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. . .