Tech Tip Tuesday: Surveys and Stickies and Polls, Oh My!

It's that time of year when your Inbox is flooded with requests for feedback via a variety of surveys and polling tools. Why not include your students in the fun? Here are three tools that are great for gathering students' opinions all year long, and of course they can also serve as quick and easy checks for understanding. 

ParticiPoll is a service that you can use to add interactive polls to your PowerPoint presentations. Your polls are created and delivered within your PowerPoint slides. Once you've added ParticiPoll to your PowerPoint you can create as many polls as you like. Each poll can have up to six response options. The best aspect of ParticiPoll is that you don't have to leave your slidedeck at all in order to administer the poll and see the results of your poll. Your audience can respond to your ParticiPoll poll through their cell phones, tablets, or laptops. To respond they simply go to the URL for your poll and choose a response. When you want to display the poll results you just click to the next element in your PowerPoint slidedeck and the results are displayed for all to see. All polls are anonymous.

AnswerGarden is a neat service that allows you to embed a open-ended feedback tool into your classroom blog or website. With an AnswerGarden embedded into your blog your students can simply type responses to your question and see their responses appear in a word cloud. Creating an AnswerGarden is a simple process that does not require you to create an account. To get started go to the AnswerGarden homepage and click "create AnswerGarden." On the next screen you will enter a question or statement for your students to respond to. To share your AnswerGarden with students you can give them the link or embed the AnswerGarden into your blog. Optionally, before sharing your AnswerGarden you can turn on moderation of responses and set an admin password.

Dotstorming combines a bit of Padlet (online sticky notes) with a polling tool. On Dotstorming you can create a space for people to post digital sticky notes. Those notes can contain text and or images. That part of Dotstorming is just like Padlet. What makes Dotstorming different is that once the notes are posted, you can have people vote for their favorite notes. As the creator of a Dotstorming space you can restrict the number of votes that each person can cast. For example, you could say that each person gets two votes and once those votes are cast they're prevented from casting any more votes. After the voting is completed, you can sort the notes according to the number of votes they received. See Dotstorming in action in this video (from freetech4teachers.com).

Professional Learning

A lot of professional learning has been going on behind the scenes this year. Here is one highlight from this past week:

Book Study Group
The last meeting of the year for the Common Formative Assessment book study group took place on Wednesday at lunch with a discussion focused on how to more fully involve students in the assessment process. Teachers shared a range of strategies that they have tried in the past or currently use, and they reflected on the positive benefits they've experienced, including a shifting of the responsibility for learning from the teacher to the student.

This book group met six times throughout the school year, with each meeting's discussion focused around one or two chapters. According to Bob Cook, "For me, the best part of the book club were the conversations about how other people tackle the same issues that I find myself confronting. They provided insights that I hadn't thought of myself.  Oh, and great brownies!" Bob also appreciated that the meetings gave him the opportunity to talk with people in other departments whom he doesn't typically see that often.

CFA Study Group members (Jo, YiYun and Alyson not pictured)

I am currently taking suggestions for possible books for next year (or a summer book group if there's interest) and will send out a survey in a week or so to see who would like to participate. If you have a topic or a particular book you'd be interested in reading, please let me know! A few that are already on the table for consideration:

Teaching for Social Justice

Developing Assessments for the NGSS

Kid by Kid, Skill by Skill

Collaborating for Success with the Common Core

Essential Questions &/or Learning Targets

Embedded Formative Assessment

3 Tools for Sharing Part of a Video

"Online videos can be quite useful for reiterating a lesson to your students, for inspiring thought and conversation, and for introducing a new concept to your students. The struggle we have sometimes is finding a video that gets to the point quickly. And sometimes we don't need students to watch all of a TED Talk or other lecture in order to get them thinking about a concept. That's where tools for sharing portions of videos are useful.

In YouTube there is an option to start a video at a specific point. Under the sharing options on a YouTube video there is an option to select a start time for the video. Unfortunately, there is not an option to select an end time. See the image below for a look at the time-stamped sharing option in YouTube. 

Vibby is a service for breaking YouTube videos into segments and inserting comments into those segments. To segment a YouTube video on Vibby simply grab the URL for the video and paste into the Vibby editor. Once inserted into Vibby you can highlight a segment on the video timeline. Vibby then plays only the sections you've highlighted. Click on a highlighted section to add a comment to it. Videos edited through Vibby can be shared via email, social media, or embedded into a blog or website. Click here for a Vibby tutorial.

TubeChop gives you the ability to clip a section from any YouTube video and share it with others via a link or via an embed code added to your own blog or website. TubeChop lets you select a start time and an end time for an video that you share." 

Have questions or need a "tech partner" to collaborate with you on using one of these tools? Your instructional coach is here for you!

The content in this post is excerpted from Richard Byrne's Free Technology for Teachers blog.

Science Spotlight

Thanks to guest bloggers Chris Roules and Adam Fusco for sharing about some cool things going on in Science this week!

Capstone Project
by Chris Roules

All who have come to the LMC in recent weeks will have found it to be very different.   Since the science department moved out of its own space, the LMC has been the primary science lab for the grade 9 and 10 students.   During the month of April, the grade 9 students are using the LMC as they complete their “Capstone Project." 

Now in its fourth year, the Capstone Project is an individual culminating activity completed by every student in grade 9 and again in grade 10. Students design and conduct their own scientific research or engineering design cycle. Grade 9 student projects need to be linked to chemistry or physics.  If conducting scientific research, the student will clearly define the problem, establish the control variables, and do hands-on experiments of how the independent variable affects the dependent variable.  If doing an engineering cycle, the student will define a problem they wish to address, and then design a physical solution for that problem.  The prototype is made, then tested and evaluated through at least five iterations. The Capstone Project incorporates hands-on aspects, which must be done at school, a journal of the student's day-to-day progress, a final presentation to their peers, and a formal written report.  There is a wide variety of fascinating projects this year, and no two are identical. You are welcome to stop by the LMC now through Wednesday, April 27^th, and see the students in action during periods 1A, 3A, 1B and 2B.  

IB Group 4 Project 
by Adam Fusco
How can I make a rocket fly higher? What happens when I get sick? These are two of many questions the Grade 11 IB students had the grade 5 students try to answer through 5 - 15 minute interactive lessons. All year, students who are taking IB have to partake in a group 4 project. There are three aims of the project, which all basically boil down to being able to work together to complete a common goal. The goal for this year was to provide an interactive science fair where each of the grade 5 students were taught a concept in five science disciplines: biology, chemistry, computer science, sports science and physics.
The group 4 project lasts a total of 10 hours which includes planning, doing and reflecting. The planning phase was a week prior to the group 4 day in which students had to come up with and design a lesson in one of the pre-chosen science disciplines stated above. The active day was held in the high school gym for the entire school day on Tuesday where students had to set up their lesson and practice, practice and practice where other groups would critique and offer feedback for improvement. After lunch all the work and preparation was then put into practice as 121 fifth graders went through the 5 – 15 minute science lessons. The last aspect of group 4 is the reflection piece where each group will develop a TED ED lesson that they can send the fifth graders for review and extension. All in all, many lessons were learned in how to break down material for young students, how to work together, and definitely a humbling perspective of what it is like to be an SAS teacher.

Internet Search Tips

Whether you teach students who are ten years old or forty years old there will be times when they turn to you and say, "I can't find anything about this" while they are researching. In most cases the problem isn't that the Internet doesn't hold any information for them. Rather, the problem is that students don't know enough strategies to help them dive deeper in their Internet research. In the slides embedded below Richard Byrne shares his favorite search tips. The slides also include some videos that demonstrate how to use the methods he has mentioned. Good tips! (From freetech4teachers.com)

The fourth slide refers to the keyboard shortcut that enables you to search for key words in a document or on a webpage. On a Mac, it is Command + F. A Google survey found that only 1 in 10 computer users are aware that this feature exists. Are you part of the 10%? For more handy keyboard shortcuts (which are huge time savers), click here. 

Showcasing Student Work

As students are completing both long and short-term projects, the opportunity for them to present to audiences beyond just their own teacher and classmates is extremely valuable. This week, Jo Denley's IB Language and Literature students enjoyed hearing feedback from a variety of SAS staff members, and all month long, adult panelists will be on hand in Blake Brown's AP Capstone Research classes to hear student presentations and oral defenses.

IB Language and Literature

Jo's year 1 Lang & Lit classes have been working on a project attempting to answer the driving question: How does media influence audiences for the purpose of education, politics or ideology? They chose their own media category to focus on (e.g. political propaganda, condom ads, road safety directed at teens, how the Ebola virus was represented by the media, etc), developed a research question, and created some type of a product which demonstrates their understanding of how media influences for different purposes. Visitors participated in a gallery style presentation of the final products (websites, documentaries, infographics, etc) and had the opportunity to ask the students questions about the project and their learning. 

For those of you unable to attend in person, here are a few of the finished products:

Websites:

Transport for London: promoting safe driving and road safety

Seeds of Thought: an analysis of the impact of Disney animation 

Is There Anything Wrong with PETA? exploring PETA's use of media tactics

Infographics on Political Satire:

Statistics/Content

Political Satire & Humor

Bias in Language

AP Capstone Research

In Blake's course, students have worked all year on their Research project which culminated with a 20-page paper submitted right before Spring Break. The paper comprises 75% of the AP score, while the additional 25% is their score on their POD. Each presentation/oral defense is 20 minutes max., and only 2 students can present any given period. The presentation portion is the first 15 minutes, where the student presents their research before a panel of a minimum of three adults. The defense portion of the POD (5 min) begins immediately after the presentation, and is basically when each of the 3 adults asks the student one scripted question about their research. Additional follow-up questions can then be posed by the adult panelists or other students. Some of the topics that were presented this week include a Novel Intra-City Freight Transportation System, an analysis of the impact of attending a small Liberal Arts college vs. a Research University, and an examination of the growing entertainment phenomenon of eSports, or professional gaming. If you are interested in hearing students present their research, talk to Blake - additional audience members are always welcome and the presentations are certainly interesting!

Tech Tip Tuesday: Tools to Use with Instructional Videos

Whether you are "flipping instruction" or using video to spark discussion, these two tools can help to engage your students while also providing you with formative data about their level of understanding. 

Annotate Already Existing Videos
Using VideoANT, anyone can add annotations to any publicly accessible YouTube video. To do this, copy the URL of a video and paste it into the VideoANT annotation tool. Then as the video plays, click the “add annotation” button when you want to add an annotation. To have others annotate the video with you, send them the VideoANT link. You are the only person that has to have a VideoANT account. Your collaborators do not need to have a VideoANT account to participate in the annotation process with you. Nathan Hall wrote a complete run-down of all of the features of VideoANT. He also posted a how-to video. Read his post and watch his video here.

Incorporate Online Discussions of Videos

Vialogues is a free service that allows you to build online discussions around videos hosted online and videos that you have saved on your computer. Registered users can upload videos to Vialogues or use YouTube videos as the centerpieces of their conversations. In the video embedded below, a short overview of how Vialogues works is provided.

Content in this post adapted from Practical Ed Tech with Richard Byrne