The 21st Century Student

Picture taken by Rachel using her iPad.

Tonight I want to dedicate my post to one of my students because today she made my day special. Most of all she made me proud to be her teacher. For over a year, I have spent my time being an advocate for 21st century education and I often times hear jokes about technology and questions on why changes should be made in the classroom. My answer tonight is for students like my student, Rachel, the 21st century student.

At the beginning of the year, I had hopes for my class to blog, but with the adjustment of going from a traditional classroom to a 21st century classroom many of the students were not quite ready to blog with all the other changes they were experiencing at the time. Recently, on her own, Rachel started mentioning her blog. Curious, I asked her about it and she said it wasn't a real blog, but an area on a computer where she was typing about her day. I knew at this moment she was ready to learn to keep her own blog, the one I had hoped the students would have started at the beginning of the year. So, just yesterday, we worked on setting up a blog for her using edublogs and this morning she came in ready to write or you might say type.

When Rachel walked in this morning, she had one thing on her mind. I had assigned a tessallation project using StoMo and iMovie on the iPad and she had hers complete. She couldn't wait to show me! When she played her video I was amazed! So much, that I shared her video at lunch with the other teachers and sent it to my principal who was home sick today. As soon as we came in from lunch and recess today, Rachel was on her blog writing, not because I asked her to, but because she wanted to. What was she writing about? Her project, what else would she write about today?

When her blog was complete, she was excited for me to read it, and had hopes the world would see it, too! After receiving special permission from her mother to have her video project online, Rachel was so excited that she jumped and yelled "I AM SO FAMOUS!" You see Rachel is proud of her work, and like many other children in the 21st century she wants a chance to share it with the world and for the world to watch, read, and listen.

So, tonight I ask that if you are reading my blog, go visit Rachel's blog and post a positive comment and make Rachel the FAMOUS person she already is! Because this child is just one of many children who need a classroom that engages them using 21st century methods.

(Please note, my student uses a pseudonym to help protect her identity and all comments on her blog are monitored by me. All negative comments will be removed.)

How I became a 1:1 iPad classroom?

This question was recently tweeted to me and unfortunately with twitter's 140 character limit, it makes it hard to answer the question fully. So, tonight I just wanted to explain how this happened for me.

A year and a half ago, my school began the Race for Education. For those of you who have read some of my other blog posts, you have heard me mention this before. I apologize if the information seems repetitive. Well, to encourage teachers to participate, we were told that 100% of the money we raise could go towards our classroom. That year, I made it a mission to bring in some new technology in the classroom. I raised around $800 my first year and purchased an iPad using that money and put the rest of the money towards buying a new table for classroom to replace a broken computer desk. So, this is originally how the iPad entered the classroom.

This past school, I started the first half of the year with just one iPad. And honestly, it was amazing seeing what just one iPad could do in the classroom. The PTOwas seeing some of the things that were going on in my classroom and decided that with our two big fundraisers, an annual auction and the Race for Education, they could afford to fund a class set of iPads. I was asked if I would be willing to take on this mission and like most teachers reading this blog, I said yes. So, half way through the school year I became a 1:1 iPad classroom. Along with purchasing a class set of iPads for my Fourth Grade class, every teacher was given an iPad to use in their classroom as well.

This upcoming school year, my school has purchased another class set of iPads for the Fifth Grade. We hope to continue purchasing another class set every school year, but again we are only able to afford to do this because of our fundraising.

QR Code Job Chart

It seems like just yesterday, I was finishing out last school year and now I'm already preparing to go back to work and teach a new group of students. I am really looking forward to a new school year, I have a lot of new things to do with the students and can't wait to see how they like them. One new thing that I have added to my class this year is a QR job chart.

So, here is how the QR Job Chart works. If you look in the bottom left of the picture you will see a piece of orange. That is actually an orange envelope that I have attached to the wall. At the end of the day, all QR codes are placed in the envelope. This year, students will have a new classroom job everyday, instead of keeping it for a week. When students come into the classroom, they will take turns getting a QR Code out of the envelope and then placing it on their number. I attached velcro to the back of the codes and on the calendar, that I have turned into my job chart. Students will then take out their iPad and prepare to scan for their job.

There are a number of free QR Code Reader Apps that are free for the iPad, the one viewed in this photo is Qrafter. As you can see it is easy to use for students and gives a quick scan, but will not create QR codes unless purchasing the Pro Pack. However, if you do want students to make their own QR Codes on the iPad, you can get a free app called Easy QR. Both apps are available on my students iPads for them to use. 

Once the student scans the QR Code, it will show the student what their job is for the day. 

So, I know many of you are probably wondering how I will know who is doing what job for the day because it seems like I would spend a lot of wasted time trying scan all the QR codes to figure this out. So, with this job chart, I created the job "Job Manager." This person is responsible for scanning all the codes with their iPad and using a google form (with one of the extra classroom iPads) will just check off which students have what job. I will then be able to access the form as an excel sheet and quickly be able to keep track throughout the day. However, it is up to the Job Manager to make sure all jobs are completed by the end of the day. 

Have questions? Use this QR Code to email me, post a comment below, or follow me on twitter @21educator.

More on Class Dojo

I know I have blogged about Class Dojo already, but I absolutely love their program. Recently they have done something that my students have been begging for without me even writing to Class Dojo, STUDENT ACCOUNTS!!! After a week of using class dojo in the classroom, my students were asking if there was any possible way for them to access their points at home. A few months later, their wish has come true and now every child in my class can access their weekly points and see why they have earned points. Another awesome feature is the ability to change their avatar, which has definitely become a huge hit. Student avatars seem to be changing on a daily basis.

With a 1:1 iPad classroom, it was easy to get the student accounts started. Thankfully, everyday my students are becoming more and more tech savvy. I went through the basics of how to get them started and for the most part they were able to set up their own student accounts. Way to go fourth graders! I had a couple students who had some difficulty, but I have learned a little comment that makes life so much better in a 1:1 iPad classroom. "Yes, I will help you, but you are going to have to wait a few minutes." Within a couple minutes, I start hearing, "Never mind I figured it out." Before people start thinking I am a mean teacher, my goal of making the students wait is to see if they will attempt to figure out how to solve their problem on their own. I find that with certain students in my class, they will automatically try to figure out how to do something on the iPad without my encouragement, but there are a few students who will not attempt trying something new on their own and causing them to wait will encourage them to try, especially when other students are commenting on what they are currently doing. I'm not looking for my students to be able to do everything on their own, but I am looking for them to try.

I think I have gotten a little ahead of myself, so let me rewind here rwrwrwrwrwrw. Just in case you didn't know rwrwrwrwrw means rewind. One of my students used this in her journal today, entertaining, YES! When I introduced student accounts to the class, I told the students I had exciting news for Class Dojo. Before I continue, you should know that my class has mixed feelings about Class Dojo. The students who always wear the correct uniform, have their homework done, get their assignments completed on time and follow classroom rules love Class Dojo. The ones that have some difficulty throughout the day are not big fans, because it forces them to be good students! Now you understand why I love Class Dojo! But when I announced student accounts, all the students were excited.

The first day with student accounts did not work out as well as I had planned. I currently project www.classdojo.com onto the Activboard and use the mobile.classdojo.com site on the iPad to give and remove points quickly anywhere in the classroom. Unfortunately, there was a small glitch in the system yesterday and students could not see their points on their iPads using their personal accounts. Although I will say, the fact that the children could design their own avatar by changing their monsters body design and color was enough to make them happy.

Today I tried a different approach for Class Dojo. I used the Class Dojo app that isn't available yet in the app store, but hopefully will be soon. The app is very similar to the mobile site but makes it easier to see all your positive and negative behaviors because they fill up the entire screen. Today the children were able to see the points they were receiving throughout the day without me projecting Class Dojo. This is great because there are times that I need to project something related to what we are covering in class and students cannot see their Dojo points. Usually, when this happens students get a little antsy and will start requesting me to show their points, now they can see their points on their own iPad without me having to stop a program that we are currently using with Activboard. For example, today I was using Poll Everywhere and it was easy for students to submit their answer and then view their student account on Class Dojo if they wanted to monitor their points. This usually happens when they hear the positive or negative sound chime in the speakers. They want to know if they were the one to earn or lose a point.

I must say that since the start of student accounts, Class Dojo has been awesome for help. When I mentioned wanting to start the student accounts they responded telling me to let them know if I need any help. Yesterday, I replied mentioning the fact that the children could not see their points. They apologized and explained that they were having some server issues and that they are working on it. For a free program, Class Dojo really goes above and beyond.

Follow Class Dojo on twitter @classdojo.

Busy, Class Play, and QR Codes

I feel bad for not posting in a while, especially since I just started this blog. Things have just been a little busy, but I was reminded earlier today that that is how the month of May works. In a school setting, May is the month of getting everything in before the end of the school year. Tonight, I'm a little exhausted from a busy week:

Monday: Afternoon faculty meeting, followed by P90X with my friend Molly
Tuesday: After working all day, I gave a one hour private tutoring session, followed by a 40 minute run, Volunteer Appreciation Dinner for the parents at the school, which was followed by a PTO meeting (Needless to say, I left the house at 7:30am and arrived home at 8:40pm.)
Wednesday: 1/2 hour math tutoring session, 30 minute bike ride, 30 minute run, 1 hour Zumba class, and P90X with Molly
Today: I went to school early for a conference before the school day started, had a 1 hour private tutoring session after school, then went on a 50 minute run

I'm definitely looking forward to tomorrow. :) I love Fridays!

This definitely has been an unusually busy week for me, and it doesn't help that on top of work I'm training for the Marine Corp Marathon in October and my first triathlon in August. During the mean time, I tend to run at least one local race a month. Although, training definitely takes up a lot of time, it is a great time for me to think and hash things out while I'm out on runs. I tend to do my best thinking while I'm out, I think because I don't have any distractions with the computer or cell phone.

Well, I wasn't really sure what to write about, so I think I will brag about my students. Today my class performed in the play, Red Writing Hood. It is a fractured fairytale play that incorporates many other fairytales and nursery rhymes. My students have been practicing for at least a month on this play. The students had to audition for the their parts, memorize their lines, and they also learned to ad lib.

My fourth graders did such a wonderful job with their play, that they received many compliments from parents, teachers, and students. Each year, I try to do something special with my class, last year I rewrote the lyrics to the Brady Bunch Intro and the children sang the Dooney Bunch. They performed this song for the school talent show and also danced the talent show act from the Brady Bunch Show, Keep On. Of course, the third graders were very impressed with today's performance of Red Writing Hood and were already asking what play they were going to do. It left me thinking, what am I going to do next year? Do I have the students put on another play or do we do something completely different?

On top of the play, I had the students help with as much as they could on the bulletin board in the hallway. The class voted on the background color and the border they wanted. All the students used their iPads to take pictures of each other. Afterwards each student selected their favorite picture to post on the bulletin board and printed them using the new color laser printer in the school. I must say I'm rather impressed by the quality of this printer. The students also wrote their own autobiographies and turned them into QR codes, which were posted in the bottom corner of their picture. Let me just say right now, our bulletin board is the talk of the school! Students who are not in the fourth grade were asking what a QR code was and how do we make them? After scanning one with my iPad yesterday for students in the hallway, I quickly found myself scanning all the codes.

Well, it is rather early, but I think I'm going to call it a night and get some much needed rest before school tomorrow.

QR Codes

I have never thought about using QR Codes in the classroom until I attended a conference in Baltimore. Of course, I sat there thinking, "Why didn't I think of this?" I tend to have a go-getter personality, so I sat at this conference contemplating how I was going to use QR Codes in my classroom. Since then, I have developed a QR Code job chart for next school year and how students could use them for getting the homework. Currently, students are testing, which means no homework this week, so we aren't able to test out the QR Codes for homework, yet.

However, next week my class is performing a play for the school, Red Writing Hood. It is a cute fractured fairytale play, that incorporates many of the fairytales and nursery rhymes all in one play. The children all have a part in the play and had to memorize their lines. Wanting to make this small 20 minute play seem like the real deal, today we worked on autobiographies to post on the bulletin board in the hallway. But instead of posting the actual autobiography, I taught the students how to create a QR Code that we will post by their picture and part.

At first the students, were a little puzzled as to if this would actually work. So, I created a demo QR Code using http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ to link to our school website. I projected this code onto the Activboard took out my iPad and scanned the code. Some of the students were a bit questionable as to if this would actually work, could the iPad really scan off the Activboard? Within a couple seconds, everyone was viewing the school website off of my iPad. Hooray, I had won the students over on creating their own QR Code.

The students worked eagerly to write their rough draft, which I approved for the next draft. Tomorrow we will finish our final drafts, take pictures, and create QR Codes for the bulletin board. This will be the first time the students have used QR Codes in the class and I am excited. How do you use them in your classrooms?

I love Edmodo

Shortly after I began FLIPPING my math class, I began having my students use Edmodo as a means of commenting and leaving questions on what they were learning in the videos I post on youtube. Edmodo instantly became a class hit because to my fourth grade students, it looks like facebook. My students are at an age where they still have some play that imitates the adults around them, especially their parents. Before we became a 1:1 iPad classroom, students used to create their own paper iPads because I had one, paper laptops with brands based on the brand of laptop their parents owned, and paper smart phones. Since many parents are on facebook, the children have this natural attraction to it. Honestly, the mentioning of facebook can make a lesson more interesting. Take for example run-on sentences, I told my students that most of the posts my friends post on facebook are one long run-on sentence. On that specific day, we pretended that the sentences we were correcting were facebook posts.

Getting back to Edmodo, Edmodo was easy to setup, the children were able to register themselves (without an e-mail address), and with little help from me were able to easily navigate through the website. Like facebook, students may upload a profile picture, but since this is the first year I'm using Edmodo, I have limited my students to only using the clipart pictures found on the website already. You can use Edmodo for a variety of purposes: communication, polls, tests, etc.

I use Edmodo currently just for my FLIPPED math program. For homework, I post a video on youtube, that I link through my classroom website on the lesson we will cover the following school day. The students are expected to go home, watch the video, and then go on Edmodo to either post on my wall what they learned in the video or send a private message about what they did not understand. The following day in class, I will focus on reviewing (anonymously) the questions students sent me. Because the homework is as easy as watching a video, most of my students will watch it within the first hour of returning home and then post on Edmodo. When I arrive home I will take a quick five minutes, read the posts that students write and either tell them they did a great job or ask them to expand on what they posted by asking them a question. Before I go to bed, I will check Edmodo one more time, for any students who may have completed the homework later in the evening.

Although, I currently use Edmodo just for math, I do have plans to use it in a variety of other subjects. My next goal is to add Edmodo to my reading program to allow students to discuss the novel we are currently reading in class. The one thing I have found with my math program is that if a student posts onto my wall and I return back with a question, I will get a number of students responding to the question I posted, not just the student that I originally asked. So, I really feel that Edmodo will be a benefit in many different subject areas.

There are a few rules I put in place for my class when I started Edmodo, they are:

1. You must write in complete sentences.
2. You may not use acronyms, e.g. lol, jk, brb, etc. 
3. You may not post or send information that is not school related. 

How do you use Edmodo in your class? Are there any rules you have with using this website or iPad app?

How I use Poll Everywhere

My fourth grade class is running a 1:1 iPad pilot program, meaning currently every student in my classroom has an iPad. This idea started when I raised money through a school fundraiser, Race for Education, and purchased an iPad 2 for the classroom. Before the iPad came into the classroom, our technology consisted of a computer that was probably being used new when I was in high school. Okay, so I'm not that old, but still, it was time for some upgrading.

With the money I raised, I was able to purchase the iPad 2 and a computer table to replace our old table which was broken. The iPad quickly became a favorite item in the classroom, the students were excited to use it and even with one iPad everyone was engaged. I still remember my class playing Rocket Math multiplication and all the students screaming out answers, which caused my principal to walk into my room one day and be surprised by seeing a classroom full of engaged students. 

Shortly after, I was asked to begin a 1:1 iPad program for the fourth grade class. What is exciting about running this type of program is the students' excited about learning. Slowly, I have been transitioning the students to doing more and more with the iPads, but we originally started using the iPads with one website, Poll Everywhere. 

Poll Everywhere is a free website and takes less than 30 seconds to register, just like the website says. Trust me, even though you can use the website without registering, you want to register, so you can preload your polls and reuse them. 

The main way I use Poll Everywhere is to review students homework. Currently, I teach a math FLIP program, and the polling gives me a better understanding of whether or not students understand the concept for the video I posted on youtube the night before. The way it works is I post a question with multiple choice answers and project it onto the Activboard. I ask students to submit their answers using their ipad. Each answer choice has a special code to type into the ipad, so that it sends directly to my poll. Typically, the first time I post the question, I will not receive the correct answer for 100% of my class. Instead of taking over, I ask the students to discuss their answers with their group explaining how and why they chose their answer. Students rethink their method based on hearing how others solved the problem and then resend their answer to the same poll. I would say 90% of the time 100% of the students will send the correct answer. 

This method of teaching works great in a 1:1 classroom and can also be used using a simple cell phone. The reason why I love using Poll Everywhere in this way is because there seems to be a huge concern that if we put technology classroom, it will cause our students not to socialize with others. But my goal as a 21st Century Educator is to use the tools of the time, while fostering an appropriate social atmosphere for my students and Poll Everywhere allows me to do this.

Class Dojo: A Fun FREE Behavior Program for the Classroom

I haven't used Class Dojo all school year, I actually started shortly after returning from an A+ Educator conference in Phoenix, Arizona, where I first heard about www.classdojo.com. Most of my students and I fell instantly in love with Class Dojo. Yes, I did say most! Some students had a hard time adjusting to Class Dojo and even tried to rebell against the system for a while (these are the students who need Class Dojo the most), that is until they realized that they control Class Dojo not the computer and not me. When the students who rebelled against the system realized this, I didn't have any problems with them getting their assignments done, calling out in the middle of class, and being a disruption in the classroom. Trust me give it two weeks and you will be hooked, if not on the first day.

Class Dojo is really easy to set up. You put in your students, make some modifications on the behavior points, and maybe you are feeling really good and decide to pick out little avatar monsters for each one of your students. If you are lazy like me, you just leave the ones that the website picks. Really, why make extra work for yourself? 

Now, you are ready to begin the day with Class Dojo. I open up my class on the website and project it using my Activboard in the classroom, this way all the students can see their little avatars and their positive and negative points. Throughout the day, I carry my iPad around the classroom and use mobile.classdojo.com as a remote to control the website. This makes it convenient to be anywhere in the classroom and give both positive and negative dojo points to students. Because in order for Class Dojo to really work, you have to be able to control the points at any time or any place, or students will realize that it is okay to cut off if they know you aren't going to take away their dojo points.

At the end of the day, Class Dojo creates these beautiful pie graphs on each of your students that can be emailed out to their parents. Come on, you have to love that! I used to stamp colored dots on calendars and when a child didn't have a good day, write why they received the color they did. Now the chart is easy to email and hey, you don't have to write a long note on the child's behavior the parent can already see that they were talking out, constantly out of their seat, not completing their work, not wearing a proper uniform, etc. Trust me, if you aren't using Class Dojo in your classroom, you should be, it's FREE, teachers love FREE!