In today’s world, the topic of using technology in the classroom can be intimidating. In this monthly column, join one teacher on a quest to discover the best way to meet the needs of her digital-age learners…moving beyond the technology tools to focusing on supporting each student’s learning.

photo: bitzcelt via photopin cc

With this being the beginning of a new year, many of us have set goals or resolutions, personally and professionally. One of the most prevalent goals is the one to become more organized. This time of year, we see advertisements for cool new gadgets that claim to revolutionize life as we know it and make our lives so much easier. Who doesn’t want to be able to fluidly move through their lives calmly and a little more stress free? Who couldn’t use some extra time in their lives? I can feel your unanimous agreement.

As teachers, one of our most precious and consumable commodities is time. I don’t know how many times I have wished for a time machine so that I could manage all of the non-teaching tasks while not sacrificing any instructional time with my students.

Recently, I was conducting a workshop and a participant raised his hand and jokingly asked, “Do you have a life outside of the classroom? How can you keep up with all of the activities going on in your classroom?” We had a good laugh and then I shared a few tools that my students and I use to efficiently manage some of the necessary, yet time consuming tasks that all educators must maintain. I noticed all of the teachers in the workshop furiously taking notes on all of the tools that I shared and I realize that with all of the things that we must manage from day to day, there is a desperate need to streamline our classroom routines and not lose out on any of our important practices.

Have I piqued your interest? Do you want to free up some time in the school day and be able to spend more time working with your students? I am going to share three apps that my students and I use to efficiently manage our time.

Take Note
Especially this time of year, we often have students who are absent due to illness. I know that recently I have had many students who were absent for multiple days due to pneumonia, flu, or strep throat. When they return, they are often out of sync with the class and they need some additional time to get missing assignments and receive tutoring on topics that they have missed.

We want all of our learners to keep up with the pace of the class and find success in all of their endeavors. The challenge comes when we really need to continue the pace with the rest of the class. How do you meet the needs of the many and the needs of the few who were absent?

Enter Notability. Notability is an app that allows the user to make notes by typing text, taking photos, or recording voice. In our classroom, each student takes a turn creating a note of the day's activities. The students understand the importance of creating an informative and accurate note because their peers are depending upon them. They know that at some point in the year, they will be depending on the notes to help keep them informed and up-to-date on our classroom learning.

The notes can include text (class activities, homework, class work, deadlines, announcements, etc.), photos (my students take photos of the flipcharts they use, review games they play, vocabulary lists we have, our science experiments, etc.) and audio (of me or one of my learners explaining something that needs more than text or photos). When a student is out for a day or two, he/she comes in when he/she returns to school, gets our class iPad, opens the note for the dates he/she was out and discovers exactly what went on in the classroom that day. An added bonus is that the notes are also easily emailed, so they can also be sent to students or parents at the end of day.

This takes a potentially time consuming practice and places it in the hands of the students. After I taught one student how to create notes, that student then taught the next student and so on. After about a week, the students completely managed this practice on their own. The students are taking ownership and responsibility for their learning and I am able to spend my time continuing to teach.

Time to Confer
How many of you have a huge binder to document your one-on-one or small group mini-lessons? Documenting all of our conferring sessions with each of our students in all content areas can quickly become a huge succubus on our time. Keeping these accurate records are necessary for us and our students to document their progress in each content area, but where can you find the time to do it accurately? I have tried many different methods and never found one that I felt was the right fit for accuracy, practicality, and timeliness.

Then I discovered Confer. I felt like my hopes and dreams of a method for documenting these daily conferring sessions had finally been answered. Once one begins using this app, one immediately recognizes that a classroom teacher created it.

Using Confer, you can quickly take notes on a student’s strengths or needs. Also, using “Quick Text,” you can create a note and apply it to a group of students. Once a note or comment is created, it is saved, and can easily be applied to other students at a different time.

With my students, when we confer one-on-one, they each set personal goals that we can add and they can look back to see when they reached each goal, putting the responsibility for their personal growth firmly into their hands.

As if that wasn’t enough, using this handy app, with the tap of a button, you can easily sort students into groups based on academic needs. Since each note is dated, you can sort students by date to see with whom you haven’t conferred with recently. Using these functions, no student can slip through the gaps and miss out on their conferring time.

In addition to documenting when you confer, on what you confer, with whom you confer, and the goals set by each student, Confer also makes it simple to share this information via email with parents, fellow teachers (if you team teach) or administrators. You can also export your data into a Google Spreadsheet or Word Document.

Confer has become one of my secret weapons for organization. My students love it because they can quickly access their goals and progress and email it to their parents. It takes a massive amount of data, organizes it in meaningful ways, and makes it accessible with a few simple taps on the screen. I’ve gone from hours of documenting and reams of paper, to minutes and the handy use of my iPad. Thank you, Confer!

Who Needs an Assistant?
We know that many times as classroom teachers, we feel like we need a full time personal assistant. How can we balance all the teaching and nonteaching tasks that we have without dropping the ball on one of them? Where can you find the time?

One of the many important tasks that we have is documenting behavior and citizenship of our students, the good and the not-so-good. We know that documentation for each student can quickly become time-intensive with the demanding needs of our diverse students. Yet, it is imperative that we maintain accurate records.

I would like to introduce you to my assistant, Teacher’s Assistant Pro. This user-friendly app has the capability for teachers to input the names of their students, as well as their parents’ email addresses and phone numbers. When a student deserves an accolade or makes poor citizenship choices, this app allows you to complete a simple note and with a couple of taps on the screen send an email to parents and the administrators. Once a comment is made for one student, that comment remains in the app so that you can click on it as an option, further saving your valuable time.

One thing that I do with my students when we privately discuss their behavior is that I have them design the consequences and future plan of action for their behavior. It puts the responsibility on them to make any necessary changes. This app is easily customizable to meet your needs. So if you like to send home positive reports like I do, this can be easily done as well. My students love that this is not simply punitive in nature, but allows me (or them) to quickly send a note praising them for reaching a goal or going above and beyond in their actions.

Although, I am not promising that these tools will completely revolutionize classroom life as you know it, I guarantee that they will make your life more organized, give you more time to work with your students, and less time on necessary, but time-consuming tasks. Wishing you a happy, more organized, and a bit less stressful New Year!

Are you a fan of Plugged In? Come see Julie D. Ramsay present a session on collaborating in class and online at IRA’s 58th Annual Convention, April 19-22, 2013, in San Antonio, Texas.

Julie D. Ramsay is a Nationally Board Certified educator and the author of “CAN WE SKIP LUNCH AND KEEP WRITING?”: COLLABORATING IN CLASS & ONLINE, GRADES 3-8 (Stenhouse, 2011). She travels the country to speak, present, and facilitate workshops in applying technology to support authentic learning. Read her blog at juliedramsay.blogspot.com.



App, App, and Away... Creating a Class of Superheroes, Recording Artists, and Famous Athletes

Teaching Tips: A Peek Inside—Digital Tools that Empower

In today’s world, the topic of using technology in the classroom can be intimidating. In this monthly column, join one teacher on a quest to discover the best way to meet the needs of her digital-age learners…moving beyond the technology tools to focusing on supporting each student’s learning.

As classroom teachers, we are faced with the challenge to meet the needs of each of our very diverse learners. If your students are like my students, many of them have a large deficit in the background knowledge that many adults take for granted. When students read a text or begin to write, they depend on their background knowledge to build meaning and create high-quality pieces of writing.

Many of my fifth grade learners have very little life experience. Many of them have never been out of the state; some have never been out of our town. So when we are reading a piece of literature or nonfiction text and it involves travel, adventure, or different geographical locations, they have almost no schema to build their comprehension upon. Think of all of the literature and nonfiction texts that involve a journey or a geographical location. Also, I must take into consideration that I, like most of you, have students for whom English is a second language, who have exceptional needs, and who are struggling readers and writers.

How do we give our students the opportunity to understand the inferred implications of the characters, plot or setting, whether real or imaginary, so that they can make those connections that are crucial to getting immersed into these magical places? Is there a way that we can take them on a journey similar to the characters without leaving the classroom?

On the Right Path

A couple of years ago, my students were involved in a collaborative writing project with students from all across the United States. All of these students were interested in understanding what made citizens of each state unique. They wondered, “What would it be like to be a citizen of a state that is not Alabama?” The challenge was that everything that they were writing was just basic recall of facts. There was no depth of understanding of the content they were reading or writing. There were no connections, no cause and effect, no conclusions, no synthesizing.

As we were working with a class of third graders within our school building, the other teacher and I began brainstorming how we could give our students some background experience so that they could really understand what they were reading, researching, and writing about in regard to our state. We wanted them to dig beyond the facts and gain a deep understanding of the past and how it impacts the present.

We discovered that there was going to be a Native American festival at an archaeological park within an hour’s drive from our school. We felt like this would be a wonderful opportunity for our students to build that background knowledge, experience hands-on activities, and be able to draw comparisons, contrasts, and conclusions that they could include in the pieces that they were composing.

The day before we left on our trip, a student approached me and asked, “Mrs. Ramsay, I really think we should share our trip with our collaborative partners. It would be awesome if they could go with us.” She continued, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could create a virtual trip while we are on the actual trip?” The rest of the students eagerly chimed in with her. So the question became how could we not only build background experience for our students, but how could we do that for all three hundred students from across the country involved in this project?

Trip Wow!

The answer came to us in a free tool called TripWow, sponsored by the travel website TripAdvisor. This intuitive tool leads users through the basic steps of creating a simple travel documentary using the photos, or images, that they have. It guides the user in pinpointing a starting destination and an ending destination. When it is published, it begins with a map that shows the journey and tells how many miles have been travelled. Captions can be added, music selected, and it can easily be shared through social media outlets, emails, or embedded into websites, wikis, or blogs.

As we began our trip to the archaeological park, the students were looking at it as not only a learning experience for themselves, but for all of their peers who would view this virtual field trip that they would be creating. They really listened, jumped into activities, took notes, and asked really thought-provoking questions. Knowing that they would be publishing their learning for an audience gave the entire trip a much deeper meaning and enjoyment. It was no longer a day off from school. It was a quest.

As soon as we returned from school, my learners began asking if they could call home to get permission to stay after school to work on their TripWow (as a side note, this was a Friday afternoon). Several of them stayed and took all the notes and ideas from their classmates as they began publishing their own virtual field trip.

The final project turned out to be the highlight for all of the three hundred students. The discussions that it spurred helped students to dig deeper into their state’s background to answer the questions from my students. All of these students now have that scaffolding that they need to help strengthen their reading comprehension and their writing.

School Bound? No problem!

So what if you are in a school district where field trips are almost nonexistent? I face that challenge many years myself. Does that mean we cannot give our students a similar experience? Absolutely not!

One book that we try to read each year is Christopher Paul Curtis’ BUD, NOT BUDDY. The book centers on a boy, Bud, who is taking a journey in Michigan during the Great Depression to find the father that he has never met. My students struggled to understand not just the time period, but also how far Bud had to actually travel and the challenges that he would face along the way.

One student casually commented, I wonder how it looks in Michigan (can you tell that I get a lot of inspiration from my amazing students?). That’s when I realized that by creating a TripWow, the students would gain some experience about the location and be able to “see” what Bud would have seen. It would allow them to activate their mind’s eye for not only this book, but also future books and writing as well.

Within a short amount of time students were able to locate photos and create a literary field trip following the journey of a character. I have employed this tool many times to support my learners’ needs in building understanding. It has been especially effective in meeting the challenges with my Exceptional Education students.

One More Time…This Time with (More) Meaning

On occasion a piece of literature connects with a group of students and speaks to who they are as individuals. This year, Katherine Applegate’s THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN did that for my class. THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN was selected for the Global Read Aloud, so before that I hadn’t read this book with students (but it definitely won’t be the last time). In addition to being told from the point of view of a silverback gorilla (which is based on the life of a real gorilla), and using some of the most amazing figurative language, it challenges the reader to evaluate his/her stance on serious issues and deals with deeply moving themes.

My learners were immediately hooked. My tech-savvy students quickly realized that the real-life Ivan lived at the Atlanta Zoo, which is only two hours away from us. They were having book chats and exchanges via Twitter, our class blog, their individual blogs, and Skype with students from all over the world. Their global peers could not believe that we were so close to the true one and only Ivan. Their global peers asked them if there was any way that they could go and visit Ivan for them and send them photos and updates so that they could experience it too.

The three other teachers in our school participating in the Global Read Aloud and I got permission to take our students to the Atlanta Zoo to visit the final home of Ivan. Just like in our trip to the archeological park, our students entered this trip with a sense of purpose and determination to bring their experiences to the over 24,000 students who were depending on them to share their experiences.

They tweeted throughout the day, took photos, and shot video. Upon returning, they debated about which photos actually would best teach their audience and enhance their understanding of the book. They actually discovered that they couldn’t say everything that they wanted to say to their peers because the captions only allowed so many characters, and so they took to their blogs to share more details. They searched for other books with similar themes and plot outlines to share with their global peers. Their reading and writing drastically improved because they had this experience and they felt the need to give back to the Global Read Aloud community of learners.

Through the writing and publishing with TripWow, they not only grew as readers, writers, and ultimately learners, but they impacted the learning of thousands of other students worldwide. Although this was a physical trip for my students and virtual one for their peers, the true journey was one of discovery where they deeply evaluated and synthesized the relevance of content and literature on their lives today. That is truly an accomplishment worth stepping back and saying, “Wow!”

Click here to see the TripWow project, and read a blog post Julie’s students wrote about their pilgrimage to the Atlanta Zoo.

Julie D. Ramsay is a Nationally Board Certified educator, a fifth grade teacher in a student-driven classroom, and the author of “CAN WE SKIP LUNCH AND KEEP WRITING?”: COLLABORATING IN CLASS & ONLINE, GRADES 3-8 (Stenhouse, 2011). She travels the country to speak, present, and facilitate workshops in applying technology to support authentic learning. Read her blog at juliedramsay.blogspot.com.

Plugged In: Giving Every Student a Voice with Twitter

Plugged In: One Book to Connect the World

In today’s world, the topic of using technology in the classroom can be intimidating. In this monthly column, join one teacher on a quest to discover the best way to meet the needs of her digital-age learners…moving beyond the technology tools to focusing on supporting each student’s learning.

I know that writing instruction can strike fear in the hearts of many educators. I think many teachers wonder, “Do I have to be a strong writer in all genres to teach my students how to write?” Although I feel like teachers who write become more confident in leading their students through writing projects, and they understand better the perspective of a student who is composing a piece of writing, there is no way we can become true experts in all genres.

There is great news though—there are people who get paid to write and publish in each genre. They are the true experts. After all, we are the ones who need to lead our students to the resources and experiences that will strength their scope of learning. These texts become mentors for our students to study, analyze, and emulate throughout their writing experiences. These are real texts, not something merely generated for one particular lesson. As one of my students said, “These people are the best at what they do. If we learn from them and write the way that they do, we become experts too.”

The first time my students wanted to create opinion editorials, I really had to do some digging to find some age-appropriate—yet still authentic—ones to share with them. Once I found my mentor texts, the challenge that I faced was that although I usually could find physical, hard copies of mentor texts for my classroom, students often gravitated to a particular one throughout the writing process. If a peer had that one text, the others would have to wait to look at it while a peer was using it. And as classroom teachers, we know how “creative” students can become while they are waiting for something. Also, many of them would want to write at home and wouldn’t be able to have access to all of the texts while they are writing.

How do we put high-quality mentor texts into the hands of our writers, provide accessibility to these resources, and keep the writing momentum going? The answer comes in the form of a digital tool called LiveBinders. LiveBinders is just what its name says; it’s a digital three-ring binder that organizes all of your resources neatly and easily online. To begin using LiveBinders, you need to sign up for a free account. Then you can begin creating binders on any topic.

My students expressed an interest in publishing poetry for a collaborative project in which they were engaged with peers across the country. Different students wanted to learn different types of poetry. We began by creating a poetry binder. Within that binder, we created different tabs for the different forms of poetry that my students were interested in writing. Then, under each tab, we could put the different online resources and mentor texts that we found for that topic.

That’s one of the features that’s great about LiveBinders—it organizes all of your links into one organized place so that students aren’t surfing all over the Internet. The webpages are now in your binder as a “page” so that students can study the mentor texts right there. You can even add a “LiveBinder It” bookmark tool onto your web browser’s toolbar so that when you (or your students) find a mentor text, you can easily capture it and add it to your binder, which is easily organized by tabs and subtabs.

Another great feature of LiveBinders is that you aren’t limited to just adding webpages to your binders. You can upload images, Word documents, and PDFs as well. You can combine your resources into one place, giving your students accessibility to these resources from any device that has Internet access. Every time we are using mentor texts and writing in new genres, I have students who find additional texts that they want to share with their peers demonstrating to me that they really understand the importance of finding high-quality resources, and they have a clear understanding of the characteristics of different genres. With LiveBinders, you can have access and the ability to edit from any device seamlessly. There is also a free app available on the iPad if any students have those at home or you have these devices available to use in your classrooms.

As educators, we know that the more we connect with fellow teachers, the more information, insight, and resources we learn to enhance our lessons with our students. LiveBinders knows that as well. With a LiveBinder, you have the ability to invite other educators to have access to your binder to add additional resources. While we were working on our poetry project, I connected with another teacher who was also teaching poetry. I gave her editing rights to our poetry binder and she was able to add her resources to our binder providing her writers, as well as my writers, a greater collection of mentor texts to enhance their own writing.

So the next time your students express an interest in writing and creating in a mode that you may not feel a high degree of confidence about, remember to look to the experts, the ones that can provide guidance and mentoring through their own writing. With LiveBinders, you can provide all of your students access to all of their mentors organized easily in one place…their digital binder.

Are you a fan of Plugged In? Come see Julie D. Ramsay present a session on collaborating in class and online at IRA’s 58th Annual Convention, April 19-22, 2013, in San Antonio, Texas.

Julie D. Ramsay is a Nationally Board Certified educator, a fifth grade teacher in a student-driven classroom, and the author of “CAN WE SKIP LUNCH AND KEEP WRITING?”: COLLABORATING IN CLASS & ONLINE, GRADES 3-8 (Stenhouse, 2011). She travels the country to speak, present, and facilitate workshops in applying technology to support authentic learning. Read her blog at juliedramsay.blogspot.com.



Teaching Tips: A Peek Inside—Digital Tools that Empower

App, App, and Away...Creating a Class of Superheroes, Recording Artists, and Famous Athletes