A Teacher's Journal #7: Action Research

After many years of saying "someday," I'm finally enrolled in an Educational Technology Master's Program. My current course requires me to keep a journal to document "connectedness" online. Below is my seventh entry. 

The Master's of Education program I am attending has a Capstone requirement that will be center around an action research project. While trying to wrap my thoughts around this, I kept visualizing the components as a combination of classroom and science laboratory. I decided to help myself digest this in an infographic. 

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A Teacher's Journal #6: Global Connections

After many years of saying "someday," I'm finally enrolled in an Educational Technology Master's Program. My current course requires me to keep a journal to document "connectedness" online. Below is my sixth entry. 

One of the best parts about being a connected teacher today is making connections with classrooms and teachers from around the planet. I have found a few ways to do this and feel that it has benefited my classroom greatly.

Twitter: Chats and Teachers to Follow

The first way that I started making global connections was through Twitter. A former administrator had encouraged us to make teacher professional accounts and to find Twitter chats to participate in. Using the "Education Chats" calendar made it easy to find hundreds of potential teacher chats. The Google calendar used can be sorted by topic, day of the week, and even time zone. Clicking on the links gives more details and sometimes links to question lists. Here are a couple of international examples:

• Wondering what educators in Manitoba are talking about? Check out #mbedchat on Mondays at 7pm (PST):

• What about teachers in Africa? An #AfricaEd Slow Chat continues over the course of the whole day.

• What about in Germany? #EdChatDE at 11am on Tuesdays will let you participate. No need to speak German--Twitter will help translate!

• Want to find more international teachers to follow on Twitter? Check out the embedded post below.

Playing around a bit this morning and managed to create this map of my Int'l Educators Twitter list. Check it out and find some new awesome educators to follow! #AfricaEd #internationaleducators #AISQ8 #isedcoach #bfc530 https://t.co/ARVrWS6Ahb

— Ryan Harwood (@rharwood17) June 5, 2018

GridPals

A new opportunity for teachers and students to connect across the globe is called GridPals. Using
GridPals, teachers can sign up to be matched up with another classroom or two from other places. A real teacher uses a Google form to help matchmake between classrooms. 

Once matched, teachers coordinate via email as to topics and timing. We participated this year and were matched up with an Australian teacher currently teaching at an international school in China as well as a teacher in Texas. Students shared three Flipgrid sessions getting to know each other, talking about government, and showing/telling their favorite parts of each school. It was a fantastic way to connect! The other teachers and I are planning on reconnecting with a new batch of students this fall. Here's FlipGrid's blog on GridPals with all you need to know to sign up. Teachers can also use Twitter to search for #GridPals and #FlipGridFever for more ways to connect using this fun, new tool.

A Teacher's Journal #5: Open Educational Resources

After many years of saying "someday," I'm finally enrolled in an Educational Technology Master's Program. My current course requires me to keep a journal to document "connectedness" online. Below is my fifth entry. 

Image: Created in Canva,
marked for public use.

Open Educational Resources or OERs have been around since the dawn of teaching. We, teachers, love to both share and steal, uh utilize great classroom ideas and resources. However, with the Internet, this has become something truly amazing. We can now share ideas, lessons, and even whole units with teachers all over the world. Some are capitalizing on this using sites such as Teachers Pay Teachers to supplement income (and who can blame them). 

Others are taking a different route and openly sharing what they create, some using Creative Commons licensing. According to the NMC Horizon Report (2014), "The goal is that OER materials are freely copiable, freely remixable, and free of barriers to access, cultural sensitivities, sharing, and educational use" (p. 10). Working at a charter school with much flexibility and freedom in my curriculum planning, I have greatly benefitted from these resources. 

Here are just a few out there that are all FREE:

Language Arts

ReadWriteThink: Amazing lessons all supporting language arts. Many are creative and fun. This is an excellent source for teachers K-12.

Social Science

Big History Project: This is a whole curriculum set up with rich activities, videos from specialists, etc. Use it from start to finish for a high level, deep thinking course or pick and choose resources to use. It is well put together and allows you to enroll a whole class. 

Science

NOAA: Climate resources include lessons and tons of data. 

Null Earth: Global map of wind, weather, and ocean conditions. Really cool animation that is in almost real time. It helps students understand currents and is beautiful to boot!

NASA Education: Lessons, videos from space stations, inspiration. . . This site has it all for STEM fields!

Technology

Code.org: Free, fun coding lessons that are put together with kids in mind and some serious backers (Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.). 

Common Sense Education: Digital Citizenship lesson plans from Common Sense Media. This is a fantastic resource along with their game, Digital Compass (also free). These resources help teachers with everything from cyberbullying to properly using resources online.

Multiple Subjects

Teachers Pay Teacher: Free area. There are hundreds of resources here that altruistic teachers have posted for free use. Check it out!

Teachers Give Teachers: Set up by teachers including Lisa Highfill (who is amazing to hear speak, by the way). This is set up to share hyperdocs (lessons set up in a series of links in one document). They are excellent!