The funny thing about aging is that you don't realize it's happening until it's already happened. I have been blessed to teach in the same classroom for the last decade. I've taught mostly 6th grade Language Arts and Social Studies, but I've also taught 7th grade Language Arts and Social Studies, Video Production, and Associated Student Body government.
This is the first year that I have felt like a veteran teacher. Maybe it's because we've had an influx of first and second year teachers, or maybe it's that I am no longer quite as peppy as I used to be if I don't get a full seven hours of sleep at night. Probably, it's the fact that my school is celebrating it's 20th anniversary this year. I guess it's hard not to feel at least a little older when you realize you've been around for half the life of an established school. My leadership class wanted to do something special to recognize our school's 20th year, so we decided to create a living history wall. The original idea was to collect photos from staff and past yearbooks, then create a bulletin board in the hallway to display them. Another group of my leadership students decided to work on a documentary film about our school's history and interview staff members who opened the school. When they started looking at footage of the interviews, one of my students said, "Wow. I wish we could share some of these clips with the school. Our movie is going to take a while to finish, but it would be cool to just show people the best of what we have." And just like when Marty McFly realizes that time travel really is possible thanks to Doc Brown's DeLorean, my students were super excited when I suggested the concept of augmented reality. If you're unfamiliar with augmented reality, the concept is similar to using QR codes. In both methods, additional content is activated by scanning an image of some kind. In QR, the trigger image is the square code itself. In augmented reality, the trigger image can be anything from a math problem on a page, to a building on your school campus, or a poster hanging on the wall. Not Yo' Mama's Yearbook Photo Experience
Students began to create their living history wall by requesting yearbooks and photos from staff and administration. They had a blast digging through the images, marking their favorites with sticky notes. Eventually, students narrowed the many photos down to a little over twenty based on the following criteria:
Next, students previewed a ton of documentary footage to match various video clips to images. In some cases, students found perfect clips from the staff interviews they had already shot for the documentary. However, students felt that some of the pictures needed a specialized script, so they wrote and recorded some of their own video commentary, too. While the videos were being filmed and edited, another group of students worked on laying out and stapling up the wall itself.
Since augmented reality is a new idea on campus, students also posted directions next to the wall to help users access all of the content.
The "20 Years of Workman" wall debuted during Parent Conferences. In preparation, ASB students filmed several video tutorials that aired on our weekly school news episodes. Several students even took turns acting as docents with a few classroom iPads in order to demonstrate the wall to parents and allow families without smartphones to participate. Of course, the best part about this entire process was watching the pride students took in their finished product. In the weeks following conferences, I continue to see students interacting with the content of the wall before and after school. Want to give augmented reality a try? Check out the resources from the 2014 CUE Conference session delivered by John Stevens and myself:
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I have a confession. It won’t come as a surprise to anyone who really knows me, but… I’m sort of a geek. If I was put on trial to determine whether or not my geekiness is legitimate, there would be plenty of evidentiary support. For example, instead of eating lunch with friends in junior high, I would take a floppy disk into the lab full of Macintosh Performa computers and work on writing my first novel. I never really made much progress. If I’m honest, I think I just liked the experience of typing and being able to help my peers understand the difference between “save” and “save as.” In high school, instead of reading issues of Cosmo magazine, I decided I’d rather teach myself to code websites. The content of my first website was limited to all of the reasons I adored the Backstreet Boys, but I loved the process of coding almost as much as I liked to draw hearts around Howie D’s head… And in college, my friends and I decided to make a television show for fun. We thought it would be great to produce an original sitcom with the intent of getting it aired on the community public access channel. We cast the show from amongst our friend base, checked out the super cool equipment we needed from the campus IT department, and had a blast filming our first episode in two feet of snow. (Thanks, Wazzu, for the quality tech you made available to students. “World class, face to face.” Holla!) I don’t think we finished very many episodes, but that is the first time I can remember editing raw footage into a cohesive whole to tell a story. Now, I teach my students to do that – and I have to say…the tools have definitely improved! In light of my own personal geekiness, I guess that’s why I tend to take exception to comments I sometimes receive from other professionals (and yes, even colleagues). Here are some examples:
You may have heard similar comments at your school site. These are prevalent attitudes toward technology integration that can be found all over the place in our profession. As part of the AppsInClass team and a technology leader in my district, I think part of my job description includes being an advocate for the purposeful use of student-centered technology in the classroom. I often feel like shouting my favorite Billy Joel lyrics at the top of my voice:“We didn’t start the fire! It was always burning, since the world’s been turning!” It is rather shocking to me how many educators view most forms of technology (even something as simple as a web 2.0 tool) as too crazy-new-scary to use. Sometimes I need a pep talk just to maintain the forward momentum of my advocacy. Here’s what I watch when I need encouragement: Now that we’re all encouraged, let’s take a look at some resources we can use to address each one of the arguments from above. 1. "All of this new technology drives me crazy! It’s too hard to learn." Sounds like this person needs some resources! Let’s start them out with some easy to integrate iPad apps, shall we? And how about some great web 2.0 resources with video tutorials? Go to the Web 2.0 section of this website. Oh! And how about an iTunes U course that includes an original iBook to get them started? Check this AppsInClass iTunes U course out! 2. "You’re a tech person. Of course you want to advocate it." Guilty as charged. You are right, I am a tech person, and here’s why you should be, too: Watch this. 3. "Your students can do that, but mine can’t." Being limited by the expectations of others sucks. My students tell digital stories and that teacher's students can, too. How about an iTunes U course that includes an original iBook that details exactly how to scaffold the digital storytelling process from beginning to end? Subscribe to Digital Storytelling: Film Challenges. Or, would you like some easy to use digital storytelling apps your students can figure out how to use on their own? Check it out: 4. "Technology is for students to use at home and has little impact on my lesson." Our students are digital natives who need to graduate with a solid understanding of how to search the internet effectively, judge information credibility, consume media responsibly, engage in digital citizenship faithfully, and produce media creatively. How about a video to show you just how essential technology is to our world today? 5. "People have been teaching without technology for years and kids managed to learn just fine."
As a passionate educator, a lifelong learner, and someone who wants to make a difference in the lives of students, why wouldn’t you want to leverage every tool possible to enable student success? Whether you see technology as one more thing you have in your professional “grab-bag” of strategies, or whether you see technology as the be-all-end-all of education, it is part of our world today. Technology isn’t going anywhere. We’ve got an entire generation of kids who are growing up geek. So: Tech up, rock out, and get your geek on, already. Join us. There is a feeling I get when a lesson is going well - you know the one, because you've felt it, too. It's similar to the way my stomach drops whenever I hear the opening strains of "Phantom of the Opera," or that moment just before I hurtle over the edge of the waterfall on Splash Mountain at Disneyland. What is that feeling? Excitement. Enthusiastic anticipation of a good thing. An excellent experience in the making. The act of teaching is the art of bringing many components together and orchestrating them into a meaningful whole: the student, engagement strategies, pedagogy, relevance, and authentic experiences. Teaching is like conducting; it's knowing when to let a single instrument play and when to let the whole symphony soar. Maybe that's how some teachers know when it's time to make a change - when the song becomes just another song and the notes are no longer special. There are so many moving parts to a good lesson, it can be difficult to harmonize them all. As teachers, we have to foster in ourselves a keen sense of timing and what it means to facilitate, as opposed to direct. While effective direct instruction is not a bad thing, the lessons that I (and my students) enjoy the most are those which allow autonomy and encourage investigation. No matter what we do, technology is almost always a main component. At my school site, I am responsible for training others about Common Core State Standards as California transitions to the CCSS over the next several years. I've begun piloting Common Core ELA lessons in my classroom and last week I decided to test drive a Common Core lesson plan that I wrote for Social Studies. In the end, the week long lesson proved to be a veritable symphony of project-based learning, iTunes U, and collaboration. The standards I decided to address were a blend of my content area standards and the CCSS Literacy Standards for Social Studies, History, Science, and Technical Subjects. Here's a breakdown: Social Studies Standard 6.5.4: Outline the social structure of the caste system. Inquiry based learning lends itself very well to Common Core, so I decided to take a PBL approach to this lesson. To provide structure, iTunes U seemed perfect. It only took me several hours to construct a course on Ancient India's Caste System. (Go ahead - subscribe to it!) The most difficult part was compiling a list of resources for students to use during the inquiry process. Here's a screen cap of the materials in the course (click to enlarge): Because my students are piloting a student-centered BYOD program, I asked them to download the free iTunes Uapp ahead of time. In class, I showed them how to search for my course in the catalog and subscribe to access content. Since students are already used to working in collaborative groups, I was able to quickly walk them through the interface of the iTunes U course I made and then set them free. Students did an incredible job utilizing the course to help walk them through the PBL process: developing an inquiry plan, creating a reasonable schedule, conducting research, compiling notes, and creating a product to demonstrate their learning. The duration of the project was an hour per day for five consecutive days, and the essential question under investigation was, "How was ancient Indian society organized and how does it compare to our society here in the United States?" Check out this video clip of my students. This is around the time that I started getting that insanely wonderful feeling of a successful lesson in progress: During the final stage of the lesson, kids were able to choose how they wanted to showcase their learning. I gave them several app suggestions, but students were free to use other apps if they felt they could accomplish the task given (click to enlarge): And these are a few of the fantastic products that students were able to create: ecause having an authentic audience is important, student projects were uploaded to our classroom website and shared via QR Codes in our school's main hallway, as well as on a bulletin board in our classroom. At the end of the week, my students felt proud of themselves, the choices they made, and the work they accomplished.
There's a feeling I get, when a lesson went well - you know the one, because you've felt it, too. Success. If you have questions about the process I used or any aspect of this post, please feel free to leave a comment. One of the reasons I love teaching 6th grade at a middle school is that I get to watch my students slowly develop all sorts of awesome qualities over the course of a year, including wittiness and a dawning understanding of repartee. In September, they’re so overwhelmed by the middle school learning curve, they don’t quite register all of my lovingly sarcastic quips, but after the holidays, it’s the long haul toward becoming a teenager – and something never fails to unlock the Sarcasm-Center of their brain. That’s when learning gets really fun, because there always seems to be plenty of laughter to accent the “a-ha!” moments. So, today, when one of my girls said, “Hey, Mrs. Pack. Are you sure this is ELA, or did you just decide we could take some time off?” I almost burst out laughing, thinking she was being sarcastic. However, when I realized that this twelve year old was entirely serious, as evidenced by her truly bewildered expression, I decided to lay my best possible answer on her: “Well. Learning is supposed to be fun, right? This must be ELA, then.” What was her reply? A hug. You might be wondering what the heck we did in Language Arts this week that would elicit such a grateful response… Answer: We made movies. ![]() My students have been reading a fantastic book of short stories by Gary Soto called, “Petty Crimes.” The short stories all take place in the same neighborhood, but feature different characters. Since most of my students are Hispanic, they love Gary Soto’s writing and they especially love his characters, which include wannabe cholos, fierce cholas, endearing abuelitos, and menacing tias. When I noticed one of my classes was having trouble isolating the main events of each story, tending to focus as much on details as major plot shifts, I decided to have the kids retell their favorite chapter of “Petty Crimes” using iMovie trailers on a couple of iPads. First, I divided students into groups by drawing names out of a hat and had each group choose their favorite short story. Then, everyone worked together to choose the most appropriate trailer template for their project; this led to a very cool, totally organic discussion about how the preset iMovie music and graphics in the trailers communicate a certain mood and tone. Students were very successful in making appropriate choices, all of which resulted from fantastic group conversations. Since digital storytelling is still a fairly new concept for this class, I delivered a quick lesson on film angles. Next, everyone worked together to retell their story in words and planned the action they needed to film to fill in all of the video clip spots in the trailer storyboard. The fact that the trailers have limited space for words and images increased the need to retell stories effectively, choose wording carefully, and search for powerful synonyms. iMovie for iPad was a breeze for students to learn, and the biggest challenge was helping students remember to film with their iPad in landscape. Over the course of the week, we spent about 15-20 minutes per day working on our trailers. Students brought in an insane amount of costumes and utilized my prop box to help them tell their stories more realistically; even in 6th grade, kids love to dress up. In the end, not every movie was perfectly filmed, but all of the students managed to successfully retell the major events of each story – and they had an absolute blast! To finish out this blog post, I thought I’d share a few student products: Comments? Questions? Feel free to leave a comment or email me at [email protected].Download my iBook: Digital Storytelling: Connecting Standards to Movie-Making
Take my iTunes U course: Digital Storytelling: Film Challenges On this past Monday, one of my former students stopped by my classroom. I always love to reconnect with students who have moved on to 7th and 8th grade, and I love hearing how their lives are changing, what they’re up to, and how their families are doing. Occasionally, I’ll run into students who have graduated from high school and I’ll see them behind the counter at Starbucks. It can be a little strange to see kids who are so much older than the last time I saw them, but somehow I’ve always been able to remember their names – it’s a weird talent. Anyway, this one kid, who’s now taller than I am, popped his head into my classroom after school last Monday and said, “Yo, Mrs. Pack. You still using iPads like a rockstar? I got a question.” For those who may not know, Urban Dictionary defines the phrase “like a rockstar” as an adjective that means, “to do something well – be it musical or not. Example: She can knit like a rockstar.” The thing is, I’ve always wanted to be a rockstar but have no musical talent whatsoever, so it’s sort of a relief to know that I can be rockstar-like while doing other things that I am actually good at. There are a ton of video tutorials on YouTube that attempt to teach people to do a number of tasks like a rockstar. For example, check out this tutorial that teaches you how to pack a suitcase like a rockstar: I think one of the ways you know you can use iPads and other iOS devices like a rockstar is when you begin to author your own content. Thanks to the advent of iBooks Author, writing my own book feels like delivering a soaring guitar solo to a sold-out stadium. Publishing a course on iTunes U and using my book as a multimedia source feels like jamming next to Springsteen, Steven Tyler, and Mick Jagger. In light of that, here are a few tips on how to author content like a rockstar:
Download my book, Digital Storytelling: Connecting Standards to Movie-Making Subscribe to my iTunes U Course, Digital Storytelling: Film Challenges Being able to share what you do in your classroom and what you’re passionate about teaching kids is an amazing opportunity. Disseminating ideas has never been so easy. Between social networking and the incredible publishing tools of iBooks Author and iTunes U, teaching in isolation isn’t really a danger for a tech saavy teacher. If you haven’t yet started publishing your own content – what are you waiting for?! Download iBooks Author on your Macbook, sign up for an iTunes U instructor account (or check with your district to see if they have an account you can be affiliated with), and start authoring like a rockstar. You can do it! Questions? Want to know how it’s done? Comment on this post or email [email protected]. By Jessica Pack
Follow Me on Twitter @Packwoman208 ![]() When I was a kid, I wanted to be just like Bill and Ted…you know, those guys who had a totally gnarly, totally Excellent Adventure? Here’s a video clip to refresh your memory: Aside from rockin’ the grunge clothing and playing a mean air guitar, the coolest thing about Bill and Ted was their time traveling phone booth – which, you have to admit, is a pretty neat concept. Every time I browse one of thoseAs Seen on TV stores, I keep hoping it’ll pop up. Until it does, however, there is another way more excellent option to transport you and your students to another place: Tourwrist for iPad. If you haven’t played around with this app, you’re missing out. Furthermore, if your students haven’t played around with this app, then they’re missing out. The function of the app is just what the name implies – taking tours of far-off places with a flick of your wrist. There are some fairly well put together web-based virtual tours out there, but the quality of the 360 degree tours on Tourwrist take the concept of virtual exploration to a whole new level. Opening a tour in this app is the closest thing to actually being there. Dude. Does This Thing Come with an Instruction Manual? Today I had my students use Tourwrist to explore the pyramids, the Great Sphinx, and an ancient cemetery in Egypt. How was this possible? See below for a video tutorial… Dude. Why Does This App Rock?As a result of using this app in class, students were ridiculously engaged, highly motivated to complete the assignment, and eagerly participated in some really fantastic academic conversation. Their assignment was accomplished in several parts. First, students watched a video clip about Egyptian religion on their iPads, then explored the Tourwrist app. They used Safari to search for credible sources of information about Egyptian religion and created a Circle Map to share their discoveries. By far, students were most excited about using Tourwrist and were able to draw a lot of really great conclusions based on what they saw. Here are a few quotes from student work:
As a teacher, it was incredibly fun to watch my students engage in learning with excitement and a genuine sense of curiosity. Once a few of the students had finished the assignment, they asked to go back into the app to explore other places in Egypt. They were able to tour some Egyptian homes, the inside of an Egyptian classroom, and other famous historical landmarks. I could tell my kids were excited by the quality of the conversations they continued to have; students were drawn to similarities they saw between themselves and modern Egpytian households, and loved sharing connections they made with each other. Here are a few of their reactions that I captured with my iPhone: Dude! How 'Bout Some Integration Ideas? Tourwrist could be easily integrated into almost any content area with any grade level, because it's just so darn engaging and fun to use. Consider trying out one of the following ideas in your classroom:
Well, it’s definitely not Bill and Ted’s phone booth, but it is remarkable. Tourwrist: An app every teacher should use. Have you used Tourwrist in your classroom? Are you inspired to use Tourwrist after reading? We’d love to hear from you, so share your thoughts by commenting. Happy travels! ![]() I’m a big fan of martial arts, and even though I don’t have any moves of my own, I am working hard to develop the ninja frame of mind. Aside from being potentially useful in dark school parking lots and deserted copy rooms, ninja skills have plenty of other real world applications. In the case of this blog post: classroom management. Through the recommendation of a colleague, I discovered Classroom Dojo, which is a super effective online management system that not only made me want to watch The Karate Kid on Hulu, but also try out the Dojo mojo in my own classroom. (This is what the ClassDojo interface looks like on the web.) Ninjas achieve balance through focus, which is awesome because that’s what ClassDojo provides. My students spend at least half of each period engaged in collaboration. Any middle school teacher will tell you that sometimes it is difficult to get kids to keep their eye on the target. This is where the ClassDojo iPad app comes into play. Using the app, I get to be stealthy, walk around the classroom, and facilitate. No more verbal ninja star reprimands or redirects! As I observe or interact with students, I add points to their group for positive behaviors and subtract points for negative behaviors. My iPad screen is mirrored on the projector using an AppleTV, and I keep the ClassDojo app open so students can gauge their own effectiveness as a group. They get excited when they earn points and quickly redirect themselves when they see points slipping away. This might be a good time to mention that each group is represented on the screen by a pretty-gnarly-but-still-cute monster avatar. There are other avatar themes you can choose from when you set up the class. Or, students can even design one for themselves. Whatever you decide, they tend to view the avatars as their mascots and get totally into it. A few super cool features of ClassDojo that every Sensei should note: ![]()
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Well, what are you waiting for? Turn your classroom into a dojo and develop your mad ninja skills, Sensei. And just in case you need it, here are a few more wise words from Mr. Miyagi: |
Author: Jessica PackCalifornia Teacher of the Year. CUE Outstanding Educator 2015. DIGICOM Learning Teacher Consultant. 6th Grade Teacher. Passionate about gamification, Minecraft, digital story-telling, and fostering student voices. Download:Archives
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