Cool Tool Alert -- ThemeSpark

A couple teachers at the junior high alerted me to this AMAZING rubric building tool last week called ThemeSpark! Now, don't stop reading because you think this is only good for the older kids or because it might be too hard to use! First, let me share with you the standards that are covered if you want to make a rubric:

• CCSS (K-12 ELA and Math, 6-12 Reading and Writing for History/Social Studies and Science/Technology)
• C3 Standards (K-12)
• NGSS (K-12)
• NCCAS (currently only the Anchor Standards)
• 21st Century Skills (4 C's -- Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, and Critical Thinking)

Essentially, you create an account (you can sign in with your school Google account), click on "New Rubric", select the subject area or areas you will be teaching, choose the grade level, then the topics (related to strands in the standards). You can then select each standard and select or deselect any of the substrands under that standard. If you have't figured it out yet, you can create a very detailed, comprehensive rubric this way!

Once the rubric is created, you can still make edits to it, and you can even use the lesson builder to build lessons to work with the rubric.

Rubrics, as we all know, can be really helpful to us as teachers, our students, and their parents because it helps set clear expectations for the work students are doing. This rubric builder in particular, I believe, can also be instrumental as we continue to move forward with standards-based grading since the rubrics and the descriptors on the rubrics are taken directly from the standards we are using to drive our instruction and assess our students' progress.

Here's a short, highly amateur video of me demonstrating the basics of how to use this really great site. If you have used it or have any tips to share, please add your comments on this post!

True Confessions

I am currently at an educational technology conference and I'm Tweeting things like this:

If students can Google it, we should not be teaching it. @mfaust Probably a good guiding principle :-) #edtechcon

— Renee Bogacz (@mrsbogacz) October 18, 2016

Now that students are accessing information 24/7, teachers are not the sole providers of knowledge. @mfaust --Ts gonna have to embrace this.

— Renee Bogacz (@mrsbogacz) October 18, 2016

Now, teachers can be some of the most empathetic and supportive people with their colleagues. BUT, sadly, they can also be really judgmental and snarky. It's an ugly truth. That's why I'm writing this post.

If I were a teacher still teaching in a classroom of my own kids, doing all the traditional teacher activities, I could see myself saying (or at least thinking) the following things about the Instructional Technology Resource Teacher:

• You're not an expert in any of this stuff you're telling us about. In fact I/my students know more about it than you do.
• It's easy for you to say we need to do all these things; you don't have papers to grade, lesson plans to develop, etc. I don't have the time to learn what you want me to learn.
• I've seen how you taught when you were still in the classroom. You were traditional -- you weren't some innovative teacher who was teaching the way you want us to teach. Kind of hypocritical, isn't it?
• What I'm doing in my classroom works really well. Why do I need to change anything?

Maybe you've said or thought some of the same things about me. If you have, heck, I don't blame you one bit. But here is what I'd like to think I would do, if I was still in a classroom with my own kids:

• I hope that I'd listen to everything that's said and suggested and try really hard to be honest with myself when trying to decide if what is happening in my classroom is really best for my learners.
• I hope that I'd pick one or two things that I think are really useful for my class and my learners and try it out.
• I hope I wouldn't try to change everything I'm doing in my classroom in one school year. Or even two. I'd give myself a good 3 - 5 years.
• I hope I'd realize that everything isn't going to work out perfectly and I'd scrap what is really bad and revamp what has potential.

I'm a people pleaser, if you haven't figured that out already. I always want everybody to be happy. I've heard that isn't possible, but I keep trying anyway :-) Because I'm a people pleaser, that means I want to work hard to make YOU happy. So here is my attempt at being a people pleaser today:

• Please don't think of me as an expert of any sort except as an expert learner. All I want to do in my job is learn about tools to help you and your students learn and learn about tools you and your students can use.
• Please take advantage of the fact that the demands on my time are drastically different from the demands on your time. Do you need a particular kind of app for the iPads? Ask me to find one. Do you want to see how an app works? Ask me to try it out and show it to you. Do you need help learning something we already have -- how to upload a video to YouTube? Set up a Google Form? Ask me to help you. Need websites for your 2nd graders to learn about tornadoes? Ask me to find some for you.
• Please don't try to change everything you do in your classroom. You do so many amazing things already! I know, because I get to come into your classrooms! Instead, think about any lessons you have that can be updated and innovated. Do a few each year. Don't overwhelm yourself by trying to change everything. It won't work and you'll hate making the changes. And refer to the above 2 bullet points as you find things that can be innovated. (Remember: it's not hard to innovate!)
• Please use a critical eye when examining your curriculum and your students. Ultimately, we as teachers want our students to leave our class with more information and understanding than they had when they entered. We work hard to help our students learn and it can be hard to admit that maybe a lesson we love needs updating for some reason. Teaching and curriculum development is deeply personal -- we pour our hearts into it because we care so much about the kids in our classrooms. When someone implies in any way that something we are doing isn't good enough for whatever reason, it is natural to get defensive because our work has pieces of our hearts in it. We owe it to our kids to evaluate what we teach and be honest about how meaningful and effective it really is.

My job title is "Instructional Technology Resource Teacher", but in so many other districts, the title for this job is often "Technology Coach". It's more concise, but I love having "Teacher" in my job title. It's what I am. I'm one of you guys -- really! I love working with you and your kids. I love teaching you and your kids new things. I love seeing the excitement on everyone's faces when something works well. Thank you for letting me continue to work with you and come into your classrooms.

Digital Citizenship Explained

(Photo Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sylviaduckworth/17190424026)

With the adoption of Google Apps for Education (now called G Suite for Education), there is more emphasis on helping our students become good digital citizens. This goes beyond simple internet and technology safety lessons on things like cyberbullying and protecting personal information online. In fact, according to the website DigitalCitizenship.net, there are actually nine themes of digital citizenship:

• Digital Access (full electronic participation in society)
• Digital Commerce (electronic buying and selling of goods)
• Digital Communication (electronic exchange of information)
• Digital Literacy (process of teaching and learning about technology and the use of technology)
• Digital Etiquette (electronic standards of conduct or procedure)
• Digital Law (electronic responsibility for actions and deeds)
• Digital Rights and Responsibilities (those freedoms extended to everyone in a digital world)
• Digital Health and Wellness (physical and psychological well being in a digital technology world)
• Digital Security (Self-Protection) (electronic precautions to guarantee safety)

Check out the actual webpage for more detailed explanations of each theme.

This year, I will be trying to provide you with easy to use resources for helping our students be the best possible digital citizens they can be. Digital citizenship instruction needs to be reinforced all year long, each time students use technology to do their work. It needs to be modeled as well as explained or taught directly. Kids also need lots of opportunity to actually practice their digital citizenship skills, so don't be afraid to let them go online and use all the tools they have available to them! Let them research and create and compose and communicate and collaborate! Will they make mistakes? Sure. But with our help, they can learn from their mistakes and continue on their road to being good digital citizens -- #FailForward!!!

I ask you to work with me and each other by sharing any good resources you might have for teaching and reinforcing good digital citizenship -- a video, a website, a lesson, an activity, the name of a book, a journal article. It can be created by you or it can be something you got from someone else or something you found online (hint: Twitter is a GREAT place to find stuff like this, as is Pinterest). Share these resources in the comments section on this post! I can't wait to see what you have to offer!

When the Technology Fails You

This post is an update of a "Tech" it Out email from August 2014.

Have you ever planned a lesson where the kids need to use the Chromebooks or the iPads or the laptops or the computer lab only to have there be some sort of technology problem? How do you handle it? Do you react like this?

Or do you react like this, cool as a cucumber, completely unruffled?

Sad but true -- sometimes the technology doesn't work! Here are a number of reasons why there could be a tech failure:

• Website is down
• Power failure
• Network is down
• Network is busy (like we have experienced in past years during MAP testing)
• Internet is busy (like we experienced a couple years ago during the US Olympic hockey game)
• Low/dead battery
• No apparent reason

Planning a lesson that uses technology then not having the technology work can be hugely frustrating! So here is the best piece of advice for planning lessons that integrate technology -- HAVE A BACK UP PLAN :-)

What can you do if the technology fails you -- for whatever reason? Check this link for some ideas:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Wo9VFQS2SyvVkpsqbVrrVW4puMYDoxW_A0maoL9ApQc/pub

The most important thing is to never give up! We know the world is an imperfect place -- John Bender taught us that!

Remember, a good lesson isn't good because of the technology being used; it's a good lesson because of the learning experience it provides for the students. Try one of the suggestions in the linked document above and move on! The technology problem will be resolved and then you can keep moving forward!