Going Back to School...Kind of

Here's the weird thing about this year: I'm currently over 39 weeks pregnant.  Now, if you are doing any sort of math around pregnancy overall, that means that I am just about at full term.  I'm actually past full term, I'm just almost at what is considered my due date.  Now, I've done something with this pregnancy that not a lot of teachers do: I worked up until the last day before my leave started.  Which means today is my last day working for a while.  This is a truly bizarre feeling for me to have such a major shift in my identity because being a teacher is so much of who I am and what I think about all the time.  Now, I'm going to have my own little offspring depending on me not to let them die and eventually I'll have to entrust another human with their education, but that's a longish way off.

The big thing is I have to trust my classroom to someone else.  I got so lucky that my longterm sub is actually a skilled science teacher and has been a long term sub quite a few times at our school, but I still want to do my best to set him and my kids up with as much stuff as possible.  Here's a couple things I did so that I could give my students all the support they might need.

Resource Website

A few years ago with the help of Google Sites, I sat down and created a website where students can look for contact information, tutorial videos from Khan Academy and practice problems all organized by unit of study.  There is a ton of stuff on there, and I encourage students to explore it as much as they can because it always happens that I get panicked emails around finals week for what to study.  It's on the website, believe me.  I started expanding it to include materials I actually made and more things that are just fun, like advice from former students and fun physics videos from Youtube.  I even have posted homework solutions up there.

Tutorial Videos

One resource I made specifically for this year are problem solving videos.  Last year, I had students asking me over and over and over again to show them how to solve the same problems, and so I decided to make a few videos over the summer working through tricky problems so they could just watch them on their own time.  Using Screencastomatic and my tablet, it became so easy to record that I kind of cant stop myself from keeping it going.  I also left the videos unlisted so students need a link to see them, but some have already found them to be a useful study tool.  Plus, this way they hear my voice so they still get a chance to get to know me, even if I can't get to know them yet.

Set Up Draft Assignments in Google Classroom

I think it's fair to say many teachers have control issues.  Besides hoarding tendencies, this may be another common thread that unites most teacher personalities.  If you don't have either, good for you.  I have mad respect for you.  But that's not me.  So something I did for big projects and things I want students to do in Classroom, I created draft versions of the assignments with the point values I want for each assignment, the appropriate attachments and directions.  All my sub has to do is post it to one section and copy it across the rest of the sections and he's set up to go.

Email on My Phone

I have never been the kind of person to have work email on my phone.  I don't want to be reachable on weekends.  However, having the ability to quickly respond via my phone is going to be necessary while on leave.  While I don't want people to have access to me all the time, I don't want to feel cut off from the school community.  I did, however, create an auto-response redirecting urgent emails to my sub.

Letters of Rec Over the Summer

The biggest job I had over the summer was to write letters of rec.  Usually, during the fall I have appointments on appointments to meet with students to get the process going and my weekends are inundated with writing letter after letter to submit to colleges.  This year, I knew writing this fall would be out of the question, but submitting the letters wouldn't be.  I let students submit materials end of last school year and told them I would write 10 letters TOTAL for submission this fall.  One student did get upset with me about that timeline and cutoff, but I only made it through the first 2 weeks of school before I had to go on leave, so it was actually a realistic issue in terms of time.  I ended up writing the letters over a few days this summer, and I'll submit them as students get their requests through the system in order.

Hopefully, through all of this set up, I may stay somewhat connected to work and my students.  Next step: labor! 

Stuff I Like

I feel like this is slowly becoming LOOK AT THIS TECHNOLOGY, LOOK AT IT.  But that's not a bad thing.  Something both teachers and students struggle with is how to be a citizen in an increasingly digital world?  Where can technology help me, and where is it a hindrance?  How much money should I invest in good apps?  These are questions that come up every day.  A big part of my preparation for school is looking at available technology and considering all of those things before I really invest both time and money (hopefully not too much) in said app.  And sometimes, that investment pays off.

Planboard

I found this app through a link on Pinterest (can't remember where, sorry, it's November.) and I thought "Oh great, another crappy planning app that says it will make me more productive.  And it will have a terrible interface and not do anything better than my DIY notebook calendar."  Boy I love eating my words.  IT IS SO MUCH BETTER.  Right now, we're in the process of changing standards from the California Science Standards to Next Generation Science Standards (or NGSS) and a big challenge is how does our current curriculum already align to those standards.  Besides a very easy to use interface, Planboard has a database of standards that is easy to navigate and sort by keywords to much unit objectives.  THIS IS AMAZING.  Also, it connects with other programs, and while it doesn't connect with Google Classroom yet, I live in hope.  It does connect to your drive so you can sort materials out by unit.  But the biggest thing is matching units to standards.  Now, I can justify what I do to the actual standards.  That is a dream come true.

EdPuzzle

I love showing videos in class, but frankly it's hard to know what students got out of them.  EdPuzzle is an in video assessment system that now connects to Google Classroom.  I haven't used it what I consider "right" yet, I just used it mostly as a video sharing system, but we'll get there.  It's, again, a time investment to learn a program, and see where it fits, but this one might be worth it once I figure it out.


Of course there are some of my old favorites like Gradecam and Plickers, and Google Classroom has rolled out some updates, but those are the newbies that I enjoy.  Is there some tech you swear by?  Let me know some suggestions in the comments!

Shaking Hands with Google Tools in the Classroom

Google has become a ubiquitous part of life.  Even this blog is hosted by Blogger, which is also a part of Google.  Now the thing is, using Google can be a huge boon in terms of teacher organization.  It can help make it easier for students to contact you and for you to allot time throughout the day.   Here a few functions and how I've used them in my classroom in case you were interested.

Google Classroom

Let's start with the basic that most teachers have access to.  Thanks to recent updates through School Loop, another common grade system, it's way easier to connect between Google Classroom and School Loop.  For individual assignments, School Loop will actually update as you grade through Classroom. 

I have mostly used Google Classroom as a method to collect larger project write ups for the group and send out different materials for that project, but in the future, I think I'll have it more used for homework submission.  Initially, I would assign things on Classroom and then collect all of the word via Doctopus and attach Goobrics that way.  The plus side of this is you can compile the rubric scores in a spreadsheet which updates automatically as you fill in the rubric.  The interface is a little clunky, depending on how you format your rubric in Goobric, but it's still pretty easy to use.

As I started having more individual work, Classroom now allows you to send a copy of the file to each student.  Initially, students had to learn how to make a copy for themselves using the Google Doc, but now you can make a copy for each student, which allows easier use of online worksheets where students can fill in their work.  It also is much easier to post things from Drive to Classroom than onto School Loop.  Also, now I can post grades on Classroom faster and it's easier to keep track of things that I have graded.   This year, I mostly used the cross posting thing between Google Classroom and School Loop, but didn't necessarily have them submit everything on Classroom, which explains why it looks like a lot of students didn't finish things below.  It organizes by due date, class and things you've already done.  The done below is for how many students have finished that assignment.  They can even click "done" if they don't submit something, and many will in order to keep organized.  There's also a calendar reminder setting that I have yet to use, but may next year. 

My hope for the future is that eventually Classroom will allow for assigned groups.  As it is right now, students can tell me their groups or put their name on the document, but to have a space for groups to submit together and get the same grade would be perfect. 

Google Sites

This is a recent development.  The new settings for Google Sites are super intuitive and easy to use.  We used it this year to make a webquest for students to study for the final instead of a basic final exam study guide.  It walked them through different simulations and tutorial websites and it is one of the easiest web page designers I have ever used.  The best part is how easy it is to put Drive files into a website.  I think in the future, I will play around with the ability of Youtube embedding and have them get the documents from Classroom but access the sites from Google Sites as a way to curate an experience.  Something I want to focus on next year is having students use videos or readings as a source for evidence in writing.  Using Google Sites would be a perfect way to organize them in one place for students to access from home.

Another thing I'm using Sites for is the ability to put all my study resources and class info in one pretty place.  I had calendar events for meetings and a form for letters of recommendation, but students could never find these links.  Also, students would often ask me if I had any good website resources for studying for tests.  I decided to create a resource website that was easy to go through and find information.  It also has pages with easy ways to contact me and create appointments on my calendar and access the folders I created to share with the class that allow students to find lecture notes if they missed a day.  Truly, this is one of the most beautiful things I have ever made.  I just hope it works. 

Google Drive

I've mentioned Drive in both of the previous things and I haven't talked about what Drive is or how I use it.  Basically, we use drive as a cloud storage system for all of the curriculum and as a way to share curriculum between all teachers.  One previous issue I've had doing this is others changing formatting or content in my work, but no more!  Now, you can share so people can see your work (or you can only see other people's work) and only the author of the file can edit it.  Another good thing about this is you can download the material to your desktop so you don't have to download things every day or rely on what can be very spotty school internet.  If you do this for long enough, however, you can really fill up a hard drive.  Most schools have opted for (at this time, it may change in the future) unlimited storage capacity in the Drive.  What this means is you can put ANYTHING on there, and there will always be space and it does not cost you money.  HOWEVER, this stuff will be deleted the second you leave your current position if you don't back it up to your personal Google Drive.  How do I know?  Because that happened to me and I didn't get a chance to back it up, so that information is gone to where ever Google trash goes to die.  Now, that I can't fix but I can control how much gets synced (or downloaded) to my hard drive. 

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Click on the little drive icon and then select "preferences" from the "…"

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Put a check mark on the files you want downloaded.  Google will keep the unchecked stuff in the cloud, and everything else will be deleted from your computer.  I did this recently to delete everything from this school year from the computer and keep only the coming school year.  Really useful.

Google Docs/Sheets/Forms

I am a physicist, therefore I LOVE SPREADSHEETS.  There's also a lot of cool options, like calendars, to-do lists and other templates that are fun to play with.  I recommend just playing with them on your own.

So the thing that I will use more this coming year are forms.  There are some crazy easy to use new features to make it more like a quiz or just compile data.  The big way I'm going to use them this coming year is as questionnaires for various data that I really need to collect, like your basic beginning of the year stuff, submitting videos or other websites to add to the resource site and to collect information for letters of recommendation.  As a high school teacher, most of my fall weekends are taken up by writing letter upon letter of recommendation, and they can start to sound the exactly the same.  By collecting really in depth data from the students, you can write an even stronger letter.  Also, this will put all of the letter of recommendation information in one place.  Which is insanely useful.  I just started using forms, so hopefully I'll utilize them more this year.

Google Calendar

Make appointment slots.  Seriously, do it.  Why?  Because then if a student shows up at your door, you can tell them it's not a good time and to make an appointment.  It's also a fast way to tell students you are busy at a certain time and not to stop by.  It sends them reminders so they aren't late and they can tell you what they need in that appointment.  It's amazing.  Just make sure they can find the link.  Also, tell them they have to make the appointment a day before.  They'll do this thing where they'll make an appointment the day of.  It's very frustrating, but stand your ground.  It also gives students equal air time in 15 minute increments.  It's awesome. 

In Conclusion

Google is an incredibly powerful tool of organization, and I've only scratched the surface of what apps exist.  I went for the basic Google Apps for Education.  If you have any other cool tricks, let me know.  I always want to try more stuff out.

End of My Third Year

There's this feeling in teaching that once you make it to your third year, you're really a teacher.  You've had your first two bumpy years to work things out, and now you have figured out your methods and voice as an educator.  That is, if you stay at the same school.

Between my second and third years, I switched schools.  Districts, in fact.  I went from teaching in the Bayview to the heart of Silicon Valley down the street from where I grew up.  While I am now teaching in my community, both where I currently live and where I am from, there are some challenges that come from changing schools, just like changing any job.  From discussing this with friends, it takes about 5 weeks to get the hang of a new company and feel secure.  In teaching, because things change so often throughout the year, you don't feel comfortable until the year is over.  And even then, you still feel like you have a lot to learn.  Plus, the next year, you get new kids.

With all of this, I think I still improved as a teacher.  I had better classroom management and organizing things as well as posting grades more consistently.  However, I feel like there are a lot of new tricks I want to steal from coworkers in terms of homework return and test and quiz retention.  It's all about figuring out what is expected at the school, and how much students actually want their work back and what is realistic for me to do.

I've already gone through and figured out some new organization methods for work return and classroom set up.  Something that hasn't changed is how messy students can be, so whatever I can do to minimize that (and keep myself organized), I will most certainly do.  I think my strength as a teacher is being reflective.  I look at how thing went (even as they are going) and think about how I can improve it.  I will never think I am perfect.  I don't think I will ever stop growing or learning as a teacher.

In the future, I hope to post more activities and ideas onto this blog, and less reflection of my practice as I move forward.  I am planning on reorganizing my classroom and recording that here to hopefully help other teachers like me, especially science teachers, to keep themselves sane.  Writing definitely helps, I can tell you that.

Technology in my Classroom

So, we have best practice at every department meeting, and at a recent one, a coworker shared an app he uses called Zipgrade.  Being the curious little science teacher I am, I decided to try and use it.  This brings up a neat topic that I feel is becoming increasing relevant in this day and age: technology in the classroom.  I actually did a project about it in graduate school, but I feel like it has become a more polarizing difference between teachers.  I find myself straddling the line between pro-technology and wary of technology, but when it comes down to it, I like when things can save me time and effort.  So, let me share with you a few tricks I've begun to compile while I experiment with apps, widgets and all that stuff.

Apps and Stuff
These are a combo of some apps for phone (both Android and iOS) and have some kind of computer interface to download and analyze data.  If you are pretty good with Excel or Google Sheets, the process of setting up classrooms in these apps is pretty straight forward.

Zipgrade:  I have a few apps I use for expediting the grading and analyzing of data.  One of the newer ones I mentioned was Zipgrade.  Through this program you can print out and grade, rather quickly honestly, scantron style multiple choice tests.  You scan with your device and can then upload a file of grades to your grading system.  Compared to how I grade a quiz of a comparable size, it takes about 1/3 of the time to grade and post grades to School Loop or whatever system you use.  The set up process takes some time, and it took me a while to figure out the weighting component, but I loved it.  That way, I never have to worry about using a scantron reader or entering grades by hand.  I'm into it.

Doctopus:  This is a mass copy system that works through Google docs.  Basically, it can make a specific copy of a Google file for each student to use so they don't edit the original document you share with them.  I use it mainly for rubrics for projects and lab reports so they can get feedback much faster.  There's a plugin where you can speak your feedback as a recording, which is great for accessibility.  There's a ton of stuff this one is capable of, I just haven't unlocked its full potential as of yet.

Socrative:  This is one of my favorites for quick quizzes.  Basically, you create an online quiz where students can answer either on their phone or on a computer.  You can use it to create a quiz game, exit tickets, team up the students or keep it individual.  The school I am currently at has a pretty strict no phones out policy, but in a classroom where you have Chromebooks or a less strict school phone policy, you could totally do a quiz game where they have rockets that shoot off into space as they get answers right.  There is an app for students and an app for teachers.  The teacher app can connect directly to your Google account and gives you a really comprehensive readout of what students have gotten correct and incorrect.  A lot of this app is similar to Zipgrade, but it is free and has a free response option.  However, in terms of assessment, it's good for formative, but for summative, I would lean towards Zipgrade due to the phone not being a part of the student interface.  Taking a test on a phone with the internet so close is too much for me to handle.

Plickers:  I'm trying this one soon with my freshmen.  This is a good check for understanding tool where each student gets a specific QR code to use during class.  You ask a question and scan for responses.  I am excited about the anonymity it brings to students, the accountability for understanding and the ease in grading with another spread sheet like Socrative and Zipgrade.  The thing I am not fully in love with, and this could be due to my inexperience with the app, is the organizational system.  Zipgrade and Socrative both have questions organized in a quiz format.  Plickers has the questions in a shared folder, so you have to choose the questions in your queue before each session as I see it now.  Hopefully, I can figure a better system.

Overall, these are the apps I have found that work the best in my space or I'm excited to try out.  If you have any experience with another system, please let me know.  If you can't tell, I'm excited to test out anything that will make my life easier and allow me to give better feedback.  I suck at giving work back in a timely manner.

I'm Still Here

And by still here, I mean in the classroom. This year so far has been NUTS.  Like legitimately a ton of work.  This is a short post for me to say that more regular ones shortly.  Today, all I want to go home.  I'm stoked by how much planning I got done for the week. I've really gotten into the habit of going through my little planner and typing things up and writing, writing, writing.  I grade, I write, I grade, I write, I sleep and I am so lucky to have an amazing family.  I promise next entry will be funnier.  I'm nothing if not funny.  Well, cute.  Well, spunky.  Let's just say I'm a snarky sassmaster, a title I have stolen from my boyfriend.