Am I Flipping Out?

This story begins about five years ago in the dojang where my 2 DDs began to study Tae Kwon Do.  I would periodically hang around through the lesson to observe.  In a single class were white belt students (absolute beginners), black belt students, and every level in between.  During a one hour class, I would see the class working as a whole unit led by an adult instructor (this is typically how class would begin and end).  The middle of the class had students divided into small groups based on belt color, led by "senior belt" students -- students working at a higher level than the group they led. There does exist a TKD "textbook" containing all the material students need to have mastered before they take their "benchmark" test (the test to move to a higher colored belt).  The text is not "covered" by instructors, rather students learn the material on their own with help from instructors and student leaders. Testing is offered on a monthly basis, and when students are deemed ready to test (by the adult instructors) they are permitted to sign up to test.  To my knowledge, there are no unsuccessful students after testing, because the "formative assessment" has already indicated readiness.


At that time, I was intrigued, and tried to imagine a way to make something similar work in my own classroom -- facilitating student leaders to work with struggling students, all students gaining mastery in their own time.  I unfortunately was unable at that time to conceive of something I was comfortable enough with to try on a large scale.


Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago.  I am a newcomer (about 2 months) to Twitter, and began hearing buzz about "flipped classrooms".  From what I could figure, the basic concept was for students to watch lecture video at home, and do homework in the classroom where there is teacher guidance.  I was initially quite skeptical.  Let's face it, a fair number of students just plain won't do homework, however it is packaged, so if the actual LESSON, the presentation of information is left in the hands of the students, and they drop the ball, where does the blame truly lie?  Wouldn't it be shirking professional responsibility to allow this to happen?  Don't get me wrong.  Philosophically, I certainly think that students should be taking responsibility for their own learning.  I believe that should always be the ultimate goal.  But philosophy and reality don't always coincide.


On a Twitter #edchat I connected with John Bernia (@mrbernia), a Middle School Assistant Principal in Michigan.  He challenged my skepticism, and encouraged me to continue looking further into the flipped classroom concept.  And so began the research.  Initially, I didn't find much to alleviate my concerns, and most of what I was reading barely scratched the surface.  Then I attended a 1 hour webinar hosted by Scott McLeod from Iowa State University.  The webinar featured a Who's Who of flipped classroom experts:  Jonathan Bergmann, Karl Fisch, Jerrid Kruse, Jonathan Martin, Sylvia Martinez, Pam Moran, Frank Noschese, and David Truss.  Given the fact that not all of these speakers were pro-flipping, I left the session just about as confused as I was before it started.  I did, however, find that I agreed most with what Jonathan Bergmann had to say, so that gave me some focus for my research.


That led me to Bergmann's video on Flipped Mastery

Lightbulb!

from here, I really started to get excited.  I started to find some answers to my first burning question -- what if they don't watch the vodcasts?  There are some teachers who use note guides that students must fill out to get "homework credit".  Others use random notebook checks.  Others use a warmup/bellringer activity that must be completed first thing, that will show that students have viewed the necessary material.  I also found Brian Bennett's post dealing with how he calculated his students' grades.  It all started to become very much more concrete to me. 

Perhaps the most important and recurring piece of advice I found, was to ease into the flip slowly, rather than to try a complete overnight transformation.  No one anywhere has said that this is less work for a teacher, in fact, creating quality vodcasts will surely be a time sucker that I am glad to have a long summer ahead of me to begin.  I do, however, look forward to making some positive changes in the way I "do business" both in and out of my classroom.  Look for future posts on this topic as I start to get my feet wet.

Leaping into the 21st Century with BYOD

Bring Your Own Device, in my humblest of opinions, is going to forever change the face of education.  I know, I know, we've heard it all before...filmstrips....overhead projectors....Xerox machines...the internet, but I really think that moving toward a 1:1 classroom by having students bring their own cell phones to use as learning tools could have a far greater impact than anything we've seen yet.

*note:  the tools described below do not require a "smart" phone

Tonight's Twitter #edchat topic was "Which emerging technologies will have the greatest impact on K-12 education in the next 5 years".  One of the recurring themes (partly due to my persistence in bringing it up over and over) was BYOD.  I began dabbling with using student-owned cell phones as learning tools during the last month of classes this year.  I began with http://www.polleverywhere.com/.  It's an easy (and free) polling tool that works via SMS.  I prepped my polls in advance, and students texted responses which were projected onto the large screen.  There is the option for multiple choice questions (with instant graphing of results) or short answer.  If this sounds familiar, basically the students' own cell phones served as "clickers".  Cost to the district:  $0 Value of student response:  Priceless

The second tool I tried was Google Voice.  As a French teacher, speaking is a large part of what students need to be able to do in order to be proficient.  In the past, review would consist of practice conversations in pairs, with as much feedback as I could manage by circulating around the classroom, or practice conversations between myself and a single student, where students would critique the performance, but were otherwise minimally engaged.  With Google Voice, I set up conversation parameters, and began the conversation as I would in a testing situation.  Each student then dialed my Google Voice number (a randomly generated phone number -- it is connected to my cell phone number, but by setting the preferences to "Do Not Disturb", my personal phone is out of the loop) and left a voice mail for me with their response to my conversation starter.  I then played back each response, giving feedback.  Each student was able to speak, and receive feedback in a single class period, and they learned from each others' mistakes.  I also used Google Voice in conjunction with Voki to allow speaking practice outside class.  I created a Voki which asked students questions on a topic.  Students responded to the questions in a voice mail.

Due to budgetary restraints, my school district isn't going to be able to provide 1:1 devices (apart from a few semi-functional laptop carts shared throughout the building) for my class anytime soon.  I also am one of the few teachers without an IWB.  Cell phones were my way of accomplishing my goals without.

So my plan for next year, is to dive in headfirst, and acclimate the students to using their cell phones as a routine part of the learning experience in my classroom.  To that end, in response to the administration's request that school supplies be posted on all department websites before we leave for the summer, I added a request (yes, request, not requirement) that students who already have cell phones, bring them to class.  I believe this to be key:  public schools cannot require students/parents to purchase cell phones/data plans for their children.  This seemed to be the biggest hurdle for most of the #edchat tweeters this evening when it came to the idea of BYOD.  The solutions I used were simple, and quite effective:  students with cell phones shared with students who had none.  This is the same solution I use when:

• students do not have a writing utensil
• students do not have paper
• students do not have their textbook with them

Sharing was relatively seamless, and for those who fear that students will lose the ability to interact face-to-face, sharing requires such interaction.

I also allow students to use my personal device (I confess...it's a "dumb" phone) which adds one more device to the mix.

With Google Voice, the classroom land line is also an option.

Yes, indeed, I did have one negative experience with the cell phones.  While students were supposed to be recording voice mails, I had a couple of girls texting some inappropriate messages.  But in the days before cell phones, might they not have simply passed notes?  And, let's face it, you can't stab someone with a cell phone like you can with a pencil.  If we ban the tools, the students will never learn to be responsible users, and isn't that part of 21st Century Learning?

Credit where credit is due:  At the end of the chat, Jackie Gerstein suggested that I blog about my request for students to bring cell phones to class next year, so thank you Jackie.  There will surely be much follow-up when the school year begins.

Overstream

Ok, so I had planned to do the next challenge -- Edmodo.  I even have the beginnings of a post saved to drafts.  The bottom line for me is that much of Edmodo is redundant, because my district has adopted schooltool to move most student data online.

That said, in my twavels this weekend, I discovered overstream.com.  It's a free online tool that allows you to create subtitles for existing youtube videos.

I started googling for something to accomplish this, after seeing this video by EF:



(the video was posted on #langchat, but I can't remember who originally posted it, because I tabbed it while doing something else, not having any idea it would become a blog post!)

My thought after watching it, was that there were some really great scenes, just enough vocab interspersed in the EF titles, and no dialogue, so students could write their own.  I tried it out myself (very quickly) and came up with this:



I found it to be quite user friendly.  This activity could easily be adapted to multiple levels by changing the number of titles required and/or specifying structures you want the students to be practicing.  What do you think?

Classtools.net

Warning:  this post is quite long!

OK, so as I'm feeling very far behind, I'm going to jump right on the next challenge!  #4 is Classtools.net.  I had perused it ever so briefly several weeks ago, so this is a good opportunity to revisit and rethink.  I'm going to briefly review template by template.  Please keep in mind that I will do so through the lens of a high school French teacher, so where I find something useful or not, may be completely different in your subject area.  My overall opinion of the tools here is that for the most part there are other tools that do the same job either more simply, more effectively, or more professionally, and in some cases I think low-tech is best.  Below is a brief commentary of each of the 23 tools (whew!).  My personal favorite (Random Name Picker) is in bold.

1.  Fakebook -- I truly love the idea of this!  Our school continues to block Facebook (although just about every student knows how to get around the filters even if we teachers don't) and I think it could be a great tool to get students using the target language in an authentic setting.  Here are my criticisms -- first of all, I wish the template were available in French (as the real Facebook is) second of all, even though it acts as a social media tool, students would be using it exclusively for class assignments, which takes away some of the authenticity.  Personally, I would prefer to be able to find a way (convince the powers that be) to use "the real Facebook" as a classroom tool.

2.  Arcade Game Generator -- Gotta admit, I'm not a fan.  The graphics are almost as prehistoric as Pong, but not in a way than makes me nostalgic for anything.  It seems as though the games require more effort to learn how to play the game than to learn the information.  Not my cup of tea

3. Random Name Picker -- a really simple but really cool tool.  How often are we doing a class activity when the same kids volunteer every time, they've been organized alphabetically since kindergarten, so that gets old, and we just need a way to even out the chances and -- just be random!  Really simple, and I really like it.  I used the kids' nicknames, so I felt OK embedding the tool into the class website for easy access.

4.  Twister -- Last night's Twitter #langchat dealt with authentic assessment, and what qualifies as "authentic" .  On that note, Twister could not be considered "authentic", because it is not real.  For that reason, I would much prefer to use "the real thing" with my students, creating a class hashtag for discussion.  However, sometimes we have to use what we have at hand, and Twitter is not functional with our school's filters, so this could be a good substitute.

5.  Keyword Checker -- Less applicable to my content area as far as I can see, as my writing assignments typically don't require use of keywords.

6.  Plagiarism Checker -- see above.  In FL our main concern is misuse of online translation devices, for which this tool would not be useful

7.  Dustbin Game -- could be useful for reviewing picky grammar points.  The game I created (and then promptly lost because I played before I saved) was to review the partitive article.  My 4 dustbins were de, de la, de l', and des.  Different food words were dragged into the dustbins based on gender, number, and starting letter.  Might be a cute way for students to practice on their own, but I don't know as it would be an effective use of class time in a HS FL classroom.

8.  Telescopic Topic -- seems like....much ado about nothing?  Or am I missing something??

9.  Post-it -- again, I think there might be more effort required to mess with the lines and boxes than needed to learn the language.  I would do this with real, hands-on paper Post-it notes.  Sometimes low-tech is the way to go.

10.  Diamond 9 -- Looks like a pretty neat tool, but probably more involved than a begginning-intermediate FL class warrants.

11.  Fishbone -- see comments for Diamond 9

12.  Venn Diagram -- Now we're talking!  I have always been a huge fan of the Venn diagram when comparing a target culture to American culture.  This version is very easy, interactive, and I would replace my paper version with this in a heartbeat!

13.  Animated book -- See comments for Telescopic Topic

14.  Timeline -- seems relatively simple...as a FL teacher I don't frequently use timelines with my students, and I think there are some better tools out there for timeline creation, but not a bad tool for the sake of simplicity

15.  Lights Out -- I just don't get the point.  :(

16.  Target Diagram -- Could be a useful mindmapping tool, but I'm not sure there aren't better ones out there that are more versatile (Mindomo comes to mind)

17.  Burger Diagram -- I have seen similar graphic organizers in B & W, and I think I prefer them simply because the colors are very distracting to me.

18.  Living Graph -- I am not a math person.  I am not a graph person.  Data makes my head spin.  That said, I am not the best person to judge this tool.  I really like what collaborizeclassroom does for me regarding data from student polls taken in the target language -- it makes me nice, simple little pie charts that I can understand!  :)

19.  Learning Cycle -- A bit too complicated for what I think it's supposed to do...then again, maybe I'm not understanding it.

20.  Jigsaw Diagram -- see comment for Dustbin Game

21.  Priority Chart -- see comment for Target Diagram

22.  Source Analyser -- I can see this being a very useful tool for teaching students how to do research, and how to evaluate research materials.  More in depth than what I do as a FL teacher, but I think English and Social Studies teachers could easily incorporate this.

23.  Countdown Timer -- I can definitely see this as a useful tool -- for someone who functions well in structure.  I am not that person, so this is not for me.

Bitstrips in the FL Classroom

So it's May 19, and I'm still on Free Tools Challenge #3 lol.  When I saw this challenge, I knew I'd fall behind, because I needed to find the right objective, and that's not always easy at this time of year.  In fact, I'm still thinking maybe I didn't choose the right one, but I did get to try a new tool, and my kids are having a blast.
So I'm using it (present tense because we're finishing up in the lab tomorrow) with a level 1 French class to get them writing about leisure activities.  Their task is to create a 10 frame comic strip about a weekend (theirs, or the character(s) they create) and the activities taking place.
The tool was a fantastic success. The students are taking to it like ducks to water, needing very little guidance, although none of them had been on the site prior to this morning.  They were easily able to create characters, find premade characters that interested them, change scenes from frame to frame, add props, control the positions of characters, etc.  Adding text with thought bubbles is very easy, although the drawback as a foreign language teacher, is that students need to know keyboard shortcuts for diacritical marks, or they cannot put them in the text.
The drawback for me, is that students for the most part seem to be spending more time creating their "artwork" than using the language.  This is not altogether surprising, and I'm pretty sure I won't use this tool again for this particular assignment, but I will definitely keep it in my arsenal for future use, perhaps in a level 2 or 3 class.
What do you all think?

Addendum to this post:  here are a couple of student work samples:

Poll Everywhere!

So, I'm one of the few teachers left in my district without a Smartboard or Promethean board.  I'm a techie at heart, so I have to admit, I've been kind of bummed out about the situation.  I tried to make myself feel better by listening to my colleagues complaints that they're not all they're cracked up to be.  Since the beginning of the school year somewhat, but really intensely over the last month and a half or so, I've been  diving headfirst into alternative ways to change up what I do in the classroom and make it more meaningful to my students, while broadening their knowledge of technology.  As foreign language teachers, we are really skill-based in what we teach and in what we expect the students to do:  they need to read, write, speak, and listen.  When I started looking at the ways I asked them to do that, and looked around at the tools that are available, the creative juices started to flow, and now I'm just trying to keep them from drowning me!  My latest discovery came from and it is polleverywhere.com.  Polleverywhere is a web-based app that allows you to create open-ended or multiple choice polls that your students can answer using their cell phones.  I discovered this gem of a website via a link from a post on Edudemic   Clickers?  Who needs clickers????  Imagine the looks of delight in the eyes of my students when my first direction to them was (in French of course) take out your cell phones!  The excitement was palpable.  The motivation piece was clearly present and accounted for, as evidenced by my final multiple choice poll question asking for their opinion on the activity -- all but one student expressed a favorable opinion (and that student later said he hadn't understood the choices).  Now critics of technology will certainly point out that fun does not an objective accomplish, so I go back to my goals for that day's class.  We have been recycling food vocabulary, and had just introduced expressions of quantity (bag, box, can, bottle, pound, litre, etc.)  Most of my questions were open-ended and consisted of questions like "What can be purchased in a jar?" The answers were varied, students could immediately see what their classmates had posted, and evaluate the correctness of the responses for themselves.  This particular polling app is anonymous, which has good and bad points.  On the positive, there is no issue of a student being unwilling to "put him/herself out there" if they are unsure of an answer, because when I point out errors, no one knows whose answer I am correcting.  On the negative, we do deal with teenagers, and there were some mildly inappropriate posts, but once I reexplained that the alternative was pen and paper, those disappeared.  For this trial run, I used my whole 40 class period -- I had prepared more than enough questions.  Students were engaged during the entire class, however, my ideas for future implementation run more toward quick bellringer activities that can be answered upon students entering the room, and discussed as class begins. 

Check it out!  Let me know what you think!

Web-based bulletin boards

Ok, so I need another blog like I need a hole in the head, but I've learned SOOOO much over the last month or so of research into free Web 2.0 tools and how I can integrate them into my classroom activities, that I thought I'd take this plunge.  The straw that broke the camel's back was the Teacher Challenge Free Tools 31 Day Challenge.  The first challenge (although I'm a couple of months behind) involved Wallwisher.  I posted my first Wallwisher wall on my French 3 page where you can see that the response I got was positively underwhelming!  In my defense, the updated district website did not go "live" until several weeks after I posted my wall, and the students were not quite motivated to try and find the site on their own.  So, my second attempt involved each student having their own individual wall.  We were working on the future tense, so each student had to post on every other student's wall a prediction about what that student will be doing in 25 years.  The response was much better, however, the students and I had great difficulty with "matrix glitches".  I think for future bulletin-board projects (of which I have several in mind...) I will try Linoit instead.  I have not had difficulty accessing their site thus far, which in itself is a great advantage.  Let me know what you think!