My Year of Looking Through the Lens of Technology (Guest Post - Erin Thomas)

This is in a series of posts by teachers in the TUSD Connect Fellowship for the 2016-2017 school year. I hope you enjoy reading their reflections on the impact of technology in their classroom, specific tools and strategies that have made a positive impact on teaching and learning, and their goals moving forward.

As I reflect back over the past ten months, I would have to say that being a part of the TUSD Connect Fellowship has been one of my favorite things about this school year. It isn’t just that technology has reinvigorated my teaching  practice and made the content more engaging for my students, which it has, but rather it is what I have gained through the process of having an instructional coach. In September, when I began this process, my expectations were simple:

I will know the fellowship has been successful if feel more confident about integrating technology and if my students are ready for what’s next because of what they've done this year.

Oh, how far we have come. I have to say “we” because I truly believe that it was having the opportunity to have purposeful, one-on-one coaching that has made this such a transformative process. If someone had asked me last year what tech I consistently used in my classroom, I would have replied “Powerpoint, books, pens, and highlighters. Those are all technically tech, right?” My greatest fear with infusing technology into my curriculum was that it would cause my students to become disconnected from each other and from me. I had horrifying visions of a sea of forty heads all zoned into computer screens searching for answers on Google, rather than thinking aloud and arriving at conclusions with another human being. Perhaps I had been reading too much dystopian literature, but I worried that technology would somehow suck the life out of the content and the process of learning--I couldn’t have been more wrong.

How Technology has Helped my Students Stay Connected

Despite my many fears, this year has taught me that tech can enrich student discussions. Two of the new discussion activities I created this year that I am most proud of are a Four Corners Discussion, which focuses on how to move online discussions into classroom discussions, and a Six Person Panel Discussion, which focuses on using technology to increase student independence and talk-time. My belief that the increased use of technology in my classroom would cause a decrease in their When I polled my students, both of these discussions were ranked as their favorites for the year.

How Technology has Encouraged my Students to Become Lifelong Learners

I am always searching for ways to encourage my students to “wonder” while learning. As I mentioned earlier, one of my main concerns with technology is that it would students to search for answers online, rather than actually engaging in the critical thinking required to arrive at their own conclusions. My Adobe Spark Blog is about a three-part project using the video slide show technology to encourage students to explore essential questions over a lengthy unit of study.

How Technology has Inspired Creativity in Me and My Students

One of my biggest revelations about technology in the classroom is that it won’t drain humanity out of my curriculum. The projects I have designed this year that make me proudest are the ones which reflect both how technology has inspired my creativity, and my student’s. My Student Podcast Blog on students podcasts is a perfect example of how technology can be used to make a richer learning experience.

Participating in this tech fellowship, and working with an instructional coach, has been the best thing I could have done for my teaching practice. As I look forward to the next school year, my main goal is to build on what I have created this year. While I have specific ideas about new ways to use technology (hello, Google Sites), what I am most focused on as a professional is continuing the cycle of reflection that has been established by my coach this year. I never thought that I would grow as much as I did, and I certainly never thought that I would be as excited about what technology can bring to the classroom as I am.

This year has been a journey for both me and my students. As I have grown, they have grown, and I am looking forward to what is to come next year.

Happy Summer!

Erin Thomas has been teaching English Language Arts in Tustin Unified School District since 2005. She received her B.A. in English, teaching credential, and Master's in Education from Concordia University, Irvine. Erin grew-up in a house filled with books, in fact every room contained its own bookcase, which instilled her a life-long passion for reading and a love language. As a teacher, Erin hopes to foster that same love of literature in her students by giving them opportunities to read deeply and often, and by encouraging them to share their understanding of what literature reveals about the human spirit.

Getting Detailed with Tech (Guest Post)

This is in a series of posts by teachers in the TUSD Connect Fellowship for the 2016-2017 school year. I hope you enjoy reading their reflections on the impact of technology in their classroom, specific tools and strategies that have made a positive impact on teaching and learning, and their goals moving forward.

I see technology as a tool to enhance the skills necessary to tackle an English course, rather than a new skill to be taught. I often ask, “What technology enhances the skills I am already teaching?”. As a fellow, I was able to explore a wide variety of tech tools that help build writing skills. Most of the technology that I’ve grown to appreciate and value were tools that helped my students understand the key components in an essay. One such example is Verso. Verso allowed me to hone in on skills, such as introducing evidence, writing topic sentences, and developing analysis. In addition, the feedback was quick. Categorizing student’s answers by grade level allows students to see how they would be graded, what quality of work they were producing before they actually earned a grade. This form of formative assessment gave students the space to ask questions about their writing, which fostered more individualized conversations about their writing. In addition, the anonymity provided students with a wide variety of examples. This fostered good conversations about writing quality. As a result of several Verso activities, students asked questions and evaluated their own writing in a way I was not able to see before.

The second tool I found beneficial in the classroom was EdPuzzle. I used EdPuzzle in a variety of ways: reading assignments, writing scaffolding, mini lessons. I found the most success using it as a reading tool. I uploaded the audiobook of Romeo and Juliet (scene by scene) and then inserted my reading check questions in the video. I found this useful for both my strong students and struggling students. The strong students were then able to move onto analysis during class discussion. The struggling students were given a scaffold and important parts to focus on while reading. Students the next day were able to focus on analysis and close reading, as opposed to plot-based questions. In addition, EdPuzzle kept my CP students accountable for reading, which is a common struggle.   As the teacher, I could go into EdPuzzle and look at student responses to the questions and open up class discussion with questions students struggled to answer. I was more clearly able to see which areas of the text my students needed to discuss.

My goals for next year are to improve class discussion. I want to foster a stronger sense of community in the class so students feel safer to discuss their ideas without judgement. In addition, I want to provide stronger annotation/close reading instruction. I hypothesize that if students feel confident about their reading skills they will more likely discuss their ideas in class and in front of others.

The technology that I used this year helped me scaffold writing structure, but next year I’d like to focus on refining students understanding English Language Conventions. I hope to use EdPuzzle in order to create interactive lessons featuring important grammar concepts.

The number one benefit of the Tech Fellowship was the reflecting I did. I felt that I had to think more critically about what strategies I was using in the classroom and if those strategies were really meeting my goals. The fellowship forced me to change some of my teaching practices because I was recognizing some students’ needs were not being met. On the other hand, it also helped me stay confident in some of my current teaching practices.

Transitioning from Teacher-Based to Teacher-Facilitated Learning with Technology (Guest Post - Ken Cooper)

This is in a series of posts by teachers in the TUSD Connect Fellowship for the 2016-2017 school year.  I hope you enjoy reading their reflections on the impact of technology in their classroom, specific tools and strategies that have made a positive impact on teaching and learning, and their goals moving forward.

For me this year technology has impacted my classroom by making me more efficient and taken off the load of having to be the source of information transfer to the students.  Technology has also improved quality of learning as well as the teaching process itself, making it easier to check understanding of ideas and concepts that were once too difficult to check in the traditional manner (verbally or with quizzes).

In the past, my use of technology had been limited to using Haiku as a discussion board and an avenue to take auto-graded multiple choice tests.  I had briefly dabbled in Google Classroom, but underutilized the potential it had.  By becoming involved with the Tech Fellowship, I have gained the confidence to try new tools that I would in all likelihood never have sought out and tried on my own. If it had not been for the Tech Fellowship, I feel the students in my class would have not have been exposed to the same learning environment.  I am truly glad that I took the chance to enter into this program.

Technology has put the learning into the hands of the students in the form of sites beyond that of the old standards of Google and Wikipedia.  Now students have immediate access to tools such as GoFormative, Quizizz, and Edpuzzle (click the links for sample lessons / assignments used).  These tools allow students to gain knowledge either on their own or through collaborative learning - providing students of different learning styles and preferences access to the material. In addition, I have used Haiku discussions in class allowing all students the ability to enter into a class discussion regardless of their public speaking comfort level. Lastly, Google Forms is an easy way to collect data from students on how they perceive the value and effectiveness of a lesson or concept, especially a new way of introducing a topic.

One specific lesson I'd like to share revolves around a hyperdoc my coach and I created about the most important Supreme Court cases that Earl Warren had a part in deciding. The hyperdoc walks you through the 5 tasks that students engaged in over the course of 3 class days.

The goal of this assignment was to expose the students to historic Supreme Court cases that have an impact on our lives as a whole, both through rights of the accused as well as free speech issues.  Students know of their rights but assume that these rights, lawyer, remaining silent, evidence obtained from illegal searches being inadmissible have always been the case.   

By organizing the assignment this way, students understand the time frame in which so many iconic Supreme Court decisions were rendered.  They are amazed that these rights they take for granted were argued and decided less than 60 years ago.
Resources:

• Blank Hyperdoc (embedded below)
• Hyperdoc - Student Sample 1, Student Sample 2
• Presentation - Student Sample 1, Student Sample 2

Looking Forward...

Next year I would like to start to emphasize and use hyperdocs more to create more long term assignments of more than just a day or two allowing deeper understanding of the impact both short and long term in the material covered in CP US History. I've already started to work on one with my coach about US Foreign Policy over time. It is still a work in progress (I'm prepping it for next year), but you can check out what I have so far here.

Looking Back

I cannot begin to state how effective this fellowship has been on my teaching.  I went from someone who would not use certain lessons that fellow teachers would use because I was unfamiliar with technology or a techno-phobe.  I was leary of using technology solely for the sake of using technology.  Students having their computers in class has gone from once or twice  a week, to nearly daily, such as having a pencil and paper.  The fact that I was willing to try technology to help my students to engage in their learning by the use of technology helped me to get over the fear of the use of technology for things other than attendance and grades. It also help me to see that the things that worked best in my classroom and worked best for my students were usually technology-based.

Ken Cooper is a US History teacher at Beckman High School as well as the ASB Director for the school. He enjoys teaching and the interactions both inside and outside of the classroom. Before coming to teach in Tustin Unified in 1996, he student taught at Troy High School in Fullerton and worked in Orange Unified.

Thinking About Thinking: Google Forms as a Metacognitive Tool by Tracey Kent

This is in a series of posts by teachers in the TUSD Connect Fellowship for the 2016-2017 school year. I hope you enjoy reading their reflections on the impact of technology in their classroom, specific tools and strategies that have made a positive impact on teaching and learning, and their goals moving forward.

One of the most valuable parts of my two-year experience as a TUSD Connect Fellow has been the focus placed on reflection. During each meeting, my digital learning coach and I reflect on just about everything related to my classroom: student learning, lesson objectives, tech tools, instructional practices. All of this reflection has inspired the use of one of the most impactful tech tools in my teaching arsenal: the Google form.

Google forms have made a significant impact on guiding the instructional practices in my classroom. For most new activities, I request that my students fill out a Google form afterward in order to give me feedback on how effective the lesson’s components were, how much the design of the activity influenced their learning, and how much engagement the activity generated. For example, for our study of the The Great Gatsby, I decided to use Desmos (yes, this is still the post of an English teacher) to facilitate a discussion on symbolism. In small groups, students were given elements from Chapter 5 of the novel to discuss. They were asked to determine if the element was a “symbol” or “not a symbol” and to provide textual evidence with the rationale of their classification. Each group had a student recorder who typed responses for the group into Desmos (I wanted to ensure that the focus was on discussion, rather than each student clicking away silently and independently on their own device). After the class discussion activity, students were asked to complete a short Google form for homework, giving me feedback on how the activity went in their opinion. I find this type of feedback to be invaluable when designing activities to facilitate learning. This activity is only one example of the many types of follow-up forms that I ask students to complete. I have found that these forms help to tailor my instruction to my students’ specific needs.

Students also experience the metacognitive benefits of Google forms. They take greater ownership over their thinking by reflecting on the relative success of a learning experience. They consider what aided their learning, what hindered it, and what was negligible in impact. Forms empower students to think about thinking. Students are also able to rate their own performance and the performances of others in collaborative work. For a major group project, my students were scored on their “professional collaboration.” They were asked to fill out a Google form, rating each group member’s preparation, collaboration, and performance for their project. I received these scores on the corresponding response Sheet, and I averaged students’ evaluations of their peers’ contributions in order to determine their grade. Students rated themselves as well so that their self-evaluation was fairly included in the average score. Google forms also allow students to reflect on the writing process. As part of an essay revision workshop, students volunteered to peer tutor for extra credit. After they completed the tutoring session, they were asked to reflect on the challenges and benefits of peer tutoring and to consider how the process affected their own thoughts about writing. Assignments like these make manifest a student’s thoughts and capture a critical part of the learning process.

Teaching and learning alike are stimulated and refined through reflection. Having an awareness and understanding of one’s thought processes is an important component of any educational endeavor. Students and teachers can benefit from metacognition, and the subsequent reflection it engenders, and the use of technology like Google forms helps to elicit and capture these helpful thoughts.

Tracey Kent has been teaching English at Arnold O. Beckman High School for the past ten years. A lover of learning and literature, Tracey received a Bachelor's degree in English, a single-subject teaching credential, a Master's degree in teaching, and a Master's degree in English literature all from the University of California, Irvine. Teaching combines Tracey's passion for literature, writing, and grammar (yes--even grammar) with her love of learning. She delights in helping to nurture her students' sense of curiosity and nourish their intellects. Tracey is enthusiastic about all forms of expression--literature, art, film, music--and it is this appreciation of culture that most informs her teaching. Technology's impact on art and culture fascinates Tracey, and she looks forward to discovering ways in which she can use technology to help enhance students' literacy.

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