It Started with a Dream.... Polynesian Heritage Project

Breakout: It's a Celebration!

As semester exams draw nearer, students in Mrs. Butler, Mrs. Harris, and Coach Smith’s 6th/7th Compacted Advanced Math classes at Medlin Middle School have been hard at work. Over the last week they have worked together to create an epic digital breakout experience to review all content from the semester. The idea of using a breakout to review or interact with math concepts is not new. In fact, these students have experienced the use of digital breakout type activities created by their teachers all semester.

Throughout the fall semester, students have had the opportunity to participate in several digital breakout experiences. Similar to an escape room, a variety of puzzles and scenarios lead students through an engaging interaction with content. Along the way codes are revealed that, in the end, unlock the “locks”. Digital breakouts can be used across content areas and grade levels. When asked about learning through breakouts, Gage was excited to share. “I like the technology experience. It's a new way to look at math and it makes it more fun. It’s definitely more interesting because it makes math a part of our real world." 

And now the tables have turned. The secrets to creating an engaging digital breakout have been revealed and students have been equipped with the tools to create. Ify has enjoyed the process because she says it’s given her a “behind the scenes look" at creating activities like her teacher. It has also inspired her to explore career paths that may involve coding or creating digital materials for others. After being given the content to be used, Google Forms, Google Slides, and Flippity were the platforms selected by most students. Their teachers helped organize all created breakouts on a Google Site that was then shared with students as their semester review. 

Click HERE to access the student created breakouts

So, why use digital breakouts? The better question may be, why not? Digital breakouts...

• Promote collaboration and communication within the classroom
• Enhance problem solving and critical thinking skills
• Reinforce grade appropriate Technology Application TEKS and Digital Citizenship curriculum
• Motivate and spark new learning opportunities
• Empower students to own and apply their learning

Mrs. Butler also gives a compelling testimony for the integration of Digital Breakouts in the classroom. “There is a special energy that fills the room when students are completing a breakout session. Students are engaged and eager to advance through the activities. Students enjoy taking on a challenge and competing to be the first group done. Best of all, students receive immediate feedback on their content knowledge which is huge for a learner's success.”

If you are considering the use of digital breakouts with your students, reach out to your campus Instructional Technology or Library Media Specialist for help. There are many resources available to help make your breakout dreams a reality. 

This project will be submitted as an interactive presentation and considered by the campus committee to represent Medlin at Expo 2020. For more information about Northwest ISD Expo event, please visit expo.nisdtx.org.

Bringing Seesaw to Secondary: Why Seesaw isn't just for Elementary classrooms

As a platform, Seesaw lets students blend pictures, video, voice-over, annotation tools, and external resources. It can be a powerful platform for both creation and reflection. Typically, Seesaw is used by elementary educators because it caters to kids -- it’s icon heavy, makes providing voice and video instructions easy, and because it is web-based, is easily accessed on Chromebooks. Secondary teachers, don’t stop reading yet… 

Middle School teacher Kristy Fair at Gene Pike Middle School is engaging her 6th-grade students through Seesaw. For Veterans Day and as a part of their nonfiction unit, she had her students read an article from Wonderopolis and then create a presentation about what they learned. Beginning with a lesson from Seesaw’s Activity library, which is filled with pre-created activities for K-12 for all contents, Mrs. Fair modified the assignment and instructions to better meet her students' needs. She added voice instructions and asked her students to make personal connections to Veterans day before sharing their research with the class.

What I love about this lesson is that she asks her students to reflect, make connections, and create a resource to share with their classmates all based on what they read. A lesson like this is flexible -- it can easily be made more or less challenging depending on the article linked in and on the level of critical thinking students are being asked to show in their evidence of learning. She modified the task to meet her students' needs. Regardless, Seesaw and Google Slides are simply the tools through which Mrs. Fair assigned and assessed student's comprehension and learning. 

I observed her classes using Seesaw and witnessed first-hand how excited and engaged her middle schoolers were while using Seesaw. They loved sharing their work so that their classmates could see it, and were quick to leave each other positive feedback on what they shared. They were eager to participate -- one student went so far as to respond to the Veterans Day assignment from home the morning before class, sharing a video reflection about how his great-great-grandfather was a veteran.

As a former-high-school-teacher-turned-Instructional-Coach, I had admittedly written this tool off as an elementary-only resource, but working with secondary teachers and students in Seesaw quickly showed me how useful this platform can be for meeting the needs of students of all ages and ability. At its core, Seesaw is a platform for sharing and curating work, for synthesizing thinking and evidence of learning in one easy-to-use and easy-to-share place. As an added bonus it seamlessly integrates with Google Classroom, which many secondary teachers are already using. Seesaw creates choice and flexibility in how students share their learning. Whether asking students to snap a picture of their journal, annotate and reflect on what they wrote or asking students to upload their lab data and reflect on the implications of their scientific findings using videos, Seesaw can amplify the reflections and learning that happens in secondary classrooms. 

Below are a few pre-created secondary Seesaw lessons for various contents that can all be found in the Activity Library. How will you use Seesaw in your secondary classroom?

How to Turn 6th Graders Into World Travelers

At Gene Pike Middle School, 6th grade World Cultures teachers Connie Garza and Dawn Goldstein want to do more than teach their students about other places -- they want to show their students the world. Consider for a moment that 2018 research discovered 1 in 10 Americans has never left their home state, for financial or other reasons. With this in mind, it's safe to assume not all of our students will have the opportunity to visit many of the far-off places they're learning about in school.

Still, we know that learning to understand other cultures and gaining perspective on how other people live is an important part of succeeding in our global society and in learning to be a well-rounded individual. Thanks to Google’s Virtual Reality (VR) Tour Builder, even if Garza and Goldstein can't fly their students abroad, they can still take them to places all over the world.

For context, Google’s Virtual Reality platform relies on Google Earth’s existing 360-degree footage, making it possible to virtually explore any place in the world through your computer screen or a pair of VR Goggles. What’s even better? Their VR Tour Creator allows people (in this case 6th graders) to design a virtual tour with stops anywhere around the globe and lets them embed their own photos or written details into the tour.

After explaining their task to students, Goldstein and Garza used student-led stations to guide their learning about Europe. During their stations, students used hyper docs and other printed and digital resources to learn about European countries overall, documenting what they learned in their “travel journals” and earning stamps in their “passports” for visiting each country. Throughout this step, students gained important insight into the countries and cultures that would ultimately help them build their tour during work-time.

A key success in this project is that by launching the project before introducing and researching the countries, Garza and Goldstein prolonged their students’ inquiry and created a crucial “need to know”. Instead of learning for the sake of learning (albeit a worthy endeavor), these students were learning with the motivation to design their dream tour through a European country, that would also highlight important geographical and cultural details of each place they visit. This created a personalized passion for their learning that inherently increased student engagement throughout the learning process of every country.

A major challenge in a project like this -- where students are focusing on only one from a list of topics they need to be experts on -- is making sure students master their overall learning about European culture and geography, while still highlighting the country they are most interested in learning more about. To address this, Garza and Goldstein made sure students visited each country through the exploratory stations, but they also gave students a peer audience. Because students would be sharing their projects with each other, they were motivated to do their best work; meanwhile, students were exposed to numerous European countries through their peers' student-created virtual tours.

One thing to remember is that you don’t need VR goggles to make Google’s Tour Builder interactive and exciting. Anyone can explore the tours online, and students can use the “hotspot” feature. For this project, they were asked to add detailed pictures, important travel notes, and fun facts about the culture and geography to make their tours more interactive. For example, one student used a hotspot near Italy’s Leaning Tower of Pisa to clarify that a modest dress code is an important consideration when visiting Italian landmarks. Ultimately, creating tours through Tour Builder is easy, but this "hotspot" feature lets students add reflective depth and learning to their creation. It is a feature that educators can rely on to make the task of creating more rigorous. You can see a student-created tour of Italy here: Example.

Through this project, Garza and Goldstein undoubtedly created a few travel-bugs, but even more, they gave students the opportunity to imagine themselves going on great adventures. They gave this group of sixth graders the chance to be (virtual) world-travelers.

There are Actually Three Sides to Every Story!

6th grade students at Tidwell MS will not forget this year's triangle unit! This unit was not only informative, but also hands on and  engaging. Students started the unit by learning how to use Geogebra to create triangles. Then, students created a product of their choice (book, comic strip, brochure, etc.) that would allow them to share their learning of triangles with others. Another neat aspect of this project was that students learned how to construct and build triangles from other students. Students in the 6th GT math class created video screencasts showing how to use Geogera and how to create triangles with the correct angles. They compiled their videos on a Padlet wall that was shared with the rest of the 6th grade math classes.

Taidghen, Taylor, Elijah, and Yaleiza from Mrs. Lahit's class got a lot out of this project. "I really enjoyed creating the triangles on Geogebra," said Yaleiza. "I learned that triangles are more than just a shape with three sides. There are many different types of triangles, but you only know the type based on the angle sizes. I also learned that you can not have two obtuse angles within a triangle, or two right angles." This project made students think about triangle properties during creation. Elijah points out, "The most difficult part of the project was making the equilateral triangle in Geogebra because you had to make sure to get all of the sides the same."

Creating Specific Triangles in Geogebra

Taylor and Taidghen loved the choice and creation aspect of the project. Taidghen comments, "I liked making my project stand out. I came up with statements for my book that would help others understand triangles in kid friendly words." Taidghen enjoyed Book Creator as his creation platform because it gave him plenty of options such as inserting images and shapes, as well as choosing specific fonts, backgrounds, and colors. Taidghen even utilized the drawing feature to point out matching and opposing angles within his book.

Projects were turned in on a Padlet wall, which allowed students to see each other's work. "I enjoyed seeing how other students used Book Creator differently than I did," said Taidghen. Yaleiza added, "I enjoyed looking at the Powtoons that some of my other classmates created. The Padlet helped us see all of the ways that we could have shared our knowledge."

All four of these students agreed that next year's 6th graders should complete this project. Taylor mentions, "Next year's class should do this project because it's a chance to be creative while learning." Elijah concludes,"This is a great project because you really learn about all of the triangles and the theorems."

• Taidghen's Project Link
• Yaleiza's Project Link
• Elijah's Project Link
• Taylor's Project Link

Student Created Tutorials for Using Geogebra:

Student ISTE Standards:

Creative Communicator: Students communicate clearly and express themselves creatively for a variety of purposes using the platforms, tools, styles, formats and digital media appropriate to their goals.

• 6a:Students choose the appropriate platforms and tools for meeting the desired objectives of their creation or communication.
• 6c: Students communicate complex ideas clearly and effectively by creating or using a variety of digital objects such as visualizations, models or simulations.
• 6d: Students publish or present content that customizes the message and medium for their intended audiences.

Empowered Learner: Students leverage technology to take an active role in choosing, achieving and demonstrating competency in their learning goals, informed by the learning sciences.

• 1c: Students use technology to seek feedback that informs and improves their practice and to demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways.

Interactive Periodic Table of Elements Using #GAFE

Sixth graders at Wilson Middle School were challenged to design and create digital posters of a chosen element from The Periodic Table of Elements using Google Draw.  Google Draw allows its’ users to collaboratively design their element posters. Students were advised of the rubric and each element poster was shared. 

 

 

After creating their own unique QR Code for each element, the students were able to embed them on the digital table. 

  

Click Here 

 Mrs. Warren not only wanted a very large model of the project in her classroom, but she also wanted to create a website for the students to use and share as to prepare for the upcoming assessments.  After reviewing options for showcasing their elements, students chose the website application Google Sites. With Sites, text and images come alive!. The teacher was able to create the original site and then let the students take it from there. Sites allows the creator to grant editing accesses to other users. Mrs. Warren added the students and supported them as they made decisions regarding design and organization.  The group editors consisted of Jenna, Gilbert, Carson, Sydney, Reese, Owen, and Gabriel.  Group editors provided feedback to others by editing content for errors in spelling and punctuation. Gilbert and Owen stated, “We improved all punctuation and were able to move things around to make things organized and readable.” 

Sydney and Reese both said, “This surely wasn't an individual project. We had a team that worked hard together and completed this project as fast and precisely as we could.” Gabriel and Jenna summed it up well, "We loved this project because we got to learn facts about the Periodic Table of Elements in a fun way. We didn’t just have to listen to the teacher talk, we got to create and learn at the same time." They both agreed that next year's class should do this project. "I think they’ll have fun," said Carson.

Mrs. Lindsey loves how Google tools make quick, effective collaboration and communication a snap.  “It frees more time to spend on teaching and learning which makes this an ideal environment for the 21st century classroom,” she stated. This completed site was posted onto Mrs. Warren’s Moodle page to allow students to access 24/7 for reflection and review. 

These activities are aligned with ISTE Student Standards:

1. Empowered Learner - Students leverage technology to take an active role in choosing, achieving and demonstrating competency in their learning goals, informed by the learning sciences. Students: a. Build networks and customize their learning environments in ways that support the learning process.
b. Use technology to seek feedback that informs and improves their practice and to demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways.

2. Digital Citizen - Students recognize the rights, responsibilities and opportunities of living, learning and working in an interconnected digital world, and they act and model in ways that are safe, legal and ethical. Students:a. Engage in positive, safe, legal and ethical behavior when using technology, including social interactions online or when using networked devices.

b. Demonstrate an understanding of and respect for the rights and obligations of using and sharing intellectual property.

3. Knowledge Constructor - Students critically curate a variety of resources using digital tools to construct knowledge, produce creative artifacts and make meaningful learning experiences for themselves and others.  Students:
a. Plan and employ effective research strategies to locate information and other resources for their intellectual or creative pursuits.
b. Curate information form digital resources using a variety of tools that methods to create collections of artifacts that demonstrate meaningful connections or conclusions.

4. Innovative Designer - Students use a variety of technologies within a design process to identify and solve problems by creating new, useful or imaginative solutions. Students:
a. Select and use digital tools to plan and manage a design process that considers design constraints and calculated risks.

 6. Creative Communicator - Students communicate clearly and express themselves creatively for a variety of purposes using the platforms, tools, styles, formats and digital media appropriate to their goals. Students:
a. Choose the appropriate platforms and tools for meeting the desired objectives of their creation or communication. 

b. Create original works or responsibly re purpose or remix digital resources into new creations.
c. Communicate complex ideas clearly and effectively by creating or using a variety of digital objects such as visualizations, models or simulations. 

d. Publish or present content that customizes the message and medium for their intended audiences.

7. Global Collaborator - Students use digital tools to broaden their perspectives and enrich their learning by collaborating with others and working effectively in teams locally and globally. Students:          

a. Use digital tools to connect with learners from a variety of backgrounds and cultures, engaging with them in ways that broaden mutual understanding and learning.

b. Use collaborative technologies to work with others, including peers, experts or community members, to examine issues and problems from multiple viewpoints.

c.  Contribute constructively to project teams, assuming various roles and responsibilities to work effectively toward a common goal.