Using Cellphones in the Classroom

Cellphones can be a valuable addition to any classroom under the right conditions. Students love being able to use their devices, and usually don’t even mind sharing. Here are some ways to use cellphones in an appropriate manner in the classroom. This study shows just how much cellphones and technology are beginning to impact education. When over 73% of teachers say that cellphones play a role in their classroom, it’s important to look at their value.

Quick Assessment:

Cellphones can be great for a quick assessment or exit ticket that takes almost no effort on the part of the teacher. Sites like PollEverywhere allow teachers to create questions that students can text their responses to instantly. Their answers pop up on the screen as they send them in, and it can generate thoughtful conversations. There are even options for students to answer online in the event they don’t have a cellphone.

Connecting with Students and Parents at Home:

Gtext is a site that allows teachers to send free text and email alerts to an entire group. This can be useful when reminding students to study for a test, or notifying them of changes in assignments. This free resource allows the members of the group choose how they want to be notified.

Teaching Appropriate Use of Social Media

This site offers a PDF of some social media tips that students might find helpful. Some tips include: socializing, down time is good, Keeping your phone personal, valuing your media presence, and keeping safe. This site also offers some etiquette rules, but some of them actually seem rude and might not be so appropriate for students (Booty texting??) However, some of the suggestions were good, like remembering to respond to phone calls and texts quickly, and staying off the phone in public places like trains and airports.

Welcome to Digital English Class

The beginning of a new semester always brings its share of headaches, particularly for a class like mine where I expect my students to use a great deal of technology. Teaching the students how to use all of the technologies we will be using over the semester is extremely important for time saving later. This is why I developed a scavenger hunt to teach the students how to use all of the major web-tools we will use in class.

Students learn how to use the student drive by opening the document, and how to re-save to their "My Documents". They learn how to use all of my most used webtools like Edmodo, Quizlet, and my Weebly site. The scavenger hunt leads them through every type of activity on Edmodo, creating a Quizlet account, and finding their homework and other resources on my Weebly site. At the end, they complete a poll with PollEverywhere and store he number in their phones for future use.

This lesson takes a long time, but it saves so much time later that I won't need to use explaining how to use technology. The document I use is below!

Welcome to Digital English Class by

Narrative Story with a Comic

One of the major curriculum elements of the 9th grade ELA curriculum is the narrative story. Students analyze narratives for elements of a story including plot, characterization, setting, details, and more throughout the semester. As the year-end, culminating project, students create their own narrative story that contains all of the elements we learned in class. I love this assignment because it offers so much opportunity for differentiation. As a teacher of all levels of 9th grade, I like being able to adapt this project to a variety of learners and needs.

When the narrative stories are finished, the students will use the website Pixton to create a comic strip that goes along with the story. This is a great website to use in the classroom, particularly when the students range as much as mine do in abilities. Pixton allows me to provide the students with a huge level of differentiation that is not apparent in the finished product.

Some of our finished products below:

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Digital Citizenship

Digital Citizenship is an essential skill that we as teachers must be instilling in our students, especially those of us who use extensive technology in the classroom. This is a topic that I wanted to get a jump start on, particularly seeing as it will be a part of the Common Core Curriculum that will be upon us shortly. The few days before break were chaotic at LHS, the students were antsy to start break and so were the teachers. However, a few students took it upon themselves to use social media to terrorize our students and make them afraid to come to school. This was an added challenge to the already crazy few days before break, but not one that we were unable to overcome.

When we returned from break, I decided to get a jump start on my digital citizenship lesson. I created a digital citizenship pledge on a collage website, The New Hive. In fact, this pledge was so popular that they featured it on their home page!

 

I brought up the pledge on my Promethean board and talked about the implications of Digital Citizenship with my Read 180 Intervention students. We watched a couple of videos that highlighted the different aspects of what it means to be a digital citizen as well. When we finished, I turned on "edit" mode and opened up the "sketch" feature on the New Hive website. The students were then able to sign their names all around the pledge.

Next, the students used my student account to each create their own collage about what digital citizenship means to them. Some were more detailed than others, but overall the website allowed my students to use pictures and words to indicate what they thought it meant to be a digital citizen. I printed all of these collages and posted them near the door along with our signed pledge, hopefully this will help them remember to be good digital citizens!

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Snowflakes for Sandy Hook

In the wake of the recent threats against our schools and the worrying our students have been doing over these past few days, I decided that the best way to combat this was by participating in the Sandy Hook Winter Wonderland Project. My students worked together to create a beautiful collection of snowflakes to send to Sandy Hook Elementary school, and were able to ease some of their worrying in the process. Here are some pictures of our progress! When we get back from break, I intend to use this as an opportunity to discuss digital citizenship and appropriate behavior online.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Attaching Standards to CPS Questions to Track Grammar Progress

During our professional development today, Tony Bollino showed us how to make our own standards in CPS to track our students progress on our own terms. I immediately thought of our weekly grammar practice, since it is hard to really gauge how much of the grammar the students are grasping. Specifically, it's obvious that some aspects of grammar are more difficult than others.


    I created a quiz question with the entire sentence of the week (in this case, "the evil doctor does experiments on his patients he doesn't want anyone to find out"). Each question referred to one word in the sentence, which the students had to identify. By attaching a standard to each question, I can track the students' progress in every part of speech individually. Thanks, Tony! This was great!

Creating the Standards

Quizzing Students

The Results!

By generating a report based on the standard, I can view the students' results based on each specific part of speech. This allows me to see where my students are doing well, and where I need to do some re-teaching later. Overall, this was a really great new aspect of CPS that will make these assignments much more meaningful!

Cps Data

Powerful Women in Literature

I found this link while browsing the internet the other night and I thought it was very interesting. I liked their choices, especially because they chose characters from both classic and modern literature. Check it out below! 

10 of the Most Powerful Women in Literature