Category Archives: Digital Tools

Adobe Spark…a Great Tool You Can Now Use!

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A few years ago, I wrote enthusiastically about some new digital tools from Adobe under the banner Adobe Spark. Unfortunately, a few months later, CT’s student data privacy law was introduced and Spark was not in compliance with the new law. This was a major disappointment to me and my colleagues who had tried it out and loved it. But thanks to some changes in their privacy policy, the EDU version of Adobe Spark is now in compliance. If you’re not familiar with the Spark suite of apps, and you’ve been looking for some new presentation tools, you should definitely read my original post about it. When you’re ready to use it, just go to https://spark.adobe.com and when you sign in, be sure to choose Log in with school account. From there, choose Continue with Google and sign with your madisonps.org account.

Spark will provide your students with some slick, easy to use digital interfaces to create great looking multimedia web pages, social media-style posts, and short videos. Besides being excellent presentation tools, they are sure to make learning fun.

Flipgrid Fever…Catch It!

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Flipgrid is a video discussion platform that is made for today’s iGen students — digital natives who know YouTube celebrities by name and snap selfies without a second’s thought. While at first I had my doubts about a digital tool that seemed to encourage a sort of narcissism that Gen X-ers like me are quick to criticize in younger generations, I see it now as a great formative assessment tool that fosters verbal communication skills. With the right teacher supports, it promotes reflection in the same way that teachers’ videotaping their own lessons does. So how does it work? In short, students use the app to respond to their teacher’s prompt, taking short video selfies that get uploaded to their teachers “grid” or collection of submitted videos.

I had been hearing a lot about Flipgrid over the past year or so and had played around with it on my own, but I had yet to find a teacher here in Madison who had found a use for it in the classroom, until last week. When eighth grade social studies teacher Robyn McManus contacted me to make sure Flipgrid was compliant with Connecticut’s student data privacy law (it is!), I jumped at the opportunity to see the app in action.  She had the excellent idea to use it with her students as a formative activity in preparation for presentations they will be delivering at the end of their current unit. Creating these short 30-60 second videos allowed students to reflect on their speaking mannerisms…by counting how many times they said “like” or “um,” or did they “uptalk” too much? But it was also a formative teaching tool for Robyn, as her prompt was designed to show how well students understood and could reflect on the previous week’s readings.

As you can see to the right, students can use Flipgrid on a Chromebook or laptop equipped with a webcam (these students chose to create their video as a trio), or it can also be used with a smartphone or tablet’s front-facing camera.

I was impressed with how well students engaged in the task at hand. While some students chose to complete their videos in the hallway where it was more quiet, the majority who stayed in the classroom had no problems tuning each other out while they recorded their reflections. Many, on their own, chose to use the app’s virtual stickies to plan out what they wanted to say and use them as cue cards, and they all had fun applying various playful stickers to their videos in appropriate ways.

There are so many ways teachers can use of Flipgrid in the classroom, across all grade levels and content areas. I’d love to sit down with you to discuss the possibilities in your classroom. In the meantime, check out the ways this teacher infuses #FlipGridFever in her classroom. Then check out this educator’s guide to the in’s and out’s of managing Flipgrid. Note: Teachers should, and students must, log in to Flipgrid with their MPS Google accounts.

Meet the New Google Classroom

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While many of you have always loved Google Classroom for its ability to streamline digital work from students, some have complained that it falls short when it comes to organizing class resources and materials. Google has just announced some improvements that have the potential to satisfy everyone’s needs and concerns. With these improvements come:

  • a dedicated Classwork page, making it easier for students and teachers to find posts containing assignments
  • a new grading tool designed to allow teachers to give better, faster feedback
  • an improved tool to copy and reuse classwork from previous classes
  • customizable notification settings

Plus, there are more improvements on the horizon, such as:

  • organized materials (resources) on the new Classwork page
  • Classwork pages for pre-existing classes
  • creating online quizzes in locked mode

Read all about these enhancements in more detail here. If you haven’t yet explored Classroom to manage part of your web presence, now’s the time.

Help Students Evaluate Online Sources with eLink

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Let’s face it…setting students loose on the Internet to find good sources for any research-based learning activity can be messy. It’s much easier to point them to the sources we’ve selected for them. But by doing that, we’re not giving them the opportunity to learn how to find and evaluate their own sources independently–a skill that is more important than ever, given the sea of spurious, misleading, and heavily biased information that exists on the Web. Our district’s Library Media Specialists to an excellent job showing students how to evaluate and cite sources, yet the transfer of these skills isn’t always visible in the work students do outside of the Library Media Center. So what can teachers do to reinforce these skills?

I recently came across a great content curation tool called eLink that has some interesting potential in helping students curate web content more carefully, and in helping teachers assess the way students evaluate sources. Like all good digital tools, it’s simple. As students find sources they believe are credible and will help them with their research, they add them to their eLink pages, which are essentially web pages with a slick, modern-looking visual representation of all their hyperlinked sources. The example below might be something students create in a Health class.

 

Because eLink pages are so visually appealing and professional looking, I suspect that students will choose their sources more carefully, knowing that they are “honoring” these sources by including them on their eLink page. The eLink layout also makes it easier for teachers to assess their students’ sources. Rather than having to copy URLs from a Works Cited page and paste them into a web browser (ugh), teachers can just visit their students’ eLink pages without that hassle. Moreover, this user-friendly interface allows teachers to quickly see what sources students are synthesizing as they develop their own findings.

This wouldn’t mean that students are off the hook for a properly formatted Works Cited page. I envision eLink as a formative assessment tool. Rather than see that students have used less than credible sources after they’ve turned in their work, teachers can have students submit eLinks in the early stages of their research. Student submissions might indicate that teachers need to revisit how to evaluate sources with certain students, correcting bad research before it’s too late. But that’s just one idea. How can you see students using eLink? Leave a comment below.