What I Have Learned, Thought About, and Created: Week of 12.18.17

Monday

I was enjoying my time talking to a student at school and asked, "What are you looking forward to on your holiday break?" What I wasn't expecting was the answer that they didn't want a break because they were happy at school. At that moment, I knew I should have known better. Not every child is going to have a two-week break filled with family, travels, gifts, or food. Yes, I should have known better but this person of privilege hadn't spent the time I should have thinking about this question before I asked it. I went on to talk to the student wanting to ensure that their basic needs would be met (which I feel confident that they will be) and I realized two things. One, yes, the child wasn't going to have the same holiday I will, but this child was also genuinely happy at school.

This sweet first grader found joy in coming to school. She loved her teacher and she loved learning. How do we keep this going? Is it the child that changes over the years, the content, or the instruction?  How can we transform our schools to where our high school seniors are saying the same types of things as they prepare for the holiday break?

Secondly, we need to remember that school is a safe place for many of our students. They come to school and find someone who cares for them, who loves them, and spends time with them. They are served a hot meal in the cafeteria. These are things that many of us take for granted. They are definitely things I never had to worry about nor my children. I spent some time researching holidays and students and found an article entitled Not All Students Look Forward to the Holidays: How We Can Help It is worthy of spending a few minutes reading before heading into the break. It definitely gave me some things to think on.  Who is a student you can reach out to over the holidays?  That simple act of kindness could be the highlight of their break!

Tuesday

Another blog I subscribe to is Student Voice. It is run by students and it never fails to impress me with the work they are doing in schools and in advocating for public education through their local and state governments. You can subscribe to their blog here as read their weekly newsletter. In this week's post, they shared an article by Youth Truth and results of their most recent survey on student engagement.  This research directly connected to my Monday thoughts on how to keep students engaged in learning the way they are when they are young.

I am passionate about student voice and I do believe the place to start in making changes to ensure our students want to come to school, and find joy in it, begins by asking students!  I'll wrap up Tuesday's learning with this quote from a middle school student. Just another reason to be someone for a child!  #KidsDeserveIt

What I Have Learned, Thought About, and Created: Week of 12.11.17

For a long time, I've wanted to write a blog about the things I thought about, or learned, during the week.  I knew if I started a new blog for this, then I would need to blog weekly and that was a lot of pressure. If you could see the drafts of my blog, you would be able to see that I have started this multiple weeks. Well, this week I decided that there are no rules saying I would need to do this weekly and if this is my only weekly post, then that is absolutely fine!

I love to learn. I believe that learning happens in all sorts of places. I will advocate that professional development doesn't have to happen in a workshop or conference, but it happens daily around us. I learn from so many different places and as I write these weekly posts, I will try to remember to share where I get my learning. 

So, here goes week 1!

Monday

Today, I read Five Ways to Boost Student Engagement with Flow Theory. (It came across my Medium.com daily digest.  You can select categories of interest on Medium and get a daily email with links to articles. Bonus, it even tells you how long it will take you to read the article!).

There have been plenty of times as an adult learner that I get so focused on a task, I don't want to pause for even the simplest of tasks because I don't want to break my concentration; I'm in a groove!  However, I think back to the number of times I would announce to my own children that they needed to put something away for us to do something at that moment. They would ask for a few more minutes. I did this same thing in the classroom. After all, I had a schedule. We had standards to learn, things to do, and we needed to move on. I wonder how many times I interrupted flow?

How does flow happen in the classroom?  The article points out the importance of student choice and agency and finding learning challenges that the student is intrinsically motivated to complete. Then, helping the student understand the metacognition cycle necessary to begin and complete the challenge successfully. This article is one I am going to continue to think about. The idea of flow embodies much of what we look for in a learner-centered classroom.  What are your thoughts?

Tuesday

Results Coaching published an article entitled Managing Our Biases (you can sign up for their newsletter on their site). Last year, I read Teachers' Explicit Expectations and Implicit Prejudiced Attitudes to Educational Achievement: Relations with Student Achievement and the Ethnic Achievement Gap. It is a fascinating study on bias that examines the effects of implicit bias on achievement.  Implicit bias is the bias in our behavior that results from subtle cognitive processes that often operate at a level below conscious awareness and without intentional control; basically, we are unaware of feelings that we might have for or against a type of person. This particular research concluded that the implicit bias of a teacher had a significant impact on the mathematical achievement of students.

I spent some time exploring various implicit bias tests from Harvard.  At first, I found these online tests rather hoaxy, but the more I explored them and then read about the research, I was intrigued. We regularly discuss closing the achievement gap and we focus on students and intervening, but what if we started by focusing on our self, the educator?  The above research connects implicit bias to math achievement. What if we could improve our students while improving the person we are?  What if there is something that we are doing that we are totally unaware of (implicit bias) that we could change to improve the future of our students?  Sign me up!

I just linked a lot of information above, so let me give you a quick rundown!

• You don't really have much time at all?  Take a couple of the Harvard implicit bias tests linked above. These are quick, interesting and could help you develop an awareness to any bias you might have. 
• You found out you have a bias or you just want to know a little bit about bias, read the first article from Results Coaching.
• You geek out about data and you enjoy an academic journal read or you just really do want to know more in order to help improve instruction for students, read the second article.

Tuesday, Part 2!

I have long been a fan of changing URLs in Google to copy, view, etc. However, I LOVE the new hack to make a template. Previously, when some changes the URL to force make a copy, most users continue and make a copy of a document they have not viewed.  In doing this, you might end up with a lot of random stuff in your Drive that you really didn't want a copy of in the first place.  In the past, I used a hack of changing the URL that ended in "copy" and making it "view" which allowed me to see the document and then choose if I wanted to make a copy (You can still do this if someone shares a copy link document with you).  However, this new hack allows you to change the URL so others can preview it and then choose to use the template!  

You can read the full article from Shake Up Learning here. You can also subscribe to her blog posts or follow her on Twitter!

Wednesday

Today I took some time to create!  Our students are all creating eportfolios of their work and I believe it is important for teachers to take the time to reflect on their goals and achievements and have an eportfolio as well. It is time for me to do an update on mine, but you can view it here. In February, I will be presenting on eportfolios at TCEA, so I took some time today to create a resource for the presentation session and to share with teachers who are ready to create their own eportfolio.  This is a work in progress, but I wanted to share with you what I have so far. If you would like to make a copy of it, you will get to try out the new Use Template feature that I blogged about on Tuesday!  The template is available at this link. 

Thursday

I love the work of Eric Curts and his focus on using GSuite Apps in unique ways in the classroom. I get his blog post delivered to my inbox.  You can subscribe here. Here is currently writing an ongoing post on the 12 Days of Techmas.  Yesterday's post was focused on creative ways to use Google Drawings.  I LOVE Google Drawings and I don't see it used as much as other Google tools.  I was excited to look at his post and see what he was recommending. He included one of my favorites which is using Google Drawings to insert video into a Google Doc (I use this in HyperDocs all the time!).  In addition to some of my favorite uses, he also included a few I had not thought of previously. One of them was how to insert a Drawing into a Doc and select scribble as the line to allow students to use it as a whiteboard to insert into a Google Drawing. My math teacher heart got all excited about this option!  He included this image in his blog post that you can read here. I highly recommend reading his post if you work with students on computers.  It is a little trickier to use Drawings on an iPad (when will that app come?), but you could still good some good ideas!

Friday

Last week was Hour of Code and kids across the world were coding in their classrooms and homes!  I am a firm believer in encouraging girls into STEM careers as I do believe they are underrepresented, but I believe we do this by exposing them to these concepts. Today I read No Need to Pinkify from Code Like a Girl (I found this article from my medium.com email as well). It talked about how we don't need to attract girls to coding by flowery fonts and pink and purple polka dots but we need to give them equal exposer to coding. The article was a short read but one that caused me to think about my practices. 

Part 2

I'm still enjoying Eric Curt's 12 Days of Techmas.  Today he wrote about his favorite Chrome Extensions and you can read the full post here. He listed a few that I have not tried yet. One I am starting to explore is VoiceIn Voice Typing.  Voice typing has been in Google Apps for a while, but this extension allows users to speak rather than type into any text field. This could be useful for our students on Chromebooks who are still struggling to type.  You can find the extension at this link.