Classroom Management - 1 Tool & 1 Trick

As May comes to a close, and I officially allow myself to start counting down days until my dreams of relaxing at the beach are squashed with the reality of being a mom to three kids 7 and under, I begin my annual ritual of "next year." Finishing off a particularly challenging few days with some 7th and 8th grade students, I am going to begin my "next year" preparations with class routines and behavior management tweaks and alterations. Thinking that perhaps I am not alone in this springtime consideration I thought I would share a tool I plan to implement in the fall, and a trick that I can't live without in the 1:1 world.

The Tool - Class Dojo

About a year ago I had the pleasure of learning about this great new tool from one of its creators. I was immediately intrigued and started to play. A couple of months later, I watched the tool win the Innovation Challenge Award at NBC's Education Nation summit. At the time I did not have routinely scheduled classes of my own so it was hard to implement. Now, given my rowdy adolescent frustrations, and the great enhancements that have been made to the tool in the past year, I am even more eager to add this to my classroom routine in the fall.

So what is Class Dojo? It is a classroom behavior management tool that allows simple, real-time feedback for students and simple behavior record-keeping for the teacher. The teacher creates a class for each of his/her class and then sets the six positive behaviors and six negative behaviors that he/she finds most critical to the class routine. Once the class is set, tracking becomes a simple two click process.

A recent update has added a mobile website option that allows you to use your mobile device or tablet to track student behavior and effort during class. Additionally, there is now a student login so students and parents can log in and check student progress and effort. 

So why Class Dojo? For me it does three critical things:

1. Creates an efficient an manageable way for me to track student behavior, in a clear and quantifiable way.
2. It is quite concrete for the students. I have also heard from a number of Dojo-lovers that it saves immense classroom time because students are given direct, real-time feedback without frequent class interruptions. It is also reported that students will strive for the points! 
3. If I use this as well as I hope, sitting at progress report time and at the end of term will be a far less stressful process. Now I will be able to reflect with actual data, data that, for me, is nearly impossible to collect during the course of the class without a system like this. 

A Trick - Revision History

There is a simple fact that I have come to grips with in running a 1:1 classroom...students are going to get distracted. I have come to realize, rather begrudgingly when I started in a 1:1 classroom several years ago,  that I could either allow it frustrate me incessantly or I could manage it. I have chosen manage. To keep kids on track I use to tools that allow me to monitor their progress in a not quite "big brother" way. Google Docs is great for this. I have the students share their collaborative documents with me so that I can check in periodically throughout a period. Obviously if I walk over to them they will quickly switch tabs or swipe to another application, so the shared document gives me a small window. Recently I have been using one of my favorite Gdocs features...the "revision history" option! Not only can I see what individual students have actually contributed, but I can also see which students have been carrying on personal and off-topic convos during class, even if they erase it.  I have yet to find anything really read worthy, but I did have fun printing off a few examples and adding some notes before I handed it back to the students. 

"Printing" Web Pages

How often have you wanted to use a website for class or to share a web article with a parent or colleague and hesitate because too much "stuff" is splayed all over the page? Well, hesitate no more. There are several tools that help with this, but my two favorite are Print What You Like and Joliprint.

Print What You Like is a web tool that allows you select what you want to print, and eliminate the unwanted content on a page. Simply go to the link, enter the URL of the page you want to modify, select what you want to print and remove what you don't - what you select will highlight in yellow (see picture below), you can either isolate what you select and print that, or you can delete everything you don't want and print what is remaining. You choose whatever content on the page you would like to print!  Once the content you want to print/share is all that is left, you can either print the page or save it as a pdf using the option box on the left.

Joliprint is a little bit different. In Joliprint you enter the URL and Joliprint automatically converts the content of the page into a magazine-like pdf. You have multiple choices to how you want to store and/or share the creation (see below).  The "copy the link" option makes it very easy to share the creations on a web page or a blog. Click here to see a link to a joliprint pdf I just created from this article on Wired Magazine: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/api-copyright/. Joliprint also allows you to create a free account and store the documents you create on the account.

• For those of you that use bookmarklets, there is a Print What You Like bookmarklet and a Joliprint bookmarklet that you can add to your bookmarks toolbar. There is also a bookmarklet for Safari on the iPad.

So which one do I prefer? Well the ease of use of Joliprint is amazing and the magazine-like pages are appealing, but sometimes that isn't what I want. Sometimes I just want a small piece of a page, and sometimes I just want it to be a linear block of text, not a magazine. Print What You Like can be a little frustrating in the beginning when you are learning to delete unwanted content or isolating what you do want. Once you play for a bit, it becomes fairly easy. So my answer, as usual, is that my preference comes down to what I am looking to do with the tool. Once I have decided that, I decide which of the two tools to use.

Have fun, and if you have any questions, just let me know!

Streamline Time and Have Some Fun

 Streamline Time and Have Some Fun!

As teachers we are constantly busy and moving from project to project and lesson to lesson. I am always looking for new tools that not only enrich my lessons and projects but also make them interesting and streamlined. One tool that I have found to be very helpful and fun is Pinterest. Pinterest is a social networking site where you can organize and share things you like, in other words, an online pinboard. I have used Pinterest to create book lists for classes. The benefit of creating the list through Pinterest is the visual component where students can see the book covers. Students and teachers can write a summary about the book and others can comment to give their opinion so it becomes interactive for participants.

An assistant superintendent in Rhode Island recommended LessonWriter to me. The state is piloting Lesson Writer for all it’s schools. Teachers choose content from any digital source, and copy and paste it into Lesson Writer. Lesson Writer will then create vocabulary and lesson plans etc using Bloom’s prompts. Using Lesson Writer, a teacher can: “make lessons with twice as many words, differentiate instruction and include Common Core Standards". There is a great demo on how to use it on their website.

Learn by watching? Check out MacReach & MacMost

 
Sometimes I like to pretend that I have some real innate technology skill or some gathered expertise, but the truth is, I am just fairly skilled at finding answers, playing and practice. The last computer class I took was in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1995 during which I learned how to create a database using FileMaker Pro and do some desktop publishing with a VERY old version of Microsoft Office. Not really helping me out so much these days! So where do I find the latest tricks, or go to to find how to make some of these applications work?  Well my tips for this week is to check out two great podcast series: MacReach (Part of EdReach) and MacMost. Both series offer fantastic video tutorials on topics ranging from backing up information to creating podcasts using Garageband.  The video tutorials can be watched directly on the websites, found on youtube, or in iTunes. I subscribe to both in iTunes so that they are ready and waiting for me when I get a minute to learn. Enjoy!

Socrative & Poll Everywhere

Leveraging technology does not always need to be about making things "cooler" or "more engaging" for students. Its really okay if a technology just makes a teacher's life easier, and/or makes the classroom run just a little bit smoother. And SOMETIMES, technology can do both. With that in mind, here are two great tools...SOCRATIVE and POLL EVERYWHERE.  Both are free for education and have the power to change the flow of your classroom, engage your students, create a quick assessment tool, and make teachers happy.

So what are these tools?  It depends on how you choose to use them!

• Both can function as tools to create quizzes and be quick response or "clicker" systems in your classrooms.
• Both can be create anonymous polling mechanisms or can require students/teachers to enter their names.
• Both can be accessed via smartphone or through the internet. Socrative has an app available for mobile devices...don't need a device for every student...kids can work in pairs/small groups.
• Both have multiple options for question type...true/false, multiple choice, open response, etc.

Examples for use:

• Just finished reading a passage from a novel and want to do a quick check-in with kids regarding their understanding of what you read...create a quick quiz and have the kids quickly respond.
• Students a little shaky on some basic math facts or struggling with spelling or definitions of unit vocabulary...have students do a quick response
• Have a 1:1 classroom and think kids might be off-task...use a quick open response question to pull them back in to the discussion.
• Take a quick temperature of the room without making kids raise their hands.

Admission:

I should admit that I prefer Socrative. It is designed for classroom use (PollEverywhere is not academic specific), and I love I have an assigned room number.  My students know how to get there, and can do it quickly, which enables me to get to preplanned activities with ease, or to throw a question at them spontaneously because the direction a lesson took dictated the need. 

A few video tutorials:

Some additional reading material:

Cell Phones as Classroom Tools by Greg Kulowiec

FreeTech4Teachers Review of Socrative

FreeTech4Teachers discusses an update to PollEverywhere