I’m presenting on Literacy Tools and Strategies to Support Social Emotional Learning at ISTE U’s Summer Learning Academy 2022. This professional learning opportunity allows educators to learn at their own pace about the topics we all care about, now through Oct. 14. For $64 you have can access to amazing professional development. More at iste.org/sla.
Check out the Padlet of curated resources related to my presentation on SEL with teaching tools, strategies and related research.
The following post was a guest blog post I wrote for ISTE this past week. You can read the entire post on ISTE’s Blog.
Tai Poole is a ninth grader in Canada and has been hosting the podcast series Tai Asks Why? with the Canadan Broadcasting Company (CBC) since he was 11. Each episode is under 30 minutes and delves into thought-provoking topics: How much is too much screen time, what is love, and what’s happening to my teenage brain with insight from Tai’s family members, experts and scientists. Tai is one of many young people starting their own podcasts, building an audience and brand around them.
Why not get your students in on the podcasting action? You don’t need fancy equipment to get started. Just an idea. Producing a podcast requires students to articulate an idea, as they showcase their understanding and learning. Students can create them independently or in collaborative groups. The content can be serious or light hearted, fictional or grounded in truth. Podcasts cover a wide variety of subjects including science, current events, history, fan fiction and storytelling. If they aren’t sure where to begin, they can listen to published podcast examples to help determine the direction and format.
Podcasting builds skills
When students produce a podcast, they become problem solvers and enhance their technology skills. The ISTE Standards for Students call for students to express themselves in a variety of formats and platforms. Throughout the podcasting process students apply research, writing and verbal skills to communicate a message. When students create their own podcasts, they act as knowledge constructors and empowered learners.
Here are three more reasons to create podcasts with students.
Most of the information students receive is in multimodal formats: digital, print, visual and audio. Podcasts are tools for learning information and content. Podcasts come in a variety of formats and topics. My students are currently listening to the murder mystery podcast series Tig Torres: Lethal Lit as a mentor text for their own mystery stories they are creating.
Creating podcasts for a wider audience is engaging and authentic. The New York Times and National Public Radio both host annual podcasting contests for teens to create and record original audio material under 10 minutes on any topic. Sharing student-created podcasts with the world enriches the learning experience for the listeners as well as the podcast creators.
Sharing podcasts with local and global audiences requires students to create a positive, safe, ethical and legal digital behavior. Producing a podcast requires students to record and edit digital content. Students are required to choose sound effects, record interviews and include sound bites from experts to add engaging features that draw the listeners attention. Podcasting depends on creative communication.
Last week ISTE kicked off its first ever Creative Constructor Lab bringing together amazing educators to inspire ALL, experiment with digital storytelling, design thinking, coding and more. Over seven days there were 70 virtual hands-on sessions, daily creative design challenges, and lots of sharing among participants. Innovative leaders and presenters included Tim Needles, Claudio Zavala, Holly Clark, Josh Stock, Sean Arnold, and many more talking about injecting creativity into our classrooms through hands-on presentations and design challenges.
What inspires you? That was the theme that was threaded through each presentation and design challenge. #Eduleaders and presenters invited participants to be courageous and creative throughout the week in order turn around and do the same for our students.
Here are five innovative projects to do with students that are grounded in storytelling and video creation.
2. Middle School educator Sherri Kushner @Sherrip shared a visually powerful project her students created in order to speak out against injustice. Students designed portraits for change. These mixed media designed highlighted student voice and activism.
3. Author of the new ISTE publication, Awesome Sauce: Create Videos to Inspire Students, Josh Stock shared dozens of quick video and bigger projects. From choice boards to PSAs, Test Reviews, Travel Videos, Screencasts, and more, Josh is a wealth of information and ideas to use videos for communication, learning, and showcasing understanding.
4. Tim Needles is the master of design challenges. An art teacher and artist in New York, Tim emulates creativity. Some of the daily challenges included: create an untraditional selfie, animate a selfie, create a 4 frame romance story, and create a Spark Video Poem. Here are the directions for the Spark Video Poem and the untraditional selfie. I am going to do both with my students in the upcoming week.
5. Design a Virtual Tour. Virtual tours are a way to expose our students to a whole new world view, and there is a plethora of free tools to utilize along this journey to discovery. Virtual trips can be built into menu choice boards or educators can lead live virtual tours for distance learning. There are many pre-made tours that are already available at no cost, and also discover how to create their own using websites such as Google Earth, Google Arts & Culture, 360Cities.net, and more. Virtual trips enhance learning and knowledge of resources to help empower students on their quest to becoming global citizens. This Wakelet collections contains virtual tours, resources, and articles from Amanda Jones.
I am still reviewing and rewatching the presentations that I did not get to yet during the Creative Constructor Lab. This virtual experience provided creative ideas to bring into our classroom and inspire students as innovative designers and knowledge constructors. Whether learning in person or remotely, students need the opportunities to create and teachers must personalize learning experiences that foster independent learning across content areas using a variety of digital tools and resources that engage and support learning.
Beginning Saturday, June 22nd The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) kicks off its annual conference in Philadelphia, PA. This conference is the mecca of edtech. There will be over 1,400 sessions for professional development learning from coding to maker space, Google innovation, gamification, and so much more. I will be blogging from #ISTE and continue to share innovative technology and teaching practices on this blog.
Below are the hyper doc and slide deck for my workshop Giving Voice and Power to Readers: Tools and Strategies to Maximize Learning Potential. This workshop is for educators and literacy specialists looking for digital tools and strategies to support diverse student readers. Due to the diverse readers in our classrooms, teaching reading has taken on a variety of approaches to promote literacy that not only addresses functional reading, but promotes reading in a way for students to be critical consumers of information and effective communicators. Being literate in today’s society is not merely about consumption and intake of information but about creation and meaning making.
Access VP Reading Hyperdoc here
Last week the New York Times published the article, On Instagram, 11,696 Examples of How Hate Thrives on Social Media (NYT 10.29.18) three days after the mass shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA. This article highlights social media companies attention to or lack there of “treatment of toxic language and hate speech” on their platforms. Interestingly, “Social media companies have said that identifying and removing hate speech and disinformation — or even defining what constitutes such content — is difficult.”
The past three weeks I have been dealing with my own ordeal of hate speech and false representation on Twitter. After five years and 40 twitter book chats with my students, three weeks ago I moderated a Twitter book chat and an ambiguous avatar joined the chat sending funny pictures and memes. When they did not identify themselves I blocked the account. That did not stop my students participating in the chat from seeing the stream of continuous tweets from this person. If fact, the images and tweets escalated to spread hate speech, anti Semitic photographs and sexist and anti gay memes. The person’s tweets were directed at myself and a student of mine. I reported the tweets to Twitter and within a day the racist, antisemitic, homophobic, and sexist tweets were removed and the account was suspended. But that did not stop this person.
The next day a new account was created by this same person and they used my image as their Avatar. The name of the Twitter handle referenced a Nazi program, Nacht und Nebel (German for “Night and Fog”). This directive issued by Hitler targeted political activists and resistance “helpers” in World War II to be imprisoned or killed. The person sent tweets to me telling me to die and making derogatory statements. When I reported the tweets to Twitter my reports were denied telling me that this was not a threat. The tweets escalated over ten days and the person tweeted in binary code, hex64, and other code threats to me and students of mine. All the tweets were reported to Twitter but Twitter did not consider it a threat or hate speech written in code!
I contacted the FBI, I filed police reports, the DA was involved.
It took legal action to get the IP address which was connected to a residence in the town where I teach. This residence has a young person who is a student in my school, he is not a student in my class. The family is cooperating with the police and the school; additionally, the family has agreed to get counseling for their son. Since the police approached the family my image has been removed and all the tweets have been taken down.
My principal sent the following message out to our community:
Dear Parents,
We at XXXXX Middle School pride ourselves as educators who not only attend to the academic needs of our students but who also focus on their social and emotional needs. We share your challenge in teaching these young adolescents how to judiciously and ethically use contemporary technology as moral citizens of the school community and ultimately the world.
Dr. Haiken, Team 8R ELA teacher, has been using Twitter for the past six years. With the consent of parents, she and her students tweet about the books they read, creating a sort of twenty-first century book club. Unfortunately, someone has used this account to insert horrible, racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks, some directed at one of our students. We are investigating this and are making every possible effort to discover who the troll is. The police and Twitter administrators have been notified. A full investigation is being conducted and appropriate consequences will be implemented.
We are having discussions with our students about the deeper issues involved, and we need your help. As we partner to help our young people grow into empathetic, responsible adults, we need you to have follow-up conversations at home not only about social media but also about how we treat those who might be a little different from the mainstream.
Bullies hide behind the anonymity of social media. All children regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or beliefs deserve a safe and healthy environment in which to thrive and learn. Please help us deliver this message at home.
These events impacted by teaching and the educational environment. It saddens me that this person who has digital smarts chose to use them for evil and spread hate. In the meanwhile, I think about what are the best ways to promote positive digital citizenship and responsibility so that my students make smart choices online and not become a victim or perpetrator of hate online.
Recently, The Wall Street Journal published a video:
I concur with the two teachers in the video when they talk about teaching empathy and modeling positive (digital) behavior.
Digital Citizenship is an ongoing lesson that needs to be addressed every year with every student. Social media is not going away, and blocking websites in schools or telling students they cannot use phones is not a realistic solution. These events have helped me to look more closely at the role that social media plays in our lives and how I can promote positive digital behavior in my classroom so all of my students use their digital powers for good.
Below are five resources to teach digital responsibility and citizenship:
Wicked EdTech – Here you can find a video playlist on Digital Literacy
Google Applied Digital Skills – Ready-to-use video lessons teach digital
skills that have immediate, real-life application.
Be Internet Awesome – Google’s Digital Safety Resources for the
classroom and home.
Common Sense Media Digital Citizenship – Empower your students to
make safe, smart, and ethical decisions online.
ISTE Digital Citizenship – Here you can find articles and resources connected to digital
citizenship in schools.
How do you envision technology in your classroom?
How do you utilize technology with your students to promote deeper learning, critical thinking, and creativity?
How do you see technology enhancing your teaching goals?
Technology is transformative. It is more than an instructional tool. Teachers need to decide for themselves the technology tools they should use for instruction to benefit student learning. Today is about understanding the possibilities and gaining more knowledge for teachers to embed technology more fluidly into their daily classroom practices and curriculum.
Where better to help answer these questions, learn from edtech leaders, and be inspired to integrate technology in meaningful and creative ways to support our students as learners and digital citizens than the International Society for Technology Education Conference (#ISTE17).
This year, #ISTE17 was held in San Antonio, Texas with 18,000 attendees and more than 5,000 edtech companies, start ups, and industry leaders (Google, Microsoft, Apple). The conference was jam packed for five days of workshops, panels, key notes, playgrounds, poster sessions, and exhibitors.
Here are five key ideas, themes, and takeaways I found dominating the event:
3. Maker Everything. Makerspace is here to stay and it is only getting bigger. Makerspace is not just tinkering but teachers are using it as a way for students to deepen their understanding of a concept, lesson, and idea. Makerspace does not have to be a stand alone club or activity, many educators shared their integration of maker space across the curriculum.
One of the coolest Makerspace ideas I saw at a poster session was shared by Heather Lister and Michelle Griffith of Brannen Elementary in Brazosport ISD. Their poster session was jam packed with maker space ideas, suggested supplies, challenge cards, and project examples. Heather shared a World War II Map of Allied and Axis Powers that could light up with copper sticker tape and LED circuit stickers.
4, Next Generation Learning NOT 21st Century Learning. Let’s eliminate the saying 21st Century Learning. What does that mean, anyway? It is 2017 and we are almost 20 years into the 21st Century. Here are 8 habits of Next Generation Teachers as defined by Andrew Churches. How would you rate yourself?
Adapting the curriculum and the requirements to teach to the curriculum in imaginative ways.
Being visionary and look ideas and envisage how they would use these in their class.
Collaborating to enhance and captivate our learners. We, too, must be collaborators; sharing, contributing, adapting and inventing.
Taking risks, having a vision of what you want and what the technology can achieve, identify the goals and facilitate the learning. Use the strengths of the digital natives to understand and navigate new products, have them teach each other.
Learning and continue to absorb experiences and knowledge to stay current.
Communicating and fluent in tools and technologies that enable communication and collaboration.
Modeling behavior that we expect from our students.
Leading is crucial to the success or failure of any project.
5. Sketchnote It & BookSnap It, Blog It, Podcast It, Vlog It. Because we live in a visually rich digital culture there are so many different ways to share, reflect, and show our understanding and learning. People are sharing through Twitter, Instagram, Podcasts, Blogs, and Videocasts. Sketchnoting and BookSnaps are additional ways to help present learning and thinking. Sylvia Duckworth shared a Sketchnotes for Educators Workshop at a playground session I attended and Tara M. Martin, Booksnaps founder, presented an Ignite Session on Booksnaps for learning. Sketchnoting is a great tool that I have shared with my students to showcase their learning and understanding. In the new school year, I will offer Booksnaps as an option for students to share their reading and thinking about a text. The booksnap below was created by Tara M. Martin.
ISTE, Capstone, Amplify & School Library Journal are collaborating and hosting a webinar on how to leverage technology to help new and struggling readers.
I am honored to be part of this panel discussion along with
K.C. Boyd, Lead Librarian, East St.Louis (IL) School District
Cynthia Merrill, Literacy Consultant
and Moderator, Kathy Ishizuka, Executive Editor, School Library Journal
During the webinar I will be sharing strategies and technology tools to aid struggling readers.
Technology tools that I use in my classroom to help support the diverse readers in my classroom include the reading platform Actively Learn. Actively Learn is an online tool with a library of thousands of texts and Common Core-aligned lessons that both teachers and students can interact with in real-time. In the reading platform, teachers assign pre-existing Actively Learn materials to students or upload their own content, then track student responses and activity using data tools within the platform. Students can interact with a text by digitally highlighting and annotating, responding to embedded questions and content, and leaving feedback and comments for peers. Students can translate the text in their home language and define unknown words within the platform. Students can mark their confusion within the text and the teacher is able to annotate the text with additional links for clarity and deeper meaning to support student reading. In my classroom I utilize Actively Learn weekly for Articles of the Week in order for students to make connections across texts and address current events.
Audio books are another tool beneficial to struggling readers. I love my Audible App on my phone and listen to books every chance I have including my commute to work and home. Listening to a text while reading can help students visualize and comprehend complex text. Students are using different skills when they are listening versus reading but research shows that students have a higher listening comprehension than reading comprehension. In addition, podcasts are great texts for students to listen to explore concepts and ideas. My favorite include NPR’s Radiolab podcasts and any podcast from author of Tools of Titans (2016), Tim Ferriss. Check out Tim’s Podcast with YA author Soman Chainani.
Two great resources with more about technology tools and strategies to engage diverse student learners include Jules Csillag‘s Differentiated Reading Instruction and Robert Furman‘s Technology, Reading & Digital Literacy: Strategies to Engage the Reluctant Reader.
The following post is a guest blog post I wrote for ISTE’s EdTekHub and was published on 1/5/2017.
Many of our students are among the 155 million Americans playing video games regularly, and you might be, too. That’s a good thing. When my 11-year-old is playing video games, he’s using many skills – facts and information are tools to solve problems in context, and he gains actionable feedback he uses to win the game. When he fails to level up, he doesn’t give up, but continues playing until he progresses to the next level. He also seeks information online to help him find Easter eggs hidden throughout the game. He teaches his friends how to power up with each level of the game. Failure is a source of feedback and learning, collaboration is necessary, and learning and assessment are tightly integrated.
How can we use this pervasive and engaging gaming phenomenon to redesign and supercharge the learning experience?
Here are five ways to gamify your classroom to boost engagement, collaboration and learning:
Gamification is about transforming the classroom environment and regular activities into a game. It requires creativity, collaboration and play. There are numerous ways to bring games and game playing into the content area classroom to promote learning and deepen student understanding. Whether teachers are looking to bring some aspect of gaming into their class or use a game platform across the curriculum, they can use gamification elements to enhance learning and student engagement, tap into Common Core State Standards and address the 2016 ISTE Standards for Students.
The Teaching Factor 