him/her. Introduce yourselves if you don't know each other already. Talk out/write down the question "What's your fist bump buddy's favorite sport?" responses.

DAY TWO

*Warm-up: Give your high five buddy and quick high five and say hello using his/her name. Then greet your fist bump buddy using the secret handshake you made up together yesterday. Make sure to say hello and greet each other by name. Now back to finish the game. 

Round 3: Find someone you didn't choose from yesterday that is of the opposite gender. Introduce yourselves if don't already know each other. This is your dab buddy. Ask the question on the sheet: What is one thing that not many people know about you? Talk out/write down the question responses.

Round 4: Find someone you have never met before this week. This is your elbow nudge buddy. Give them a nice nudge. Introduce yourselves. The question is: What makes your nudge buddy's family special? Talk out/write down the question responses.

DAY THREE

On the final day, use the information the buddies collected to introduce each student to the group. To do this, have one student at a time raise his or her hand. When it is that student's turn, each of his or her buddies each should say something about the student learned in previous days. For example, Karisa raises her hand. Her high five buddy tells the group she loves science and technology. Her fist bump buddy adds that she likes watching water polo and her dab buddy tells the class she's a vegetarian. Finally, her nudge buddy tells everyone that her family loves learning new things on trips and reading. By the end, we're starting to get a sense of our class as individuals and laying the foundation of a classroom community.

Now here's another really great part--an added bonus if you will. Students are to keep these "Mingle Buddies" slips in their notebooks to use throughout the year. We teachers will occasionally announce, "Go find your high five (or dab, nudge buddy, fist bump buddy, etc.) and those students will meet up again to discuss topics as a pair. We envision using this at least a couple of times a week especially early in the year to get students up and moving as well as working with others that they wouldn't normally for a fresh perspective. 

Icebreaker 2.0 fine-tuning tips: 

*We're going to make sure that students end up with four different partners for each round.

*We've tried to scaffold the questions in the rounds from most easily approachable to a little more personal to build as comfort levels hopefully do. 

*If there is an odd number of students in the class, then we as teachers will add in to balance it out (I kind of hope there is because I want my own high five, dab, fist bump, and nudge buddies myself!)

* For during the mingling part of the icebreaker, I've created a "Mingle Buddy" Youtube playlist to quietly play as background music in the class.
*We'd like to encourage students to use their special greeting when they see each other in the hallway and other classes. It would be so awesome to see secret handshakes and friendly nudges happening naturally throughout campus.

Telling Your Classroom's Story Using a Syllabus Infographic

Back to School week for teachers at our school means coming back the week before the students do to set up classrooms and attend staff meetings. One of our theme's for reflection this year is how are we telling our academy's story? I've already written a post that connects with this on using a classroom Twitter account as a window into our teaching worlds, but there are other ways to do this as well of course. At our recent staff meeting our Coordinator asked us, "How does your syllabus help to tell your class' story?"

The question threw me for a loop. My first thought was, "Uh, it doesn't. My syllabus is just a boring paper with my course outline. That's what syllabuses (syllabi? whatever.) are, right?" But then as I often do later, I let it sink in. Often our syllabus is one of the first things that parents see of our classroom. It's the introduction to what our class is all about and by association what we are about as teachers. Uh, oh. . .  So, what was my syllabus saying?

With new student/parent orientation around the corner, I decided to remedy this right away. Amanda showed us a fantastic example from Jillian Molina, our seventh/eighth grade teacher. I looked online for what ideas are out there and found more great examples of what innovative teachers are doing to capture their classes. After much some consideration of what fits best for my style, I transformed both my Core (Language Arts and Social Studies combo course) and Science/Tech syllabi (syllabuses?) to better tell my classes' stories using Piktograph. Here's a link to my full-sized Science/Tech syllabus infographic and Core syllabus infographic. It was a bit of a learning curve at first as it's been quite a while since I've dabbled with this program. However, I think the pay off is worth it.

What about you? How are you sharing your teaching and school's stories with the community or the world?

Classroom Twitter Feed

One of the best things I've done in the past couple of years as a teacher has been to add a classroom Twitter account after a suggestion at Monterey Bay Aquarium's teacher training. It's helped me connect to parents, students, administrators, our librarian, and other teachers. Social Media like Twitter and Pinterest have a vibrant teacher community that if you haven't tapped into yet, I highly suggest you do.

One great thing about Twitter is that even those not on it can see your current posts in a Twitter feed--no "following" required (though it is nice when they do and "like" content). It's good if in general you take larger group photos, take photos in which students' faces are not close-ups, avoid using names if student's faces can be easily matched up, and especially with younger students consider taking photos from the back of their heads if engaged in interesting tasks or images of the work itself. Note: Our school requires students and parents to sign an image release. If your school does too, make sure to check with your administrator in case there are students who should not be in photographs. Anyway, here's mine:

Tweets by @LEroomI3

Designing a Flexible Seating Classroom

Perhaps after noticing that our middle school students tend to spend a whole lot of time working on the floor (by choice) and moving furniture around to accommodate our lessons, our administrator told us that we'd have the chance to remodel our classrooms to allow for flexible seating. I was so excited and ready to jump right in to reimagining my space. I wanted intentional spaces set up for students to choose from based on regular uses (gathering area maybe to be named "The Campfire" or "The Family Room," Maker Space, Reading Nook, etc.). After reading some articles on the topic, I thought a semi-private area might also be useful for individuals or very small groups to focus in (I'm going to call mine the "fish tank" since my aquarium will be incorporated). Of course, all this will be subject to change with the students' input and in consideration of their needs. However, just trying to wrap my head around what type of space new furniture would take up left me with the need to visualize via diagram. So far, here's what I've come up with using the website Floor Planner's free mode.

My Next Year's Classroom Ideas Diagram (with my notes):

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3D View:

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Will it stay like this? Definitely not! But at least I have a starting point. Need more info? So, do I! Here are some great resources on the topic I've found are a great place to start (please, let me know in the comments if you've tried the switch to flexible seating or have some good resources to share):

 Classroom Eye Candy (Cult of Pedagogy)

Flexible Seating and Student-Centered Classroom Redesign (Edutopia)

The Cemetery Method (Anne Shaw)

Albemarle County Public Schools (Edutopia Video)

Keepers for Next Year

As this year wraps up, I'm thinking back to some tools/strategies I used this year that will be "must use" in my middle school classroom for next year. .

Boom Writer: 

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Reading the teacher blog Cult of Pedagogy, I was intrigued by a new writing tool called Boom Writer. BoomWriter is an online writing tool that allows students to enter writing pieces into an in-class competition for the whole class to see and vote. Teachers write a prompt for students to respond to in writing. Then, after the teacher approves the pieces (or asks students for revisions), the class can vote on who wrote it best. I used it to have the students practice using their vocabulary words. The other sixth grade teachers and I have been looking for ways to have students interact more with the meanings of their vocabulary words. This seemed like very good tool for that purpose. Students loved having an audience for their writing and the built in extras of having a little character to decorate appealed to the students (while giving me as a teacher a little time to read their work and approve/ask for revisions). Students had great informal discussions going on while writing about word meaning and loved reading each others' work.  Even normally reluctant writers were eager to try it again!

Socratic Seminars

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We had a great time with using Socratic Seminars this year. Mostly we used the classic inner circle/outer circle format with everyone having a role during the seminar.

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I also tried out a new "Socratic Seminar" style to see if gamification spin could help pull in those that were a bit more reluctant to join in the argument. It at least gave them a way to reflect on what was happening. What is Socratic Smackdown? Basically, the Socratic Smackdown is a modification on the classic Socratic Seminar. It has students focus on a set of argumentative strategies that they earn points for if they use them well in an academic argument. It was lots of fun but one of my classes lost focus a bit and had to be redirected. I'll be fine tuning before using it again. My slideshow I made to introduce the format to students is embedded in this post. The idea is from Institute of Play that has other resources that I will also be checking out in the future.

Schoology:

We used this online learning system, Schoology, extensively this year at my school. It's free to sign up and use. Here's just some positive uses for me and my classes so far:

Discussion Posts: I wanted student to reflect more on their learning, see what roles they played in collaborative projects, and be able to share out their work with the class easily. Schoology's discussion posts became an awesome place to accomplish all of these goals. I would use the discussion post format to describe the assignment for students so that they had a resource to go back to for expectations. Then, as we worked on projects or when the project was complete, one student in each team would post the project link. All in the group would follow-up by replying to their team post by answering 2 or 3 reflection questions. I used this Edutopia list for ideas of reflection questions. I also used it share out about endangered species topics while projects were in progress and followed up with a lesson on giving effective peer feedback on a recent endangered species project.

Schoology Groups: I created groups for Yearbook, Garden Club, Engineering Club, and also for my sixth grade partners and I to share resources. This became a nice place to collect useful resources such as fonts to use in yearbook and how to send designs to the 3D printer for engineering. My fellow teachers and I used it to share assignments created as well as quizzes for vocabulary (which we could each help proofread and revise for clarity). It was great!

Rubrics: These made it easier to grade and cut down on copying off all those little slips. Plus, parents and students could refer back to them to see (no, loosing the rubric paper before showing curious parents or partners who were absent when they were handed back)!

I'll leave it there for now, but as teachers know it is never ending! So many more tools to find and refine practices. . .

Science Family Night

Science Family Night is sure to become a yearly event for our middle school program, Leading Edge Academy. It was challenging trying to wrap my head around the idea of it at first. We knew that we wanted more parent engagement for the event and that we wanted to let them have the experience of what it is like to be one of our students participating in science curriculum at Leading Edge. Luckily, last fall I went to the CSTA conference and they had the perfect session for me about planning a Science Family Night. Caleb Cheung from Oakland Unified led it and I left feeling empowered. I immediately sent off a huge email to Amanda and Jillian planning out stations and imagining the video. Luckily also they humored me and we had the amazing LE Live student team with video editing experience who were willing to help put the intro video together. As the event came closer, planning hand-on activities for 100+ people was fun, but figuring out what supplies we'd need and gathering them (while teaching, grading, planning, etc.) was a bit of a struggle. Jillian was a great support in getting the big signs together and up on the walls with a team of students.

The Event Line Up

Introduction Video: Student made video was being shown on repeat in the science lab. It talked briefly about NGSS, engineering practices, and the passport process.

Stations:

• Flight Zone (drones, paper airplanes through hoops)
• Scopes (Microscopes, Foldscope guessing game, cheek cell slides)
• 3D Design/Art (Tinkercad, 3D printer demo, digital drawing pads)
• Newspaper Towers (newspaper + masking tape + ingenuity + persistent parents = a whole lot of fun)
• Science/Math Contest Area (showing off Exploravision and math projects, parents/kids writing down problems they wished were solved, flyers for Young Scientist Competition)
• Photo Booth (safety goggles, cylinders, lab coat, etc. with a student-made backdrop. . .  We tweeted out the photos in real time.)

Snack bar: Parents and students turned in their passports for goodies at the end (4 stamps = two food items/ all 6 stamped=three food items)

Surprises

I was surprised by just how into it the parents themselves were. I was expecting our students and their siblings to jump in with both feet to the activities, but really the parents were the ones who came to life the most at our stations. They built newspaper towers challenging each other to build higher, folded paper airplanes to fly through hoops, wrote down meaningful everyday problems they wished would be solved, learned about our 3D printer, and squinted through microscopes/foldscopes. 

Successes

Having an introduction video and passport system were very successful. Having hands-on elements at each station was also great. The best part of all was having so many student volunteers take ownership of everything from making signs, to greeting families, to running stations, and even tweeting out pictures. Having music playing throughout also seemed to help set a festive and fun tone. My playlist brought in some songs with science theme ("Weird Science"), songs from other events this year ("Jai Ho" and the Greek alphabet rap) which students would understand the references to, and songs that were uplifting and fun ("7 Years Old" and "Stressed Out"). Here's the link to my list. I remember looking around shortly after the event began and thinking, "Wow, it's running itself now." and then shortly later, "This feels like me as a teacher summed up. It feels like my classroom when it's in full swing."

Looking Ahead

Next year, I would find a way to make the activity cards larger. They were kind of small on the tables and became a bit buried. I think they helped give direct, but would've have been better if some large, poster-sized copies were on the wall by each station as well.  I'd also set up the 3D printer extra early and have the job in progress well before. Putting it on a sturdier table dedicated just for it would be good. I'd also think even more about the layout more for better flow and easier access to all areas. It wasn't bad but maybe some seating by the snacks area would help. 

Also, I loved having an introduction video but wished the route was clearer to families as to where to go. I did put it out in all of the flyers and messages to start in the Science Lab. However, many still came up to the MPR asking where to go (with some wandering in confused even after student volunteers directed them down the hall). Some mentioned that it made it more of an adventure starting off in a quiet classroom then heading over to the big, fun room though.

I wondered too if an hour might have been a more appropriate amount of time. We had our biggest crowd at the beginning and were running out of food at the snack bar by the end. Perhaps pushing it all together into one hour would work (or closing off the intro. video after 45 minutes at least) would be better. 

Next year, I think we'd also need to do a different theme to keep it fresh. I bet we'll have even more families attend next year because the eighth graders were gone to Ashland this year and also families just seemed to have so much fun. I think they'll want to come back for more. My mind is already spinning about using a CSI theme. Maybe something around a certain guinea pig who has gone missing. I can imagine families taking fingerprints, looking at dna data, analyzing hair samples, watching videos of "suspects" who each seem to have a reason to want him gone (custodian with allergies, teacher who thinks he smells, student who thinks he'd be happier at his house, me tired of nagging kids to clean his cage. . .) It could be a lot of fun and now after planning and running one it seems a whole lot more doable than it did at the beginning of the school year.