April #WBTchat on Twitter with 3rd-5th Grade Teachers - Classroom Management

Great #WBTchat tonight with some amazing 3rd-5th grade Teachers! Thanks to all that participated! NExt Tuesdaym 8pm with MIDDLE SCHOOL!

Here's the feed from tonight's chat...

3rd-5th grade #WholeBrainTeaching Twitter chat! Tuesday 4/8 8pmCentral

Last week's Twitter chat was awesome! Thanks to everyone that participated!!
This week's chat is for 3rd-5th grade teachers. Our topic this week will be the same as last week: classroom management. Please forward this blog link to all of your 3rd-5th grade colleagues!

If you'd to join in the chat with our amazing WBT Exec Board, all you need is a Twitter account. If you don't have one yet, you can create one for free by clicking here.

 Once you have your account, you need to search our Twitter hashtag, which is #WBTchat. You can do this from either a computer at the twitter site,or from any mobile device that has the Twitter app.

 A Twitter chat is a basic Q&A format. The moderator will post a question like this...
Q1: What is the best classroom management system in education? #WBTchat

 To answer the question, and participate in the chat, you have to do two things. First, start your tweet with "A1" to show that you are answering the first question. Second, you have to ionclude #WBTchat in your answer so that it shows up in the feed. So, it would look like this...
A2 whole brain teaching of course! #WBTchat

The tweets can come at you pretty fast during a chat, so you may want to choose another platform to use while participating. I really like Tweedeck, as you can see both the feed for the specific hashtag that you are following, as well as your Notifications. That way if someone in the chat says something to you (by including your @name in their tweet), then you can see it a lot easier while still watching the chat feed.

 Once you signed in to TweetDeck with your Twitter account, click the plus sign on the left hand side. Then click on the magnifying glass image(Search)and type in #WBTchat. This will pull up the hashtag feed. Then click the blue "Add column" button on the bottom. This will create a column specifically for the #WBTchat feed.

Another option, is to follow the #WBTchat right here!!Please leave a comment if you have any questions, and I hope to see you every Tuesday!
1st Tuesday: PreK-2nd
2nd Tuesday: 3rd-5th
3rd Tuesday: Middle School
4th Tuesday: High School

  Tweets about "#wbtchat"

#WBTchat PreK-2nd Whole Brain Teaching Twitter Chat

Here's the story from our very first #WBTchat on Twitter! Thanks to all that participated! We will do these each Tuesday at 8pm Central Time.

• 1st Tuesday of the month - PreK-2nd
• 2nd Tuesday of the month - 3rd-5th
• 3rd Tuesday of the month - 6th-8th
• 4th Tuesday of the month - HS

Here's our story from tonight's chat:

Google Forms and Google Hangouts

Google forms and hangouts are two great resources that can allow you to collaborate with other people. All of Google's products are rooted in real-time collaboration. I am a Google-Junkie. Below you will learn hoe to create and use a Google Form for gathering information from people, as well as how to create and join a Google Hangout.

Google Forms are a great way to gather information from people in am organized way. It's a simple survey tool that automatically populates all of the survey responses into a spreadsheet. I have used a form to gather data about my students at the start of the year: a type of virtual interest inventory.

The steps below explain how to create and use a Google Form. There is also a screencast of the process for you visual learners (like me). 

1. Log in to Google and click on Drive

2. Click "Create" and  choose "Form"

3.  Name your form and choose the theme

4. Add in all of your questions. You can choose from various styles of questions, and choose if you want the question to be required. An advanced option is to add different pages within the survey. For example, you could have three questions on the first page of the survey, then three more questions on a second page of the survey. For smaller kids, you may want to have one question per page so they don't get overwhelemd by all of the questions being on the same page

5. Click "Choose Response Destination" and click "Create" to make the spreadhseet that will hold all of your survey responses.

6. Click "View Live Form" to see what your form will look like.

7. Click the blue "Send Form" button in the upper right, copy the link and paste it into an email, blog post, or other location that your survey respondents have access to. When someone clicks on this link it will take them to the survey. Their results will automatically populate into the spreadsheet that you created in step 5.

At the bottom of the form you have some choices to customize your form, depending on its use. You can set it to someone could submit another response, publish a link to show the results of the survey, and allow respondents to edit their submission. How you choose to set these depends on the purpose for your survey.

If you want to see how it works...

Click here to view the live form and submit a response. You can go ahead and fill in the form!

Click here to see the spreadsheet with responses.After you fill in your responses you can see them here.

When you go back to your Drive you will see both your form and your spreadsheet in the list. Please watch the screencast, and post a comment below if you have any questions!

Google Hangouts are a great way to collaborate with people. This has amazing capabilities for a personal learning community that goes beyond your regional resources.A hangout is a way for ten people to be in a video chat at the same time. There are also built in apps that allow you to show YouTube videos, pull up a document from your Google Drive, as well as give yourself a pirate hat or a birthday cake. Google is silly sometimes.

The steps below will explain how to join a hangout that you have been invited to.
1. Go to Google, log in, and click on Google+ (it will say +You if you haven't set up your Google+ account yet).
2. Slide your mouse over the left hand side of your screen to allow your toolbar to pop up. Select "Event".
3. Click the event that you have been invited to.
4. Click on the link "Hangout" to join the video call!


 

The Power of Twitter

There are so many great uses of Twitter for professional development. There's a whole community of amazing educators out there that you can connect with in the Twittersphere, and I didn't even know they existed until a few months ago! I remember saying last year, "I just can't see myself using Twtitter." But now, I find myself using it every day to ask questions and get inspired.

While talking with some teacher friend recently, I realize that many people were just like I was last year: they just don't know how to use Twitter to enhance their craft. And yes, being a teacher is definitely a craft - even a type of art form. 

To start, you need your own Twitter account. Signing up is easy, and of course it's free.

From there, it's all about connecting with other people. The easiest way to find people that you want to connect with, in order to share ideas and learn from them is to use hashtags. A hash tag is really just a way to group similar posts by all Twitter users. Here are some great educational hadhtags that I use on a regular basis:

#wholebrainteaching 

#education

#edreform

#edtech

#geniushour

#middlesci

One great twitter user has a hole collection of educational hadhtags, found here There are hashtags for every topic imaginable, so you just have to find some that fit your needs.

When reading tweets in a particular hashtag, you need to look for a good tweet that gives you 
inspiration. You can then "follow" that user and see every tweet that the user sends out. 
Once I follow someone, I will also look at the users that they follow, and usually find people 
that I'd like to follow as well. 

I have started to follow some people, only to find out that's their tweets either don't fit my 
needs or they simply tweet way to often...which is annoying...thats's ok, you just 
"unfollow" them!

Another great way to become connected is to find a Twitterchat. There are hadhtags for this 
too. Many chats actually happen on a certain day at a specific time and last for an hour. There are
 moderators for the chat that post questions and then the people participating respond to the question,
and to each other, all using the hashtags. There's a great listing of educational chats found here. 

For example, a Twitterchat that I really like is #satchat. This happens every 
Saturday morning, and is a general education chat. So there are a lot of different topics 
covered. The moderators usually tweet out the topic in advance, so I know whether or
not I want to check it out.

When chatting, the tweets can come pretty quickly, and using the mobile Twitter app or Twitter
online may not be able to keep up in a way that makes it easy for you to follow. There are several
other great apps that can help with this. I like Hootsuite and Tweetchat, so you may want to check
those out too.

Twitter is a great way to connect with other educators and hear about new ideas. It's a 
chance to be inspired and learn about new ways to keep your classroom interesting and relevant.

If you decide to sign up, don't forget to follow me @MeadorScience! You an click the 
Twitter link in the top right to view my page.

Happy Tweeting!

Web Tools 2.0

I am a tech junkie. I can't help myself. I LOVE finding new and exciting ways to use technology in my classroom. I am cautious to not use technology just because it's cool, but really try to find ways to enhance my curriculum with technology.

Click the image for other great web tools.

That being said...in my room I have a SMART board, SMART Response clickers, an Elmo, an iPad, 5 iPods, access to a classroom set of netbooks. I am SO lucky to have all of this technology available to me. I would love it if my students each had their own iPad, but instead my district is in the process right now of getting a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) program up and running. It is being tested with our Seniors right now, and will eventually trickle down to my 6th graders - hopefully by next year.

I wanted to talk today about my newest adventure into the tech world...

My current unit focuses on the geologic time scale. In previous years, I have placed students into small groups of 3 and allowed each group to choose one period of time from the geologic time scale to research. The groups focused on either the land, plants, or animals from that time period. The land group created a large picture of the landscape on butcher paper, and prepared a speech to explain their research. Both the plant and animal groups also prepared a speech to present their information, but also created to-scale cutout drawings of their plants and animals. During their speech, those plants and animals were placed onto the land poster, so that when finished the butcher paper looked like a picture taken during that time period (showing land, plants, and animals).

With the addition of the iPods in my classroom (and the five extra iPods that I can loan from our library) I decided to change up this lesson and enhance it with technology. Instead of having students present their speeches to the class, I had them make a video using the iPods. Groups could do a speech, an interview, a skit ,or any other creative type of video. The purpose of the video was simply to teach their classmates what they learned through their research.

After groups finished recording themselves, they used the app "Splice" to edit their videos. This app easily allowed them to add text, transitions, and sound, as well as edit the clips of video. Once finished, I uploaded their videos to YouTube for Teachers, and used the url's to create QR codes using goqr.me. I then printed the land group, plant group,and animal group's qr code and posted them next to the poster for that period.

On the final day of the unit, pairs of students rotated around using a qr code reader app on the iPods to scan each qr code, watch each video, and look at each poster.  While students did this, they also completed a "test sheet" in which they had to 1) answer questions to show that they watched the videos and looked at the posters, 2) answer questions to show that they understand the organization of the geologic time scale as a whole, and 3) analyze their video and poster compared to their peers' videos and posters.

I am ABSOLUTELY amazed with how well my students completed this project! They FAR exceeded my expectations with their creativity and understanding of the new technology.

BIG POINT COMING.... (as Coach B. says...)
What TRULY amazed me, more than anything else,was how the strategies of WBT that we have worked on all year shined through during this project without any prompting from me. Examples...

1. While the students were working with their group researching and preparing for their videos, I heard countless groups reciting the rules to each other! Students helped to keep their group in line with project deadlines by urging each other to "follow directions quickly". Most groups even used the gesture! Other groups kept their group members on task by telling each other to "keep our dear teacher happy". A-ma-zing!

2. When I needed to give quick directions in the middle of group work time, I was able to simply say "class" and get complete silence in less than one second. In previous years my classes were good about quieting down when I needed them to, but it took 5-10 seconds to get everyone's attention. Not with WBT! Literally ONE second to go from extreme engagement in cooperative group work to absolute silence and attention.

3. The best example yet...in several videos, students used WBT strategies on their own! One group pretended to be a class with a teacher and several students all learning about their time period. The "teacher" used Class-yes and the scoreboard as part of their video! Many groups used the "because clapper" and the "example popper" to help explain their research. I did not give them any sentence frames, or any reminders to use these great tools...they did it on their own! WOW!
With both whole brain teaching strategies and technology, I turned this good lesson into an absolutely amazing lesson.  I am SO proud of my students for all that they have achieved!!

I will post pictures soon of the finished products!

WBT Video Challenge

Help my students win the "WBT Rising Stars Video Challenge"! Watch the video below and share it with all of your friends and family! We need the MOST number of views by January 11, 2013. We are competing against two other amazing whole brain teachers from across the country...but I'm not going to tell you who, because I don't want you to watch their videos!! :)

Please also "like" the video, and leave a positive comment for my students to read!