5 Ways to Respond to a Students' Phone Being Out Besides Smashing It

You've seen a video like this, right?

I don't want to get on a high horse and pretend there hasn't been a time or two through the years that it hasn't been a dreamy proposition, but is this ever justifiable when you're awake, and of sober mind?

I had a Facebook friend propose this should happen to any student that has their phone out. Who does this help? Is there a follow-up to this video where the student whose phone was destroyed (or anyone else in the room for that matter) comes to see the errors of their ways and begins proselytizing in the name of luddites everywhere?

I had one of my "good" students in a class of several that cause me trouble who I caught FaceTiming with her friend. Was I frustrated? You bet. Does she need a consequence? Of course! But the only thing an over-reaction does (even a referral, I think) is take a student that is much more often than not an ally in the room and turn her against me. So I had her shut it down immediately when I found it, then as she was about to leave for lunch, I called her over to conference with her and asked her what she thought her consequence should be. (Believe it or not, I did not yet have one ready for "FaceTiming in class instead of working on guided practice" LOL)

So, I'm still working out what exactly this students' consequence will be for today, (although I'm leaning toward some kind of essay on appropriate tech use/PSA/fix all the iPads backgrounds back to normal work), but until then, here's a few other ideas. 

1. Treat it like you would if the student were your own child. Especially if its an isolated incident, do your best to laugh it off, tell them to put it away, and move on to the next battle.

This is easier if you actually ARE a parent, but teachers are great at empathy, so I'm sure you'll make due. Besides the fact that you probably would have had a hand in paying for that device (or the replacement), you would also have to parent and have a relationship with this teenager after your moment of phone-smashing passion. Its tough to recover from things you say/promise/or do in moments of frustration. 

2. Call/email home and let the parents know that their son or daughter is using class time to Insta-tweet-book instead of asking a question about the course content or getting in extra practice.

 If your student is obsessive about it in your room, their parents are probably equally annoyed by the behavior and they will no doubt have your back. Make sure you back up the threat, but in my experience, kids will do a lot to avoid an effective call/email home. 

3. Have a charging station in your room away from everyone's seat. 

I have a strip by my desk where kids can plug in their chargers and put it in a box.  Time/space to charge a device is a hot commodity in my buildings, and when its in the box, its not a student's desk, distracting them with notifications every 3 minutes. 

4. Give them something to do USING IT PRODUCTIVELY.

Recording audio notes, setting a reminder for homework, responding to a backchannel discussion, pulling up a video related to their work, sending them to a page like thatquiz.org with some readymade practice (math, science, and geography). Redirecting their thumb swiping to a positive activity is an easy redirect.

5. Start a conversation about your favorite educational/learning/productivity app.

Once I put the TED app on my class iPads, my favorite question has always been from students assuming it was related to a Seth McFarland movie by the same name. :) People don't know better until they know any better - maybe your student will delete one of their 5 messaging apps and make space for your recommendation. 

What else have you done effectively? Leave a comment!

3 Reasons Your Classroom Needs a Charging Station

With the exception of the last two weeks of May, I had a corner of my classroom near my iPad cart that had two different surge protectors available for kids to plug in and charge their phones/tablets/eReaders. I needed one of them to power the iPad cart anyway, so I figured the other open spaces would be a good opportunity to be "cool" about my students and their devices.

My initial expectations were that I would avoid a lot of conflict from kids unplugging classroom materials (like the iPad cart or my printer) to plug in their chargers without asking. What happened were two outcomes that had me second-guessing my experiment. The students began to fight over 6 or 7 charger spots (because many were charging when they didn't really need to), and instead of losing a distraction at their seats, the phone became more distracting as they would want to go back and forth to check for new texts and notifications. 

I announced to my friends in the math office last week that I was deeming the charging station a failure, and that it would not be returning next year. "Honestly, I thought you were crazy just for trying it," a friend in my PLC said. My own assessment was that perhaps I'd been naive about my students maturity to put the devices back there and leave them alone.

Today I'm rethinking. 

I read this from an ongoing series from Fast Company featuring creative people (http://www.fastcompany.com/3029506/most-creative-people-2014/charmian-gooch)

"When people say something is really crazy or naive, that's when you know you're onto something," says Charmian Gooch of her latest campaign to end corporate secrecy laws.

Double-whammo. Between my colleagues and my own self-doubt, I confirmed that perhaps, the charging station could be worth it. And I'll tell you why you need one for your students, too.

1. The charging station is a chance to practice discipline, self-control, and responsibility. 

It bugs me when kids tell me how grown up they are,  but we DO have a responsibility to give them opportunities to practice responsibility in the grown-up world. Controlling access to outlets in your classroom against people who have a legitimate use for them just feels to me like one of those things that look crazy out of the context of my little classroom-kingdom.

2. The charging station allows kids that want to use their devices for class to use freely without fear that their battery won't make it until they can plug up at night at home.

Many kids really DO have their cellphones (at least in some part) as a safety device to allow parents to more easily keep track of them. 

3. You'll save time and frustration from students asking you if they can charge their phones in the USB on your desktop, or anywhere else.

Besides the unintended consequences I mentioned, the charging station DID also do what I'd hoped. I spent much less time dealing with charging requests and anger with kids sneaking behind my back to charge their phones in outlets I was using myself.

Having to exercise classroom/behavior management (the kids going back and forth from their seat to check their phones) isn't a reason to not try (and keep) something new. So, you'll find a charging station in my classroom next year, and I look forward to the cool things my kids show me they can do on their own devices.

Using Paper Slide Music Videos to Reconceptualize Content

Today's post is a super-easy way to integrate video creation into your class. All you need is one tool to record video (smartphone, tablet, digital camera, flipcam).

Resources:

Dr. Lodge McCammon's Math Songs

Lodge's resources (mp3 and lyrics) on Discovery Streaming

My Students' Videos

My first attempt at paper slide music videos I attempted to have each of my 3 classes collaborate to make one video, which turned out to be a mistake. Only 1 of the classes were able to pull it all together and finish.

This week, for my second attempt, I split the students into groups of (up to) 4. It was good for forcing more accountability for the work, and because it required fewer students to all be there/have their materials/do their work, we had more measures of success.

                                          

Lessons I've Learned about Paper Slide Music Videos (in case you didn't read them on the post-its) :)

1. Make your videos in groups of 3 or 4, and let the kids self-select. 

2. Don't be stingy with materials. I counted out enough slides for each group to have enough, but there will inevitably be crumbled slides on the floor that need to be redone, so keep a stack of extras on hand for the kids to access.

3. Reteach and reconceptualize the content throughout the process. The thought required to package the idea of proportions visually is more than simply solving problems out of your textbook, so you may be shocked about misconceptions students have along the way. Use it as a teachable moment.

4. Celebrate! Producing these videos in one take required my students higher levels of organization, perseverance, and attention to detail than I'm used to seeing from several of them, so it was a delight to be able to breathe a sigh of relief and congratulate them when they were successful.

5 Reasons NOT To Use Remind 101

Remind 101 is a website and mobile app with one singular purpose - sending text or email alerts to your subscribers' cellphones or inboxes. Its used mainly in an educational setting, but there's no reason any organization with a need for quickly distributing information to its members could not utilize Remind 101.

We're hosting a Remind 101 session in our building this Friday during our half-day PD, so I wanted to get ahead of those that may be curious and give you some reasons NOT to use Remind 101.

1. You don't have a smartphone. Or a tablet. Or a computer.

Oh, you do have at least one of those? Nevermind. There are many ways to access and send Remind 101 messages! I don't have a smartphone, but I use the website and the app on my iPad equally.

2. You don't know how to write an email.

Sending a Remind 101 alert is as easy as sending a short email message. In some respects, its easier, because you do not have to address it to individual recipients. You just click on the class, type the message, and it goes to every student that has subscribed to that class. Even BETTER than email, you can schedule the message and control when it gets sent. I usually type my messages during class, but set it up to send during passing time or after school.

3. You don't want students to have your cellphone number. (or you don't want to be responsible for knowing your students' numbers).

NOT A PROBLEM! Students sign themselves up using the class code you provide and Remind 101 takes care of all the phone numbers. The only thing you see are your students' names and YOU never even have to enter your number.

4. You want your students to be responsible for ALWAYS writing down the homework off of your chalk/white/SMARTboard.

Sending reminders and alerts to their cellphones will train them to be lazy. Just make sure you'll hold yourself to that same standard when it comes to your own text and email alerts. I get the responsibility angle, but does that mean we SHOULDN'T use a technology at our disposal? Honestly, if I could get a text alert every Tuesday night at about 10 o'clock to make sure I put the trash at the curb, it would change my life.

5. Homework is really just a tool to punish kids who refuse to do it.

Sending a reminder to a kid's phone would increase the chance they might study on any given night, and you won't be able to triumphantly enter a zero into the gradebook the next day.

THE BOTTOM LINE
Our students look at their cellphones ALL DAY LONG. We compete all day long for attention with Instagram, Twitter, and text messages from family and friends. Remind 101 is an easy to use tool that puts your class information right in front of their faces.

Tech Skills Your Students (Probably) Don't Have and You (Probably) Do - Part 3: Sharing/Getting Ideas

"Digital Native" doesn't mean your students have technology skills in their DNA - just that they pick them up more quickly. They still need you to guide them! With this page from the Washington Superintendent of Public Instruction that our district is using as a model for our integration plan, I've been picking out skills we often believe our students possess, but often do not.

Previously:
Part 1: Research Skills
Part 2: Work/Productivity

In part three, we'll look at 4 idea sharing/gathering skills you can model for your students.

1. Editing photos with anything other than Instagram

My wife and I use PicMonkey for most of our photo blogging needs, but for heavier web and graphic design (custom backgrounds, specified dimensions, merging images, cutouts, vectors) you're going to photo-editing skills beyond "apply filter." Tate Foley, visiting art professor at Webster University, specializes in print-making, but relevance in the 21st century requires a digital presence, even for traditional arts. Photoshop is obviously the industry standard, but I've gotten a ton of use out of open-source Gimp, and web-based Pixlr.

2. Getting real-world examples of the math, literature, science, business, or social studies principals you're studying with RSS feeds and an aggregator. 

Is there a current events type assignment you routinely give? Want to get your students up-to-date examples of your field in practice? Skip the Popular Mechanics stacks at the library. Skip the Google Search. Have your students subscribe to a blog related to your curriculum and they have a readily available archive whenever its assignment time. Extra Credit: Do this yourself for ideas for classroom management, tech tools, parenting, or lesson plans.

Top Blogs Lists:

• Social Studies
• History List
• Freakonomics
• Science
• scienceblogs.com
• Scientific American
• Discover Magazine
• Communication Arts
• Literature Blogs
• Lynne Truss (author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves - the most approachable punctuation text I've found)
• Math
• Ars Mathematica
• Freakonomics
• mathbabe
• AskAMathematician

What to do with them:

• Google Reader (read on desktop or mobile)
• Get an app (Pulse, Flipboard)
• Dump onto an e-reader (Kindle, iPad, Nook, etc) with Calibre software

3. Using your mobile phone to take photos of the whiteboard to save for later

Even if you don't have a SMARTboard or other IWB, your students don't have to miss out on having class notes uploaded to your website or hosted LMS (Blackboard, Moodle, etc). With a smartphone, use a scanner app (Genius Scan, CamScanner) for best results. Even with a "feature" phone, you can still get get results following these tips I wrote about a couple weeks ago.

YOU can use them for your own posterity. Your students can use it to snap a picture of their homework, get that example they're running behind on copying, or share notes with an absent friend.

4. (Intelligently) debating a topic you're passionate about on social media, wiki, blog, or discussion forum

One year in what was essentially a freshman study hall, my co-teachers and I discovered that our kids were supremely interested in the Illuminati. All of there favorite rappers and media moguls were "in." They had video "proof." We went with it and our Illuminati project became the object of obsession for these kids for an entire week. They were great at random web searches for "jay-z illuminati devil," and naive about analyzing those sources, and even worse at articulating their arguments.

Sound like anyone on Facebook during an election cycle? Nurture your budding research journalists by taking the debate to the web.

Tech Adaptations for YOU:

Are any of these things you can already do? Depending on the age of your students, you have so many professional and/or creative skills that they need, but don't yet have! If nothing I've shared is in your wheelhouse, do some reflection and find something you can share. It might be 21st century or it might be 19th - either way I'm sure your students will appreciate you sharing. History of technology lessons are interesting, too. ;)

Tip Tuesday: How Do My Students Deal With Photos?

My AP Statistics kids just turned in a project Friday that required them to screen capture some plots from their graphing calculator and embed them into the narrative of their paper. There's a couple ways to accomplish that:

TI-84, USB Cable, and TI Connect Software

TI-83, Camera Phone

The method using the TI Connect software is probably PREFERRED, and it makes for a more polished product, but in my school, and probably for most schools and many students, the graph and take a picture method below is more realistic.

I had a project come in late today because he hadn't had the pictures from his calculator on Friday. When asked him why he hadn't just emailed them to himself, he said,

"Well, I don't have a smartphone, so I don't have a way of getting them off of my phone."

Sound familiar? As long as I have been giving projects requiring students make videos or take pictures, I've heard the can't-get-them-off-my-phone excuse. It's valid-ish. Not everyone has a smartphone (nor should everyone). I don't, either. That's my touchscreen messaging phone I bought on Amazon for $.01 in the photo above. What this student didn't know, and I guess is lost knowledge when most people just have their personal email attached to their mobile device, is that you can email any account with a text message. It works just like sending a text message, except you enter an email address instead of the recipients' mobile numbers.

STEPS:

1.  Take the photo.
2.  Begin a new message.
3.  Enter your own (or someone else's email address in the "to:" field

emailaddress@domain.com

4.  Attach your photos (usually this says attach in the message menus) 
5.  Attach as many photos as you need! The next thing this student did to shock me today was he ended up sending like 6 different emails to himself, one for each pic.

I attached 3 pix to this message.

6.  Wait a few moments, open your email on a computer, and save/print the image files.

Classroom Use:

This was relevant to me most recently with these calculator screen captures, but I could see it being relevant for assignments on field trips, scavenger hunts around the school, photos accompanying reflective pieces in a lit/comp course, evidence for student learning portfolios, or relevant notes for interactive notebooks (to be glued into a physical notebook OR a physical artifact uploaded to a digital notebook).

---

Extra bonus: 

There are several web-based photo editors for cleaning up the images once they come from the camera phones. Here are some I've used:

• PicMonkey (used on this blog and heybethbaker.wordpress.com)
• Pixlr (express or advanced) (used often for my master's portfolio, also a Chrome and Firefox extension)
• Aviary (Also a Chrome and Firefox extension)
• Inside Google+ photo viewer (from the makers of Picnik)

Lessening My Lesson Load

This photo was taken from my camera phone right after 1st hour was over.  I read pieces of a book over Christmas Break called Never Work Harder Than Your Students, and those few pages did a lot to free my time and rethink the priorities of my time in the classroom.  I think it has improved my instruction because I've had to be more creative in order to present my lessons with "less" work.

One factor that significantly contributes to my workload is rewriting notes and homework assignments on a different board when I move between the 3 different classrooms I travel to.  Using the SMARTboard for notes and interactive tools alleviates some of this hourly repetition, but if the computer is down or the server is slow, then I end up having to use the whiteboard and rewriting notes in subsequent classrooms.

The kids give me some trouble over having my cellphone out, but I think it models good mobile device use, which is a good thing.