Smart Parking Logs for Frequently Used BYOD Sites

As districts embrace BYOD, a policy that encourages students to bring their own devices to school, teachers need some good ideas for ways to incorporate web 2.0 tools in small, but useful ways. In my experience, BYOD can be very effective both for student engagement as well as making student gains. Sometimes there are so many resources that it can be difficult to keep track of them all.

Enter the Frequently Used BYOD Site place-mat. The place-mat is a simply designed paper that has four of my most frequently used places: Edmodo, GoSoapBox and Padlet. I have created two Padlet sites for each of my classes. One is for bright ideas and the second is for academic questions (the parking log). Having these resources encourages students to be creative and to ask questions while at the same time allowing me to table those questions for later if I need to. 

Edmodo and GoSoapBox are both used for polls, exit tickets, and class discussions. Both tools allow me to track student progress and I can use the data collected to inform my instructional methods. 

I print these place-mats on bright, colored paper and place the strategically  around the classroom so that students can easily scan the QR code for the needed site. Of course, it is important to teach students when and how you would like them to make use of these resources and then model the process a few times. I have a poster that my district provided that has three BYOD zones (red, yellow, and green) that helps me indicate to students when they are and aren't allowed to use their devices. 

Sample QR Code Placemat

What are your favorite BYOD, Web 2.0 tools to use in the classroom?

Using Student Learning Logs

In middle school it can be a challenge to help students learn to keep papers organized. As with everything else, students come to our classes with varying levels of readiness and organizational skills. I have learned that sometimes keeping things simple in the classroom helps to keep students organized and helps them learn to take responsibility for their make-up work and reduces the amount of missing work. Learning logs, interactive student notebooks, whatever you choose to call them, helped keep my students organized and helped me to feel in control of the dreaded paper-pile-monster that most language arts teachers know well.

Here is the way that I use learning logs in the classroom:

1. Students use logs daily, it is a part of a routine
2. Useful information goes into the learning log
3. The learning log is assessed regularly with a clear rubric, however the task is less onerous for the teacher, because assignments are spot checked. 
4. Students know where to get the learning log for the day if they are absent. This helps them to keep organized and builds responsibility. 

By following these four simple criteria, you can make learning logs work efficiently and effectively in your classroom. 

My student's learning logs consists of a sturdy spiral notebook. Students are required to come to class with this notebook daily and they understand that it is the primary tool that they will use to record their learning. Each day, as a start-up, students are required to copy the following into their learning log:

• Learning Goal
• Essential Question
• Word of the Day
• Reading Minute
• Agenda

If the learning goal and essential question are the same for a few days, I do let students write "continued" in these fields. I don't want the task to be overly taxing. I have found that this approach helps students take ownership of their learning logs--they see this piece as a useful tool. The word of the day is a "big-time bonus word" that I select. Big-time bonus words are a part of our word wall and are reviewed daily as a summary activity. This is a very powerful vocabulary strategy that helps students own the words. Students are required to write a short, in their own words definition of the word of the day after we review and discuss its meaning. I will usually show students a picture that relates to the word's meaning and then share the definition via Vocabulary.com and go over a few example sentences. Students only write a definition, which keeps things simple. 

Next, students write a one sentence summary of the day's reading minute. If you are not familiar with the reading minute strategy, I highly recommend you follow the link to read more about it. I have found it to be a very powerful tool in the classroom. After the first month of school, I have given students control of the reading minute. Each student is assigned a day, and on their assigned day, read a carefully selected, short excerpt. Students then write a one sentence summary in their learning logs. Hint- I still keep Mondays to deliver the reading minute myself, this way I have some room in the schedule if kids are absent and I am still modeling the process. I provide students with a rubric and model daily within the first month, to help ensure that student selections are valuable. Our goal is to look at powerful language and I have been very impressed by the passages that students have selected. 

The next item that students write in their leaning logs is the agenda in brief. I have this posted daily, and I feel that it is helpful for students to have a record of this. It helps them to remember important assignments as well as empowers them to be good citizens in the classroom, helping peers who may have missed a day. 

This start-up is something that I do in a simple PowerPoint template and the whole process of logging and then reviewing takes 10 minutes. I teach for a 90 minute daily block, so I find this routine to be very efficient and valuable for students. I upload the daily PowerPoint to our class Edmodo page in a folder called "Learning Logs" so that students can easily make up work if they are absent. Since the agenda is on the log, they can easily see what they missed--no more "Miss, did we do anything in class yesterday" when kiddos return from an absence. 

After the daily start-up, students use the learning log to take notes on mini-lessons, tape foldables, record work done in literacy centers, and respond to questions at the end of a text. By keeping all of these materials in one place, students are able to keep themselves organized. 

I will be sure to upload some sample rubrics in my next post and discuss ways to work smarter not harder when it comes to formative assessment.

Have you used learning logs or interactive notebooks in the classroom? What are some of the efficiencies that you have created? How have these systems helped your students?

Using Shelfari and Good Reads to Promote Reading in the Middle School Classroom

In my blog post on the use of reading workshop, I discussed Nancie Atwell's list of common lessons that teachers demonstrate about reading. In an effort to avoid demonstrating these misconceptions about reading to my students I have been working to make independent reading a part of our agenda regularly. When we do SSR, I demonstrate my love for reading by having a book of my own that I am reading. If it is a book that I think students will be interested in, I give a short book talk after SSR and invite students to talk about what they are reading as well.  

In addition, I have been exploring ways to use web 2.0 tools to make effective reader's workshops a reality. One of the primary challenges that I have faced in implementing the reader's workshop is my own lack of experience with great adolescent literature. Most of my experience with literature has been with early modern, modern, and post modern adult canonical fiction. As new a middle school teacher, I have been working on building my library and knowledge of quality literature that my students will find accessible. 

I have used Shelfari, the online bookshelf to catalog some of the adolescent fiction that I am interested in reading before I add it to my library. One of the things that I would like to do, but can't using Shelfari is to organize books that I have and would like to read by purpose: professional teaching, personal, and adolescent literature. 

Shelfari would be great as a tool in the classroom because it does allow you to create goals for reading and keep track of the books you have read, and write reviews about them. I would love to have my students use this tool next year in their reader's workshop as a part of their reading portfolios. Both Jim Burke and Nancie Atwell talk about the importance of reading logs and reading portfolios. This tool would enable students to easily track the books that they have read in the course of the school year. It would also help me to monitor their reading and reading goals. 

I also explored Goodreads, which is very much like Shelfari. I didn't like its dependence on Facebook and what Facebook friends are reading for my own purposes, but would share this with my students because they might like that feature. 

Digital Story Telling: Creating Animated Shorts in the Writing Classroom

As a final project for a unit of study on short stories, I have created a lesson in which students will write their own short story and create an animated short story. During this unit, students read a variety of short stories and excerpts from novels. To read some of the story starter prompts that students used to generate ideas for their short story project, check out these Prezi presentations:

"He Said, She Said" for the novel excerpt Flipped

Picturing Green Gables, a lesson on describing setting

For the animated short film, I considered using the following web 2.0 tools

GoAnimate

GoAnimate offers less control in terms of characters and design. In addition, it is a bit less expensive, but only offers yearly subscriptions. For my classroom purposes, I would have to buy a 1 year subscription for $99 to allow my 36 sixth grade students to have access and a secure environment where individual students would not need to sign up with personal information.   

Xtranormal

Using Xtranormal, I was able to create a secure environment using an upgraded package. While the cost is up there, about $36 per month to give my 36 sixth graders access, it allows students to create usernames and passwords without having to provide any personal information about themselves.  In order to have each student sign up for an individual free account, they would have to provide the site with some personal information.  

Ultimately, I chose to use Xtranormal for my students because the platform allowed for more control over the look and sound of their animated film. In addition, I was able to spend less given that we would only be keeping the project for about a month. 

(At left, students using laptops in the classroom to create short scenes of dialogue from their short stories using Xtranormal.)

Based on student comments, they enjoyed creating their animated shorts even more than they enjoyed working with StoryBird. I enjoyed spending time working on mini-lessons on craft before each writers workshop in which they were given time to write, time that they could plan on daily, in order to develop their short stories.  

Creating Student Reading Portfolios

Teachers  know that student portfolios can be very powerful classroom assessment tools. They are also useful in helping students keep a record of their learning. I decided to apply this knowledge and worked to help students develop reading portfolios. Student reading portfolios are great for reflecting on learning throughout the year. Often young students have difficulty remembering what they have read throughout the year. Student reading portfolios help keep students engaged in reading because they get to show off how much they have read. It helps quantify independent reading by producing a tangible product.

Procedures that I followed in teaching students how to create a reading portfolio page:

1. After students finish each novel, they create an annotated bibliography using Easybib.com. This tool is free and easy to use. Students can type the title of a book, then select the correct one from a list, and the site completes all of the bibliographic information in MLA format.
2. Students add annotations to each book, in the form of a short summary and or review.
3. Students may add a short book trailer for favorite books using Animoto,
4. Portfolios are produced using Carbonmade, Prezi, or Glogster. 

The assignment information is also presented in the form of a Glog that I created.

Story Bird to Engage Reluctant Writers

StoryBird is a great tool for getting students excited about writing their own creative short stories. Many of the students that I teach are very creative, but are not necessarily extrinsically motivated to write. However, when given the opportunity to create a product that is aesthetically appealing and feels like a professional, published piece, my students wrote more! Some even created additional stories that went beyond the assigned writing.


Within this unit I have asked my sixth grade students to respond to a variety of quick writes. The goal of these prompts is to teach that writing is a recursive process and as such the prompts need to be revisited, giving students the opportunity to add on, revise, edit, and publish. This is where StoryBird comes in and serves as a way to get students excited about the recursive nature of the writing process.


The first StoryBird that my students created was a response to Sandra Cisneros' short story "Eleven". After reading the story, students responded in their notebooks by adding a scene of their own to Cisneros' story. The scene could be a piece of dialogue in which the student imagined what Rachel might say if she had confronted her teacher after the incident with the red sweater, or some other addition of their own to the original story.


During the next class session, I was able to procure 10 laptops for students to use. Students were paired up to create a collaborative StoryBird based on the "scenes" that they created in their notebooks during the previous lesson.


Here is the procedure I followed for the first session with StoryBird:



I paired up students, and I showed students how to log on to StoryBird with the individual usernames and passwords that I created with my teacher account. (The teacher account is very useful because it allows you to create a space for students to work with great web 2.0 tools, while also protecting students privacy.)

I explained that today, they would explore and "play with" a tool that they would use to create their own storybooks from writings that they create in class. I showed students the basic features of the tool and shared a sample StoryBird that I had created. 

Next, students were given their assignment, and showed how to access it. They were given time to work collaboratively, combining their drafts to create one story based on the prompt. Students were told to find pictures that support their story as best as possible, knowing that they would not always be able to find the perfect picture to fit their original story. 

When I wasn't conferencing with student groups, I worked on creating my StroyBird on the projector, modeling the process, and getting into the trenches with them. 

In all, the first session with StoryBird was very effective. Students really liked creating their own stories and were very engaged in the process. It was very helpful to have students work with partners during this day of experimentation because this enabled students with strong technology skills to help those with less technology experience.



(Above: Shows cover and one page example from teacher sample. The selected artwork in the sample is a good opportunity to discuss how to choose themes for their storybook. Not all artwork will fit perfectly with their story ideas, yet artwork can still enhance the story.)



(Above: Shows teacher view including list of assignments that have been created and a class library of published storybirds. Also included but not displayed, class roster with student names and link to individual assignments.)

Mini-Lessons in Short Story Writing

After reading about Nancie Atwell's use of mini lessons in the writing workshop, I decided to begin to apply some of the elements of the writer's workshop model in my classroom, and it has been working very effectively. 

Middle school students typically enjoy writing short stories, but, they often have difficulty in developing round characters and creating a plot that is believable with a "so what" factor. While students have read and looked at models of short stories, they seemed to have difficulty applying elements of short story writing to their own writing. One of the reasons, is that when they  analyzed model short stories before they began to write their own short story, they were looking at the stories through the lens of a reader. Using targeted mini-lessons on craft in conjunction with a read aloud model, students are better able to apply what they are learning to their own writing. 

In my new writer's workshop, students have a folder that contains materials for their short story. This includes model texts that we discuss, handouts and notes from mini-lessons, and their writing.

Some of the texts that I have used to discuss characterization include: 

• Langston Hughes' "Thank You Ma'm"
• Sandra Cisneros' " Eleven" and an excerpt from The House on Mango Street
• A fable called "The Moth and the Star"

Each text is short enough to have a read aloud followed by a discusssion of the writer's creaft. So far, we have been working on developing round characters and these texts have worked well for discussion of how writers develop characters thoughts and feeling.

Atwell has a few mini-lessons in her book Lessons That Change Writers that inspired some of the mini-lessons that I have done in this unit. In particular, Atwell has students get to know their characters well with a "Main Character Questionnaire". Some of the questions include:

• What is your name?
• How old are you?
• What do you care about?
•  What do you fear?
• What are your dreams?
• What's the problem you are facing?
• How will you change through confronting your problems?

(Atwell, 109).

These questions worked really well in helping students to visualize their character as a real person. In addition  it get them thinking about some of the hallmarks of well developed characters, namely change and conflict.