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Digital storytelling is a way for students to present and narrate content through a digital media platform.

My Digital Story

Teachers can have students create digital stories to:

show mastery of a topic

share with elementary school students in their district

discuss various topics

Included below is my reflection on creating a digital story

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Twitter chats for educators allow teachers to:

connect with other professionals in the field

share resources with other professionals in the field

develop a professional network with which to collaborate

I participated in a Ditch the Textbook Twitter chat.  Included below is my reflection and screenshots from my participation in the Twitter chat.

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In this unit, I created a podcast to review the Web 2.0 tool Nearpod.

My Podcast

Teachers can present podcasts to their students to give them unique and current perspectives on various topics.  Teachers can also use podcasts as summative assessments and have students publish podcasts to a wider audience, allowing them to complete an authentic task.

Reflection on creating a podcast included below:

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PDF of the infographic
Reflection included below

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Where do Students Learn about Technology and Enginerring Literacy?

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In this unit, I created an infographic from the Nation's Report Card data set on "Where Do Students Learn About Technology and Engineering Literacy?"
Included below is my reflection
Teachers can use infographics in their classroom to present data to their classes; however, teachers also can have students create infographics as:

alternate assessments

synthesis of information from various sources

for an ESL student to present information in a condensed way

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In this unit, I created a floor plan for my classroom using the online tool Floorpan Creator --attached is my reflection of using this tool.
Teachers can use Floorpan Creator for:

a math project on area

a Spanish project on labeling the classroom with classroom objects

a drafting project, to create a classroom of the future

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In this assignment, I created a matrix of technology-related pedagogical models.  Teachers can use these models to:

update current lessons to include technology

modify existing lessons plans to include higher-order level thinking skills

gain different perspectives on how technology can be used in the classroom

Reflection on this matrix included below

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For this assignment, I created an account on Feedly, an online aggregator --attached is my reflection of using this online tool.  Teachers can use Feedly to:

organize information for professional development

have students organize information for resources for projects or papers

organize sources for a bibliography

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This assignment had me create a Sketchnote for Matt Cutts' TED talk "Try Something New for 30 Days."
Teachers can use sketchnotes in their classroom as:

an alternate form of note-taking

an assignment for students for when substitutes are in the classroom

a study tool

a form of alternate assessment for a topic

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My sketchnote

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In this document, I reflect on Bloom's Digital Taxonomy, an updated version of Bloom's Taxonomy to include emerging technology in education.
The reflection includes ways for teachers to:

incorporate 1:1 initiatives

differentiate products that students create

include higher-order level thinking skills in assignments with emerging technologies

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In this document, educators can find links to articles about the 2017 K-12 Horizon Report on emerging technologies.  For six important emerging technologies, links are listed for teachers to learn more information about these technologies.

Included are articles about:

Makerspaces

Robotics

Analytics Technology

Virtual Reality

Artificial Intelligence

The Internet of Things.

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Emerging Technology Reflection on Adaptive Technology 

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Emerging Technology Reflection on Adaptive Technology 

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This reflection looks at how teachers can utilize adaptive technology to:

recognize what students know

recognize what students don't know

automatically adjust to put students on the path to achieve goals set by teachers and curricula.

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Questions:
--What reservations (if any) do you have about using social medial for professional learning?
--What are your concerns (or passions) about using Twitter or other platforms?
--If you could pose a question about a classroom challenge to a wider network – beyond your school community – what would it be and why?

Answer:
This week, in Diana Neebe and Jennifer Roberts' 2015 book, Power Up: Making the Shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning, the authors discussed the huge impact social media, especially Twitter, can have on professional learning communities for teachers.  The authors cited several examples where they were able to collaborate with other teachers globally, when perhaps their colleagues in their own building did not know an answer to a question or maybe couldn't contribute to the type of teaching that the authors wanted to accomplish.

This summer, I joined a Facebook group for a World Language teaching method called CI (Comprehensible Input).  The Facebook group centers around Martina Bex's SOMOS curriculum.  Over the summer, Martina Bex and other contributors hosted live videos called "Summer SOMOS Fun Club" to answer teachers' questions about the curriculum and give ideas about how to best implement it into the classroom.  This was a hugely helpful resource for me, seeing as I used this curriculum last year without much guidance.  My department director, and many members of my department still see the use in a grammar-based approach to learning; whereas, I want to branch out and have students use more comprehension-based input strategies.  Joining this professional group on Facebook has given me many great ideas to use in my classroom and given me a forum to ask questions, if I so choose.

One of my biggest reservations with using social media is the fear of being so public.  As I mentioned above, my colleagues may not really be on board with the type of teaching I am trying to move to.  I don't want to write something on social media about being alone in my line of thinking in school and have my colleagues see it.  Maybe this is being a little paranoid?  If I could pose any question to social media without this fear it would be about how to talk to my colleagues in a professional, non-pushy manner to see their opinion about moving to this style of teaching.  Also, how would I talk to my department director and present research that shows that  national standards and many teachers across the globe are making this shift toward this teaching method.  Hopefully, being a part of the Facebook community that I joined over the summer and participating in the World Language Twitter chat on Thursday can continue to give me ideas about the types of activities I would like to keep implementing in my classroom.

Reference:

Neebe, Diana and Jennifer Roberts. (2015) Power up: making the shift to 1:1 teaching and learning. Stenhouse Publishers.

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Question:
Go back to the second half of chapter 8 and review the process for design thinking. Which steps could you easily leverage in your classroom? What roadblocks might occur? Brainstorm some ideas about how to overcome the possible roadblocks.

Answer:
While reading Chapter 8 in Jennifer Roberts and Diana Neebe's 2015 book Power Up: Making the Shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning, I really reflected on something that is bothering me about my teaching this year.  In my College Prep Spanish 2 classes, we got a new textbook.  Currently, our curriculum for our Spanish classes is very grammar-based.  I don't particularly agree with this curriculum, so I try to put my own spin on it as much as I can.  In past years, I was very familiar with the old textbook, so I was really able to work the curriculum to my advantage to use more communicative approaches in class.  However, with the new textbook, I really have been flying blind every day, creating lessons as we go along.  Unfortunately, I have fallen into our grammar-based curriculum, which moves so fast, that it does not allow a lot of class time to create innovative projects.  Basically, I have time to give notes, engage students in drill and practice, give a quiz or test, and move on.   There really is no wiggle room to add something in such as design thinking, as described in the book with the students designing an app for a problem in China (Neebe & Roberts, 2015).  If I had the time (much like our post from last week), I could certainly have my students design prototypes for problems in the world.  Students could explore different Spanish speaking countries, use current events and solve problems in those countries  Students could also design services for students in school that may be ESOL Spanish-speakers.  Hopefully, as I get more familiar with the new textbook, I can move away from the fast-paced grammar "taught and got" drills and move toward having my students complete creative activities in class.

Reference

Neebe, Diana and Jennifer Roberts. (2015) Power up: making the shift to 1:1 teaching and learning. Stenhouse Publishers.

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Question:
"Imagine that the school bells are silent and the clocks are frozen. How would you spend your class period if time were not constrained?"

Answer:
Chapter 9 of Jennifer Roberts and Diana Neebe's 2015 book Power Up: Making the Shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning, delves into the idea of a flipped or blended classroom.  In the chapter, the authors give a myriad of good information about using a flipped classroom.  Ever since I began teaching four years ago, I have been longing to try out a true flipped classroom model, but just haven't had the guts to dive completely in yet.  In my first year teaching, I gave a few assignments where students were going through a Google Slides presentation, while filling out a guided notes sheet.  Along the way, they had to fill out examples on their guided notes, which we went over in class.  My in-class support teacher suggested that I stop doing this, and explain concepts in class with students to avoid confusion.  After that, I never went back.  However, the suggestions in the book, such as using a screencast app, make me think that I can once again move toward some lessons in this direction.

If time weren't a concern or constraint on my teaching, I would definitely try to incorporate more of a flipped classroom approach.  Today, I was teaching students about how to write sentences about what they are going to do in the future in Spanish.  We spent about 15 minutes on a Bell Ringer mini-conversation, 30 minutes going over a Google Slides using Nearpod, and for the last ten minutes, students began working on an assignment to put all of the grammar concepts taught in this section of the chapter together.  In an ideal world, we would have still had the Bell Ringer conversation, but students would have gone over the information for the grammatical concept on Nearpod at home, allowing me time to coach students through the application assignment.  Hopefully, as our district moves forward in its 1:1 initiative, my administrators and colleagues will be more accepting and understanding of a flipped classroom approach.

Reference

Neebe, Diana and Jennifer Roberts. (2015) Power up: making the shift to 1:1 teaching and learning. Stenhouse Publishers.

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Questions:
--Chapter 5: Helping students reach a larger audience can also raise privacy concerns. What are the norms for student privacy in your community? What steps will you need to take, such as obtaining permission from parents and administrators, before publishing student work for a larger audience?
--Chapter 6:  What are the challenges of creating lessons that reach all learners?
--Chapter 7:  Consider an upcoming assessment (formative or summative) for which you’d like to rethink the feedback process. Which of the six strategies identified in chapter 7 do you think can best support your students and ease your workload and why?

Answers:
This year, as the high school where I work moved into a 1:1 Chromebook initiative with our students, many doors have opened in the classroom regarding the type of assignments that students are now capable of doing.  The 1:1 initiative not only can introduce new assignments to students, but it can also introduce these assignments to readers outside of our classroom, school, or even district.  In our reading for this week, Diana Neebe and Jennifer Roberts describe the motivation that students receive when they are assigned to create a product for an audience that is someone other than a teacher (2015).  Reading about this student motivation made me reflect upon assignments that I am currently giving in my classes and how I can adapt them to include a wider audience rather than just myself.  Currently, in my Honors Spanish 2 class, I am about to give an assignment where students have to select or create a picture and write a paragraph in Spanish to describe it.  However, I can adapt the assignment to have students publish their image to a blog, such as Blogger (suggested by the authors for those that use Google Classroom as a Learning Management System) and have their classmates comment on them.  Publishing their assignments to a blog is a very public thing, and I would have to look into the parent permission forms that are turned in at the beginning of the year.  Parents of students in our district consent to student's names, images, etc. being published online.  I can easily access a list of this document through our school grading system, Genesis.

In addition to having students create products in order to reach a wider audience, the 1:1 technology initiative allows me to differentiate and create assignments to reach a variety of learners in my classroom.  Neebe and Roberts describe several ways that differentiation becomes easier and more discrete than ever while using technology (2015).  Although it is very easy to describe students with different assignments and requirements discretely, differentiation also provides its challenges. As the authors note, even if you only send a group of students a specific assignment, they are sure to talk to each other about what their assignment is.  Discrepancies in level of difficulty of assignments is surely noticed by students, especially by those at the high school level, where I teach.  Another challenge, in my opinion, falls in the planning time that it takes to create various assignments for students in order to differentiate.  The authors suggest differentiation strategies, such as RAFT, to differentiate for students.  Currently, I am teaching an extra class on my prep period for my colleague who is on maternity leave.  I barely have time to think about creating one assignment for students, let alone several different options or variations at this point.  When I have more planning time at the end of November, I would be happy to start considering creating various options for projects and assignments.

Lastly, on the topic of having enough time, the authors suggest that technology tools can help to ease the burden of feedback on teachers (Neebe & Roberts, 2015).  This week, my College Prep Spanish 2 students will be handing in a 15-sentence assignment.  Many of them will probably make the same errors.  As the authors suggest, I can use the "frequent feedback" feature on comments on Google Docs to provide students not only with a key such as, "subject/verb agreement," but also an explanation to what that is, and even a link for a video explaining it (Neebe & Roberts, 2015)!  I can see this becoming a very useful tool in my feedback this year, not only to ease my own time burden of giving feedback, but also to help my students make informed corrections and revisions on their assignments.

Reference

Neebe, Diana and Jennifer Roberts. (2015) Power Up: Making the shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning. Stenhouse Publishers.

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Questions:
-Chapter 2: The roles of teachers and students often change in a 1:1 classroom. What adjustments do you anticipate? Reflect on one concern, as well as one hope for how the shift might lead to improvements in teaching and learning.
-Chapter 3: Which of the five strategies for engagement are you most excited to try and why?
-Chapter 4:  How could digital collaboration tools help you share resources and find time to work with your colleagues?

Answer:
This year, as our district embarks on a new 1:1 initiative, my experiences are changing in the classroom daily.  I am finding that I am more willing to try new methods using technology than I have been willing to before, and students are able to become more engaged in lessons on a daily basis.  This certainly is a shift that I am excited about.  However, in Chapter 2 of Diana Neebe and Jennifer Roberts' book Power Up: Making the Shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning (2015), the authors state that with a 1:1 learning environment, the teacher transitions more into the role of a coach in the classroom, facilitating students' learning, rather than being the star of the show.  In my Spanish language classroom, I still believe that I have to give my students a lot of Spanish input, which results in quite a few teacher-centered lessons.  Seeing as I teach levels 1 and 2, students' language proficiency is fairly low.  My concern with taking on the role of a "coach" falls in the types of assignments that my students would be able to complete in the Spanish language at their level of language proficiency.  What kinds of collaborative assignments would I be able to have them work on that would be not only accomplishable, but allow them to be successful?

Although I have not adapted my teaching style too much with our shift to 1:1 due to the communicative nature of my course, I have begun experimenting with adding technologies where I see fit.  During this week, I used the program Nearpod for the first time.  Nearpod falls under the interactive feedback systems strategy for engagement and allows teachers to upload already existing PowerPoints or Google Slides presentations, adding open-ended or multiple choice questions, drawing options, and virtual field trips for students to interact with during the presentation (Neebe & Roberts, 2015).  Students are given a code to the presentation and teachers can control the pace of the presentation, with all students' devices following along.  This week, I used this program to review regular and stem-changing verbs with my Spanish 2 students.  During the presentation, the open-ended questions which asked them to conjugate verbs gave me a great gauge on comprehension.  I was able to push out answers to students' computers to discuss common errors and review why certain answers were correct.

Nearpod may prove to be invaluable to me as a tool this school year, but as stated in Chapter 4 of our textbook, common planning time is few and far-between with my department-- 7 Spanish teachers and 1 French teacher (Neebe & Roberts, 2015).  As suggested, a common Google Drive folder would be so useful among my colleagues.  Instead of arranging a time for all of my colleagues to meet to tell them about Nearpod, or most likely what would happen, telling them all separately, I could create a link to Nearpod and an FAQ document to upload to our shared Google Drive folder.  If my colleagues had questions, they could post those questions in comments and I could answer them when I had free time to do so.  We have a department meeting at the end of the next week, and I may just suggest the need for a common Google Drive folder!  As our school embarks on this 1:1 initiative, I feel that it is not only important for the students to model good digital citizenship and collaborative capacity, but for their teachers to do so as well!

Reference

Neebe, Diana and Jennifer Roberts. (2015) Power Up: Making the shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning. Stenhouse Publishers.

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Question:
What are your long-term goals for infusing technology effectively?

Answer:
This year, the district where I teach (Phillipsburg School District in Phillipsburg, NJ), has taken a new 1:1 initiative with devices.  For the past three years, we have had Google Chromebooks in carts in every classroom.  This year, at the high school level, students are assigned a device and get to use it both at school and at home, keeping the same device for all their time at our high school.  According to our text, Power Up: Making the Shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning (2015), the authors, Diana Neebe and Jennifer Roberts state that many schools across the nation are also making this technological shift.  Although I am very excited to make this shift in my classroom, I am also hesitant to use the Chromebooks for some assignments.

As a teacher of World Language (Spanish), I am hesitant to use Chromebooks for the bulk of my classwork, primarily due to two reasons.  Firstly, in the approaches that I use to teach language (Comprehensible Input and Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling), I rely heavily on listening and reading activities for students.  Listening activities are mostly accomplished by students acting out something in the classroom while I am describing the action in Spanish.  Seeing as I teach mostly Spanish 1 and 2 classes, my students' language proficiency levels are not very high, meaning they need a lot of input from me.  Even as a long-term goal, I can't see my classroom shifting from high person-to-person interaction to solely relying on Chromebooks for instruction.  Secondly,  due to the rampant use of translator devices by my students, I really have to monitor what I assign on the Chromebook to ensure that my students do not breach our academic integrity policy for completing their own work.

That being said, my long-term goal with the district's new 1:1 initiative is to use the Chromebooks to enhance my students' cultural awareness and competency.  As stated by Neebe and Roberts (2015), students are coming into a new workforce very ill-prepared for the tasks at hand.  In my opinion, the workforce is becoming ever-increasingly global and students need to develop an awareness for other people and cultural customs that can be developed through technologies such as Google Earth 360, Mystery Skype, WebQuests, FlipGrid and Google Expeditions.

Additionally, I would like to use technology to increase differentiation in the classroom.  Seeing as there are so many helpful programs and websites for language teachers (Conjuguemos, StudySpanish, Quia, Quizlet, and Garbanzo, just to name a few), it would be very helpful for me to give support and extra practice for my students who may be struggling to learn the language.  On the other hand, if I have learners who are really exceeding expectations, I can use technology to provide them with additional resources to take their learning to the next level.

All-in-all, I believe that the use of technology in the classroom has many valuable uses.  As stated by Neebe and Roberts (2015), on average, it takes teachers three to five years to fully master using a new technological tool in the classroom.  This year, as my district moves to its new 1:1 initiative, with technology as my aid, I hope to begin to master the skills of imparting a new cultural understanding to my students, while using differentiation to address individual needs.

Reference

Neebe, Diana and Jennifer Roberts. (2015) Power Up: Making the shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning. Stenhouse Publishers.

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The textbook we used during EDIM 510 was titled "Power Up: Making the Shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning" by Diana Neebe and Jen Roberts. The reflections on the chapters are based upon material in this book. Included below is a link to buy this book. Inside, educators can find information on successfully implementing 1:1 devices in the classroom, reflections on social media use in the classroom, among many other topics!

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Power Up: Making the Shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning

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Amazon.com: Power Up: Making the Shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning (9781625310132): Neebe, Diana, Roberts, Jen: Books