Announcer (00:00): This is the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.
Vicki Davis (00:04): We are spending two weeks counting down the top 10 episodes of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast. Thank you for all of you who have listened to and shared the show.
Coming in at number nine was eight ways to engage every learner. Now, this was an extended episode, and I did record it in fall of 2021, but I wanted it to be a little bit more.
But I’ve worked, I’ve gone through this. It is a very extended episode. But a lot of the principles that are here are still absolutely rock solid. I was excited to listen to this episode again and just see how many things we’re still carrying forward. I would say that I edited less than 3%. Classcraft is gone. Flipgrid is gone. But really, most of these other tools are still there. So I hope you enjoy this extended episode, this kind of walk down memory lane.
I have a few references to the season of 2020-2021, but these are all in-classroom principles that I still stand beside. So I hope you enjoy this episode coming in at number nine in our all-time downloads. So we are going to learn about eight ways to engage every learner, but also I have 45 different ideas that go with those eight ways. Now, I’ve also noted for you things that have to do with SEL or social emotional learning, face-to-face tips that I learned.
I’m also going to share tools and tips to help you progress quickly. So I just finished my 19th year of teaching and getting ready to start my 20th. Now, this year was not easy as we were moving into distance learning. Some of us didn’t think we were going to make it back in late June. I finally got to go rafting. This was the Chattahoochee over in Columbus. And I actually took one of the worst spills of my entire time of rafting. So I like to raft in these deckies along with my family.
And I’ve probably been down 20 or 30 times in a similar device here or a similar raft. But this particular time, someone hit my husband and he dumped out and I slowed down. And because I slowed down, I did something you’re not supposed to do. And I lost momentum and I flipped over. I really thought I was going to drown. It was kind of a scary experience. Well, my husband told me in early July that I needed to get back out there. Now, sometimes when you have a bad experience, you want to just quit and never try that again.
Now, some people use tools and maybe that tool wasn’t used in the right way or maybe students ghosted. Just because you had students ghost on you in Zoom doesn’t mean that Zoom is an ineffective tool. It means that at that time, perhaps there were a lot of challenges that could not be overcome for a variety of reasons. And granted, a lot of those reasons were not really anybody’s fault. It was just a matter of the circumstance. So, and again, it wasn’t really my
fault that I dumped over. It was a circumstance. It was a collision, an unexpected collision that happened. In a very fast-paced area of the river. Doesn’t that sound like what we’ve been through? So in early July 2021, here I am going down another river. I had to do it. I was a little bit scared, but I had to go down it. And I went down a pretty significant rapid. Yes, that’s me by myself paddling, paddling like crazy. And the lesson is we had to get back in the boat. I did successfully go down.
It was awesome. And I know for me, I think almost every teacher probably had to think about, you know, am I going to keep teaching after a year like this? Because it was just so hard. I can’t judge all of teaching based upon that year. Now, certainly it was a year that some people said, you know, I’m done. And, you know, we all have to make that choice for ourselves. But I’m not done and I’m excited to be starting year 20. Sometimes we just have to get back into the boat. And this is something we have
to teach and help our students to understand too, as part of social emotional learning. Sometimes we fail and sometimes we make mistakes. We have to learn from those mistakes and we have to move ahead. So again, we’re going to be learning eight ways to engage every learner and 45 ideas that go along with them. We’re also going to talk about those social emotional learning and talk about how things need to be done perhaps face-to-face with some face-to-face and some
online suggestions, as well as the tools and tips. Now, one thing that we all need to remember is that classrooms are made of bricks and clicks. This is one of the earliest things that I wrote on my blog way back. I started blogging in 2005, so it was very, very early, that we have the face-to-face classroom and we have the online classroom. But when you blend them together is when you get the real power. And so we all have to be able to do that. So our first principle, if anybody’s been following me for a while,
you will have heard me say, innovate like a turtle. We want to make slow, steady progress every day. This is something we We want to teach our students and we want to teach ourselves. Or we’ll become like me in the rapid and we will lose momentum and we’ll turn over. Now, in the fall, it’s going to be so very stressful for a lot of us because we may have students who’ve lost a lot of learning time. You’ve also got students who are going to be stressed out somewhat,
have fears and all kinds of things that’ll happen. So that’ll be part of our second item that we’ll discuss. But the first one is innovate like a turtle. So this is based on a Japanese principle, Kaizen. Which is slow, steady improvement. Now, I have this for my own life because in my own life to turn 50, I celebrated with my sisters running in the Disney half marathon. And slow, steady progress can take you a long way. This is me celebrating my first half marathon. I had actually run a 10K the
day before and it took me 19.3 miles in two days. Now, I innovated like a turtle because I used the Jeff Galloway method, of running, which is a run-walk method. So I might run for 30 seconds and walk for 10, or I worked where I was running about two minutes and then walking for about 30 seconds, but it was still slow, steady progress. Trust me, it was not very fast. So one thing I would encourage you to do is to schedule turtle time. Pick 15 minutes a day, twice a week to learn something new, and keep a list
of at least three things that you want to learn next. And you also want to find apps to help measure progress for both your students and for you. Now, for me, there is an app called Don’t Break the Chain, but I prefer the Streaks app, which lets me track about 12 habits that I am working on that I try to improve, everything from taking vitamins to working out. To reading and other things that I have on my little turtling that I do to try to improve.
But you can also, students can also earn digital badges or face-to-face badges to measure their progress. So there’s this whole credentialing and badging method that can help students innovate like a turtle and show their progress as well as us. Now, there are games that you can play that will show progress. One of my favorites is GimKit. Kids can earn points and also see their progress. But you can also set goals as a class. When I teach typing, I don’t set individual goals. I don’t think that’s really
appropriate because students have different strengths. I was always that student that typed over 100 words a minute. Well, my mom was a typing teacher. I took piano and mom started teaching me typing when I was in fifth grade. So it wasn’t really fair to the person who’d never even seen a typewriter or a computer before to compare me to them. So what I like to do in that case is to set class goals. And then as the class breaks a 10 mark, so for example, when they go from 20.
Gross words a minute or Guam to 30 Guam, then the whole class gets rewarded and it’s very motivating because sometimes a slower student might have an amazing day and bump the class up to the next achievement level and that student becomes the hero by just improving at their level. So I love to do overall class goals to measure progress and help my classes innovate like a turtle. Now, for you personally, in the book Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds that
I co-wrote back some time ago around, I think, 2013, talked about building your PLN. Now, I think every teacher should have a PLN and a PLC. Personal Learning Network is a network of people outside your school and a PLC is a professional learning community, which is within your school. I also believe that students should follow this model and have a PLN and also a PLC. You would have the Professional Learning Network, which is where you link with people on that topic or other classrooms in other ways.
Now, here’s some ways to build your PLN. Remember, books are awesome. And when I read books for modern authors, I like to connect with them online. But we don’t want to get to the point where we think if it wasn’t written in the past year that it’s not relevant. I know that it’s very, very tempting to think that with what we’ve been through. And certainly, as it relates to some technology tools, it is something that we need to consider in terms of technology.
However, there are timeless principles that we all need to appreciate and to understand that can come from books. Blogs, I like to use Feedly and keep up on my blogs. There’s podcasts, of course, mentioned my podcast, The 10-Minute Teacher, but there’s so many other great podcasts out there. Just found out my friend George Curros. Has a podcast called The Innovator’s Mindset that has several, I think, 20-something episodes now. And somewhere, I missed it. So every summer, actually, we’ll go through and
rebuild my podcatcher, which is the tool I use to listen to podcasts, rework my Feedly, things that break the algorithm. I think algorithm-busting techniques when it comes to building your PLN or PLC are very, very important. Because if you don’t, then you’re going to get what X or what Facebook decides to show you. Discussion boards are also a great way to build a PLN, but I would like to mention them in particular for building a PLC in your classroom because when you take
a course, very often you will have discussion boards and you want to learn how to communicate that way. Now, face-to-face conferences are still so very important. As soon as we can, there is a difference between online and face-to-face. And so we do want to try to get back together. And if we can’t, then attend a conference like this and then make an appointment with four or five friends from different places to jump on Zoom and to talk about what you’ve learned.
Even have a lunch and learn and jump on Zoom, have lunch together and talk about what you’ve learned because it does make a difference to connect with people. Outside your immediate area. And then also take a look for hashtags that will make a difference. Now, idea number seven is a really important one, and it’s one in our fast-paced society that a lot of us don’t take time for. I actually have a chair right here in my office just over to the side.
I call it my prayer and thinking chair, and I start every morning in that chair. It is a special place. I got this principal from John Maxwell who has a specific chair he sits in to think. And so there are times, even when this presentation, as I was planning it, this is a new presentation, and right now every presentation I’m doing is new because I have so many things to update based upon all that we learned in both hybrid teaching, face-to-face teaching, and hybrid teaching.
Online-only teaching. I’ve got to update all of those best practices that I’ve learned. But you need to have time to reflect and think. And one way to do that, of course, is to have a journal. I have several different types of journals. I have a personal journal, and I have a learning journal. Things that at the end of the day, I write down, I learned this, or I learned that. Then I have one on my desk at school where I write down different things that
I learned. I even have a journal for awesome moments, joyful moments. When I’m struggling with joy, I can look back at those and journal in that way. Now, it’s also important to take time to get out into nature. And I have my front porch all set up now with my citronella candle to keep the South Georgia bugs away where I can sit there on the glider swing and look at the birds and look at the sky. And I can’t tell you how many great ideas come when I’m just out there outside in nature.
Do have social media sabbaticals. I’m actually putting this presentation together at the end of a social media sabbatical where I literally took a break. And remember, you can delete apps off your phone without deleting your account. So I removed Twitter, removed Facebook, removed Messenger, removed all the things that I just wanted to get out of there. And then when I reinstalled, I set up them to not track across my other apps. And then I made sure I turned off all the notifications. I want to be a creator and not a user.
And it really worries me when I start feeling like I’m the one being programmed. Instead of me more managing what I need for the work I’m doing. Of course, I like the serendipitous accident that happens sometimes with the algorithms, but I really start worrying when I start getting only stuff I like because that means that I am in a filter bubble and bubbles are not good for anybody. So do try to unplug. Now, I’ve read quite a bit of Cal Newport’s work about
deep work and I subscribe to his podcast, and there are some things that he talks about actually the benefits of being bored. I don’t really ever get bored. I always have things to think about, but there are times that it’s great to just sit still. And I think it’s important to talk to students about that. One of my friends, Sabrina, who teaches English, had one of the best writing projects she’s ever had. She took some kids out by a lake that we had near the
school and they sat there and they wrote and they didn’t have their phones with them. They didn’t have anything with them but their notebook. They came back with some of the best writing they have ever done because they were just able to unplug and think. And I think we need to carve out more time for thinking as we are creating. We need to make time for that deep work for ourselves and for our students. And this also impacts our professional development. We’ve been learning so quickly
for so long that carving out that deep work time is very important for educators. And then we need to shift from using to creating, imagining, and inventing. We need to help our students do that. So I like to share this one first because it’s easy to get overwhelmed in a presentation like this and everything in the Pear Fair that you’re going to experience, which is going to be so awesome. So I suggest that you just pick three. What are the next three things you’re
going to try? So jot down, take a whole bunch of notes, but then when you’re done with this presentation and with the other presentations… Take a highlighter and highlight what are the next three things you’re going to try. You can always come back and find more. That won’t be a problem, trust me. But pick only three. Otherwise, you’ll be overwhelmed and you’ll do nothing. So our first principle is to innovate like a turtle, make slow, steady progress every day.
And when you do that and you’re learning as a teacher, you’re talking about what you’re learning with your students and they can see that you are modeling the lifestyle of a lifelong learner, which is what you want. So our second principle is extremely important. It’s related to social-emotional learning, and it is to relate so you can educate. Now, one of the earliest studies when I started teaching that I read was from Robert Marzano that students will resist rules and procedures along with the
consequent disciplinary actions if the foundation of a good relationship is lacking. So you have to relate to educate. When I used to just start off with content, give them all my rules and all different kinds of things, I don’t do that anymore. I start off, I will hand out my syllabus and my information that needs to go home that’s required by my administration. But my first day is spent getting to know my students and what they love. Now, this came from my son, youngest. We have three children and our youngest,
came home one year and he was talking about this amazing teacher. And it was on the first day. I’m so amazing teacher. And I asked her, you know, what was the lesson? And she was teaching English. And he said, you know what? She had us draw our seal of what it represents and who we are. And I drew a little bit about Minecraft and she just talked to me about Minecraft and she’s the coolest teacher ever. Well, it’s about how you make them feel. And when you find that thing that they
love that you know a little bit about, it makes a massive impression. And I talked to the teacher later. It was just a minute or two conversation. It sounded like she had talked the whole class period with just him. He was so excited. So finding that thing that the students love from the first day will help you make your lessons so much more engaging for that class. You know, I teach at a school where a lot of kids are interested in soccer. But this past year, I had a lot of kids in one class that were interested in baseball.
If I had started off with all of my soccer analogies, that just stories that just wouldn’t have worked. Sometimes kids are more interested in theater and arts. So understanding what those things are makes a huge difference. So here we go. Here’s idea number eight for this presentation to take a mood surveys. I like to do this with emojis. Sometimes I’ll have kids draw the emojis. Sometimes I’ll just ask an open-ended question in classroom where they answer privately.
And then sometimes I will use a tool like Classroom Climate here in Pear Deck. Now, the cool thing about Classroom Climate is I can sit there and I can look at the mood of each student at the beginning of class. Now, I’m not going to stop and say, Daniel, I see you’re sad, or Ian, I see that you’re sad. I’m not going to do that. Of course not. Now, this is a demo. This is not really my student name, so don’t worry about privacy. But you can see what that mood is, so you can be in tune to that and understand what’s going on.
And then at the end, how did the lesson go? And just get the up or down, and you can follow up with that. Now, I love that you can take a look at it, and you can see, compare the mood to how I felt about the lesson. And those are two different things. How are you feeling? And how did you feel about the lesson are two entirely different things. One is how did you feel about the content? Do you feel like you learned it or not? And then the other is how are you feeling as a person? So it just helps you
understand kids a little bit better and especially when they come back. And this is from personal experience. When they come back from break. And in those first few weeks and every so often, at least once a week, I try to do some sort of mood measurement just so that I could be in tune because this is a very complex, difficult time these days. So idea number nine is to ask open-ended questions. Now, this is the survey that I used after spring break with my students this year back in 2021.
And it was just a simple of how are you doing on a scale of one to 10 today? On a scale of one to 10, how were you doing last week, which was the spring break? And then what’s the biggest reason for the change? So this helped me understand, were kids glad to come back or not glad to come back? Did anything happen that they needed to know? And I will tell you, several super important conversations happened that were life-changing for kids, for parents, and for me.
Some of the most important things that happened the whole year happened as a result of this sort of, let’s just call it mood delta or mood change survey. And again, I’m not trying to dig into private information, but just whatever the student wants me to know, they will tell you. And it’s very, very helpful. So the other idea, this is for face-to-face classroom, is I always tell students very early in the year, they’re welcome to write an anonymous note and leave it on my desk at any time.
And I give them some examples. Let’s say I accidentally hurt somebody’s feelings and you want me to know, but you don’t want the person to know where it came from. Please leave that for me. If there’s anything you think I need to know, if there’s bullying going on or any kind of problem like that, you are welcome to leave an anonymous note. Now, typically students do sign their names, but they kind of get used to the fact that people leave notes on my desk. Now, sometimes I will have a paper
form and not require their name if they don’t want to and do it that way. The other thing that I like to do in my face-to-face classroom is I’ll make an open offer very early in the year that I will set an appointment with students anytime and give some examples. So I’ll say if you want to talk about a project, if there’s some ideas you have, but you’re kind of embarrassed to talk about it in front of everybody else, or if you have something you want me to know or you have a question about something,
let’s set an appointment. And you can come in during snack attack or the end of lunch or early morning or after school, and we’ll talk about it. and it just puts them in the driver’s seat. I even let them say, I think I’m going to want an appointment later this week. That way they can change their mind if they want to and it’s no pressure. So this is a really important technique and I will tell you, I’ve seen more social emotional issues, understandably, since the pandemic hit
than in all of my previous 17 and a half years of teaching. So these are very important techniques to help us relate. Now, this is one of my friends teaching second grade with her little honeybeats, Miss Debra. She has theme days and you can see it’s a superhero day. And I’ll tell you that in particular, when we had to do online learning, having theme days, even for the seniors, made a big difference. It’s hat day, it’s sunglasses day, it’s whatever day.
And then you can even do it in the face-to-face classroom. But theme days really do help you relate and connect because you get to know more about what kids are interested in. And I love theme days, whether it’s face-to-face or online. The idea 13 is to have small group meetings. Now, I have a podcast released in August 2021 where a Harvard professor actually shared with me that. His students had better projects because they met in Zoom for those projects.
And so that is something that I’ve seen also. My students wrote better scripts because they were meeting in Zoom after hours. So if you think about it, college kids can hang out in the library sometimes, or if they live off campus, they can’t. Because I remember when I was in college at Georgia Tech, the kids who live off campus really had a disadvantage. They couldn’t meet in the library after hours. They couldn’t really meet with their group. And those were the missing people in the groups. Well, what’s happened is by
using a tool like Zoom or Google Meet, those people in those groups can now meet together in powerful ways. So I think this is something that’s going to stay with us after we get all the way through the pandemic is the ability to meet in teams in online platforms is absolutely essential, I think, and a best practice for going forward. Also, teachers were meeting in reading groups and having groups of four or five kids and were reading together. So these are two definite best practices.
And my students who write, who work for me in digital film, they write the scripts on their own time. So over the summer, they’ve been meeting in Zoom and also face to face to talk about the scripts for the fall. And it’s a great best practice. Now, anytime you can play games, you can have different ways of doing this. I love GimKit for playing games. There’s games inside Pear Deck. There’s all kinds of ways that you can play games and have activities.
So this also helps you relate to students because when you have a shared experience. Fun experience, it really does make a difference, which also fits with idea number 15, to take brain breaks. Now, Rob Donatelli is somebody I followed on Twitter, and I’ve had him on two podcast episodes that are linked on these slides. But brain breaks are fantastic ways to give kids a break with their brain, but also to have a fun experience together. So lots of good ones there.
Now, number 16 is that, you know, you have to relate to educate, but sometimes you need relatable guests. Now, this particular guest is a computer scientist programmer over at the Marine Base in my local area, and he came and spoke to my students about programming. And here he was talking about innovation in the U.S. military and also what he does. Now, if you study the research, particularly in computer science, one of the issues is that students need to see someone that they can relate to.
They think, oh, that person is like me or I’m like them, and I can do that too. And we need to have a diversity of guests. So do work to have relatable guests. And I’ll show you a screenshot of how I did this online. Later in the presentation. Idea number 17, this is probably the most important idea of the whole presentation, and this is about intentional conversations. Now, I’m going to come back to this research that relates to computer science,
and I share that because I’m in computer science, but this encouragement matters in all types of areas. So I’m going to tell you a story about a young girl named Sue and a teacher named Mrs. Scruggs. So Sue was a, she was an army brat, and her father had been injured and had PTSD. And so her family was very much in poverty because he was in the VA hospital for so many years. With his PTSD, he was not able to come home. So because she was a poor student,
Sue had to milk cows and had to do a lot on the farm and had to do a lot of things to care for her little brother and her little sister. Well, Sue was in high school and she was getting ready to get on the bus. Her mom couldn’t come and pick her up. her mom had to work. So, Ms. Krug’s came up behind Sue and tapped her on the shoulder and said, Sue, I need to talk to you. And Sue said, well, I can’t miss the bus. Mom can’t drive into town to get me today.
And so, Ms. Krug says, no, I’m not going to make you late. The bus will be leaving in about 15, 20 minutes. This will take about five. So, Sue thought she was in trouble because that’s kind of what happens with us teachers sometimes and followed Ms. Krug’s back to her room. And Sue told me that she saw Ms. Krug’s cross the desk from her and saw her long, beautiful fingernails and her, you know, just so well put together. And Ms. Scruggs looked at her and smiled
and she said, Sue, you have leadership capabilities. And Sue is like, what? Ms. Scruggs says you need to run for student government. And Sue says, poor kids aren’t popular and they can’t run for student government. And Ms. Scruggs says, well, it does not matter what you, it doesn’t matter, I’m sorry, I always get teared up in this, it doesn’t matter what you think or your poverty level or whether you have money or not. You do have a lot of friends and you have a lot of leadership capability.
So Sue said, well, let me think about it tonight. So Sue went, got on the bus, went home, didn’t talk to anybody. She said she laid awake that night, looked at the ceiling and thought about it. And she started counting her friends and she thought, okay, so I’ve got these seven friends and they’re in an overturned school bus. And yes, they have a dirt floor and a lot of times they stay home because they have to shoot food to be able to eat. But I think they might come and vote. And there are seven of them there.
And she started counting all of her different friends and she realized that she had a lot of friends. So she got on the bus the next morning. She asked one of her friends, what do you think about if I would run for student government? And they were all like, yeah, yeah, Sue, we can do this and we can do that and we can do this. And so they started planning how Sue was going to run. And so Sue went and told Ms. Scruggs that she would run for student government.
Well, when she put in her name, oh my goodness, everybody just kind of made fun of her and all that kind of thing. But not everybody. She did have a lot of friends and they were campaigning for her. So as you can guess, when the day came. All of her friends came in. Yes, most of them were other poor kids like Sue. And they all came in and she went on a landslide. Sue got into student government and realized that she was a leader. She went back to Mrs. Scruggs and she said, you know what, Mrs.
Scruggs, I think because I’m a leader that I might need to go to college. I wonder if I could be a teacher like you. So Sue was able to get a scholarship to go to Auburn University. And while she was at Auburn, she went with a friend from a little town called Camilla, Georgia, and ran into a man named James. And eventually, James and Sue got married, and they had an oldest daughter. I literally exist because of a conversation that a teacher had with my mom, Sue.
That’s why I’m here. That’s how important our conversations are that we have. So when I say this is the most important concept, it absolutely is. Now, my mom did pass away recently. Back in December, and we buried her January 4th. And this was a hard year for many, many reasons. Me and my whole family, we had COVID in December. We’re not gonna go through all the things that happened. But one thing she taught me is that when you serve and think of others,
it is the best long-term strategy for life. So she always taught me, when you have a hard time, find somebody else who’s hurting, find somebody to serve. And then I would always do that. Now, this also relates to one of my most popular blog posts I’ve ever written that kind of got inspired by a comment that Kevin Honeycutt said on my podcast. He said, you can flip a kid with a comment like you flip a house. And so I wrote a blog post called 10 Ways to Flip a Kid and Turn His Day Around.
There are so many ways to do that. You can re-believe in a child. You can care as they enter the classroom and call them by name. You can notice kids who need extra attention and give that extra attention. You can be genuinely interested in your students. You can be positive. You can talk privately with kids who act out. In fact, praise is great to be public. Some kids you have to praise in private because they don’t want attention to be drawn to them.
But you have to kind of know that too. But if I ever have criticism or issues, I always take them out in the hall and have that conversation privately. You can pull up a chair and that’s a lot less intimidating than talking down to a child. You always try to get on their level. I do very early in the year try to compliment students. I like to write comments on every single report card and every single progress report that are personal to that student.
But if I know that there is a student who struggles or other teachers, I’ve heard that teacher talk about a student struggling, I will intentionally call or email that parent. Usually I’ll email the parent something positive because if I call, they’ll see the school and they’ll think it’s negative. And it’s not. So I want my first contact with that parent to be something positive, and I try to do that on the first day, the very first day. So also having grace and discipline, there are times that you need to have grace
because some kids don’t ever get it. And then do something extra for kids. You know, there are times then before COVID, of course, that I baked cookies or baked cinnamon rolls or did something like that, and I found other ways to do that during this time. So idea 18, I want to stress this, is have intentional conversations. Now, I came across some research. My summer professional development is a course to update conversations. My knowledge on teaching computer science. I’ve been doing this for a while, so it was time.
But students who were told by parents or teachers that they would be good at computer science are 2.5 to three times more likely to be interested in learning computer science in the future. That is in, so it’s the encouragement of parents and teachers that truly make a difference in that area. And I think if you look at other areas, that also is where they make a difference. So principle number two is we relate so we can educate. and we also relate so
we can change their lives. Principle number three is that if we want to engage every student, we have to examine the learning experience continually. Students have to examine their learning experiences and we have to be learning about how they’re learning. So add a reflection to every single assessment. In Google Classroom, you can do this in private comments. I got this from my friend Alice Keeler, that every private comment in a Google Classroom assignment,
students should reflect with one to two sentences on that assignment if they felt like they understood it and how it works. And this is a very important best practice. Every single assignment should be a reflection in some way. And I love the tool Wiser. They call it worksheets, but it’s really not because it’s so differentiated and amazing. But you can have a reflection, an up or a down reflection, and you can also include video or audio or text as your answer. So if you don’t want your camera
to go on, it can be just audio or you can type text or you can have audio and video. And encourage multiple modalities for reflection, which is great. And of course, classroom climate, which we’ve already discussed in Pear Deck. So here’s idea number 20, student learning journals or reading journals. Now, remember, in Google Docs, you can make a date to be a heading and then you can put them in a table of contents so students can jump down to that journal entry.
Now, there’s so many different ways that learning journals can be used, but a writing learning journal is a very important thing. In fact, that’s when I really kind of started realizing that I loved writing. I had to keep a writing journal. For a whole year for a teacher who taught composition in ninth grade. And it really did change my life. But you can also come up with questions. Idea number 22 is word cloud polls in Google Slides. So you can take a poll and ask a question and then make a word cloud of it.
So there’s a tool called Slido that you can do this with. And, you know, in one word, how would you describe your week so far? And everybody typed it in and then there you go, which is really, really cool. So word cloud polls are a lot of fun. You can also use a metacognitive tool. I found one called Sown to Grow, but truthfully, you can embed this into anything. You can even make Pear Deck or Google assignments that will help you reflect in a metacognitive way. And that’s fantastic, too. So we need to be examining
our learning experience continually. With formative tools and with all different kinds of tools to truly understand how we’re learning and to reflect on that. And that’s why it’s also important, the journals I mentioned earlier, to keep doing that. Now, principle number five is to engage student interests. This is also how we relate to educate and why we start at the very, very beginning. Now, when we start off, we want to find unique readings that
students can do. Now, one of the sites that teachers loved during all of this process at my school is called Epic Learning. There are a lot of tools that you can use or websites you can use where you can find lots of personal reading interests for students. But you can also create dashboards for different interests using Symbolo and. Give students those dashboards or let them make their own with websites so that students can find things that interest them or find multiple ways to complete
an assignment or to learn knowledge. Now, idea number 26 is that there are many teachers that are using Wakelets in this way. So you can see this is a particular Wakelet and how it was put together, but you can create a digital media center using Wakelet. This is great for librarians, but also you can have a center using Wakelet for your students. Idea number 27 is to write and read books. Now, I love Book Creator, and there’s so many different multi-modalities inside Book Creator,
audio, video, so many things that you can do in it. This is one of the best writing projects that I’ve added to my seventh grade curriculum ever. The students write books, they proof. So what we actually do is the students will pitch it to me verbally, and then they will draft it in Google Docs, and they have to get peer feedback, and it has to be great. And then they’ll pull it over. Now, they can do cartoons. They can do all kinds of other things.
They can add their graphics. But it is a writing assignment. So we do want to get all that peer feedback before we pull it in. And then they can publish and share it with their families or with one another. So that’s another great one. So do work to engage student interests in every way that you can. And part of that, again, is knowing those interests. From the very beginning. Now your students are going to spend the whole year learning content, but you have to start off by learning them and knowing who they are.
So principle number six is to create in multiple modalities. Now, you definitely want to differentiate instruction and to instruct in multiple modalities with video, with audio, with text. But students have to move from users to creators. They need to know how to create using a computer and not just have the computer use them. So they need to be transliterate across multiple modalities. And here’s some ways to do that. Now, certainly I’m going to end up with many
more than 45 examples just because I’ve bulleted these, but this is kind of just kind of made it more concise. So first of all, you have written text. You can use blog posts, discussion boards, website creation. My eighth graders create personal websites. My ninth graders go in and update them and students update them throughout high school so they can graduate with a hyperlink. Then you’ve got website creation and including contextual links and understanding
how to link to other things. So I’ve got a whole book, Reinventing Writing, with a whole section on community of practice and also contextual hyperlinking and how you write for the web, which is actually very different than just writing an essay. But then they can also write books, which we’ve already discussed. Audio, they can do their own podcasts and edit those. And do they know how to upload a recording and send it in? Especially your students who are perhaps have a written expression issue,
but do not have a verbal expression issue. They need to learn how to record their feedback and upload that and send that to you instead, because that’s the best way for them to share or communicate with you. Okay, so now number 30 is photography and digital stills. So simple photography, can you take a photo? Do you understand photo composition? I like to teach the principle of thirds and how to get an excellent photo. But then also photo manipulation and the things that you can do that,
even understanding the deep fake is a part of digital citizenship and knowing that people can fake things. But drawing programs and, you know, digital pencils are fantastic. I love the Procreate app on my iPad with my digital pencil. There’s so many things you can do now with creation and see, even when I’m drawing a sketchnote in Procreate, I can turn that into a video and it will go back and replay the whole thing in stop motion, which is pretty incredible.
Then you’ve got digital video and animation. So you can have simple recordings. Can I record something and share a presentation or a recording in that way? But can I also do movie storyboarding and editing? I teach a digital film class and the kids learn so much about collaboration and working together. Can they work on a team? Do they even character animation? There’s a really cool Adobe tool called, I think it’s Adobe Character Animator, and it’s fantastic.
And it basically turns your own face and you become a puppet and you can turn yourself into a fish or whatever, and you can export that video and use it somewhere else. So there’s so many tools that you can use for a digital video and animation. But then you’ve got 32 here, and this is just kind of a free-for-all. It’s app smashing. And What that means is that when you use multiple apps to pull them together, and so I might go into 3D Character Animator and export
a video, and then I’ll pull that into Adobe Premiere Pro and pull that together, and then I might do something else with it and pull it into another app. So a student might take something into three or four apps, and this is when we get into computational thinking. Now, the current thinking is that we really need to help kids be able to break down problems, spot patterns, and have this computational thinking and problem-solving capabilities in elementary so that we can start into some computer concepts into learning.
Middle school and high school. And it’s not so every student can be a computer scientist. It’s because computer and technology are so integrated into every single field now. But students need to understand how you break down a problem and what things can be computed and what things can’t, no matter what field they go into. So a basic, it’s not computer literacy, how to use a tool. A lot of people get very, very confused between, they say, oh, well, we teach computer science and
the kids are making PowerPoints or Google Slides. That’s not it. It’s actually not just using a tool, it is creating new things and new ways and creating algorithms and analysis and inventing using technology. So it’s a little bit different than just using apps. But app smashing would definitely come into the category of computational thinking because you are determining the appropriate use of each of those apps. So we want to have our students create in multiple modalities.
And again, remember, if you have feedback on any of this, just tweet me at Cool Cat Teacher, and I’d love to have conversations with you. So number seven is we want to solve real-world problems. I’ve been using this quote a long time, and it’s more true than ever. You can’t just drop new innovations into a classroom and hope the instructor will invent effective ways to use them. To fully utilize a new teaching technology, you often need to invent new teaching
practices as well, John C. Lee Brown. So one of the most real-world things you can do is to actually involve students in evaluating teaching practices. Now, it is okay to share the SAMR model with students, especially older students. And this is a model most of us would be familiar with who’ve used education technology. S is for substitution. It’s a direct substitute for something. There is no functional change. It’s just I’m making it electronic.
Augmentation means that there are some functional improvements. So, for example, I might have a worksheet, but then it’s self-grades. Modification means that I can significantly redesign the tasks, but redefinition means that I am totally redefining how I’m teaching. I am creating a new task that was previously inconceivable without technology. And you want to move to redefinition. Now, I love this graphic, and it’s hard to see. I’m going to have to look closer.
Tim Lapdor, this is from, I pulled it off of Flickr, that there is an adoption. Model that you can actually put over SAMR. That when we start using a tool, we end up with inflated expectations. So we start a substitution, we start getting into augmentation and we have these inflated expectations of what it could do. And then it can’t do it that way. And we end up in the trough of disillusionment. And I would argue that a lot of teachers and districts are in the trough of disillusionment right now.
But if you will push through and you will start saying, okay, how can we use this and modify it and redefine how we use technology so that we can use it better. And if you can have students be part of that process, they will push you faster into modification and redefinition because you are involving them in the evaluation of teaching practices. So for example, when I started using formative assessment, it used to take me about two weeks to teach binary numbers, binary addition, and binary conversion.
Now I can do it in three days. And a lot of it was because I was using formative assessment. But not only was I formatively assessing the content knowledge. I was asking students which way they liked to learn the content. So the next time I did it, I did it much more efficiently. I actually start off binary numbers with a hands-on activity. It’s called unplugged. And then I moved to using technology. And that came from getting feedback from my students on not only whether they
understood the content, but how I was teaching. So involve students in evaluation of teaching practices or formative assessment. Now, Pear Deck does have several kinds of formative templates. Get familiar with these. And remember, please don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because you can get a number out of something means it needs to go in the gradebook. It does not. So for example, I don’t ever want to give a quiz or a test until I know that
my class has mastered, is at an 80 to 90 percent mastery level for every student. So if I assess that first day in binary numbers and I see that one student is just not getting it at all, then I’m going to set an appointment or I’m going to have a way or reach out to parents or do something in a non-embarrassing way to help that student understand it so that they feel like that they are keeping up with everybody else and not getting significantly behind.
So what technology lets us do is it lets us collapse that float of information of knowing what do kids know. So as knowledge is forming, I can more quickly understand what they understand and. So that I can help the student not feel as behind. And I’m not putting it in the grade book because the first check or the second or the third or the fourth or sometimes even the ninth or ninth check is a check. I’ll tell them I am checking for how I’m teaching right now.
That’s what I’m doing. I’m not grading you on what you know. I just want you to do your best. But I will, as soon as I feel like we’re there, I will start grading you on what you know once I know that I have effectively taught it. So that’s kind of what I do there. Now, another thing that we can do is to be real world, is students can create their own world. Now, one thing we tried to do when we went to complete distance learning was to add activities.
And we actually had a Minecraft club and my students created, this was optional, didn’t receive a grade, but they created the ancient wonders of the world in Minecraft. It was one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen, but also let them publish for a real world audience. So when students publish for a real audience, it also makes it more real world. The other thing we did is we had a course that I created on artificial intelligence for computer science students, and they were able to interact with real world
guest speakers. It was an incredible project and the students learned so many things. And then the other thing is when they collaboratively present and connect with one another and build those presentations and present for a global audience in some way, whether it’s a student summit or student presentation, that also makes it real world. Idea number 39 is that you can create a capstone project requiring solving of a community problem. Now, you can see resources on Mad About Mattering, which was a project that
I co-created with MadLearn and some other folks. And students created, mapped their heartbreak. So they tried to solve a community problem or a local problem in this. So when you have a capstone project, you can have students map their heartbreak or identify community problems, and then it definitely becomes real world. Idea number 41 is you can create projects which flatten the classroom and let kids connect. This is so important. And this survival craft was a fun project that Lee Graham
and some other folks created. And they used Minecraft and they taught the giver and there were all kinds of activities that we did. And it was fantastic. Great project. So principle number seven is to solve real world problems and to connect in a real way to the world. Now, principle number eight is to empower students with AI assistance. Now, students can have almost like their own little personal learning assistant if they learn how to use the right tools.
One of those tools is Read and Write for Google Chrome. This is especially important for those, students who struggle, like some of our own children, whether it’s screen masking so they can read, whether it’s simplifying and removing the clutter, whether it’s highlighting something and having it read to you, using tools that empower student learning are so very important. You can also have read-alouds and students can read things aloud. You can use Seesaw or anything that lets voice recording happen.
But you can also empower AI writing with coaches. So I like to teach Grammarly, Hemingway app, ProWritingAid, and WriQ. And there’s other apps that are out there. But talking about AI writing coaches, there’s actually some AI apps out there that will paraphrase things for students and make it very hard to catch plagiarism. So AI ethics, if you do anything with AI, this is really something that you should do with even young kids. MIT has a curriculum on AI ethics and there’s
also exploreaiethics.com. That has information, and it’s a really important topic. So I don’t think that we can talk about all the tools that they can use and computational thinking and teach them how to program and code. It’s like the wise man said in Jurassic Park, we’re so excited that we could, we never stopped to see if we should. And that’s what we want to get our students to do. So principle number 18 is we want to empower students with AI assistance.
So I hope that we have accomplished all the things that I said we would accomplish. We have talked about eight ways or concepts that can engage every learner if we will adopt and use them. We’ve given you 45 ideas and we’ve talked about social emotional learning and how important it is. We’ve mentioned that face-to-face as well as the blended learning is important and giving you some tools and tips to make progress faster. So I hope this has been very helpful for you.
I’m glad that you’re participating in professional development. I do hope that you’ll connect with me on the podcast at the 10-Minute Teacher and subscribe wherever you subscribe to podcasts or, subscribe to my newsletter at coolcatteacher.com forward slash newsletter. And do take time to learn three tools or to have three tools on your list and go ahead and pencil in some turtle time this week, at least two times of 15 minutes each and sit down and learn.
And when that 15 minutes is up, move on and try to converse with people about it as well.
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