(Sholl)iloquy

Where I was Honestly, before this class I was skeptical of technology in the classroom. I knew that as teachers we were supposed to be incorporating it into our classrooms. During my observations, I had only seen a couple of teacher use technology effectively. I grew up in a generation where technology was growing and starting to be used in a classroom, but we weren't allowed to have personal devices on us. That made me biased because I'm not much older than some of these high school students and I got through school just fine without a lot of technology. At this point I did not see technology as an aide, just a distraction. Growth After finishing my Educational Technology class I feel like I have learned so much.It truly has been one of the most interesting and useful classes that I have taken during my grad work. I think there are two main areas where this class has allowed me to grow. Growing out of my comfort zone Getting out of my comfort zone is a big one. The b

About iCivics iCivics is a free website that was founded by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the first female Supreme Court justice. It focuses on topics that are related to civics and government function. There are a couple of purposes of iCivics. You can sign up as a teacher or a student. I signed up as a teacher, so everything I was seeing is from the teacher's perspective. There are lesson plans and activity ideas for teachers. There are also several activities or games for students to complete on a variety of topics, which teachers also have access to. Underneath the games is the estimated time that it takes to play the game; this is beneficial for planning purposes. When you play the games you get points. After earning points, you can choose to spend those points voting for a choice on impact project. Every three months, iCivics donates money to the impact project with the highest number of points. Using it in the classroom In Virginia, students will at some point

What is Canva? That was what I asked myself when I was asked to use it for an assignment in grad school about a year ago. Our professor wanted us to make an infographic about something and told us that this resource would be a good one to use.  Canva is a graphic design resource that is available as an app and from its website. I have used both the app and website versions and both run pretty smoothly. I only have the free version which limits what you can do through the app. The upgrade is $12.95 per month. Below are the different features between the versions. There is also Canva Enterprise, but that is primarily for groups of people with 30+ members.  I'm really fine with only having the free version of Canva. I don't think I would use it enough to warrant the Canva for Work version. However, if I ended up using the app a lot I like it enough to consider paying for the upgrade.  One feature that is only in the upgrade is the resizing of designs. I've use

Experience with Padlet This week I had decided to review Padlet as a resource. There is a desktop and app version of Padlet. I signed up for the free version, which gives you a limited number of Padlets that you can create and you can only upload files of smaller sizes. You can, of course, upgrade with prices starting at $8.25 a month. To create a Padlet, you can either pick from templates or you can start from scratch. If you start from scratch, you will pick a type of Padlet to create. Below are the options: I wanted to do discussion questions on the U.S. Constitution so I picked the Canvas format, although Backchannel would have worked as well. This is what my Padlet looked like when I was finished: This would be the view as both the creator or someone who is just contributing. To add a comment, you click on the pink + button at the bottom right hand corner. You can the connect the comments with an arrow. One thing that I liked about this app is there are a variety of

About the Video I was thinking about what kind of activity that a short video could be useful for. (Hint: There are many.) I'm thinking that in my classroom I could do an activity called Four Facts. The topics would vary, but I would have my students create a video that shared four facts about a certain topic. For my example, I chose the city of New Orleans. On this example, I chose pretty broad facts: Location, Elevation, Brief History, and Culture. However, this four facts format can really be switched up. You could do four little known facts, important facts, facts I didn't know... There are just a lot of options.  Using Adobe Spark This was my first time using Spark. I created my video using their app because I was traveling this week and it was pretty convenient to use. To get started I was prompted to either start from scratch or use a template. I chose to start from scratch because I didn't see any templates that fit my purpose well. I started building

Retrieval Practice The best way I can think to describe retrieval practice is to share what Jennifer Gonzalez says in her blog. She says that, " retrieval practice is the act of trying to recall information without having it in front of you ." This probably doesn't seem like a new concept to you. If you're like me, you might have thought of flashcards or tools like Quizlet. These can be ways to do retrieval practice. Some other ways that Gonzalez mentions are low-stakes/no-stakes quizzes or brain dumps. I focused on these last two methods for this activity. I created a quiz on Virginia's geographical regions using Socrative. The quiz could be used as an exit ticket or a warm up for the class after a lesson. This would be a no-stakes quiz since I would not be using it as a grade. If this quiz was a warm up, you could bridge it into a think-pair-share once everyone was done. Socrative This was my first time really using Socrative. Overall, I liked it. I thoug

My assessment I created a formative assessment on the three branches of government. I could use this as an exit ticket after a lesson or as a warm up in the next class period. My quiz is broken up into three sections for the three branches, with 2-3 questions per section. Why I chose Google Forms First of all, I personally find Google Forms easy to navigate. Since this is a short, formative assessment, I didn't want to spend too much time on the set up. Google Forms also allows you to break up groups of questions into sections. I found this particularly helpful for this topic because I could look at an individual's responses for a certain section.  For example, I can see how this person (me on my trial run) did on the Judicial section. If all or most of the answers are correct then I can infer that they have a good grasp on the judicial branch. Conversely, if they didn't do well on this section, I would infer that they need to review and refer them to an acti

Summarizing formative assessment Over the past couple of weeks I read the following articles: What Are Formative Assessments and Why Should We Use Them? , Tech Based Formative Assessment , Dial Up Your Formative Assessment Technique , and Formative Assessment Techniques for 21st Century Learning. Each article varied in the content, but they all dealt with how formative assessment should be used. Based on these articles and what I have seen in the classroom, formative assessment should be a part of instruction and/or should be used for learning. Formative assessment can provide student feedback on where they are at in their learning process. I've observed teachers using formative assessment in the middle of instruction and used it to either reinforce concepts or to review common errors or misunderstandings. I've also seen formative assessment used as warm ups or exit tickets. Students should also be given another opportunity after the initial formative assessment to show

Focus for this week This week I focused on scaling back my interactive presentation. I felt like my first presentation was not worth the time I spent working on it. I probably could have found a more productive learning activity that required less work. This week, it took me around 30 minutes to do my presentation and I felt that it had a solid amount of content. My presentation is designed to be used in Present mode, and is something that I could use during instruction, my students could use as a study tool, and has potential to be an example for something they can create on their own. Below are some pictures of my checks and balances presentation: Checks and balances of the US federal government are usually taught with a visual aid because it can be a confusing process! This is the starting place on the presentation and students can choose which branches or directions they want to view first by clicking on the title or an arrow. This page is called the Clean Slate! page and c

Interactive Slides Background This week I worked on creating an interactive resource using Google Slides. This was the first time I really created something interactive via Google Slides, so it took me a while to get everything set up. My first step was to mentally come up with a game plan on how I wanted my interactive slides to work. After I knew what I wanted, I created my slides and added the content (this week my topic was the three branches of US government). Once I had my content, I started to create links between my slides. One of my goals was that my users would be able to go back and forth between the necessary slides with ease. Below is an example: Users can click on "Lesson" to go straight to the lesson, "Review" to jump to the review, and "Next Class" to see what the topic of the next class will be. I also set my links up so that students can have a choice in the order that they want to go over the content.  Students can decide whi

Choice Board Background This week I created my first Choice Board! I wanted the subject to be on something that I could potentially teach so I chose the Salem Witch Trials. I find the Salem Witch Trials fascinating and Halloween is almost  right around the corner so I thought this was a fitting subject to focus on. As of now, I would assign the Choice Board at the beginning of the unit so that they can start working on the activities as we go over the content. I might assign it later in the unit if my first group struggles with having it so early. The way I have my Choice Board set up is that I would make a copy of the Google Doc for each student on Google Classroom. I have three pieces of clip art that they will place over the three activities that they choose. Once they do that, they will submit the Google Doc back to me and then I will create assignments on Google Classroom for them to turn in their activities. What I struggled with Some of the activities are designed to show

Getting my blog set up I’m a little embarrassed that as a digital native I have little to no experience with blogs. This is definitely going to be a learning experience for me, but I’m ready for it! The instructional video made setting up my blog fairly easy. I occasionally had to refer back to it, but the setup is user-friendly. In fact, what I struggled with the most was coming up with a name for my blog. I started out with generic ideas like Katie’s Corner, but most of what I came up with was already taken. Finally, I used a strategy from my Yearbook and Newspaper days and started brainstorming words that had to do with myself and blogging. Obviously I ended up blending my last name, Sholl, and the word soliloquy. I look forward to continue playing around with my blog and personalizing it. Uses in the classroom I’ve been thinking about how I might use blogs in my classroom. I could have my students keep a personal blog throughout the year and have them use it almost like