Orientation 2012/2013

Once again, school has started at NBHS and we are getting into the groove of the year.  This year I have 3 senior Econ/POD/Psych/Soc classes, 1 World Cultures Class, and 2 Honors Civics Classes.  The grades in order listed are 12th, 10th, and 9th.  I run a basic orientation every year to introduce the students to the tools we use in class, such as Edmodo, Edublogs, and the iPods and iPads.  Over the years I have scaled back what I introduce to the students, some of the items introduced were rarely used, or used so much later in the year students had to relearn how to use them, no need to mention them here.

This year is nice, orientation is moving much more quickly, almost all of my seniors already use the tools that were introduced, a few need to learn Edublogs, but have used Edmodo, my are similar.  All of them used Edmodo last year, but need to learn Edublogs.  A few of my freshmen have used Edmodo in the past, but none have seen Edublogs yet.  Almost all of my students, if not all, have read or written blog posts, so they understand the basic concepts, they just need to see the specifics of Edublogs.  Every one of my students has had experience with some sort of mobile device, specifically iPods or iPads, possibly just not in a learning situation.  The students familiarity with these tools makes my job so much easier. No longer do we need to start at square one and move forward, most students have some experience and they willingly mentor those students who may need assistance.  This frees me up to troubleshoot issues like resetting passwords, reconnecting devices to the Internet, or working with students who need a lot of assistance.

Three days into class and all but one of my classes have logged in to Edmodo and field tested the iPods with Edmodo, along with the new Edmodo interface that will soon be released to the public.  The only class that did not log in will do so on Tuesday, we hd abbreviated periods due to a pep rally schedule.  We had a few hiccups and bumps in the road, which is par for the course when using technology.  Fortunately we turned all of them into learning situations, with students helping each other out, mentoring others, and even helping me troubleshoot and test different workarounds to the issues.  The most important lesson students learned was patience and not to stress if things go awry, I emphasize the fact that if things don’t work as planned, we adjust and move on without penalty.

At the end of the day, only about 4 students had to use one of the laptop computers to access Edmodo and complete the assigned tasks.  if we would have had more time, or preferably block scheduling, I could have kept those students on the iPods and worked out a solution to the log in issues. If time was not short, I also could have had the students start on their blogs.  The biggest consumer of time today was the handing out and collecting the iPods from the students.  Most of my classes are 20+ in student numbers, it takes time to hand out the devices and collect them with the system in place, manually handing out the devices and students initially a sheet of paper.  The good news is that it took under 10 minutes to hand out and collect devices in each class, and history has proven that the time improves as the year goes on and we all become more familiar with the process.

Next week we jump into Edublogs and students start writing posts about course expectations, then we move into the course curriculum.  The students’ familiarity with 21st Century tools and skills as enabled us to move forward at a faster pace into the purpose of the courses, the actual curriculum.

 

 

 

 

Discovery Education and CoverIt Live: Two great tools that work well together

First off, sorry for the Reeses’ rip-off…now on to my post. I rolled out CoverIt Live with all seven of my classes today.  It went rather well…a few minor technical glitches, several stressed students, and a bit-o-scrambling on my part. I wanted to show a Discovery Education video to my classes, the topic was about 9/11.

This would be a perfect opportunity to also show the students CoverIt Live.  I wanted to make sure the students were focused on the video, not other things, so I thought of my options.   A worksheet full of questions to complete would probably only be done by a few and copied by many, so it was out of the mix.  Discussion is good, but pausing and discussing interesting sections fragments the video and waiting to pause may lessen discussion.  I went with an option many of the students have already experienced; texting while watching videos.  This would give us live discourse without totally disrupting the video.

The iPods were handed out as usual in class and one student in each class got to use the lone iPad my classes have at this time.  The students logged into the Edmodo online classroom, then jumped to the sub-groups.  I embedded a separate CIL for each class on a different wiki page…past experiences have shown that the sharing of pages causes issues with my students.  This is also why I posted the links in the sub-groups, there would be no chance of clicking on the wrong link.

The set up of CoverIt Live can be found here on a previous post.

We watched about the first ten minutes or so of the videos and had the students post a few basic comments.  They introduced themselves and made one or two general comments.  They were urged to use first name and last initial as their post ID. There was one student who tried to use a pseudonym.  The comments were not published, though appropriate, and the students were once again asked to use their real names.  I did not try to figure out who the student was…no harm, no foul in my book.

My first period was a bit hesitant with the process, I had about five or six students adding most of the posts.  Once the others found out they would get participation points for the assignment, I had most of the class jump into CIL.  We actually had students turning in iPods after the dismissal bell in an attempt to get participation points. The timestamp shows when comments were submitted, so I can monitor the process.  Other classes were very interested in the processes, both video and CIL, and we almost ran late in several classes.

Later, several students had to log out earlier classes from Edmodo before they could log in, which happens on occasion with the iPods.  Running 24-25 iPods through one airport, along with several other machines can bog things down, especially when dealing with Cold War Era cement walls.  A few others had previous students names in the ID window…I am not sure how that happened since each class had its own CIL and its own wiki page, but it seems that CIL remembers ID names on each device. The students were focused, for the most part, on the assignment and since we did not have time to finish the video in class, I placed the session on “Standby” and we will continue the process tomorrow.

We did spend a few minutes to discuss etiquette on how to respond to others questions and comments.  I used the free CIL app on my Droid X to walk around the room and review any comments that might need “refined” before they hit the “public” Internet site.

There was an overwhelming preference by the students to use CIL when working with videos in class instead of using worksheets. They seemed genuinely interested in continuing the effort and even expanding it to working with other classes via Skype later in the year.  I hope to utilize Skype in the Classroom to achieve that goal soon.

The lesson can be completed with any type of mobile technology, or computer.  All you need is to be 1:1 students to computers, therein lies the problem for many…

Class Orientation: Day Three…Bring on the Blogs!

Today we slowed the pace down a bit during class orientation and let the ideas of this week soak in.

A student from each period logged into Edmodo and projected their view of Edmodo to the rest of the class.  It looks rather different on an IWB when compared to the screen on an iPod Touch.

We worked around the various functions as a review and the students were given instructions to finish up left over tasks from yesterday.  The students liked the notification feature in the top right of the screen, they saw how easy it was to keep informed of class information.

Next the new assignments were introduced; signing in to their individual blog,  changing their password, and if there was time they would start their Class Expectation Blog Post.  The first two assignments were short and sweet.  The third assignment made their faces drop at first…it seemed as if more than a few were expecting DOOM and GLOOM when the word BLOG was mentioned.

I then explained that instead of writing paragraphs and essay question answers on paper that would be possibly forgotten at home, in a locker, lost by one of us, and eventually thrown out or forgotten, we would complete most of our writing on the INTERNET.  Same writing they are used to completing, different platform for submission.  The mention of Digital Portfolio and Resume did not seem to resonate with them as I had hoped…I will explain that purpose again once they have more information posted online.

A student volunteer worked the Edmodo interface where the assignment, links, directions, and rubric are posted.  They pulled up the documents in a preview mode as we discussed the assignment.  They opened my example post on my Class Expectations for this year and saw what was expected of them.  Students who were in my classes last year added to the information.  Once they concretely saw what was expected of them they became more relaxed.  I suspect, and hope, the office will get less calls this year because, “Mr. Salvucci is making my child blog and I thought the class was about social studies.”

I know information being filtered through students to parents can become muddled or convoluted so I am sending parent information letters home to be signed.  This should help keep confusion to a minimum.  Unfortunately, I forgot to send them home with my earlier classes, so they will all be send home tomorrow.

A few students who were added to my class through schedule changes or being new to our school did not yet have accounts.  I jumped into Edublogs and used my Pro status to create blogs for them.  The entire process took about 30 seconds per student.  During Period 8, we had a slight “hiccup” and my students lost connection with Edublogs, but were still able to access other web sites.  I posted a quick tweet to @Edublogs asking about their status and received a timely reply.  The entire time of being unable to connect was only about five minutes and it was toward the end of class so we just wrapped up the lesson for the day.

In other events of the day, my two world cultures classes voted on dividing into sub-groups.  When the idea was brought up, I began to comment that I know what we can do…which was finished by one of my students from last year, “you are putting it to a vote with a poll.”  Some of my students know me and Edmodo rather well.  The results of the poll will appear later in this post.  Just as a note they were given the option of staying in one group or splitting since they are not an overwhelming number of students.

I have one class, a period 2 20th Century U.S. History class that is one day behind everyone else due to Junior class meetings on Monday.  They were almost caught up by the end of the period, with some students even to the point of logging into their blogs.  It was nice to see them jump right in and be comfortable with what we were doing.

All in all I believe we had a very productive day.

Class Orientation: Day Two

What a day…today was organized chaos with a very productive outcome.  It was also iPod Roll-out Day.

The students remembered the process we discussed yesterday.  I ran a brief discussion as to what we were trying to accomplish and the students seemed confident we would be successful.  The Polyvision interactive whiteboard (IWB) was used to model the steps to each of the following tasks.

They came back to my cart when called to sign out their iPods.  They double checked the numbers, initialed the sign-out sheet and jumped into Safari to go to our district Edmodo domain.  The web pages were open on the Polyvision IWB and the regular dry-erase board contained static text as to what was needed for the class today.

Many students already had accounts and could log in and join my classes, others had to create accounts to join my class groups.  For the most part the students at both levels were at ease with the interface.  Even students who were viewing Edmodo for the first time noticed how it was similar to Facebook in looks.

Once the students logged in they saw the assignments for the day.  Each of today’s three tasks were listed as assignments along with turning in the signed parental forms from yesterday.  The goal was to ingrain the concept of “I need to turn in assignments” on Edmodo and know how to do so.  Last year my students were a bit forgetful with this concept, but we did not use the assignment tool until late in the school year.

At this time the signed forms were collected by hand and the students used the Edmodo assignment interface to leave a digital note that they had their signed forms.  I later compared the turned in forms to the number of students who left digital notes…the numbers were close.

The students were then turned loose to go to their new Gaggle email accounts.  The link to Gaggle was embedded in the Edmodo assignment along with a pdf copy of directions.  I had the directions opened on the Polyvision board with links to the various pages open in multiple tabs.  This enabled the students to view what to expect on their screens with a larger interface.  Students volunteered to run the board during this exercise.

Once logged in to Gaggle, the students came back to my desk to change their passwords.  Administrator or teacher rights are needed to do this with Gaggle.  We had the process down and moved quickly to update passwords without holding up the class.

Students then sent an email to my school email account.  This had them actually complete a task they may need to do in the future and get my school email address in their contact list.  The plan is for them to use their Gaggle accounts when signing up for Web 2.0 tools or to email me when Edmodo is down.  They can access their Gaggle accounts to verify email addresses and retrieve passwords if needed.  Otherwise, we will be using the Edmodo classroom for communications.

Students were great at helping each other and mentoring others who were having technical difficulties.  Their ability and willingness to help out freed me up to handle issues that needed full administrative rights to fix.  These included changing passwords in Edmodo and Gaggle, looking up users in Gaggle, and reconnecting iPods to my dedicated classroom wireless network.

We adjusted on the fly with some students not in Gaggle’s system; they could not complete some of the assignments yet, but collected information so I can try and get them in soon.  This situation reinforced the concept of flexibility and the need to adjust as necessary in the classroom.

The day was not flawless by any means, but it was a great learning process for all involved.  What seemed the most impressive to me was that all of this was accomplished on an iPod interface.  Most of my students have used iPods for games and music, but few have used them in a classroom setting, with the exception of students who had me last year in other classes.

20011 School Year Day One: With Students

I titled this post accordingly, since I have been prepping for the 2011/2012 school year for awhile.  In general, I am always trying to build upon what I work on with my classes and improve as a teacher.  Specifically, I have been “game planning” specifics since I was told which courses I would probably be teaching in late May.

My plan was to scale back last year’s student class orientation from the two week monstrosity it became to a nice clean and concise three day roll out.  I am only introducing Edmodo, Gaggle email, and Edublogs as hands on tools right now.  Google Docs and possibly Evernote will be rolled out once we start working with books and documents.  Anything else will be dealt with on an as needed basis throughout the year.

Anyways…away we go…

Today was an intentionally slow day, handed out class rules for students to bring back signed, reviewed the rules, discussed how we use the iPods and iPad in class, talked about what topics we would be covering, and from my third class on introduced Cel.ly.  Cel.ly is the new group text notification tool that I will be using this year.  I will discuss Cel.ly in another post sometime soon.

One reason for starting slow is that the students are still fine tuning their schedules.  I have had several students added to my classes, and one entire class missed their class period due to a Junior Class meeting.  Most students SHOULD have their schedule changes completed by Wednesday at the latest.  Another reason is that I have many students for the first time this year.  It is important for them to be able to ask questions and get an idea what we will be doing before jumping in.  Admittedly, there were few questions from new students, but a good number of questions came from past students.  The most prevalent was whether or not I would be pulled out to be the district’s Technology Integrator again.  I do not know if they were hoping the answer would be “yes” or “no.”

By this evening, a small number of people have signed up for my Cel.ly groups, which is a good sign.  I have everything for tomorrow set up in Edmodo. I am hoping tomorrow’s iPod roll out goes smoothly, that is the key for moving into actual class work in the next few days.

I hope to post a review of tomorrow’s activities by Wednesday morning.

What I Learned Today: iPod Restrictions

Okay, I finally played around with restrictions on my class set of iPods.  I am not a big fan of censorship, and banning things, I prefer to have things open and teach appropriate behavior/use of tools.  Afterall, the world outside of school does not have filters, students need to learn how to self regulate.

Anyway, as I updated the iPod cart I began looking into the restrictions on the devices.  You can limit content and what can be adjusted on the iPods and lock in those restrictions with a four digit code.  I set two iPods up with restrictions to see what would happen.  You can restrict the following items; Safari, YouTube, iTunes, Installing Apps, Deleting Apps, Locations, Accounts, In-App Purchases, ratings for multimedia and apps, and game center settings.

I locked down the two iPods restricting everything but Safari and YouTube, since we have a firewall and filtering system here in school which would control what can be accessed from those apps.  The restrictions were not worth the effort, they not only blocked others from working with the iPods, but they blocked me.  I could no longer use the cart to update apps and information, I had to go into the iPods individually and unlock the passcodes to make adjustments.  The process was going to be too cumbersome.  I need to be able to make adjustments to apps and such from the cart.

By limiting the “accounts” my students would not be able to log into school email using the email app on the device.  I also have the students using Evernote and Google Apps, they would be locked out of adjusting those accounts with the restrictions on.  I took the restrictions off for those items also.

It was a nice, short experiment that proved to me to keep restrictions to a minimum.  I did lock down the Game Center, and restricted media to PG-14.  This was mostly for superficial reasons, the students cannot access the Game Center because they do not have my iTunes password.  The students are also limited to what they can actually download to the devices and I have made a habit of not putting explicit material on them either.

Overall, for the time it takes to adjust the iPods it does not make much sense to put the restrictions in place for a high school setting.  Unless you have a lot of free time with nothing better to do…

iPad and Car Chargers

I do not have much luck with trying to charge my iPad via a dc outlet in my vehicles, however our Nissan Rogue comes equipped with a full USB connection.  This connection allows me to plug iPods/iPads directly into the Rogue’s audio system.  This type of connection charges the devices AND allows them to be controlled by the vehicle’s radio controls.  It is nice to be able to use the standard radio controls to safely control the music selections on iPods or iPads.

Previously with an iPod/iPad plugged in to the auxillary port on the dashboard or a wireless connection over an unused radio station you were stuck with random shuffling of songs or a linear playlist.  My how things have changed since I was a little boy sitting in the backseat of my father’s car listening to AM radio.

iPods: Back to 1 to 1

My iPod cart is back in the hands of my students, albeit in a limited basis and with strict conditions, which I will not get into now.   But I will accept the conditions, since we are once again moving forward.  The iPods have been rolled out on a consistent basis with my Honors Civics class, a good group of 9th graders with a wide array of technology experience.  They have another 3 years in the building and the experience will help them throughout their stay.  The other classes will gain access to the iPods, not on as consistent a basis as I would like, but we are again moving in the right direction.

This also makes it easier, and much more logical, to reincorporate the iPad into the classes.  There was no sense in having a single iPad to be passed around as a toy between students.  Now it can be rotated around on a daily basis, along with the iPods, so students can become familiar with the mobile platforms.  Last year proved that if the iPods can be used on a regular, almost daily basis, the novelty wears off and the students goof off less.  The students still need to be monitored, they goof off with pencil and paper, so it is not necessarily the iPods that are the distraction.

The entire process will hopefully build momentum and experience with the students, where they can not only learn the course content; but they will also learn how to utilize the tools they already have access to appropriately, effectively, and creatively.  The added experience on my end will hopefully allow me to continue to grow as an educator and improve upon creating a student centered and driven learning environment.

Student blogging from the iPods: Cross posting

My students in honors civics and Econ/POD participated in the One Day on Earth Project, a global multimedia documentary that took place on October 10, 2010, or 10/10/10. They worked on their reflection posts of the project. I had them use the iPods to write their posts in Edublogs, using the HTML tab. The students accessed Edublogs via the Safari app. Once they completed their reflection and had the post proofread, they were to copy the post and paste it into the One Day on Earth website, and my Freshmen also pasted into their Keystone Commons account.

The students accomplished this by holding their finger on the iPod screen until a circle appeared, then they lifted their finger they had the option to copy, select, or select all. The chose the select all option, then copy. See images below.

They opened a new window and logged into One Day on Earth and had to choose the “view normal page” option located at the bottom of the screen. Once they have the normal page view, they can open their blog and add a post. Students had to click the HTML tab and then paste their copied material into the second site. They added a title, proofread their post again, then published their work. My Freshmen then repeated the process in the Keystone Commons site they signed up for earlier this year. They were encouraged to also post links to their blog posts on their Twitter and Facebook accounts. I am hoping they begin to use these sites for more than just a collection of random comments and photos, that are in some cases inappropriate. I am hoping they begin to use the sites for positive promotion of their work along with becoming more conscious of what they post on the sites.

Overall, in the grand scheme of life, this little task was not a big deal. That being said, in my little piece of the universe it was monumental for several reasons. First and foremost they participated in a global project, which was a first for all of them. They also are beginning to use social media for educational purposes, which is new for many people, not just my students. They also are learning how to successfully complete more tasks, even if they are mundane tasks, using the iPod Touches. Their skill set with technology is growing which will hopefully give them an edge as they go through life.

School Week Two: A change in plans

Week Two of the 2010-2011 school year is now in the books, fortunately, so here is my take on how things went…

by the end of Week One, the students were becoming a bit frazzled with getting hit with new tools everyday, even though they were not familiar with using the iPods and the tools.  I had the students log into the class blog site on Edublogs.  I upgraded to the pro account and set up student accounts.  I will not explain the process here, since I already have several posts explaining the process.  The students logged in and followed along watching what I was doing on my laptop.  I had my screen projected over the LCD projector onto my Polyvision Board.

Students were given the opportunity to sign up for an Animoto account using my all access teacher code which enables them to make longer videos and have all of the advanced account privileges for free.  They understood that we would not use it right away, but needed to sign up now so they could use it over the next six months.  They viewed an example of an Animoto video while they signed up.  We were able to create accounts using the Free Animoto App on the iPods.

We had a short week to begin with the Labor Day holiday on Monday, then we had Foresight Benchmark testing on Wednesday and Thursday.  The testing creates shorter classes, about 30 minutes each, so we used the time to have students work on their introductory blog posts and get caught up with any account sign ups and basic tasks.  Students were still coming and going on my class roster, so catch ups were necessary.

Students continued using the mini Eno Board and the LiveScribe pen throughout the week, but it was hard finding a rhythm in such an abnormal week.    I figured it best to hold off on the rest of the tools until they are needed, the kids were getting stressed and tired of practice.  Week Three starts the roll out of curriculum and projects that will receive more scrutiny in the assessment and grading departments.

I do need to roll Google Apps for Education out in the next week or so, but that is another story for a later date.