Have you ever wanted to use a PowerPoint presentation with your lesson, but not had a board/screen on which to project? My school has Interactive Whiteboards, and some schools in Israel have projectors in each classroom - but not everyone has such technology at their disposal. But most of our students now have smartphones! Problem solved! (Providing the phones are connected to the internet via wifi or their phone package.)
I was working with a group of counselors this week, and, while we were in a very technology-rich setting, in a room that had all the bells and whistles, for part of the session, we were divided into groups and could not all use the main projector.
Enter: Nearpod!
Nearpod is a free application that enables you to share a PowerPoint presentation, simultaneous with anyone who is hooked up with your presentation, on smartphones, tablets, laptops or PCs, and YOU control the progression of the slides!
You can use NearPod:
in the classroom.
for synchronous online sessions (it’s easy to use with Google Hangouts on Air!).
at any venue that has access to internet / wifi - even outside (providing you are in conditions that enable you to read the screen - meaning not in strong, direct sunlight.)
Do not be discouraged if you or your students try to download the app to your phone, and you get the message that your phone is not compatible (I almost flipped out when I saw that message ;-). If this happens, your participants can use it with their phones via the phone’s browser.
You can invite your students to a session beforehand by sending them an email from Nearpod, with the URL for the session and the PIN number. They can go in, but it won’t start showing anything until YOU start the “show”!
You can share materials from different media: PowerPoint presentations, PDF, MP4, websites, interactive polls and lots more. While you are presenting the material, you can see how many students are connected to your presentation, with the counter in the upper left hand corner of your screen (if a student disconnects by opening another app, the counter will show that.)
There are also free lessons that you can download and use. I just played around with a nice one named “Get to Know Each Other” that could be a really nice way to start the new year, or get to know others in any new group. It includes interactive questions, opportunities to share drawings or pictures, and other questions that will help participants learn a little bit more about each other.
I was really pleased with how it worked, and the other counselors in the group were excited about the potential it holds, as well!
If you like the idea of this type of slide sharing, you might also want to explore “Every Slide”, which is another application I heard of JUST before i was about to go in and present with Nearpod, but haven’t had time to experiment with yet. (If I get to do so soon, I will share my impressions and comparisons, as well.)
I think these new options are REALLY exciting, and go one step further to bringing digital content to all of our classes! Can you think of situations in which this tool will help you? If so, please share, below! And if you DO try it out, let us know how it goes!
Digitally yours,
@dele PS Thanks to Efrat Maatoof for suggesting this tool! Check out her blog - she has oodles of great ideas (providing you read Hebrew)
Trying to flap my wings and fly...... I have been using my own PLN (Personal Learning Network) to try and learn how to harness this Twitter business. I still have more questions than I do answers, but I figure I will share my progress here, and hopefully pretty soon, will have both honed my expertise AND shared the process with you here. My PLN is not a very organized one - but it works for me. The first thing I do, is I go to my mailing list of GTA (Google Teachers Academy) graduates - a source which invariably comes to my rescue with all of my Web 2 (not only Google) needs. I am in the middle of working through a thread which is providing lots of helpful hints! My other sources are the English Teachers' Network of Israel (ETNI) list and the Facebook group we have "EFL Digital Pedagogy". One of the emails from the GTA graduates, came from Carole Geneix (@CaroleGeneix), and this is what she wrote:
She uses Twitter as an "Exit ticket".
Her explanation: "Exit ticket = some kind of informal or formal survey at the end of class to check what they have retained from it, if they understood a particular concept you wanted them to teach, etc. (She) uses sometimes a GoogleForm, but Twitter is quick and personal, and fun so far."
I asked her how she deals with "creative spelling". I am an English teacher, and this is something that concerns me - since I work VERY hard teaching them NOT to be "creative" in their spelling. However since Twitter is limited to 140 characters (including punctuation, spaces, etc.) most tweeters out there DO use shortcuts such as "b" instead of "be" and "gr8" instead of "great". I know that when I am tweeting, I often leave out vowels (since we have all seen that email, I'm sure, that shows how we can understand something in English even though it is without vowels (if you aren't familiar with it, check this out). I had considered having a lesson teaching them accepted conventions of "creative spelling", however Carole suggests the following:
"The 'no creative spelling' rule is actually very important for me. One of my goals is to teach them proper writing, so it's definitely something I will not compromise on. If they have several ideas they can tweet several times! Also, you realize pretty quickly when you get into the habit of tweeting how much useless things there are. The idea is to teach them to be analytical, concise and synthetical, and that really serves my purpose. They get really good at it pretty fast. I also want to start a competition about using ALL of the 140 characters. Could be fun."
This actually makes sense to me. I have adopted her approach for now... if any of the readers here have a different opinion, I would love to hear it!
The final excellent tip she provided was about accounts:
"I do not use personal accounts. My students are high-schoolers, and they do have personal accounts, so if they did so then I would be able to see their stuff. Which I don't want to see. LOL. They use individual accounts that they created for school. I use an account that I created for all my classes (I also have a private account). Everybody follows everybody. My feed is posted on Moodle too. Note that I want their accounts to be public. You can make them private, but then it defies the purpose. It's a public, school account. It's out there, and it's a good experience. They know they are being watched and read."
So - I have followed her advice and opened a new twitter account for myself, as a teacher (@AdeleNHS) and plan to have the students do the same tomorrow.
The final thing I needed to do in order to work with the tool in class tomorrow, was to find some way to project the Twitter feed in the class. As I have mentioned before, I am lucky enough to teach in a school that has interactive whiteboards (IWB) in all the classes (don't be TOO jealous - we have them "thanks" to the fact that we got a new school built 5 years ago because we are in rocket range) and had been searching for a way to show the feed. I received a few recommendations, among them TweetBeam, which looks good but I wanted something more built-in for my class site. I then found a Googlesite, which has an explanation, as well as a webcast-tutorial for how to embed a Twitter feed into your Googlesite. (If you are interested in learning more about Goolgesites, he also has a TON of explanations for that in the other tabs). Like the author Tony Amsler (@TonyAmsler) writes, it's kind of "geeky" but with the tutorial and explanation that accompany it (as well as the fact that not being part of a GAfE, in this case, works to my advantage AND working with a PC, as opposed to a Mac also lets there be fewer steps) I actually found it doable! (Trust me - I got an even GEEKIER response than this one....)
NOTE: After emailing with Tony, I realized that that the solution that is explained in his tutorial, is for showing ONLY the posts that _I_ write. (Thanks for that clarification, Tony.) It does not show the entire steam for #AdeleNHS, so, if anyone has a trick for embedding the stream of a conversation using a specific hashtag into a Googlesite, please do share it with me. I also want to share with you two tutorials that one of the other GTA teachers, Karen Mensing (@MsMensing) shared with me. The kids are significantly younger than my students, but they are cute, speak clearly and give some pretty succinct pointers!
Another great resource I came accross (can't exactly remember how I stumbled upon it while mushing through the web) is the Livebinder "Educator's Guide to Twitter", the tip of which I have barely managed to scrape through, but is chock full of information about using Twitter in the classroom.
Here are some tasks I am thinking of assigning:
My students are doing their extensive reading (library books). I will have them tweet the following:
Stage One (just to get them tweeting):
1) The title of their book and their author.
2) The setting
3) A quote that they like.
4) Which character they would like to meet, and why.
5) What their impressions of their book are, as they read through it.
Stage Two (to get them interacting with each other):
1) Using our class hashtag (#AdeleNHS) and their friends' handles, each student will need to to ask someone a question about the book they are reading. (Especially if the asker has read the book before)
2) When they finish the book, they will be asked to write a short recommendation (without spoilers)
Stage Three:
They will be asked to record themselves doing an oral report about their library book when they finish it. They can post these on Twitter privately or publicly if they wish (alternatively, they will send it to me on What's App or Email).
Stage Four:
After the vacation, this class will be going on a three day trip. I plan to ask them to report on interesting facts that they learn while on their trip (extra credit).
In general, I will suggest that students use twitter, with our class hashtag, to ask clarifying questions, whenever something is unclear. There are no stupid questions. All questions are legitimate, and if one student asks a question, others may be THINKING the same question, as well.
I am really excited about the prospects here! What do you think of these ideas? Can any of you suggest how to harness Twitter for your EFL classrooms?
I know - I am usually here to give YOU ideas and solutions, but I am really flummoxed by this Twitter business,and hoping that someone out there in educational blogger land will read this and come to my rescue. As I stated in my previous blog, I am trying to find ways to use Twitter in my teaching, in order to help my students become familiar with it as a tool that they have at their disposal when needed. However I cannot for the life of me figure out how to harness its effectiveness. This is what I WANT to be able to do: * to notify my students of what they need for the upcoming lesson * to conduct short interactions with them during and between lessons * to be able to SHOW the interactions on the smartboard in my classroom * to share things that I believe they will find of interest as English learners * to teach them how to follow me * to teach them how to sort through different postings and find what is relevant I, personally, have started to use Twitter in order to do the following: * share my blogs about digital pedagogy (as a teacher trainer) * communicate with my students (as their teacher) * advocate for Israel (as a Gaza-border resident) So my question is: what do I need to tell my students to do in order to follow my communications which are meant for them, and not have to get the communications meant for other educators or on the issue of advocacy for Israel? And another question: would it help me if I opened a SEPARATE Twitter account just for my students? I have brought a Twitter specialist to my classroom (and although he IS very good, he is NOT using it in the way _I_ want to use it - in the classroom. Hence, I still need help). I have read and watched a gazillion tutorials online. But I have yet to find anything that helps me make sense out of the seeming chaos. When using Twitter at my computer, I use TweetDeck, which organizes things clearly for me. However, on my phone (and that is what my students will mostly use for tweeting in the classroom) it seems a mess! I have told my students to use #AdeleNHS in order to send me a message (four of them did so) and I have suggested to teachers who want to work on me with developing activities for using Twitter for teaching EFL to communicate with #AdeleEFL (one teacher did so.. thanks Naomi ;-) Others are welcomed to do so as well, and join in the discussion!
Any suggestions are welcomed. Please feel free to either add them, below, in the comments to the blog, or email me privately: araemer@gmail.com. If you feel it would be more efficient to talk to me on the phone, you can call me: 054 7916468. I promise to share what I learn with all of you (if I ever get to the point where I feel I have what to share on this front). Digitally yours, @dele
This has been a very difficult summer. I apologize for neglecting this blog, but promise to try to get back into the rhythm of weekly posting, now that things have calmed down in my region.
When I look back to my last post, I clearly see that it was the last quiet weekend we were to have here for the summer. I live on a kibbutz on the border with the Gaza Strip, and my home was in a war zone. I remained in my home all summer, with a new purpose: to help my country by granting interviews to foreign journalists, writing reports on CNN iReport. As part of this mission, I found myself dragged into the world of Twitter.
We had NO summer - the war ended on August 26th, the day two of my friends were killed here on my kibbutz, and another lost his legs, all hit by the same mortar, as they were supporting electricians who were trying to restore electricity, which had been knocked out during the rocket barrage that morning - the same one that sent shards of mortar into my home.
Before my first lesson of the year, I went to a psychologist for a chat, and explained my situation: I am an English teacher, who has functioned as a war correspondent for the past 2 1/2 months - and I cannot understand how I was going to make the metamorphosis back into teacher/teacher-trainer. His response was simple: "Bring the war correspondent into the classroom with you."
That is just what I did. I spoke to the students about what I did all summer, showed them CNN iReports (which is a place where ANYBODY can write or post photos of events, and let their stories be shared with the world. My iReport page is here.) iReport can be used as an opportunity for encouraging descriptive writing, digitally. If I take this one step further, and have my students write and publish their descriptions, I will share them here.
I also realized the potency of Twitter during this period of time. Through my interviews with Sky News, I had been approached to find a teenager who could respond on Twitter to questions, as they had done with Farah Baker, a 16 year old from Gaza who tweeted about the war. I contacted my students, and, although most of them either did not respond at all, or were simply not in the area, some of them were willing to try. The problem was, NONE of them had a Twitter account. In fact, I sent out a call via social networks to which I am connected, calling for teachers to help me find a student who could do this. None were found. Sky News then asked me to fill the slot - and I participated in a 30 minute Q&A session, that was promoted by Sky News live, internationally, using #AskAdele. I was warned that there would be people popping up saying horrible things, but that I should only address questions that I felt were appropriate. I was thrown into the deep end, and told to swim - with the help of a platform called TweetDeck (which I have found comfortable and continue to use, when I am on Twitter from my PC), communicating with people who had questions about the conflict, what it is like to live on the border, and other related issues. It was a fascinating experience! One of authentic use of digital tools and the English language.
So as part of my "coming-back-to-school", I brought a Twitter expert from Tel Aviv (Hen Mazzig from @standwithus) into my classroom, to teach the students why Twitter has become so important as an international platform for conversation, and how to use it to their advantage.
My aim in exposing the students to these platforms, is to attempt to encourage them to use English, and digital technology for purposes of advocacy. It can be to advocate our situation here in Israel, on the border with the Gaza Strip - or anything else about which the students feel they have something to say.
I plan to continue with this experiment during the year, and am looking for different ways to authentically engage my students on Twitter.
Do any of you have experience with Twitter in the classroom? Setting hashtags, running conversations? If so, please share them here! You can be sure I will share mine, as well! Stay tuned!
I LOVE GoogleForms! I use them for EVERYTHING! Collecting student contact information at the beginning of the year, collecting coordinator information in my region, collecting birthday dates for the teachers in our staff..... if you need to collect information of any kind, Googleforms is the BEST way to do it!!! And there is SO much more you can do with it, as well! I am going to be giving a "GoogleForms Help" session in our summer REED conference for coordinators, and have prepared these two short tutorials (00:07:13 + 00:10:39) to give participants the basic steps they'll need for preparing a GoogleForm. Since the sessions will be only 45 minutes each, I decided to do it the "Flipped Classroom" way: doing the teaching through the tutorial, and asking the coordinators who signed up for the workshops, to learn the basics before the sessions, then come prepared with ideas for how to use the GoogleForms. Then at the session, rather than instructing, I will be able to walk around and facilitate, in the hopes that my participants will leave the room with a GoogleForm that they will be able to use. The first tutorial is for anyone who has never made a GoogleForm before. You need to go to your GoogleDrive (and if you do not know how to use GoogleDrive, let me know, I will prepare my next blog on that!) and create a "form".
The rest is explained in the YouTube tutorial here:
The second tutorial explains how to make a self-answering quiz. I am not referring to a quiz that is self GRADING (that is done with a script called Flubaroo, which I will be happy to explain in another blog). I am referring to a self-answering quiz which lets the students know if they answered correctly or not. It is not for grading purposes. It is not even necessary that the teacher collect their responses. Since the self-answering quiz will not let them proceed unless they have given the correct response, it is sort of a moot point. But you MIGHT want to get their names so that you can see who went in to do it! Here is the second tutorial:
So... do YOU love GoogleForms?! Do YOU use them all the time? Share the creative ways you use them with us here!
I've written about GoogleDocs before, but this week I want to encourage the use of it for an administrative purpose in schools that have programs which span the length of more than one year, when it is vital to keep clear of records of students’ grades over the years.
In Israeli high schools, students sit for their matriculation exams from the 11th grade (until now - they could begin in the 10th - but in light of new directives, bagrut-fever will be postponed, thankfully ;-). There is the curriculum for literature, which some schools begin teaching in the 10th grade. High school EFL students also need to read four library books and get graded on the reports they write for them, and do a research project at some point in high school. All of these grades, accrued during the 3 years of high school, are used as part of their yearly grades (sort of buffer grades) when they sit for their matriculation exams.
As a teacher-counselor, I have heard more than my share of horror stories, ending up with the loss of students’ grades: teachers leave the country/ switch schools / leave projects in cars that got stolen . Not only teacher-triggered, foul-ups can also happen when students move during the space of these three years (more often than one would think) and their grades do not always move with them! Even in the simple case of moving from one class level to another during high school can cause records of grades to go astray. It has become harder and harder to reliably keep track of these grades.
A while back I started urging staffs with whom I work, to use a 3 year follow-up page. This entails filling out a page for each student when they are in the 10th grade. On this page, the teacher records all of the grades that need to be saved for their matriculation grades. The teachers were then asked to give these pages to their coordinator at the end of each year and the coordinators were advised to save them all in a large binder.
On the surface, it may seem like annoying bureaucracy. However, really, it is simply responsible professionalism, ensuring that the grades that students earn, are reliably saved and kept to be used when needed. Unfortunately there were teachers who did not fill these pages out, or coordinators who did not collect them. And pieces of paper sometimes get lost. There were additional complications if you wanted to fill out the record in the middle of the year, you would have to go to the coordinator, take all your pages and then remember to bring them back to the coordinator. A misfiling nightmare waiting to happen.
With the inception of GoogleDocs this whole procedure has become much simpler and more user friendly. I have prepared a template out of the 3 year follow-up page (linked here - or just do a search on Google for “Googledoc templates”, and then write:“3 year follow up” - it will pull up the template I made) . Granted, the first time you fill out a page for each student is tedious, I admit. It makes it easier if you add any information that will be common to all (name of literature text, or teacher name even, for the first time you use it, then each time make a copy and add the student’s name). But if you save these pages in a folder in an organized manner in your GoogleDrive you can then share the folder with your coordinator. This will enable the coordinator at any point of time to see what a student's situation is regarding these grades. It will also enable the teacher to be able to add grades as work is completed, be it different pieces of literature or projects or book reports. Or, if the student changes teachers or moves to a different school, you can share it with the new teacher. And no more worries of mis-shelving a form! It’s digital! Just a search in your GoogleDrive and it will be found!
Providing the 3 year follow up pages have been organized into a folder, and the folder has been shared with the English coordinator, if something happens (say,if a teacher leaves, or the student has been moved from another class) it is much easier to keep track of these important grades and to ensure that they do not go lost.
It is even possible to share each student's file with the students, themselves, so that the students know where they stand. By sharing it with each student, granting them rights to view or comment (NOT edit), they can stay up to date on the grades that are going to seriously impact their final grade.
It takes a while to get used to the idea. It takes some effort, especially at the beginning, but believe me: it is worth it in the long run. It is a responsible, logical, and professional way to keep track of grades and share them with whoever needs to see them.
Digitally yours,
@dele
Postscript: This is my 15th blog posting. The 10th since resolving to see this as being a weekly responsibility of my job as counselor for ESL and Digital Pedagogy. And I have as many followers (just checked - yep - 15!) I share the blog all over (relevant FB groups, Google +, Twitter, email) and feel sort of pushy with it - like I’m asking for handouts, or running for office. But, in fact, I’m just trying to share my enthusiasm about the helpful digital tools I come across and find convenient and productive. So…. if YOU find this blog of any value, please subscribe! It will be great for my ego ;-) Also, do let me know if there is anything specific you would like to have me write about here!
Here's another one of those tools that I had been trying to figure out for a while. It's called Timeline JS (find it at: http://timeline.knightlab.com/). It took me a bit of playing around with it, and some "workarounds" as they are called (work·a·round ˈwÉ™rkəˌround/ noun COMPUTING a method for overcoming a problem or limitation in a program or system). I wanted to use this tool, which is an interactive, multimedia timeline producer, as a way to get people to introduce themselves at a workshop, in an unusual way - (something I had seen one of my mentors do a while back, and just HAD to figure out). The good news is: I finally figured it out. (It entailed using a Googleform that would feed into a Google Spreadsheet, which I would use for copying and pasting data that the participants would send me..... but that is not the usual way to use this tool, as I said - just a fun way to show off a bit ;-) The even BETTER news is: this is a simple timeline tool that can be used in the classroom collaboratively by both teacher AND students, and it is a lot easier than I had expected! There are a lot of occasions I can think of just off the top of my head, when a timeline tool can come in handy.
For example: one of the topics we often use in my school for an umbrella topic for projects is "Making a Difference", where the students must choose a famous person who made a difference in the world, and research him or her. Making a timeline of these peoples' lives, using photos, video footage, maps, etc. can really bring the major milestones of a famous person, their achievements, highlights and other interesting events, to life! Another way to take advantage of this tool could be to make a timeline of events in a piece of literature you are teaching, to help your students follow plot development. It could be used for a short story, a novel or play, or even as a book report task! The example that I used here is a partial timeline for the play All My Sons, by Arthur Miller, which many of us teach in high schools in Israel. It is not complete at the time of publication of this blog post, but the beauty of it is, it can be added to and reposted. So, if you have a look in a few days' time, maybe I will have had time to upload some more events in the story, and they will automatically be seen on this timeline. Of course, some of the dates are ones I just made up (since it is not mentioned WHEN the events actually happened, I made up approximate dates for the purposes of getting them in the timeline.)
As you can see from this sample, it really drives it home in a more multidimensional way than could just a regular word-file timeline.
It's absolutely easy enough for teachers to use, and to teach to their students. Here is a clear, short tutorial that explains how it works.
Here is a longer, more detailed walk-thru.
So, what do YOU think? How could YOU use this tool with your classes? I would LOVE to hear YOUR ideas!
