Student Agency

3 Reasons to get your Students Vlogging or Blogging This Year

October 3, 2019

We are amid an educational era where students have access to the world in their back pockets. These students, born at the onset of the smartphone in 1997, have never lived in a day where the answer to almost every question can be found in the blink of an eye. The use of mobile devices and computers are an integral part of every moment of their lives. In light of this shift, how might we leverage the power of Generation Z?

Although Generation Z students live in a digitally connected world, the writing assignments assigned in school have not progressed from the analog format developed decades ago. Regardless of your age, we’ve probably all written similar essays: personal narratives, persuasive letters, and responses to books of literary merit. So why do writing assignments continue to stay the same when our students’ world has so drastically changed? In order to match the writing experience to the lives of our hyper-connected students, we need to leverage technology to connect with our Generation Z students. Through blogging and vlogging, we can encourage our students to communicate in engaging and authentic ways that mirror their personal lives. Here are 3 reasons to get your students vlogging and blogging this year:

Replicate an Authentic Experience

In the last ten years, careers in blogging and vlogging have exploded. Teens and adults are making a living through contributing content via blogs, Twitch streams, and YouTube channels, and reaching more people within the ages of 18-49 than all cable networks combined. These individuals are making thousands of dollars a month sharing digital content. Blogging and vlogging are neither exclusive to high school students nor the English Language Arts classroom. The highest paid YouTuber is a 7-year old boy named Ryan, who rakes in $22 million a year. For our students, no form of sharing their stories is more authentic than web-based platforms and apps: YouTube, Edublogs, Seesaw, and FlipGrid to name a few.\

Promote Creativity and Self Expression

When we don’t restrict blogging and vlogging to academic topics, students will potentially share feelings they may not have otherwise explored. Whether it is through speaking or writing, continued practice improves our students’ confidence. They become more comfortable with their voice, beliefs, and opinions and often discover talents they didn’t realize they possessed. These are valuable life skills our students will carry into the workforce.

Increase the Desire to Write and Communicate

In the traditional classroom, most students’ writing stays within a small circle of readers: the student, the teacher, the parent(s), and perhaps a peer editor or two. For most students, that’s not enough motivation to craft a strong, polished and robust piece. But when employing blogging or vlogging, the game changes. Instead of a minimal audience, the scope increases to the entire world. Knowing all eyes are on them, what our students say and how they plan to say it changes.

What might your students say if they had a digital tool to share their voice? Consider how blogging and vlogging can motivate your students to talk all year long about the process, rather than just the end product. Instead of only sharing their work at the conclusion of a unit, they become producers who share their thoughts every step of the way. Imagine what you might learn from your students if they used either tool to reflect on the project-based learning process, a challenging math concept or a complicated science experiment. As you start the next school year, I challenge you to change up the student experience and create more authentic writing and speaking opportunities in your classroom. Don’t let fear hold you back from allowing your students to experience the best year of communication and sharing yet!

Amie Adams is passionate about engaging both students and adults in learning through the use of technology, especially social media and Google. She is able to affect daily change in this work as an Educational Technology Specialist for one of the largest districts in Denver, Colorado. Amie has been educating for 14 years, has earned a Master’s degree in Educational Technology, and is currently pursuing an Ed.S in Leadership in Educational Organizations. She believes in innovating and disrupting the educational norm to create engaging learning experiences that meet the needs of today’s students. In her free time, she is a mom of two, an avid baker, and a lover of all things ‘90s pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @Whamies.

How to Bring the Shark Tank into Your Classroom

July 27, 2019

I remember the first time I heard the premise of the show Shark Tank. A bunch of out-of-touch billionaires discussing finances and crushing the dreams of entrepreneurs? Hard pass. But, sure enough, I happened to catch half an episode at a friend’s house, and I was instantly hooked. The combination of brief but captivating pitches, innovative new business ventures, an authentic audience with constructive feedback, and unique competition spoke to me as both a viewer and, more importantly, an educator. My first thought after seeing the episode: how could I leverage this format in the classroom?

With that goal in mind, I set about establishing various ways to apply the core aspects of the show into student-created assessments, professional development wrap-ups, and much more. After running a number of Shark Tank sessions in a number of formats, below are my five keys for a successful implementation.

Develop an Engaging Prompt to Focus the Competition

The biggest strength of the Shark Tank format is its malleability for a variety of situations. Running a workshop or professional development session? Wrap up the session with a Shark Tank competition to have staff pitch implementation of the new concepts. Developing a culminating assessment for the end of the unit? Challenge students to capture the most significant theme of the unit in the form of a product or service. Looking to add design thinking, project-based learning, or genius hour to the classroom? All are great fits for a Shark Tank competition as an endcap to the process.

When developing your prompt, consider how you frame the scenario. What is the most important aspect to you: process, product, or both? If you want a feasible “product” to come out of it, have you given your audience ample time to go through the design process to ideate, iterate, and prototype? Are you more concerned about them demonstrating understanding through the process, with the final presentation more of a celebration than a true “pitch?” In that case, make sure you give both your participants AND your evaluators the “look fors” in a successful Shark Tank pitch so everyone is on the same page for what wins the competition and what will receive plenty of constructive feedback.

For the course I teach for preservice librarians, both the process and product were key: how do we use the design thinking process to solve a challenge for today’s library media specialist? Using this prompt, students knew they needed to connect with librarians to discover their challenges, brainstorm ideas, and then pitch a potential, actionable solution that their user group could implement down the road.

Workshop How to Give a Succinct Yet Effective Pitch

What I absolutely adore about Shark Tank is the creativity through constraint: the entrepreneurs get oh-so-little time to sell their idea that every second of the pitch counts. One of my first steps to model how to give an effective pitch is to literally have students watch a few example Shark Tank pitches to get a sense of how people approached the limited timeframe and what they emphasized in their “elevator speech” about their idea, product, or service. After that, we usually get students used to the “pitch” format by playing a fun, improv game that challenges players to do their best on-the-spot pitch. My favorite games to use for this activity are Silicon Valley Startups and Snake Oil, two engaging card games that work in a small-group format.

Creating effective visuals to go along with the pitch is often a pain point for presenters. I emphasize using only a short, key word or phrase (if any text) on slides and encourage the presenter to let their voice do the heavy lifting for information. Instead, the visuals should focus on focused graphics, data, or metaphorical imagery that reinforces or enhances what they say.

My big rule for visuals in one-day workshops? Participant teams get ONE slide to use with their pitch. Getting them to think strategically about how to use their limited space to sell their idea, lesson, or solution is always a fun mental hurdle.

Find an Authentic Expert Panel

What makes the Shark Tank so fascinating is the real-world stakes associated with actual investors considering the business ideas. Although our students may not be ready to get funded by investors, there are plenty of avenues to provide an authentic “expert panel” on the subject of your choosing. For my class of preservice librarians, I brought in a K-12 librarian, a higher education librarian, an instructor who teaches in a library media program, and a tech-savvy educator. Since my students knew that they were going to be assessed by industry professionals and future colleagues in the field, they knew they had to “bring it” on presentation day.

For your potential Shark Tank, consider who might be a logical choice within your school, community, state, or even nationally. For younger students explaining the big takeaways from a concept or how to make change in the schools, enlist older students who could give them feedback on their ideas, pitch, and understanding of the concepts. For staff members pitching new ideas to implement, bring on district administrators, colleagues, students, and more. If you want your students to design a new product, process, or service, tap local business owners, government officials, or other key figures. If you don’t have them in your backyard, bring them in via video conferencing platform.

Engage the audience by making them investors

One of the biggest issues with student or staff presentations is that the viewers often take on a very passive role. Sure, we have them fill out feedback forms and encourage them to provide constructive comments that help each other grow, but there does not seem to be as much of a concrete way observers impact the presenter’s success beyond such feedback.

In the Shark Tank activity, viewers are given a set “budget” that they get to distribute however they like (I usually give them $1,000 hypothetical funds to invest overall). After viewing all of the presentations, the observers can then dole out their hypothetical however they would like, choosing to split it among multiple presenters or giving it all to the best idea they witness. For easy collection and tabulation, I typically pre-populate the groups into a Google Form and have them submit the group they are supporting with how much they are giving that team, allowing for multiple submissions if they support more than one group.

With the audience-as-investor format, you have now created more paths to victory for your students. Not only is there an expert “Shark Panel” who gets to crown some winners, but the audience investment allows for a sort of “People’s Choice” award for the team who garners the most favor from the crowd. If you are at all worried that students or colleagues might intentionally vote for the least promising pitch to up their chances of winning, simply split the groups in half and have two separate competitions. Teams only submit their investments for the other half of the groups or individuals they are not up against, taking an incentives away from funding an unworthy recipient. Problem solved!

Share the Final Products with the World

Sure, you’ve had your students pitch their ideas to an expert panel and their classmates or colleagues, but why stop there? Record the pitches and push them out on YouTube. Make a copy of their slide decks and share them on social media. Have each participant or group record their elevator pitch on a public Flipgrid and get feedback from the world!

If you try out this activity, share it on Twitter with the #SharkTankEDU hashtag – it would be great to see what you, your students, and your staff create!

Jon Spike, a graduate of UW-Madison, started his career as a high school English teacher. Since then, he has served as a K-12 Technology Integrator, helping students and staff use technology to engage, inspire, and create. He currently works as a Coordinator of Instructional Technology and Integration Services at UW-Whitewater, collaborating with preservice teachers and College of Education instructors to leverage technology. He also teaches a course on Video Games and Learning.

Jon has presented across the U.S. to educators and administrators as both a consultant and Google Certified Trainer, sharing his expertise at the ISTE, WEMTA, and ICE conferences, as well as the Midwest Google Summit. He currently serves as Director of Higher Education on the Wisconsin Educational Media and Technology Association Executive Board. You can follow Jon on Twitter at @Mr_JSpike.

What is a GenMars Mindset?

July 20, 2019

3… 2… 1… Blast-Off

“Takeoff and landing are the most thrilling part of a trip on an airplane.”
-The Martians in Your Classroom

Stepping into a new role this year has me a little on edge. I have all of these ideas and plans, but I know that others are going to look at me like I am a Martian! The Martians in Your Classroom: STEM in Every Learning Space written by Rachael Mann and Stephen Sandford confirms that I am doing what is best for “Gen Mars” (the students of today). According to the book, Gen Mars students are the students who are sitting in our classrooms today: full of inquiry and curiosity. So, I am left with the question posed in the book, “How do we prepare Gen Mars for a world that will continue to change exponentially?” In developing this GenMars Mindset with your students, here are four ways to be inspired.

Look Through the Telescope

“In the Martian Classroom, students learn to communicate and use their voice to make an impact, both in person and virtually, to share ideas globally.”
-The Martians in Your Classroom

How are we teaching this mindset in our classrooms? If we were to look through a telescope into space, we would be amazed at the sights. I remember the first time I looked through a telescope, I was in awe. I could see the pieces and parts that create the bigger picture. Our classrooms are no different. As we plan, with the bigger picture in mind, our Gen Mars students need to be creating, inventing, discovering, and failing as they are mastering the parts and pieces.

See The Constellation

“Invention is the twin of discovery.”
-The Martians in Your Classroom

Creating an abstract picture through innovation and discovery, I am ready for my students to inventio (invention and discovery in one creative act.) This is rarely a pretty picture as students are discovering and learning about themselves through the invention process. If we want our students to be successful, we are going to have to let them take the seat to discover their own journeys, even if that means having a risk of failure.It all boils down to passion and how much passion our students have in what they are working on. “Having the willingness to go after something and put in the hard work, regardless of the guarantee of success or acceptance of the ideas is part of the process.”

Notice The Stars

“One of the most important discoveries in the Martian Classroom is that ideas are built on other ideas. Ideas become inventions.”
-The Martians in Your Classroom

The stars are unique in their own ways. Some of us marvel at them when the skies are clear and all is calm. And the others, take them for granted; passing by them without a glance. We, as educators, must bring awareness to look at everyday items and be bothered by the normal. It is a mindset that needs to be re-thought as, What else could I use this for? How could I change this to help others? How do we cultivate this atmosphere in our classrooms to impact our students? We model, give opportunities, and time to discover. “Challenge students by giving them assignments that they do not have an answer key, questions that still do not have answers.” Also, we have to tap into the students interests and passions. Every one of our students are stars, unique in their own way; one size doesn’t fit all.

Explore

“Education aims at the boundaries of knowledge, not just the minor improvements.”
-The Martians in Your Classroom

Exploration and Implementation. The vulnerable and scary part of this journey for many educators who may read this book… The What Now? We must believe. Be ready to fail. We must be models of reflection. Have the mindset of process over outcome. We must dedicate our classroom time to discovery and inventions. It is time to blur the boundaries and not teach in seclusion. We must collaborate and reach beyond our four walls to include other educators, the community, and our Professional Learning Network. While you may be completely overwhelmed, just imagine being the first person to think about traveling towards the moon.

I am grateful to Rachael and Stephen for this book as they are spreading the word that being a Martian should be a normal sight in a school. Wouldn’t you like to have a Martian as a teacher? Our future needs us to develop and lead Gen Mars to think beyond, be bothered by the status quo, and know how to find and solve the problems of the ever-changing world.

“Around here, however, we don’t look backwards very long. We keep moving forward, opening new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
-Walt Disney

Get your copy today!

Jamie Chenault is a middle school technology instructor in Kentucky. She is a Google Certified Educator and Trainer, PBS Digital Innovator, and Apple Teacher. She loves spreading inspiration through her blog at jamie-chenault.com. Follow her on twitter @chenault_jamie.

Video Journals to Help Build Powerful Ideas and Reflective Thinking

June 10, 2019

Student storytelling with video — Getty Images

We often hear phrases such as, “student-centered learning” and, “student-directed learning.” Educators often manifest these phrases through the creation of small groups, allowing students to work together, or giving student-choice in projects.

Although these are effective strategies, are they able to create conditions that allow students to build the skills of critical thinking and metacognition? I believe students can best build these skills through storytelling, inquiry, and reflection.

Storytelling with Video

The goal of teaching is to help students discover how they are thinking about a particular concept, their frustrations, any challenges they are facing, and successes they’ve experienced along the way. An effective way of getting students to reflect at this level is through storytelling.

Video Journals

A great way to reflect on a journey is through a video journal, such as one created in WeVideo. A video journal gives students the chance to reflect on their learning about a particular topic, unit, or project.

Video Journals may be new to you and/or your students but are quite easy to use every day in your classroom. Here is how to get started:

Identifying Your Topic

A huge roadblock of journaling is figuring out what you want to talk about. I find that if you have a conversation with your class and guide them through a couple of reflection questions, they will soon have lots of talking points.

Here are a few prompts to help get the conversation started:

When were you on-track with this project? How did you know you were on-track?
During this project, when were you successful? What did that feel/look like?
When were you most engaged/focused on this project? What were you doing? How did that action affect the end result?

Collaborative Inquiry Process

Once your students have completed their reflective video journals, it is easy to bring in the collaborative inquiry process. Have your students share their videos with each other (my suggestions are through Google Drive or a YouTube channel).

Next have your students partner up. Each partner will take turns sharing their video stories. What can prove to be most helpful to each storyteller and listener are the words and phrases that emerge during the storytelling as well as key concepts, themes, and ideas.

As each storyteller shares, the listener records notes, capturing important features of the story being shared. Here are a few prompts you can use to help students identify the concepts, themes and ideas:

What were the most compelling features of the story?
What was the most quotable quote that came out of this storytelling?
What was the most significant moment in the storytelling for you as a listener?

Reflecting and Building

As each student reviews the notes the listener took during the storytelling, students have the chance to pause and personally reflect on what was shared through this process and what stood out to their partner from their video journal.

Whether this opportunity to reflect is done independently or as a group, students are able to use this time to consider how their personal experience can serve as a beginning point for crafting an inquiry question that builds on an aspect of their experience.

Students craft a question, personally, and write it in the center of a sheet of chart paper or online in a collaborative document. Here are some sample questions students could create:

What really matters when solving problems?
What do I want to carry with me in my problem-solving toolkit?
What do I want to change?

Using this question, students are able to discuss the proposed questions, exploring and expanding the possibilities of the inquiry.

Exploring Assumptions, Not Answering Questions

The intent of this activity is not to answer or propose ways to resolve questions, but rather to explore related assumptions and ideas. As students dive deeper into the questions posed, they many want to go back and revise their own question.

Utilize these questions as you and your students continue to solve problems, collaborate and critically evaluate information. These questions can be used as a platform for launching into a new project or to go back and refine a prior activity.

Storytelling for Idea Generation

Storytelling goes much further than just regurgitation of a past experience. If done in a meaningful and thoughtful way it can help students become powerful idea generators and provide a platform for reflective thinking. It also helps to build listening and questioning skills, so that the listeners assimilate these stories with their own experiences, and are able to express a concept or feeling in a new and unique way.

More Strategies to Deepen Learning

If you are looking for more strategies to help your students deepen learning, check out WeVideo Every Day: 40 Strategies to Deepen Learning in Any Class where I share tried and true classroom strategies to help students expand their knowledge and dive deeper into content and 21st century skills.

Dr. Nathan D. Lang-Raad is a speaker, author, and professional learning facilitator. He is the Chief Education Officer at WeVideo. Throughout his career, he has served as a teacher, assistant principal, university adjunct professor, consultant, and education strategist. He was director of elementary curriculum and instruction for Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, as well as education supervisor at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. He speaks at both local and national professional conferences and is the cofounder of Bammy Award-nominated #LeadUpChat, an educational leadership professional learning network (PLN) on Twitter. Nathan is also the cofounder of #divergED, a Twitter chat focused on divergent thinking and innovations in education. He is a Google Certified Educator, Microsoft Innovative Educator, and 2016 Apple Teacher, serves on the board of the Student Voice Foundation, and serves on the International Literacy Association Task Force. Nathan is the author of Everyday Instructional Coaching and co-author of The New Art and Science of Teaching Mathematics with Robert J. Marzano. He has written several blog posts that have been featured on the EdTech K-12, Corwin Connect, Education Week, K-12 Blueprint, and Solution Tree websites. Nathan received a bachelor of arts degree in general science-chemistry from Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas, a master of education degree in administration and supervision from the University of Houston-Victoria, and a doctorate of education degree in learning organizations and strategic change from David Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee. He resides with his husband, Herbie Raad, in Maine. To learn more about Nathan’s work, visit drlangraad.com or follow him on Twitter @drlangraad

HyperDocs in Math

May 17, 2019

As a high school math teacher for 29 years, I have watched my students change so much with how they learn and what they are exposed to in their school years. My students are products of instant feedback and they do not have to wonder about anything because they have Google in their pockets with their cell phones. A few years ago, as I was returning my paper assignment that I had graded, I noticed that my students would not even look at their mistakes. I have completely changed my class such that now my students get immediate feedback six times every single day in my class. Now my students look at their mistakes and learn from them before the assessment is given. I have experimented with many things in the classroom throughout my career and I can honestly say this works and I love it for many reasons. The most important reason is my students. I teach with HyperSlides and have built my slides to be engaging activities that allow students to work at their pace. They are able to complete interactive materials with instant feedback and built in self assessments. This provides students with more ownership of their learning and prevents waiting for a paper to be graded to see if they understand the content. HyperSlides is based on the strategy coined in the HyperDoc Handbook: Intentional Lesson Design Using Google Apps. Learn more about HyperDocs here.

Teacher Time

I start my class off with everyday with Teacher Time. Research shows that a student’s age plus one is the number of minutes you have of their attention before they start drifting from the topic. Therefore, if I teach 15-year-old students that means I have about 16 minutes to ask them to zone in and understand the material. Teacher Time is designed on that fact. I pre-select three to four problems that I teach to my students on a given topic or standard. I stand and deliver those problems in class as part of the teacher time, after completing those problems my students are directed to a Google Form with one problem that is similar to the one that they just watched me complete. The Google Form is branched, meaning that if students get the question right they move on to their Hyper Slides activities that I have prepared. If the student misses the question they are directed to help in the Google Form, which can be a video, or a problem that is worked out and placed in the form as an image. Once they are more comfortable with the question, the students try the problem again. If they are successful, they move forward, if they are not then they are given help as I watch their data live from the Google Form. Without my students having to ask for help, I make my way over and revisit the problem that was missed with individual attention while other students are moving forward.

Drag & Drop

Drag and Drop is one of the ways I allow my students to practice. It is interactive and allows them to practice the way their state assessment will be. In my state of Georgia, there is a Drag & Drop activity on the assessment that my students take. I have made a daily Drag & Drop in Google Slides for them each day as a quick practice and it is so much better than a worksheet. My students like this because they get a chance to Think-Pair-Share their results before turning in their slide deck. I want my students to be able to share and communicate about the math that we are doing in class. The Think-Pair-Share gives them time to collaborate with each other and build working relationships in their class, much like I do with my own job.

There are aspects of of digital Geometry lessons that are my students’ favorites. I do not assign traditional homework; instead I do a work session. The work session is an interactive engagement that provides the students a way to understand and practice their skills they have learned. The work session allows the students to ask for help and to sharpen their skills before their assessments. I use live data in my classroom daily. The live data is generated with Google Forms in a few different ways. I shared the Teacher Time You Try, however, built into each lesson is a Student You Try activity. The Student You Try is a Google Slide in the slide deck that has the pencil icon and my students know that they place their answer in a Google Form, which provides them with immediate feedback on their comprehension of the standard. If they get the problem right they move forward, but if they do not get it right then help is given to them in that Google Form with a branched form that allows my students to see their mistake and to try again.

Self-Assessment

Self-assessment is an important piece of my class and I have my students self-assess twice daily. After completing the slide deck, students fill out the Google Form and the indicator for me to know if they got it, need more help or clearly don’t understand. I also provide a way for them to ask a question about the lesson. I choose to do this before they see their grade on the ticket, so a true value of the assessment is done before they see the grade. At the end of the slide deck, I give my students a self-assessment slide that asks them to decide how they feel about the lesson. I think it is important that they can reflect on these as we progress through the curriculum of my class.

I use Bitmojis in my lessons and allow my students to use them to express how they feel about the lesson. I think for students that grow up with Bitmojis this is a great way for me to connect with them.

Another aspect of my class is my review menus. I realize that not every student needs every example, but some do. I teach to the many and accommodate the few, meaning I offer all kinds of different ways for my students to learn. This is an example of a menu for a summative review that I give my students. The red links are mandatory in my classroom and the other links are options depending on the self-assessments and the ticket grades for the unit. My students like the choices of the review menu, it helps them understand what to study for a summative assessment. My class has a high-stakes test, and showing my students’ study methods for their weaker standards is very important. I make menus according to topics so they can quickly find their materials. I teach using Google Classroom everyday. My students get a slide deck with all the different components and they get direct instruction for the topic of the day, everyday. However, to help with students missing class for different reasons, I post a video of me explaining the problems, and a PDF of the problems worked out in teacher terms so they can easily follow the process.

After years of teaching high school math, I have reflected often about my methods of teaching. Over the last three years I have taken my passion for using Hyper Slides in my classroom and applied it to training teachers. I share the things I have learned with educators around the world. Going digital is not for the sake of making teaching easier, but it does. The purpose was not to keep all things in my classroom organized, but it did. Integrating G-Suite for Education changed the landscape of learning FOR MY STUDENTS.

Lynda Moore has been a teacher for the last 29 years in Georgia, and the last 25 in Burke County at Burke County High School in Waynesboro, GA. She has taught all different levels of high school math. A lover of technology and a lifelong learner she has two children, her 21-year-old son, Trent and her 16-year-old daughter, Addison. She has been working with Google in her classroom for the last four years and training teachers the last three years. Teaching online Google Classes has allowed her to connect with many teachers learning about how to better engage their students. You can connect with Lynda at:
Twitter: @Lyndamoore209
Facebook: KnowMooreMath
Instagram: @KnowMooreMath
Email: [email protected]

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