Class Podcasting with Anchor.fm

Four years ago, I had the privilege of teaching British Literature in summer school. If you're new here, you need to know that all of my experience is as a math teacher, so this was a dramatic departure from my usual teaching and planning flow. 

However, the year before, I'd had the privilege of teaching Government (this all because my degree and 1st Missouri certification was actually in secondary social studies, but that's a whole other blog post #checkyourprivilege). The year before in Government, I had recorded and published our class discussions on a podcast, and I was quite pleased with how it had gone, so I was excited at this opportunity for more discussion in a literature class. 

I had really high hopes for these Brit Lit recordings, so I got it all set up here, published my intentions, and added a new side panel on this blog linking to it. 

And I never published them. 

Through the beauty of Google Classroom archives and Google Drive, I actually still have all of those recordings, so I'm going to take the opportunity of a question this week from a colleague about podcasting to correct a wrong from 4 years ago and publish these "Brit Lit Perspectives" using the Anchor app.

Here was my colleague's email:

I'm developing a performance assessment for a grad class, as well as an actual end of unit assessment for my students. I found the site "Anchor" which I am really excited about and seems very easy to use. 

However, I have some questions about how students post:

Are there sites that allow me to control content or do all students need to have their own individual podcasts?

This particular site seems like everyone would need to have their own account, using their school gmail, but then I would have no control over posting. Or, all students would have to use my account to post through, and that also doesn't seem productive.  

The way I understood it, she wanted an easy way to gather students' audio files and get them published while still being able to control and censor content as necessary. 

I've been a guest on an Anchor hosted podcast with Connected Learning, so I know it was simple, and a quick Google search verified that you could upload/import audio files to your Anchor account on the web or the app, so this was the suggestion I replied to my friend, the future podcaster: 

1.Have students record their clip with their smartphone or use the site https://online-voice-recorder.com/

2. Students turn in their file to you on Canvas. 

3. You preview as necessary

4. You upload to the anchor app or website the audio files from your account.

I would do it this way because (1) I think you're more likely to get a file turned in to Canvas than waiting on kids to upload to Anchor (and kids don't have another thing to login to), (2) it allows you to preview content for quality and appropriateness, (3) keeps kids from having to "use your account" (I could see one student's files accidentally getting deleted by another) and (4) gives you one place to show off your students' work when you share to a public audience.

Here's how that actually went for me...

1. Sign up for Anchor.fm

 Easy enough...they have the option to make an account or use Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Apple. I used Google, just in case you care. LOL

2. Getting started

What a friendly start page! I can do this! Also, I find myself oddly attracted to the "money" button. LOL. Looks like I need to click the purple button. 

3. Building your podcast

This is the stage where my process (and probably my friend's process, also) are going to be slightly different than "typical" because I will be pulling my old files from Google Drive (and her probably from Canvas, our new LMS because...COVID). For now, though, I am going to record a little preview/trailer blurb. (I'm loving the UI on this page, by the way.)

4. Recording your audio

As I remember, most of the student files you will hear once I publish on Anchor will be from the mic on the iPads I was using, so there will be a ton of ambient noise and the volume levels will vary. This was in part a matter of logistics and design - I wanted them to partner up, so even if they had earbuds with an inline mic, they couldn't use it. I would suggest NOW that you and your students use earbuds with a built in mic, or (if you're really serious about audio) a plug in USB mic. 

This page says they can hear me...I don't know how, so I tested it anyway. (It was correct. My audio was fine.)

My clip was recorded. AND I CAN ADD BACKGROUND MUSIC RIGHT NOW? That's a bonus feature I did not expect that renders useless my somewhat less than amateur skill at mixing audio tracks. Oh well. :)

5. Time to publish your episode!

After saving my episode by clicking on the purple button at the top, I came here to title and give a synopsis. If you a podcast fan, your favorite podcast might also give "show notes." I suspect this is also where I would post those. 

6. Finalizing your podcast details

I'd already named the podcast (although now "Brit Lit Perspectives" feels super lame), but choosing a category proved harder than I suspected. Good news is, it probably doesn't really matter. LOL

7. Cover Art

It's like judging a book by its cover...it's not "good" to do, but everyone does it anyway. 

Choose a photo, or upload your own. If you're feeling cute, you'll make something in Canva real quick. At first I picked the "Choose one for me" option, which seemed good enough, but Canva is just so easy, it's a crime to NOT use.

For real..I was able to make this in 5 minutes.

Too late for me now, but I could have done most of what I just made in Canva on this screen. Moving on!

8. Distribution

When I did this year's ago with Government Class and He REALLY Said That, getting your podcast on iTunes and other devices was a thing you had to Google and hope you did correctly. Now, you click a button. Beautiful.

9. You Have a Podcast Now

I clicked on the dashboard button and that's it! I'm a podcaster again! I appreciate the feedback this "Welcome to Anchor!" checklist gave me.

10. Adding your students' audio

This is what you really want to do!

1. Start a NEW episode and record an intro, setting up your listeners for that pure, silky student-created content.
2. Go to Google Drive, Classroom, Canvas, or whatever LMS or saving situation you are using for students' assignments and use the uploader to add the files as clips to your episode.
3. For an added touch of quality, use the transitions tab to drag over clips that smooth the transition from one students submission to the next.

11. Final Touches

I clicked save with my episode of students audio and got back to the episode details. Hey! This is where I get to specify the season and episode number! Another Anchor win. So easy.

12. Sharing is caring!

Okay, so obviously I want to share this now. Looks like I can share using these buttons as one option. 

Using "public site" seems good for posting back to your class website or LMS, (Canvas, Google Classroom, etc) and for spamming all of your friends and family via DM and email.

13. The final product

Look how good that public page above looks! I can't believe how easy this was...all of this work was about 2 and a half hours, and that includes the screenshots and commentary for this blog!

https://anchor.fm/chuck-baker3/episodes/Why-do-we-study-Brit-Lit-ehlent/a-a2s2g1o

Create Interactive Number Set Venn Diagrams with Google Slides

I'm in number sets and set theory land in our Applied Math curriculum, which means I'm in the midst of my yearly debate on what, exactly, matters about classifying numbers, and what doesn't.

That's manifesting itself this year in a desire to bring more interactivity to our investigations of these numbers. While searching for activities a few days ago, I came across this self-checking Venn Diagram activity that I really enjoyed. (Okay, its not the one I actually found the other day, but that seems to have vanished from my history. LOL)

Here's another self-check style page for sets - I particularly like that a few of these questions require description of sets that are already in groups.

What I liked about the practice I found in my initial investigation was that it had students thinking of the numbers not ONLY in terms of "integer" or "rational," but square or even, too, so I integrated rational/integer with square and even to increase rigor in this activity.

My diagrams look like this:

Creative Workflow:
1. Place your circles on the Slide, change color properties to differentiate regions
2. Define your sets
3. Use an equation editor (I used the Daum Equation Editor Chrome app) to get images of numbers to save to laptop or Google Drive.
4. Insert numbers into slide, adding numbers to fill out the sets.
5. Duplicate slides for new groups
6. Share link to students

Student Workflow:
Students will be separated into groups of 3(ish) and directed to the Google Slides document pictured above via Google Classroom. Students will drag the numbers from the grey box onto the Venn Diagram and then add their OWN number anywhere to the diagram using a text box.

I made a separate page for each group in this one Google Slides file to keep the open/close/grade/repeat to a minimum for my groups. It could end up just being a copying situation, too, but I like the layer of potential scaffolding in place of the other groups being able to see what each other is doing.

Alternatives:
Paper. Yeah, you could. There's less of a penalty if students need to revise their number placements this way, though. Instead of erase or start all over, its as simple as dragging.
Google Drawings. If you are working on a laptop of desktop and can edit Google Drawings (not possible on my class iPads), you could accomplish the same interactivity with a Drawings file. You would, however, lose the scaffolding I mentioned above.

Can I get the file??  Sure - make a copy. :)
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1dnL4UM94SE2WYzC24nPFS-l-p4MhQVworTy55PJus2M/edit?usp=sharing

Do You Make Room for Teaching INefficiently?

We all love how efficiently technology helps us find, recall, and create information, right? I can more efficiently contact the parents of my students through our online Student Information System. I can recall and edit old documents and lessons plans from my Google Drive just by searching. I can grade assessments more efficiently through my MasteryConnect GradeCam, Google Forms, and/or any number of apps and websites set up to give our students fast, formative, differentiated practice and feedback. (We use Renaissance Learning's, Accelerated Math most in my district, I just saw MathSpace at the St. Louis EdSurge event, Khan Academy has a coaching/practice element, and FrontRow has contacted me before - seems like a good product.)

But sometimes, in our hussle to meet and assess our power standards, track students progress and remediate/differentiate, or run class through our time-tested, "this works best for me" classroom procedures, we get TOO efficient. 

I have an old friend from college, Matt Inman (now a private-practice therapist in Austin), who started a podcast and blog this year titled, Inefficiency. His motto is, "Going out of our way, for that which we love most." The idea has really resonated with me personally as I've binge-listened to past episodes this month, but the idea that is sticking with me professionally came from episode 6 with psychotherapist, Dr. Roy Barsness. Dr. Barsness was describing a patient he had invested a lot of time and energy with, spent a lot of "inefficiency" on, who wound up becoming inappropriately attracted to him - to the point of suicide if he would not go to bed with her. He recounts his experience with this difficult patient:

"Many people would have dropped her...what i hated was the difficultly of working with a borderline patient, and that the patient was the problem. All I knew was my patient wasn't my problem. The problem in that room I was me - I didn't know how to be with that patient. And so I tell my students, be really careful with psychopathology, because this is the only way the patient knows how to be, and YOU have to learn how to be with that and to discover together where there's a different way of being. And so I hated that blaming of the patient, and especially of the borderline during my training... I thought, "I can work with her. The problem is... she needs a lot more than I can even give yet, but I was scrambling like crazy to find out if I could find it..." - Dr. Roy Barsness, Inefficiency Podcast, Ep. 6

My wife and I joke(?) a lot at home about how often on TV and in movies that teachers end up sleeping with their students, so lets steer away from that as NOT the point of this example. Think about those students in your school who bounce from teacher to teacher, never really connecting with anyone. How often do we talk with out colleagues that, "if she would only figure out ______," or "I really need his parents to ______ before he can be successful in my class."

Don't these kids get the most lost when we rigidly stick to the efficiencies that technology afford us in our classroom? Flipping out classrooms is a terrific use of video and so transformative for many students' ability to better understand lecture content, but I've seen a lot of students turned away at some of their neediest moments with, "Go watch the video." Its inefficient to say something that they should have gotten from that lesson's video, but it might be most caring. We go to great lengths to set up our class websites, and get all of our handouts/content online. It's quite efficient to always directly dismiss students to the class website or Google Classroom when they need something we've put on there, but sometimes, I think the right thing is to just stop what you're doing and serve that student.  It's inefficient, but our students matter, right?

"But you're just dismissing their immature behaviors and lack of responsibility." You were just thinking that, weren't you? I'm not writing this to excuse irresponsibility from 16/17/18 year olds that should really know better (and often DO better at their after-school jobs, or even in other teachers' classrooms). The key to building that relationship with that difficult, needy student is, as Dr. Barsness put it, "to discover together where there's a different way of being." Whether they are or not, I think our default assumption as teachers has to be one our best intentions from our students. That on most days, most of the time, they're giving us the best of what they have to work with in the situation.

As much as legislatures across the states want to make clear the evidences of our work after just a few months, education is a marathon. You might get thanked by a great lecture or a particularly interesting/engaging project/lesson/activity, but the things that matter most for our students happen after they leave us. in the NEXT math class, they pull that nugget of knowledge out and apply it to a project. In someone else's class they come up with a creative inquiry question to drive a project and then see it through. Our students that end up learning the most from us are the ones that needest us and we were able to give - we inspired or gave to them more than others.

I think finding moments to teach inefficiently in the midst of all the efficient technologies we build around us makes all the difference in finding satisfaction, purpose, and reward in our work. Nothing about scanning a bubblesheet makes me want to go back to class everyday, but taking time for creatively engage my students or reflect on one more thing to try with my students gets me there often.

Where is your well? In order to continue coming back, again and again for our students, we must have more to give. What are you filled with? How do you renew? ONE important life-giving activity is reflection and looking forward.

Matt posted a 2015 Year End Review on the Inefficiency website that I would wholeheartedly encourage you to fill out before returning to school. Don't pressure yourself to do it all at once, though. I think I took 3 different sessions of sitting for about 20 minutes to get through it, but it was great for thinking back and on setting personal AND professional priorities for 2016.

Give Your Students "College Ready" Texts They'll WANT To Read

Its no secret that the ACT (and success in college as a whole) is dependent upon a high-level of reading comprehension. The science section on the ACT has much, much more to do with reading and understanding a non-fiction, technical text than it does your memory of mitosis or Newton's 3rd law.

That being said, it be hard to avoid the importance of raising reading skills in my ACT Prep class this summer. I haven't looked at my students' benchmarked reading scores from the school year, but given the
"don't-you-dare-call-on-me" silence of death I've gotten our 2 days of class when I asked for a reader, I'd be willing to bet they are not high. I don't think the students at my school WANT to be poor readers, and most of our low readers probably carry some shame about and would put in work to raise their skills, but putting in the hard work of catching up using reading texts that are not of personal interest to them creates a mental barrier. Rather than hurdle/climb/scratch/claw over it, many of our readers go the easier route of blaming something/someone else for their deficiencies, or they resign to "I'm not a good reader."

As I was perusing the Chrome Web Store this week looking for more utility to add to my Chromebook, I ran into Newsela, a news aggregator that promises to give my students articles that will be of interest to them at a lexile/grade level score that I can set to best support them.

I had really hoped Newsela ran on some super platform that used some fancy coding to take any article a student could throw at and replace synonyms, interpret meaning, and chunk long passages into shorter ones, but apparently I live in the future.

Newsela DOES have a respectable amount of articles to choose from (updated daily), and I was even able to find one about the dance team from a school in my district that the +St Louis Post-Dispatch profiled last fall.

Here's what Newsela allows you to do with any of the articles on the site:

• Assign to students for reading. From their student account, they pull up their "binder" to find what you have curated for them.
• Set a lexile level for them to scaffold vocabulary weaknesses while focusing on comprehension
• Assess comprehension with a quiz that they put together or a writing prompt
• Highlight and annotate passages to give your students extra insight or further scaffold their reading.

To share some of how it works, here's a few screenshots of my perusing that article:

This is the layout of an article on Newsela. You have options to assign the article (or to hide it) at the top, the text in the main column with sharing buttons above the title, and choices to differentiate reading levels and assessment on the right in blue.

Newsela doesn't ONLY replace "higher" words for lower, the editorial staff also provides subtitles and headings the lower you go down lexicles. This is the same paragraph on the 5th grade and 12th grade reading level.

Is it a PERFECT tool for getting your students relatable content? Probably not, but it gets you a long way in its ability to provide choice and scaffolding for your readers, and its faster than a classroom trip to the library for students to find and choose books on the appropriate level.

Using Visual Notes for Memory and Understanding

Are you an doodler? Associating notes and terms with images is helpful for recalling information later, so doodling (or finding images that relate and then pasting in) is a good strategy for taking something mundane like note-taking and creating an "experience" that will be easier to call upon during test time. I still remember the tank I drew with icicles hanging from it in 10th grade on my Cold War notes.

This brings me to today's use of visual notes. As much as it pains me to say, "victory" on the ACT does not always go to the "smartest" students, but instead, to those who can best play the game. In a bubble, I'd much rather teach math concepts and skills, but when it comes to gaming the ACT, sometimes those get in the way.

This is best exemplified in my experience from my 2 experiences taking the ACT as a student. The first time, I had a TI-83 at my side, checking every graph and solution I could, searching for just the right formula. I didn't finish that section - I don't even remember being that close. The second time I took the ACT, I did not have the graphing calculator (I have no idea where the graphing calculator I'd been using went) - I didn't even have a scientific calculator! I told my dad on the way to the test that I needed to get a calculator, so we stopped at a supermarket, bought a 2 dollar four function calculator. The magic of my 2 dollar calculator test was that I HAD to skip around to the things I could do easiest. I was much more agile in my thinking, skipped around more quickly when I felt stuck, and actually did 5 points higher that time. My "knowledge" got in the way the first time from me showing what I definitely knew, and there were probably some questions I could have done that I never got to.

I found a list of strategies for each section of the ACT on sparknotes.com for my students and I've tasked them to make a "poster" for each section and the included strategies. My skill set and interest leans toward illustrating in any whiteboard or drawing app, but I left open the option for using the PicCollage app to bring in images and text or Haiku Deck to make a slide show with an image for each strategy.

Here's the example I created using the Paper app based on tips from this video that I showed earlier in class:

Here's a preliminary student example:

My favorite part of this one is the crossed arms emoji for "eliminate answers". :)

More visual notes resources:
6 Apps To Visualize Notes on iPad
Sketchnotes and Visual Thinking Note-taking - This page summarizes and links to many OTHER resources
Show with Media: Visual Note-taking

Happy note-taking!

Enrich Class Discussions by Podcasting Them

This post describes the rationale and some nuts and bolts of the Government class podcast I'm working on this summer. You can read more about that class and listen to the episodes at governmentclass.mrcbaker.com.

This summer school I am delighted to be teaching a 2 week "credit recovery" course for Government, something I taught in my student teaching in 2005, but have not worked with since.

One of the things I'm looking most forward to is the class discussion. There are opportunities for these in math class the deeper you go with relevance, 3 Act Math Stories, and or project-based learning, but because much of studying the social sciences is how everything that has (or may) happen relates to you or others, class discussions are something that I like to do several times a week.

I used today's first podcast as a way to get the kids to reflect on what they see as the role of the federal government, if they think the government is doing well in that role, and to think of or research specific cases that exemplify their stance. Here's a link to the prewriting doc I put in Google Classroom for them.

I gave them 15 minutes to think through the doc and get some of their answers down, stressing that the idea does not have to be at its fullest fruition since we were prewriting. I moved around the room, talking through some ideas with students, clarifying questions, and encouraging that putting good effort in the prewriting was going to make them sound really smart when we started recording.

After their prewriting time was up, ordinarily, that's where you would have a class discussion, right? You, the teacher would throw out a question, the students would share their responses, you would counter with follow-up questions to help clarify their statements and summarize for everyone else, and students would respond to each other. And then with the exception perhaps of some stellar note-taking from some student, the discussion would die as soon as the bell rang, living only as a memory, and only for the benefit of the people in the room.

But if you record it, the discussion lives on! Why record (and why podcast specifically)?

1. Recording the discussion archives it for students who were absent or want to review it later when studying
2. Recording and pushing it out as a podcast invites parents into the classroom without having to be IN the classroom.
3. An audio recording is less intimidating to students who may not want to be on video and less intrusive to the normal flow of the discussion. I set my Chromebook in the middle of the circle, pressed record, and then left it alone.
4. Podcasting the discussion creates an audience for your students beyond their classmates and you, their teacher. A class discussion may have gotten blown off, but everyone was on their best behavior and best engagement while we were recording. 
5. Letting kids know you trust and value what they say to put it on the internet is a message of trust and value in them as people. Who doesn't love to hear that?

But HOW do I do this, Chuck?

1. Get a voice recorder app for your iOS or Android device, or open up an online audio recorder. Today I used online-voice-recorder.com. When you save/export these, it will save as an .mp3 file.

2. What if you can't hear my students on the playback? I used twistedwave.com to edit individual files with fade in/fade in or cutting out any period of more than like, 5 seconds of silence, but MUCH more useful was the "normalize' tool, that allowed me to highlight the quiet sound signature from a quiet student, "normalize" it to the rest of the audio, and turn up the volume just in that one segment.

3. Ideally, things will go great and everything your students say will get recorded. :) If that doesn't happen, or you need to separate the recording between different hours (or any other reason you may have two separate .mp3 files that you want together) I used http://audio-joiner.com/ to put my files together after I had them edited how I liked.

4. Do you have the .mp3 file how you want it now? What should you do with it? You could do something like attach the file to your website, Google Classroom, Edmodo, or other LMS, or even share the link from Google Drive via email or Remind. That's by far the simplest solution. If you want to try posting your audio as a real life, honest-to-goodness podcast, you'll need a blog post the files to, generate an RSS feed, and get yourself submitted to iTunes. Here are tutorials for that.

• Setting up Drive and Blogger
• Making and submitting a podcast to Apple iTunes 

When deciding if you need the extra layer of complication submitting to iTunes, consider your audience. Are you podcasting your class discussions for the stakeholders of your school and/or district, or are you hoping to share with a larger audience? If your answer is the former, you don't really have a need for iTunes - people you want to share with can just get the file as an .mp3 shared via email or Google Drive.

However, as I said in the Why Podcast section, I sensed that my students stepped up their game knowing that other people were going to be turning in as well, so it is worth the steps to host the podcast on iTunes and this blog.

MY next step is to start to train the students to be able to record, facilitate, save the .mp3 files themselves. My government class is less than 10 students this summer - I don't think it would have been as successful an experience if we were trying to get a "regular" class size all engaged in the same discussion at the same time. In that case, I would hope to split it into at least 2 concurrent recording sessions. The obvious advantage here is that then the teacher steps even further into the background and can just sit in a guide/contribute rather than driving the discussion. 

Is it Tech-Ready? 3D Solids Town Project

A large part of my job as self-appointed edtech evangelist in my building is seeking out opportunities for my colleagues to take something they are already doing that works well and take it to an even higher level with technology enabling them to learn more, share more, or show more.

Last week I was inspired by a 3D solids project my mentee and another Geometry teacher did earlier in the semester. I did a Google Sketchup project last year to assess 2D area, and one of the greatest tools in Sketchup is its ability to easily create 3D solids, so I asked Colleen and Emily if we could have a chat about their project.

Our discussion was centered on these 4 questions:

• What were you assessing with this project?
• Why did you choose to assess those goals this way?
• How do you feel your project went?
• Would using the technology bring added value to this project?

So is this project tech-ready? As far as simply evaluating ability to calculate surface area, volume, and write linear equations, I think it translates nicely, however (and I think this was a surprise to Emily), you do lose the physical, tangible skill reinforcement of measuring a physical object if you take this project into Sketchup. With the emphasis we're trying to place on graduating kids that have and/or are ready to gain technical skills, I think it might be worth it to keep this as a paper-based project, or at most provided Sketchup as an option.

I have really enjoyed seeing these projects on the walls the past month, and I'm impressed at the evolution it represented in instructional design from the last project these Geometry classes. It was a good integration of some Algebra concepts that are sometimes hard to put in the Geometry curriculum, particularly in this unit. However, since this is an ed tech AND math blog, let's explore some ways we could go further next year.

What are some things we could do to keep the tangible skills but still enhance the learning experience with this project?

• We were talking about having kids check the workability of their word problems by having their classmates solve them - you could generate a rich feedback loop having kids post their problems on Google Classroom, a student blog, or Voicethread and require kids to respond and give feedback to a set number of their classmates. You could do the same on chart paper in the room, I think, but moving that opportunity online keeps the feedback more easily accessible (instead of a giant piece of chart paper), and opening up the number of people who could comment on any one student's problem.
• Have students decide the surface area or volume they want for each 3d solid and then create and print the net for the solid themselves using image editing software. Even MS Paint would work. :)
• Students chart the lines of their streets on an online graphing utility like Desmos, and just enter the placement of their physical 3d solids on their poster as coordinate points. This option would keep a map-making element to the project with a tool more approachable (and accessible) than Sketchup. 

What other ideas do you have, readers? Do you think the physical measuring skills are not worth the limitations they place on the type of product the kids can make and share? Is there something else we can use technology to enrich and enhance the experience while keeping the physical manipulatives?

Is YOUR School #FutureReady? Here's What Some Students Said -

I had to pleasure of "crashing" the St. Louis Regional Future Ready School Summit last week as a part of the volunteer team, so I've been reflecting a lot on my own practices, some of the decisions we make as a school that we do have control over, the decisions our district makes that I have no control over, and how all of that meshes together to affect the "future readiness" of my students (and figuring out what that really means.)

According to the Future Ready website from the +U.S. Department of Education, a #FutureReady school commits to...

• Fostering and Leading a Culture of Digital Learning Within Our Schools.
• Future Ready district leadership teams work collaboratively to transform teaching and learning using the power of technology to help drive continuous improvement. We work together to protect student privacy and to teach students to become responsible, engaged, and contributing digital citizens.
• Helping Schools and Families Transition to High-speed Connectivity.
• Future Ready districts conduct comprehensive diagnostic assessments of the district’s technology infrastructure and develop a sustainable plan to ensure broadband classroom connectivity and wireless access. Future Ready districts work with community partners to leverage local, state, and federal resources to support home Internet access outside of traditional school hours.
• Empowering Educators through Professional Learning Opportunities.
• Future Ready districts strive to provide everyone with access to personalized learning opportunities and instructional experts that give teachers and leaders the individual support they need, when they need it. Future Ready districts provide tools to help teachers effectively leverage learning data to make better instructional decisions.
• Accelerating Progress Toward Universal Access for All Students to Quality Devices.
• Future Ready districts work with necessary stakeholders to ensure that all students and educators across the district have regular access to devices for learning. Future Ready districts develop tools to support a robust infrastructure for managing and optimizing safe and effective use of technology, so students have opportunities to be active learners, creating and sharing content, not just consuming it.
• Providing Access to Quality Digital Content.
• Future Ready districts align, curate, create, and consistently improve digital materials and apps used in the support of learning. Future Ready districts use carefully selected high quality digital content that is aligned to college and career ready standards as an essential part of daily teaching and learning. Teachers are able to share, discover, and adapt openly-licensed materials and teaching plans.
• Offering Digital Tools to Help Students And Families #ReachHigher.
• Future Ready districts make digital resources available that help access expanded college, career, and citizenship opportunities. Future Ready districts promote ways to leverage technology to expand equity through digital activities such as completion of the FAFSA online, virtual counseling services, college scholarship search tools, and online advising access, all of which help to return America to the nation in the world with the highest college completion rate by 2020.
• Mentoring Other Districts and Helping Them Transition to Digital Learning.
• Future Ready districts work to design, implement, and share their technology plans. Future Ready districts join regional summits, participate in an online Connected Superintendents community of practice, and publish their Future Ready technology plan at a site such aswww.MyDistrict.org/FutureReady.

How is YOUR school doing on these measures? The Dept of Ed partnered with +AT&T and +McGraw Hill to offer a dashboard to district leadership teams for self-assessment, planning and data tracking. Its a great tool for focusing your team on the vague idea of "21st century learning."

After the first day of the summit, I was curious what my own students thought about that, so for my second day out, I left the following writing prompt for them:

Tomorrow my students will be argument writing on how #futureready their school is. #stuvoice #kidsgradehard pic.twitter.com/67t67JKViX

— Chuck Baker (@chuckcbaker) April 28, 2015

The way I wrote the prompt, the kids understandably took it down to their experience as students, but I was surprised to the extent that many of them said it was because their teachers didn't care about them. I don't know how different the results may have been with higher performing students (these were my juniors/seniors who have failed at least 1 semester of math and many of which will not move on to Algebra 2), or with kids from a different district, but rather than focusing on student use of technology and the lack thereof in most of our classrooms, the narrative I saw developing as I transcribed in the handwritten responses were that my school is failing students (in the sense of not fulfilling our mandate to prepare them for what's next) not because of irrelevant work, but mostly because teachers either did not care, were not good teachers, or both.

You can read the full text of student responses here.

The ones who DID respond positively usually referred to career and technical ed classes we offer (business, food, Project Lead the Way), or in offering the ACT or scholarship information, which almost hits on the second to last Future Ready principal listed above, but still discounts the technology that can be leveraged to enhance those opportunities.

I've also included a few word clouds trying to best visualize the narrative I saw developing. If you read the full responses, I think you'll agree none of these quite "get" it, but the ones where "don't" is most prominent come close.

So what do you DO with this information?
I'm pretty sure part of the discrepancy between their responses and the Future Ready principals was a combination of the way I worded the prompt and the students' own experiences. Obviously they wouldn't have anything to say about teachers' professional learning opportunities or mentoring other districts in digital learning.

What I DO take away from this is that a school's first priority should be in setting up procedures and systems that let students know implicitly and explicitly that they are cared for and who they are and will become matters. The Summit welcomed Dr. Tiffany Anderson of +Jennings School District, a district close to mine that has taken the pledge and seen a significant turn around from unaccreditation to accreditation in the last several years to tell the Jennings story.  Dr. Anderson laid out three principles they use to guide decisions in the district: relationship, pedagogy, and curriculum. I think its easy to tighten up pedagogy and curriculum - those are processes and fixed by training. Relationship is harder because relationships get hard and ugly sometimes. Relationships are made of people and people mess up.

The day can best be summed up for me and my students in what I tweeted just as Dr. Anderson was wrapping up with her experience guiding the students through understanding and expressing their feelings surrounding the Michael Brown and #Ferguson protests in our community last fall.

I just want to give Dr. Jackson a hug. WOW. @JenningsK12 is evidence of power of trusting your kids #moedchat #FutureReady

— Chuck Baker (@chuckcbaker) April 29, 2015

Tip Tuesday - Copy Your Padlets for Other Sections

I love using Padlet as a landing strip for students to share ideas, work, or problems they're creating.

Here's some ways I've used Padlet on my class set of iPads:

• backchannel
• students' summary statements after reading a text
• generating questions before or after reading
• gathering guesses or estimations of an answer during Act 1 of 3 Act Story
• students creating/solving exercises to share with each other
• reflecting on a video or text

Some of those uses listed above might actually be enriched by students being able to go back to earlier periods in the day and see what they did, particularly the backchannel or creating exercises for each other to solve. For the reflections or checks for understanding, I think having other kids' thoughts on there pollutes the experience and prevents new ideas.

For yesterday's work, I wanted my students to make up the graph of a line, write the equation for that line, share their work on the padlet, write the equations of some of their classmates lines, and then have the classmate check them off as correct or needing more work. It wouldn't have been the end of the world if some of the lines got repeated, but it was important that the line creators were in the room so that they could check their peers' work.

In THAT case, where you need a fresh board for each period, you can COPY your padlet with identical settings so that you don't have to duplicate your own work.

I chose "copy with posts" on this occasion because I wanted my own example up there. 

 Another pro tip: edit the addresses of your padlets for easy sharing with the date and hour.

After the day was over, I had 3 padlets that all looked SIMILAR, but were unique to each hour.

For more info, check out the Padlet blog - I checked after the fact, but they wrote a recent post about copying, too.   :)

"Hangout" with an Expert

My district is holding a STEM Expo next week, and I thought this was an excellent opportunity for my AP Stats students to present the statistical significance projects they design and conduct at the end of the semester each year.

The only problem with my vision was that I don't have any experience on what presenting a poster at a science conference looks like. From what I've heard from a couple of my friends that are/were STEM graduate students, its not really the same as showing some PowerPoint slides and discussing.

Enter my friend of a friend, Washington University doctoral student, Ryan Watkins, who has presented a poster a few different conferences. She did me a super solid and met with my class at 7:30 this morning.

Ryan's bio:

Ryan is a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, finishing her Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Science. She graduated from the Florida Institute of Technology in 2010 with Bachelor's Degrees in both Physics and Space Science. She have completed three NASA internships — two at Kennedy Space Center as an undergrad and one at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. She was appointed as a NASA Student Ambassador in 2008 and is actively involved in STEM outreach at all age levels. She has published papers about the effects of rocket exhaust on lunar soil and is currently studying volcanic regions on the Moon using orbital images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. She plans to continue researching the Moon and become involved in planning future planetary missions after she graduates. She dreams of becoming an astronaut one day, and hopefully be the first woman to walk on the Moon.

Before the Hangout, I sent Ryan's bio to my students through Google Classroom and had them all respond with 2 questions to get help them prepare and make the most of our time. I think the best question from a learning/work perspective came didn't actually get asked.

"What are the qualities a good STEM poster should have (kind of like an informal rubric I could refer back to)?"

It's not entirely common that I will have students (especially earlier than the day before the due date) ask for a rubric to guide their work. And that he even thought to ask someone else (sort of outside the classroom setting) is especially impressive to me. (She ended up sending this great resource from NYU with tips, tools, and guidelines for research posters right after our Hangout)

HANGOUT VS. FACETIME VS. SKYPE
I chose to do this via Google Hangout today for a couple of reasons:

• I wanted to let another AP teacher in the district whose kids are also presenting at the Expo in on the broadcast
• I wanted to archive it in case my chronically absent students were absent, or the kids just wanted to watch it again.

I could have accomplished the 1st goal via a regular Hangout, but to record it, I would have to have been running screencasting software on top of my window (which would be the only way of recording a FaceTime or Skype), I was worried about lag on my network as it was, so asking my computer to also due more seemed like pressing my luck.

The best feature of doing the video chat via Google Hangout was that I could do it as "Hangouts On Air," which automatically broadcasts the chat live to your YouTube channel and then archives as a regular YouTube upload after the fact (which is how it is embedded earlier in this post).

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS
Video chatting or live streaming can be taxing on a network, so if at all possible, you should try to schedule your chat away from peak times (for us, its lunch time), or at the least, inform your technology department and perhaps they can clear some extra bandwidth for you ahead of time.

We spent several minutes before we actually got started getting "in" the Hangout and then getting my settings right before we even "started" the interview, so if you're crunched for time, its good to know that you can start the Hangout before you actually start broadcasting it.

Hangouts On Air and Hangouts actually live in different areas of your Google world. Hangouts you setup via Google+ or the Hangouts app, but Hangouts On Air need to be setup through your YouTube account. Here's some info on getting started with Hangouts On Air.

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!

Do Your Students DESERVE Technology?

"Well, its they fault for having iPads..."

This was a students' response a couple weeks ago when I told everyone we were putting their project on hiatus because someone in their class walked out with an iPad yesterday. (The day after someone walked out with the class fish to be "funny.")

"The school should have known they'd be stolen - this is the hood."

I'm not oblivious to my own white privilege, and my school is definitely not Pleasantville High, but to describe our setting as "the hood" is laughable at best and disrespectful to the students in cities who have to go to schools across the country where their safety IS obviously in question.

But... maybe my school is more authentically ghetto than I thought. In a real, Webster's Dictionary kind of way, many of  my students are at least CULTURALLY isolated and trapped. When I announced their class would be going back to worksheets, there were some kids who started making contingency plans to finish their project work after school or on their cellphones, but no one really expressed the same outrage at the injustice I was about to enact on this class as I was feeling myself. I wonder how aware they are of the creative, cool, relevant projects kids with more access to technology are doing every day in other schools?

Some of my students may have even been relieved - completing a worksheet requires much less of them than a student-paced, open-ended statistics project like we've been doing. Worksheets eventually go away because the teacher moves on to the next teacher-centered, teacher-directed activity. The sheeple can follow along.

When relevance is a CLASSROOM-SPECIFIC focus, it sends the message organizationally that its only something that happens in so-and-so's class. Something THAT TEACHER is doing extra. (I had a kid tell me today after he told me he couldn't enter his answers into a Google Form that he was going to just go to credit recovery so he could get a math class that doesn't use technology. His teacher last semester that he failed with was heavy on flipping the class and using Study Island for some assessment.) When student-centered, relevance-seeking technology use is only in pockets, students can escape (and slip through the cracks). Students can blame THAT TEACHER on bad experiences. When relevance is a school-level or district-level emphasis, it starts to shift the CULTURE, which can then change the students' mindsets.

So what did do the next day? I kept the iPads locked up for that class for several more days after the fact, but they're back out now. I don't want to manage two different lesson plans for the same course, nor do can I bear intentionally making the decision to leave the iPads in the cart. I believe the only thing to fight my students' ignorance is with knowledge and exposure, and the only way to ever know and expect better is to see and experience better. 

Defining Students' Capabilities (What Happened on the Scientific Notation Project?)

What do you think defines more of your students' capabilities to create, the tools you give them, or the content you teach?

Which builds more capacity in our students to solve (their own) real problems, teaching them to ask better questions, or teaching the content necessary to attack those problems?

I had a great conversation with +Jeff Horwitz from Chesterfield Day School in December about continuing to push myself to think out of a box about what problems kids can solve and what products they can create in 2015 with the technology and information available to them. There are skills we teach at the high school level in our career and technical ed and arts courses that 15 years ago a kid may have needed to make a professional-ish product.

When I was a kid...

• I "published" stories and books by using a printer, our best markers, and those little metal brads and giving them to my parents. One day, I even got invited to an city-wide event where I got to read my story in a classroom of TWENTY-FIVE other kids and parents who were attending the same event.
  
• I "produced" songs by recording myself singing along to the radio on a casette recorder.
  
• I "interviewed" people from other cultures by making up fake languages and talking into my casette recorder.
  
• I "published" a newspaper by drawing a picture in the box and writing on the lines of a pre-printed template on newsprint that my parents bought one time. (And just once. So, the fun was over in an evening.)
  
• I saw my grandparents on my mother's side fewer times than I can count on my hands, because they lived more than a day's drive away.
  

My 5 year old...

• Has published an interactive ebook and shared it on my facebook with her friends (okay, my friends, their parents, but you know what I mean.)
  
• Without even being given the idea, recorded music videos on a Leapfrog Leappad with songs she makes up herself.
  
• Has a "fashion" blog with images of her designs that she'll request we post to so she can show her friends her pictures of "horse braids", "tags for charming babies," necklaces, and more
  
• Can Facetime her Mimi and Poppa almost whenever she wants, sharing all the latest news from STL to ATL. 
  

Its hard for me to even imagine what she'll be capable of once she starts reading, but I have a feeling it will only be limited by our ability to get the tools into her hands, and her own imagination. 

I think in a lot of ways, I expect greater creativity and imagination from my preschool-aged children than I might from the high-schoolers in my classroom. Is there a chance our expectations of what they may be capable of is what defines the end product? If something is an "11th-grade" project, what makes it so? Is it the math content from a course they haven't yet taken, or is it a complexity limitation? 

Once you raise your expectations of the quality that students are capable of producing, how do you sell that to your students that have a fixed mindset of what they can accomplish? 

Two weeks ago I gave my Applied Math students a mini-project about multiplying or dividing numbers in scientific notation. I gave them the choice of 4 different questions to research and solve, and a choice of poster, collage, video, or whatever else cool they could come up with as their product. Several students steered toward poster, which was fine, but the disparity between quality was what rattled me for the better part of a weekend. Choosing to work by herself, one student finished her work in 2 class periods (and most of the 2nd was filled with coloring in block letters and graphics on her poster.) I had a group of 4 boys "finish" the same question in 4 class periods with what was probably a level of quality I could have produced in 3rd grade. 

What happened with these boys (the 2nd photo above)? Is it a matter of their teacher accepting this poster as "done," even as I already know that it will barely pass muster on my rubric? Can we mandate creativity in core classes? Do I have to put quality measures in my rubric that really should be assessing a student's learning of the content? 

From my experience, its not enough to give the option of creativity in the classroom and producing cool, quality work. Some students will flourish under that setting, but it cheats that ones who will continue to function at the lowest common denominator. I don't think its enough to show our students what they can do - we have some level of responsiblity to push and encourage them to make it happen.