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Allowing students the opportunity to express their knowledge verbally has always been a powerful motivator for some students. Creating opportunities for students to express themselves is important. Practically, the technique can be time consuming. Just imagine yourself watching thirty students stand and deliver. Consider a music teacher, who needs to listen to 60-70 students play a passage for assessment. Consider a trades or science teacher who wants a classroom of students to demonstrate safety techniques before working in the lab on a project. Consider an ELA teacher who would like to have students read a poem or prose passage dramatically.

Teachers can expand opportunities for verbal expression with a digital tool called Flipgrid. At its core, Flipgrid allows students to record video content responses on virtually any device. Chromebook and laptop users can rely on a built in video recorder. Tablet and phone users can record and post with iPads and phones.

Flipgrid is so much more than its core capability of gathering video responses. Entire lessons can be built into the grid with links and video resources. Student responses can be shared or kept private. Feedback from teachers or peers is easily created.

Microsoft bought Flipgrid recently, unlocked the previous paid professional features, and has given the entire platform to teachers and students - for free.

Multiple Design Qualities can be addressed through Flipgrid including Organization of Knowledge, Affirmation, Novelty & Variety, and Clear & Compelling Product Standards.

The following video is a great tutorial on using Flipgrid. We enjoyed viewing the video on a separate device (iPhone) as we built our first Flipgrid on a laptop.

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Allowing students the opportunity to express their knowledge verbally has always been a powerful motivator for some students. Creating opportunities for students to express themselves is important. Practically, the technique can be time consuming. Just imagine yourself watching thirty students stan

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Sandy

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Schlechty Center Designed Unit Examples - Lessons - Tes Teach

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model units.pptx.K Exploring Frogs.pdf.Kindergarten Example of Engaging Lesson..Schlechty Center - Video Journal.Designing Learning Environments Unit template.pdf.may14alicia_final22.pptx.8th Grade Example of an Engaging Lesson on the Census.8 Census Unit.pdf.Dayton Students.m4v.11th Grade Example of an Engaging Lesson on Polynomial Functions.Polynomial Functions unit template.pdf.polynomial unit in ppt with descriptive review.pptx.WOW what a change!!

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Elementary

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Free set of elementary curricula that introduces students to the foundational concepts of computer science and challenges them to explore how computing and technology can impact the world.

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This has many variations!

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Anyone can learn computer science. Make games, apps and art with code.

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After her students had that initial experience exploring with the Spheros, Herring decided to increase the complexity. For the next Spheros project, students chose a character from Mark Twain's classic novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and programmed their Spheros to represent the personality, emotions and journey of that character. To do this, students had to go back to the text and use close-reading strategies to find textual evidence that would back up their interpretation of the setting, motivations and feelings of the character. Then they had to decide how the Spheros, a simple round ball that can light up, could represent those qualities.

For example, one group chose "drunk Pap" as their character. They programmed their Sphero to zigzag across the river (marked out on the floor with tape), stop at the house, and then shake and turn red. As students went through the process they soon realized their graphic organizers of ideas were more like hypotheses; they had to adjust and add detail as they tried things in the programming language.

"The programming process models the writing process," Herring said. Many of her students struggle to see writing as an iterative process -- they prefer to dash something off and never look at it again. But as they collaboratively planned their storylines, tried programming different representations into the Spheros and modified their approaches, they began to see the importance of revision.

"When they could make that connection between writing and programming, it really changed their approach to writing," Herring said. "It made them more open to that process."

In her honors class, Herring used the Spheros for a project on Beowulf. Together the class studied the three different battles between Beowulf and Grendel. Then students split into groups and chose different battles to represent. They had to code their Spheros to not only represent the actions of their character in the battle, but also collaborate with the group representing their opponent so that the interactions in the battle matched up. "The alignment of the two programs was really challenging and they liked it," Herring said.

Herring tried the Spheros activities with both her honors British literature class and an on-level class. The two groups of students reacted differently to the assignment. The honors students were more reluctant to jump into the project, seeing it as "playing around," not serious work. They wanted to continue doing what they were used to -- analyzing text and writing papers.

"When we think about higher-level kids, we think they're really reflective and understand how they're learning," Herring said. "But sometimes they're so overwhelmed by all these highly rigorous courses that demand a lot of them that they don't have time to think." As their teacher, she could see that they were digging into the text, closely reading, listening to one another, articulating their opinions and collaborating, but she had to actively point out these aspects to students.

In contrast, the on-level group was more engaged than Herring had ever seen them. "On-level kids were just so excited that someone let them get out of a desk," Herring said. "They really saw it as impacting their understanding of the text. They saw this deep connection and change in their learning experience."

Many of these students had struggled to care about English class, but when Herring let them show their thoughts in a different way and discuss before writing, their ideas flowed on paper more easily. And Herring is intentional about allowing students to revise work for a new grade to make sure her grading policies for writing mirror the kind of growth mindset she seeded with the Spheros programming.

Herring admits that she likes to keep her assignments fairly open, and that lack of structure can fluster students who have been told exactly how to complete assignments in the past. But Herring tells them she's giving them freedom because she believes in their ability to impress her, that they can come up with far more creative approaches if she doesn't give them a framework.

"It was so incredible to see how that freed them up to see that 'my brain has value. I'm a creative person,' " Herring said. She also found that when students got out of their desks and worked together, different students tended to shine. She saw leadership and innovative ideas out of students who previously seemed checked out.

"I think it changed their perspective of themselves as learners," Herring said. "They felt more confident. They were more willing to take risks." Some of the students in her on-level class are now planning to take honors classes next year.

Throughout the year Herring experimented with different programming apps of various complexity to scaffold her students in their programming skills, as well as their literary analysis. She started them out on the manual app, which isn't really programming, but gave students a chance to play with the technology and get over its novelty. For the next project she asked students to use Sphero Drive N Draw, an app that takes a step toward block-based programming by letting students draw the path the Sphero will follow. Most of Herrings projects used the free app SPRK Lightning Lab, a block-based coding app.

For students who want more control over the code, Sphero Macrolab and orbBasic for Sphero require the user to actually write code. Herring didn't use these two apps because she worried if the coding got too complicated and challenging, it would distract from the literature focus of the project. Herring herself had almost no experience with coding when she launched this project.

"We really didn't go in with me as an expert," she said. "I think that might have ruined it." When she was learning alongside her students it gave them a chance to become the experts, to show her things they had figured out, and to reinforce the playful nature of trying something, improving on the design and working toward an ultimate product that made them all proud.
LEARNING FROM OTHER EDUCATORS
When Herring introduced the Spheros experiment it was her first year teaching high school after several years at the local middle school. She first learned about Spheros in the classroom from another educator teaching in New York state.

Veteran teacher Richard Perry was frustrated that his upper-level AP English students weren't connecting with the heart of John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath. They weren't having trouble analyzing text, but he could see that they didn't seem to have much empathy for the experiences of the Joad family. He hypothesized that there was too much distance between students' privileged socioeconomic backgrounds and the experience of the Joad family; instead of empathy for the characters, students felt annoyed that so many bad things happened to them throughout the book.

Perry decided to build a mountain and assign student groups a Sphero that represented their family traveling over the mountain. "The whole idea was to make sure the kids understood you can be a good, hard-working person and sometimes the situation is still going to be aligned against you," Perry said.

Perry gave student groups a few class periods to get familiar with the Spheros, then he brought out the mountain he had made out of cardboard and AstroTurf. Students got a few class periods to work on programming their Sphero to get over the mountain and were expected to document their successes and failures. Finally, each group got five minutes to try to navigate their "Joad family" over the mountain. Perry had built in traps and at times the Sphero would cut out, as the Joad family car had done.

"The first year none of the families succeeded," Perry said. But students had gained a lot of empathy for the Joad family, which showed up in their writing. The second year, Perry used the same activity, which was also an inclusion class. Perry said one of the students in that class was blind, and although incredibly bright, struggled with being seen as "disabled" by peers. He explored the mountain by touch and ended up identifying some of the tricks for his group.

"He became the hero for the entire unit," Perry said. His group was the only one to successfully cross the mountain. Students saw the student's blindness as an asset in this situation; he had the tools to understand the world around him in different and necessary ways. "That had an impact on me, too," Perry said. "He beat me at this task because he had this ability that I don't have, and it impressed the hell of me."

Perry took the Spheros activity to the next level when his 10th-grade students were reading Lord of the Flies. In discussions, it was clear that students were having a hard time connecting with the themes of the book. They didn't believe humans would act the way the boys on the island did, and had no perception of what survival would have been like.

Perry designed three challenges to represent surviving on the island: a shelter challenge, fire challenge and a pig hunt. He then assigned each student a character and doled out different abilities and resources depending on the character's personality. For example, the Sphero representing Piggy was programmed to go half as fast as the fastest boy's Sphero, but because he is a resourceful, smart character he had more tools to complete the challenges.

"We gave them the chance to really step into the shoes of those kids," Perry said. And when it came to the pig hunt, a culminating scene in the book, the students "went all Lord of the Flies on each other," ganging up on the weakest among them in order to win.

"We had that moment when the light came on," Perry said. Students had unwittingly acted exactly as the characters did in the book. Suddenly all the theoretical arguments they made before the activity fell flat. To improve the project next year, Perry plans to have students set the parameters for the different characters based on textual analysis.

Both Herring and Perry are excited at how such a simple robot like the Sphero could activate student thinking, discussion, excitement and empathy in their classrooms. They're thinking about how they might have their classes collaborate and learn from one another, especially because Herring's students are more ethnically and socioeconomically diverse than Perry's.

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How Robots in English Class Can Spark Empathy and Improve Writing

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After her students had that initial experience exploring with the Spheros, Herring decided to increase the complexity. For the next Spheros project, students chose a character from Mark Twain's classic novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and programmed their Spheros to represent the personality, emotions and journey of that character.

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Dash & Dot Show 4 - The Algorithmics Robot Band | Wonder Workshop

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85+ Awesome Apps that Integrate with Google Classroom

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Check out this list of over 85 Apps that Integrate with Google Classroom! Did you know that Google Classroom plays well with others? Yep! Google is known for making their applications open to working with third-party applications, and Google Classroom is no exception.

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Using technology should be about how to improve how you interact with your students. Google makes it easy to transform your class to be more about collaboration. One of my favorite activities is collaborative Google Slides. That is all students in the class on the SAME document. This allows for use to be a "community of learners who helps each other get better." I can see all students working. I can give feedback significantly faster than if all students were on their own document. Peers can easily provide feedback simply by going to another slide.

Template
alicekeeler.com/slides
Collaborative Google Slides

You can make collaborative Google Slides and attach them in Google Classroom in about 40 seconds (practice required). Make a blank Google Slides document. Title it. Close it. DO NOT TYPE ON THE SLIDES. (You can, just to make it fast and easy leave it blank). Make an assignment in Google Classroom and click the Google Drive icon. Since you just made the blank Slides, you can quickly choose the first document in the list. Change the sharing settings to "Anyone with the link can edit." Assign.

Students open the collaborative Google Slides and click the plus icon in the toolbar to add their own blank slide. I suggest having kids put their name in the speaker notes to "claim" the slide.

Use My Template

Making your own blank Google Slides works great. If you want to kick it up a tiny notch I created a template. In this template there is only ONE layout for students to choose from instead of 11. The slide layout provides a space at the bottom for students to type their name.

1. Make a copy of the template alicekeeler.com/slides

2. Rename the document

3. Close the document

4. Create a Google Classroom assignment

5. Attach the Slides

6. Change from view to "Students can edit file."

7. Assign

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Crazy Easy: Collaborative Google Slides Template - Teacher Tech

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Using technology should be about how to improve how you interact with your students. Google makes it easy to transform your class to be more about collaboration. One of my favorite activities is collaborative Google Slides. That is all students in the class on the SAME document.