This is yet another week of lots of PD opportunities. The district has a PD day on Friday; today is the first of 3 days of FETC, and today also features NewsLit Camp with CNN. Leslie Fisher is offering 3 webinars this week. Edweb is offering 6 webinars, ranging from STEM to equity, diversity and reading complex texts. So, having one Zoom link open in the background seems to be the way this week is going to roll. But, I wanted to focus on a three really good professional development opportunities I had last week and today. I attended Leslie Fisher's Friday night webinar on notetaking, featuring Knowt and attended quite a few math Fun Factor webinars as well. Media Literacy is something I firmly believe we all need more of, and NewsLitCamps are always informative. Fun Factor MathFirst, Fun Factor Math. I read about Fun Factor in my newsfeed from Smithsonian Tween Tribune. Essentially, they are offering free math PD to K-5 educators, using hands-on materials to teach and reinforce math concepts. The really cool part is that they are also willing to send you the materials to use in your class. The 3 main tenets are: Make it hands-on. Make it engaging. Make it memorable. You can read more about it here. This link will bring you to the current schedule with various webinars listed by grade bands/topics. What I liked about it was the ability to take these lessons and be able to use them whether you are in person, hybrid or remotely. Teaching these concepts in a hands-on manner really helps so many children. One other thing that you will notice if you sign up for any of these webinars, is that they also sprinkle the research findings throughout, as well as offer you a slide deck, and complete directions along with the demo and the materials. Fun Factor is well worth checking out, offering various days and times to suit most. In addition to the Fun Factor math lessons, they also have a Crazy Eights math club with more activities. Oh, and they have an app! Bedtime Math is free. Check it out here. You can also contact them to run a family math night. KnowtI really enjoyed the latest Friday night webinar with Leslie Fisher. This was on tools for note-taking, with a deep dive on Knowt. There are so many tools to help students take notes. I learn something new every time. I had read Richard Byrne's post on Knowt, and talked about it briefly here, back in November, but having the creator of Knowt talk about and show his product...wow! You can see the webinar on demand through the end of the week, here , but only thru 1/29/21-Friday morning 7 am PST. This tool has great possibilities for both educators and students. Teachers can take their notes, or even copy from a website and automatically generate flashcards, quizzes and more. The data you can get is so helpful, showing you how much time your students spend on the quiz question, enabling you to immediately use the data to help re-teach or clarify topics that your students need help on. You can use premade assignments, reconfigure assignments, differentiate assignments and so much more. It is integrated with Google Classroom. It is free. It is being developed every day by students who are still in college as well as Abheek Pandoh, the CEO, who recently graduated from Rutgers. This will link you to the Knowt Team YouTube channel, where you will find full hour webinars, but also a host of short and sweet FAQ tutorials to quickly answer questions. Just need a little help setting up your class- check this quick tutorial link. Finally, a quick repeat of Richard Byrne's video. Newslit Camp with CNNThis is the second NewsLit Camp I have attended. The events of the last several months have reinforced the need for media literacy to be taught in schools. If you need to learn more, click here for the Playlist of Professional Development videos from News Literacy Project. The video featured below is just one of 8 sessions. John Silva and Shaelynn Farnsworth will be presenting tomorrow- 1/27/21 on edweb about conspiracy theories. Resource Folder: bit.ly/NLCResources Highlites of/links from sessions I attended:
Ideas to ShareChristine Dixon over at Make, Design, Innovate has recently offered some fantastic STEAM choice boards on her site. From K/1 thru Grade 5, she and Marla @teachseuss have created Choice Boards to help students- Watch, Make, Create, Learn and Play. You can read all about them and download your own copies here.
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This has been a crazy couple of weeks. Emotions run high, lots of uncertainty, COVID numbers increase... hard for both teachers and students to get back into a rhythm of learning. I actually learned a lot this past week, attending the STEM 4 Innovation conference, the Future of CS conference and a Friday night Leslie Fisher webinar on what's new with FlipGrid. Next week brings FETC, a free virtual conference.
Attending virtual conferences, while not at all like meeting people and talking with them in person, has been a great way to stay in touch with other teachers, with what is new in the tech integration world and learning more about how to help teachers with the pivot from f2f to remote learning. I was fortunate enough to snag a ticket to the Future of CS conference and 2 things really stood out to me. One was the role of AI or artificial intelligence in our everyday lives and how we can best begin to or continue to teach these basics to K-12 students. The other was the fact that technology is inherently biased along racial and gender lines. I attended an incredibly informative workshop run by Vicky Sedgwick, Alexis Cobo and Kelly Powers. Vicky has kindly given me permission to share the slidedeck. There are embedded links on the slides and an amazing amount of additional resources linked on the last few slides.
The other takeaway from this conference was from Dr. Nicki Washington's final keynote called, Do You *Really* Want an Inclusive CS of the Future? She points out in example after example that “Racism isn’t a BUG, it’s a FEATURE.” I hope to get access to a shareable recording of this one, as I think everyone would benefit from hearing more about this issue. It was a very powerful presentation. We also received complimentary passes to view Coded Bias- which I also highly recommend.
Ideas to Share
Teaching Social Justice is More than One Lesson
Hyperdocs to help teach social justice. This blog post includes 5 hyperdocs to help students process the recent events and to work through ideas on social justice.
Teaching Social Justice is More than One Lesson
Big Deal Media published a series of articles on Media Literacy today. Images are linked to the resources.
If you are interested in media literacy, be sure to sign up for NewsLitCamp with CNN, coming up on Jan. 26. https://newslit.org/updates/all-educators-newslitcamp-with-cnn-worldwide/
More math...Mathigon is an excellent online math resource. It's "the textbook of the future".
Ideas to Share
Elementary STEM with Ms. Crosman YouTube channel has STEM challenges, STEM read alouds and more. Worth checking out.
Tony Vincent tweeted about a new extension that lets you take notes on YouTube videos- side by side.
More Jamboard Ideas from Alice Keeler and Kim Mattina
Among Us
Among Us is one of the latest game fads making the rounds. I am not a gamer- at all- but recognize that gamification can really work in the classroom as an educational tool. I have never played this game, as the first and last game I played was pong and that was an arcade game, before video games existed. But... in the interests of great teaching, I created a Wakelet of Among Us resources to use in the classroom, scrounged from educators on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Among Us themes can be used for all subjects and grade levels from using it in GimKit to Desmos to Escape Rooms.
I did not create these resources and when I could find the name of the original creator, have added it. More Jamboard
Tom Mullaney will show you how to insert animated Gifs into Jamboard.
I have enjoyed watching many of this year's Ditch Summit videos. You're running out of time if you haven't checked it out yet, as it will close Jan 8th. My favorite this year was Jamboard with Maria Arkfanakis. She shared so many excellent ideas- across all grade levels and disciplines. I really appreciated her slide deck too. Check it out here. If you can find the time, watch her whole presentation with Matt Miller, and check out all the others before they disappear!
This is a link to a wealth of Jamboard Ideas stored in Google Drive was recently shared online. I didn't catch who shared it, but... it looks like it came from Liz Stroud over at Fairmount School in Downer's Grove, IL . Thanks Liz! (She just emailed me and gave her OK to share.) She curated the links- see her tweet below. Follow Liz for more great ideas like this one that she retweeted about app smashing with Canva... twitter.com/LRCFairmount
Need more ideas and templates? Check out this post from Slidesmania.
Ideas to Share
Free PD
Ditch Summit
As I have mentioned before- this closes on January 8th. Lots of great ideas, excellent presentations. Check it out here.
Ben Collins Spreadsheet Courses
Leslie Fisher Friday Nite Webinars
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AuthorMaureen Tumenas Archives
June 2021
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