Novel Study Digital Portfolio

We may have just finished our Maniac Magee novel study at the end of Quarter 3, but after learning more about Hyperdocs a couple of weekends agos I decided I wanted to try out something new while it was all fresh in my brain.

I used Google Slides and Google Sites (among other Google Suite apps) to create a completely digital novel study for Maniac Magee using my county's reading curriculum. While it took a decent amount of time to put everything together and make sure that everything was hyperlinked to the correct link, next year when this unit comes up I will be good to go!

To set it up, I started with a Google Slides presentation. The first few slides explain how the students should set up their Google Site. The site will be used to create their digital portfolio of all of their assignments. Next, each slide in the presentation represents a different day the students will work on the novel. Each day has a set of chapters the students are to read, information they need to review or learn (usually linked to an anchor chart), sometimes an assignment for them to complete (for example, completing a graphic organizer where the students will use the text to find evidence of how two characters are similar), and then a Google Form where the students will complete their routine writing assignment for that set of chapters. The one slide has all of the directions and hyperlinks to everything the student needs. I also included a link to another Google Slide presentation that has tier 3 vocabulary for each set of chapters.

Here is an image of what a slide may look like:

The icons at the top of the slide let the students know which apps they will use each day.

At the end of the unit, the students will complete a project from the choice board:

After their project is completed and uploaded to their Google Site, then the students will have a finished digital portfolio on Google Sites that they can share with parents, grandparents, teachers, classmates, etc.. This will really allow them to take ownership and be proud of their work.

Google Draw - Interactive Ecosystem

Today was Day 1 of the Maryland EdTechTeam Summit and as with the previous years I have attended this awesome conference, I am full of ideas. While most of these ideas will have to come in a later blog post, this post is going to be about an idea I came up with about 30 minutes before I presented on Google Draw.

This is the second time I have presented on this app and I always love coming up with new ways to use it. While sitting in another session today, I had one of those aha moments and out came two ideas for Google Draw that I then threw together and presented.

In my 5th grade science class, we have been learning about life science and different ecosystems. With Google Draw, students could create an interactive ecosystem. One way they can do this is to find an image of the ecosystem and paste it into their Drawing. Next students should research different animals and plants that would be found in that ecosystem. Students then find images of each of these animals/plants and insert them onto the ecosystem image. To make this Drawing interactive, students could then insert a hyperlink for each animal and/or plant that links to a website with more information. The hyperlink could also link to a Google Doc or Slide with information that the student has researched.

Click on the image below to see an example

Digital Portfolios

I have come to realize something over the past two years in my journey of teaching 5th grade. They could care less about the papers you pass back and the feedback that is on that paper. The majority of the time that I pass back a project that my students have been working on it ends up on the floor at the end of the day or is shoved in their desk until I make them clean them out at the end of the month. If this is how they are treating their work then why am I taking the time to write feedback on every paper?!

So this year I decided to try something new. A digital portfolio! Now that Google has made the new Google Sites that is extremely easy to navigate I had each of my students create a site at the beginning of the year. All that I showed them was how to get to sites and the basic function keys. I didn’t teach them how to do everything, they are 10 years old and enjoy figuring things out on their own. It was much for relaxing for me to sit back and let them figure it out and answer the few questions that popped up rather than teach them step by step what to do. If I noticed I was getting the same question over and over I would stop everyone and explain how to do that one thing .

So here we are halfway through the year and we just finished a STEM Fair project and a Biography that were both completed electronically. I passed out the chromebooks and told my students to go to their Google Site and the immediate response was YES!! So they could care less about the paper biography draft I passed back to them, but allowing them to put the finished product on their digital portfolio and they all of a sudden began to care!

It is important that we remember that these kids live in a digital world. They want to be able to show off their work on their phone, iPad, chromebook, etc. to anyone they want, whenever they want. They don’t want to remember to take a paper home to show their parents what/how they did.

I have learned my lesson. Feedback will be provided electronically and I will allow them to update their portfolios as much as possible.

A few of my favorite digital portfolio applications:

Google Sites (the new version)
Seesaw
Class Dojo

Technology Spotlight: Kahoot

I'm so excited to be leading a guiding coalition on educational technology. I will be working with the same group of educators each month and introducing different tools they can use in their classrooms. This month I focused on assessment. I introduced Edulastic for my intermediate teachers and Kahoot for my primary teachers.

Since I've already done a post about Edulastic, I'd thought I would focus this post on Kahoot.

You can see my step by step guide below for Kahoot that walks you through how to create an account, creating quizzes, and viewing reports.

When using Kahoot, one thing to keep in mind is that you must wait for all users to enter the game room before you begin a game. Another thing to consider when choosing Kahoot as a tool is the fact that the answer choices that your students choose from are projected on the screen and the students only have the color choices on their screen. This may be good for primary students who need a simpler format when using a Web tool like this. The students are all answering the same question at the same time, so when they have answered a question they must wait for the others to answer before moving on. Again this may be good for primary grade levels where the teacher wants more control, but your intermediate students may get bored while waiting. Intermediate students may benefit from Kahoot if given a chance to create their own Kahoot for the class since the platform for creating quizzes is very easy to use.

Another modification for primary students, especially when first using Kahoot, have students complete the assessment as a small group or with a partner, ie. one device per 2-4 students.

Kahoot Step-by-Step Guide

Check back soon for my post on Quizizz so you can see which one you like best!

Guided Reading Tracker Using Google Forms

One thing that I have never been good at is keeping notes for my guided reading groups. I meet with my groups on a daily basis, but I just never found a way that works for me when it comes to taking notes. One year I even set up this beautiful binder full of note-taking pages and struggled to use it.

Enter this year, I decided there had to be a way I could quickly use my Chromebook to jot down information. I use my Chromebook for my lesson plans so it is sitting right there open on my table, so what could I use... Google Forms!

While I am not super excited about the spreadsheet for my responses (I need to play around with some of the add-ons), I am being very consistent on taking quick notes about who was present in the group that day, what text we read, any activities the students did, and any notes about the students.

Below is a step-by-step guide to setting up a Google Form to be used as a note taker for groups.

Guided Reading Tracker

Enjoy!

Vocabulary/Word Wall Cards Done Easy

It has been a while! Even though this is my 8th year of teaching, I always forget how the first month of school is always a crazy whirlwind where I feel like I am trying to catch up!

Now that things have settled down it is time to get back into action on this blog!

First up, a super quick and easy way to make vocabulary word cards for a word wall, focus board, or flash cards for the students using Google Slides

To make these word cards:

• Create a new Google Slides document
• Decide if you want the cards to be widescreen (16:9) or standard (4:3). To do this, click on File --> Page Setup --> Choose a size.
• Choose the slide layout that has a title at the top and nothing else on the slide.
• Type your vocabulary word in the "title" section. On the first slide, format your font size and style that you want for all of your slides so that it will be easy to keep them all the same.
• Click on Insert --> Image --> Search. This will allow you to do a Google search for an image you want and the nice thing is the images that are returned are all labeled for reuse with modification!
• Click on the image you want to insert and then click on Select.
• Once you are ready to create the next vocabulary word, right click and choose Duplicate Slide or click on Slide on the menu bar and Duplicate Slide. This keeps your formatting the same for each slide. Just delete the picture and search for a new one.

I prefer to print the cards with four slides on a page as seen above so that they fit nicely on my word wall.

When printing the cards:

• Click on File --> Print settings and preview.
• Where it says 1 slide without notes, you can click to see your other options. I usually choose Handout - 4 slides per page. I also use Landscape.
• Once you have chosen the size that works for you, click on Print or Download as PDF if you want to save for later.

Words Their Way - Getting Started

It's the beginning of the year which means craziness in the Potter classroom with beginning of the year assessments, getting everything and everyone organized, and our county decided to also throw in an overnight field trip in the second week of school! (seriously, the second week??)

However, in all of this craziness I made myself get my Words Their Way pretest given so that I can get my word study up and running as soon as possible.

For those that don't know what Words Their Way is, it is a word study program that allows you to differentiate the words that your students study based off of a pre-assessment.

The above picture is the overview of the word study program. You can also find out more information at Pearson Website.

I have used this program for the past four years and honestly every year I learn something new or try something new. I say this so that if you have tried it and failed, or if you are interested in trying it, just know that it can be confusing or overwhelming at first, but stick with it and figure out how to adapt it for your classroom and your teaching style.

To get this program up and running in your classroom, you will need to give your students the pre-assessment. There are three levels of this depending on what grade level you teach. There is a primary version, an elementary version, and an upper elementary version. Even though I teach fifth grade, I typically start off with the elementary version, partly because our school has a high number of ELL learners and quite often they struggle with spelling, so the upper elementary version may be too hard and not give me accurate data.

After students are given the pre-assessment, then the teacher will score the assessment using something called the Feature Guide. The feature guide breaks down each of the words into different parts. When using the feature guide, we aren't focusing on whether the word is correct or not, but rather if they got a specific part of the word correct. Sometimes words will be used for beginning and ending consonants, vowel patterns within the word, word endings, suffixes, etc. The feature guide is broken up into 11 different sections for the elementary list. After determining what word parts the student got correct, you will total up the amount of word parts correct in each of the 11 sections. The place where the student first misses TWO word parts is the place where they should begin their word study.

After you have completed a feature guide for each student, it's now time to form your groups! When I first started out, I had a group for each section that a student fell under. However, I went to a conference and actually got to attend a session with Donald Bear and he said to stop making ourselves crazy with all of these groups. He recommended no more than THREE groups in a single class. This means that there are often kids who are not starting where they should. So his next suggestion, it is always better for a student to take a step or two backwards in order to fit into a group, rather than have a bunch of groups.

As you can see in the picture above, I do have a few outliers and I just had to use my best judgment to put them in the group that I felt they would most benefit.

Over the next few weeks I will create posts to show how I use Words Their Way in my classroom and share the resources that I have found or created.