6-12 EdTech Coach Weekly Update (Week of 1/24/20)

Announcements

This week on walkabout, I continued to observe science classes about both El Monte and Orosi High School. I witnessed some great instruction by our science teachers and saw some cool collaborative activities. With vocabulary being a hurdle in science, my feedback centered on the Fast and Curious Eduprotocol. I will be doing some demonstration and observation lessons of this Eduprotocol next week at both El Monte and Orosi High School for those interested in seeing it live.

On the Fast and Curious front, I am extremely proud of Mr. Rominger and Mr. Wendell, 8th grade math, who have been implementing Fast and Curious as the co-teach. I was pleased with what I saw and left some feedback when they invited me to observe their Fast and Curious lesson.

Six of the 10 Google Certified Innovators who presented at Tech Rodeo

Last weekend, I had the privilege of attending the 4th Annual TCOE Tech Rodeo. This year's event was at the Porterville Military Academy. Besides myself, 3 other COJUSD teachers attended and were inspired by the Fireside-themed keynote done by Eduprotocols author Jon Corippo and Booknsaps inventor Tara Martin. Click here to watch the keynote.

Hanging with and learning from Jon Corippo

At Tech Rodeo, I presented two sessions, Ditch That Copier and Ditch That Copier: The Versatile World of Sketchnoting. In both sessions, I demonstrated ways to use edtech to improve your teacher workflow and efficiency to create more time to plan more empowering learning experiences for students. The goal isn't to be paperless, but to be more efficient.

After two weeks of visiting science classes at El Monte and Orosi High School, I will begin visiting English Language Arts classes next week. My purpose is to observe, learn and leave feedback. I am not evaluating or "looking for tech". Any feedback will focus student engagement and support of English learners.

Teacher Workflow Tip

Exit tickets are a great instructional strategy. A pain point with exit tickets is collecting them, reviewing them, reading the bad hand writing and spelling, and analyzing them. A few simple ways to do exit tickets quicker and more efficiently using edtech include Thin Slides, Google Classroom Question function and Booksnaps.

Thin Slides is an Eduprotocol that can be done in less than 10 minutes. Create a collaborative slidedeck in Google Slides. Make sure to give edit permission to anyone with a link. Create one slide for each student and assign it to them. Be sure to have them stay on their slide. The link to the slidedeck is distributed to students via Google Classroom. Once kids access it, give them 3 minutes to build their slide. They will add ONE picture and ONE word only about the day's topic. When three minutes are up, kids close Chromebooks and stand. Teacher projects the slides, and when a student's slide appears, they have 5 seconds to elaborate and explain their understanding. Students sit when done presenting their slides. The idea is their ONE word and ONE picture will remind them of what they want to say. As kids do their "micro presentations" you can gauge their understanding and see trends. This supports the district graduate outcome of becoming a powerful communicator. This all can easily be accomplished in less than 10 minutes as an exit ticket.

The Google Classroom Question function is very useful as an exit ticket. In the Classwork tab of Google Classroom, click Create. In the dropdown, click Question. Type in your prompt. You can set it for kids to respond to each other if you feel the need. This function plays out much like an online message board students will encounter when taking online college courses. This could be done easily as an exit ticket during the last 5 minutes of class. You could dismiss students or direct them to clean up as their responses appear. Google Classroom will organize each student's response for your for analysis. Click here to see a video for the setup of Google Classroom question function.

Booksnaps is a great way to get students to identify textual evidence, rationalize their thinking and  support claims. Booksnaps can also be an effective exit ticket. Start by creating a template slidedeck in Google Slides. For exit tickets, 1-2 slides maximum, each with a image of text, prompt and text box for students to write rationales. Distribute via Google Classroom making a copy for each student. Students open their copy, look at the prompt, use scribble tool to circle evidence on the text image, explain why they chose the evidence in text box and add an image or emoji to support what they circled and wrote. This can be done easily in 5-7 minutes at the end of class. You could give kids permission to pack up once you see they've turned in their Booksnap(s). Click here to see a video about how to set up Booksnaps.

Support English Learners with EdTech

Earlier, I explained how Thin Slides can be used as an exit ticket. Thin Slides are also a simple, yet effective way of supporting English learners. The beauty of Thin Slides is that there is nothing complicated or fancy about it. Anyone can do it confidently.

In many of our ELD trainings, Mrs. Lety Trevino talked about the importance of using the 4 C's (communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity) to help support English learners. Thin Slides can help address some of the 4 C's, the communication and creativity parts especially. The idea is to get kids speaking about content frequently. For English learners, they're given the opportunity to speak in a manner that isn't very scary. Five seconds isn't too daunting. In addition, they will hear content presented by their peers in English multiple times. The repetition is beneficial to all learners. In Thin Slides, not one student is singled out. All kids present.

For more information on anything in this blog post, please contact me via email or Google Hangouts  at ajuarez@cojusd.org. Text me at 559-355-4593. Learn more tips from me and extensive Professional Learning Network (PLN) by following #cvtechtalk on Twitter and or joining the CVTechTalk Facebook group.