MACUL sessions: Ideas for Creative Projects

The first session I went to at the MACUL conference on Friday was the most interesting and most inspiring for me in terms of how to use different tech tools in the classroom to assess students. The session was called Ideas for Creative Projects and the presenter was Justin Cowen (@jepc71). Justin spent about an hour presenting various tech tools that either students or teachers can use to make learning more interactive and engaging. His forum for the presentation was a Trello board which was an interactive board which allows both the presenter and the viewers to click on various links to take them to different places on the internet, documents, etc. A link to the Trello Board that he used is here: https://trello.com/b/rlglE0sZ/macul-2015-ideas-for-creative-projects. This link will take you to the Trello Board he used and allow you to access the tech tools that were featured in his presentation. Among those were Peardeck, Easl.ly, Canva, Thinglink, Soundcloud, Adobe Voice, Autocrat, readwritethink.org, and chromville. I will discuss Canva a little bit further because I think it is something that all of us MACers could use tomorrow if we had access to computers in our placement.

Canva is a program that allows students to demonstrate their understanding of a concept using a variety of different visual mediums such as a poster, business card, and presentation among others. Students can create infographics using a variety of different options in terms of text, photos, layouts, and backgrounds. There is an option to upload photos to use as backgrounds or just to bring an added element to the infographic. Here is an example of the poster Justin created as an example of a project students could do: Earth Day. This is just one example of how students can use a simple program to create posters that demonstrate their understanding of topics. Easel.ly is a very similar program but allows students to create more extensive infographics. With the right amount of instruction, it could be a valuable tool in classrooms.

Overall I found the MACUL conference to be very helpful and very interesting. I found it valuable to hear a variety of perspectives on technology and classroom experience and the many different presentations I heard were often inspiring. It was refreshing to see that there are hundreds of teachers in the state of Michigan who took time out of their busy schedules in the classroom to attend this conference and dedicate themselves to becoming better educators. As a quick side note, the names of the tools from Justin Cowen's presentation are also posted in the Google Doc that Jeff created. I hope that you all find them useful and helpful!

Technology Teach-In Proposal

As a History teacher, the exploration of primary documents is one of the most important teaching tools at my disposal. The problem with primary documents is without the proper scaffolding or space to ask questions, students may not see the value in using them. The ELMO is the most useful tool that I have to work with to help scaffold students' learning with primary documents. The ELMO allows me to model my own process while explicitly stating what I expect from students. Since the ELMO is a pretty standard piece of technology, I have also decided to work cell phones into this particular lesson using a PollEverywhere poll that allows students to give feedback and ask questions anonymously.

When exploring primary documents, I prefer to use the iREAD method. This method involves sourcing, contextualizing, and corroborating texts among other skills. For this particular lesson, I plan to model how to go about sourcing and contextualizing a text. Using the ELMO to display my own copy of the text on the SMART Board, I will guide students through this activity. Information about the source of the text will be annotated using arrows. Information regarding the context in which the text is written will be mark using stars or asterisks. Because of the ELMO, I am able to both state out loud and mark on a paper the reasons why I chose particular parts of the text as either information regarding the source or context of the document.

As I mentioned before, I plan to incorporate student cell phones into this activity as well. Most students in my class seem to feel uncomfortable asking questions in a public forum, especially on things they haven't seen before. Using PollEverywhere eliminates the anxiety students feel about asking questions publicly by providing them with an anonymous forum. This forum provides a space for questions, comments, and concerns that students can simply text in. For those students who do not have cell phones (I know there are a few) I will make it clear that I will also accept written responses. The combination of the ELMO and cell phones provide both myself and my students with an opportunity to use easily accessible technology to work together to advance their learning and teach them valuable skills in discriminating information.