THE TEACHER’S GUIDE TO
2016 JENNIFER GONZALEZ
a CULT OF PEDAGOGY digital binder
The Teacher’s Guide to Tech Copyright ©2016 by Jennifer Gonzalez
This document is copyrighted material. Because this is a complimentary sample, you have permission to share it with others. Reproduction, resale or any other kind of repurposing of this document for other uses beyond its original purpose will be considered a violation of copyright. You may keep electronic or paper copies of this document in multiple places for your own use or student use: On your home computer, school computer, personal devices, and on student-accessible devices. You may make photocopies of individual pages for classroom use.
Assessment
Class Responder Flubaroo Formative GradeCam Kahoot Plickers Poll Everywhere
Formative In a formative assessment fantasy world, we would be able to look at every student’s work while he or she did it. We would find a way to be in all parts of the room at the same time, so we could redirect students more quickly and give feedback that is more immediate.
Website: goformative.com Difficulty: Moderate Platform: Web Price: Free
The people at Formative have brought that fantasy to life by developing a platform that lets teachers see the responses of a whole class at one time—even openresponse and hand-drawn responses. Teachers create assessments from scratch right in the Formative platform, or upload an existing PDF or Word document and build a quiz from there. Students access the assessments by entering a class code or entering through their Formative class on their own devices.
Socrative
As students respond to a question on their own devices, the teacher can view all responses simultaneously, while they are being written, allowing for fast identification of who needs help.
Table of Contents Part 1: Getting Started Part 2: The Tools Part 3: The Terms Index
To score assessments, teachers can set up autograding for multiple choice questions, then manually grade short answer or hand-drawn responses. And as of September 2015, teachers can also give written feedback to any question. Formative’s growing library of video tutorials shows you how to perform all important tasks. Keep an eye on this page, because the developers are constantly adding new features you’ll want to use. Similar Tool: Classkick
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Assessment
Class Responder Flubaroo Formative GradeCam Kahoot Plickers Poll Everywhere
Kahoot Kahoot is very similar to Class Responder: The teacher displays questions up front, and students log in with their own devices and answer the questions. But Kahoot has extra bells and whistles that make it super engaging and fun for students.
Website: getkahoot.com
First, there’s the music: Once a question has appeared on the screen, music plays – a different soundtrack for every question – along with a retro-sounding tick-tock as the clock counts down (questions are timed). Students are awarded points for responding quickly (value decreases as the time runs out), and a leaderboard keeps track of which students have the top scores.
Price: Free
Difficulty: Easy Platform: Any device with a web browser.
Socrative
The question is projected on the classroom screen, and answer choices are shown on student devices.
Table of Contents Part 1: Getting Started Part 2: The Tools Part 3: The Terms Index
A student feedback feature allows students to rate questions for how fun they were, whether they learned from them, if they would recommend them for future use, and how the Kahoot made them feel. When you’ve finished giving a Kahoot (quiz), you can download results for your entire class in a spreadsheet. Kahoot also offers a library of public Kahoots for you to explore and use, and a PDF User Guide that shows you how to take full advantage of what the tool has to offer. Similar Tool: Quizziz
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Feedback Tools
Google Drive Kaizena Microsoft Word
Google Drive Although we address Google Drive’s functionality as a cloud storage system in another section, and most of its apps – Google Docs, Forms, Slides, and so on – are covered in other places, here we focus on Drive as a feedback tool.
Website: google.com/drive
In much the same way that the review feature works in Microsoft Word, working in a Google Drive file allows you to add comments and changes, invite others to do the same, and, with a tool called “show revision history,” review every change made by everyone involved. Comments can be made to any type of file you can create in Drive: slide presentation, spreadsheet, whatever.
Price: Free
Difficulty: Moderate Platform: Only available from within Google Drive.
Look familiar? The comments feature in Google Drive appear in the right-hand column, just like they do in Microsoft Word.
Table of Contents Part 1: Getting Started Part 2: The Tools Part 3: The Terms Index
If this is so similar to Microsoft Word, why would anyone bother moving to Google Drive? For one thing, Google Drive is free. So if you don’t already own Microsoft Word, this is a great option. Also, doing this work in Drive backs everything up into the cloud, which protects your documents from being lost. Finally, Google Drive adds a notifications feature, which can send e-mails to all contributors any time a contributor adds a comment. Although this feature could get annoying if overused, it could come in handy when working remotely, or when you want to be notified of comments from just one person (like a teacher). Google Drive used to be called Google Docs, which is now just the name for the word processing program.
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Book Publishing
Lulu Mixbook Storybird
Storybird Here’s how Storybird works: Users begin by browsing through a gallery of artwork until they find an inspiring image, and then they write a story or poem to accompany the image. The written piece can then be published on Storybird or purchased as a print book. Using the “class” feature, students are grouped into a private class separate from the regular public Storybird community. Within this space, student work is published only for consumption by other class members. Other students can comment on their peers’ work, and teachers can moderate those comments before the writers see them.
Website: storybird.com Difficulty: Easy Platform: Web Price: Free for individual use. Educator plans are free and now include unlimited class sizes and Pro features.
Users are limited to using Storybird’s artwork, and layout is largely controlled by Storybird as well. Although this could be seen as a disadvantage, what it
A page from a picture book created with Storybird.
Table of Contents Part 1: Getting Started Part 2: The Tools Part 3: The Terms Index
offers is a consistently attractive end product, and these limitations mean that students can concentrate on their writing. In October of 2015, Storybird announced a new fundraising option, where schools can earn 30% of sales on student books for a specified period of time.
Similar Sites: TikaTok, Zooburst
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Collaboration
Padlet Post-It Plus Realtime Board Trello
Trello Another skill that goes hand in hand with collaboration is project management. Regardless of what career a student is heading toward—be it theater arts or carpentry, journalism or real estate—the ability to take large tasks and break them into smaller ones, assign jobs to individuals, and communicate with team members until a job is done is an essential set of skills.
Website: trello.com Difficulty: Moderate Platform: Web, iOS, Android Price: Free
Why not give students practice in project management by getting them into a tool like Trello? Trello is a platform where users create boards, representing projects. On each board are lists (for components of a project), and within each list are cards representing individual tasks. A Trello board contains cards that represent specific tasks to be done. A card can be flipped over to reveal tons of detail on the back: checklists, due dates, whole conversations between those involved.
Table of Contents Part 1: Getting Started Part 2: The Tools Part 3: The Terms Index
One person sets up a board, then invites team members to join, creating a central place where all information about a project is stored and maintained. Collaborators can have detailed conversations about parts of the project right inside the Trello platform, and they can receive email notifications when something changes. Teachers could use Trello to collaborate with colleagues, track family projects, or as a lightweight learning management system, where students and parents are all brought into the system to keep track of important projects. See how in this video.
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The complete 255-page digital binder includes everything in this sample, plus SO much more... • 130+ tools in 30 categories • A glossary of over 80 tech terms, defined in plain English • A clickable index of terms and tools • Practical advice, tips, and ideas for classroom use • Printable on 8.5 x 11” paper • See a detailed preview here!
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About the Author
Table of Contents Part 1: Getting Started Part 2: The Tools Part 3: The Terms Index
Jennifer Gonzalez is a National Board Certified Teacher in Early Adolescence/English Language Arts. She was a middle-school language arts teacher for eight years and a college-level teacher of teachers for four. In 2013 she started her website Cult of Pedagogy, where she explores educational research, teaching strategies, ed tech, teaching books, classroom culture issues, educational policy, and all the weird little socialemotional things that make teaching so fascinating and frustrating. With every new thing she creates, it is her goal to make teachers’ professional growth easy, stimulating, and fun. Having grown up as a military brat, she now lives in Kentucky with her husband and three children.
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