*sniffle, sniffle*

Don’t mind me…I’m just starting to get that dreaded cold that’s going around school.  Swell.

Anyhoo, just wanted to update you all on how it went with having the students use the iPads to listen to their tests being read aloud using the website Chirbit.  Again, as a quick recap, I recorded myself reading the test aloud and saved the audio file on my computer.  Then I went onto Chirbit and uploaded it onto my account.  Once the students were ready to take the test, I gave them an iPad and headphones, pulled up the website link from Safari, explained how to listen and pause the audio as needed, and turned them over to their test. It went over very smoothly.

Overall, here are my observations with using Chirbit:

Pros: I was able to walk around and clarify what some of the test questions were asking without having to stop the test for everyone.  Another big plus was that the kids were able to go at their own pace.  They were able to rewind the audio if they needed it repeated and they didn’t have to wait on me to wait on everyone else to finish before moving onto the next question.

Cons:  Some students had problems pausing the audio, mostly because the Play/Pause button is pretty small.  I started looking into how I could fix this.  Another con is that if you want to rewind the audio, you just have to estimate when sliding the play bar.  It would be nice if there was a program/app that I could separate each question into its own “track”, you know? Kind of like a CD.  I will have to look into this.

Even before I asked the students how they liked taking their tests this way, I had one student say, “Miss, we should do our tests like this all the time.”  When I asked them all how they liked it, all who took it on the iPads preferred doing it this way.  Interestingly enough, during the test, one of my students said, “Miss! The questions are like the ones you had in the test review game!”  Lightbulb moment. You don’t say? 😉  Of all the students who I am required to pull for reading tests aloud, all but one opted to do it.  One of my students opted out and I think it was because she was embarrassed.  I wasn’t able to pull some students out during one of the hours because I had an IEP to attend. So I spoke with their Science teacher and gave the iPads to them in their Science class to use.  The kids were bombarded with, “Ooooh! Is that a iPad? How come they get one?” (this is exactly how they said it).  I think she didn’t want the attention.  Which brings me to how they actually scored.

On average, like crap.

Let me clarify, however.  This is where some confusion takes place.  Most people would be like, “Miss Rivas, you’re doing all this stuff to help your students but they’re still doing poorly on the tests. Is the technology, in actuality, really helping them?”  Here’s my response:  in the end, it all comes down to the students.  I can make review games, record their tests, do everything I possibly can to help them, but if they don’t do their part, like actually STUDYING, it’s out of my hands.  In the past this had been a heavy burden on me.  I would blame myself for not doing enough to help them pass.  Now, in my fourth year of teaching, I’m able to cut myself some slack and have them be accountable for their own actions.  They did not study.  They told me they did not study.  And their results showed that.  As I stated before, motivation is a huge struggle with my students.  They don’t like to work.  I can only do so much.

Chapter 2: E-Pals

It seems like a book, with as much as there is to write today. Geez.  Ok, onto the next part: E-Pals.  *insert sniffly smile here*

I’ve been so excited to kick off our e-mails to our E-Pals lately.  Friday I was able to explain and model how to do their E-Pal letter using a fantabulous tool online from ReadWriteThink.  There is a Letter Generator tool that allows students to write a friendly letter or business letter by breaking each part down into small, bite-sized portions (heading, greeting, body, closing, signature).  I displayed my laptop onto the screen and showed them how to use the Letter Generator as well as what to write.  I wrote my letter to the other 8th grade Resource teacher in NJ and showed the kids the different things they could do.  I like this because it’s not too overwhelming for my students.  They don’t have to think about too much while writing.  Plus, there are hints and notes for each part, stating where there should be a comma, etc.  I had my students write their rough drafts on paper first.  For their first e-mail, they were to include an introduction of themselves, list some of their hobbies, and ask 2 questions.  Then, after having it checked, they had to go onto the website via the laptops and type in their letters.  There had to be some reminders, such as placing spaces in between words, but for the most part, it went well.  They all sent their e-mails today to their E-Pals in Jersey.  As much as some of them complain about it, I know they are secretly excited to get a response.  🙂

So, there you have it.  I think if the kids applied themselves more, they could get very far with their schoolwork.  Until then, it’s hard for me to see whether these strategies and tools are having any effect.  After reviewing today for their Social Studies test tomorrow for Future Hubby’s class, I informed them that the QuizRevolution I created for the test will be posted on Edmodo and my student Facebook, which I know they all log onto religiously.   Whether they use my help to improve their grade is up to them.  At least no one can say I didn’t try…

And on that note, it’s time to take some meds and call it a night.  Let’s see how tomorrow goes with their tests. *heavy sigh…sneeze*

Ok.  Future Hubby will tell you that I am a dedicated Special Ed teacher.  I was up until 2 am last night creating a Science test review for not just my students with IEPs, but for any 8th grader who was interested in reviewing for their test tomorrow.  I used QuizRevolution to create the review.  I already have a Quizlet account, but it didn’t allow me to create quizzes with images or video, like I wanted.  Quiz Revolution is fairly easy to use.  The most time-consuming part was trying to search the internet for images that were relavent and easy enough for my 8th graders to understand.  Basically, I took the test, switched some wording around, and put them on the review with pictures and a video clip.  I didn’t use all the questions on the test, either.  Here is the final product.  My goal was for my students with IEPs, as well as the other 8th graders, to utilize this tool to review their Science, since Science is hard.  The terminology is complex.  That’s why I wanted to add images and highlight key words in each question and answer.  I had my students practice the review during my Extended Core (Resource) class since I knew they were the ones that would need the most help.

Unfortunately, I was administering the MEAP test this morning (our state’s standardized test), so I couldn’t actually be in my classroom to observe fully how the students were engaged with it.  However, I was able to make it back to class within the last 5 minutes to see them.  I told all of them to study at home, using this as help.  That’s when the excuses started rolling in:

“I promised my brother he could use the computer today.”

“I can do good without studying.”

“I don’t feel like it.”

My response?  “I DON’T CARE! You all NEED to study for this test tomorrow!  If anything, dang it, I was up until 2 in the morning making this for you.  Do it for me.  YOU. WILL. STUDY!”

Silence.  Then, “Ok, Miss.”  Sometimes you gotta play hard-ball with these kids.

Anyhoo, the last thing I was able to accomplish today was create a Chirbit for the Science test tomorrow.  It is roughly 20 questions, multiple choice.  Some of my students’ IEPs state that they require their tests to be read aloud.  Chirbit allows me to record the test ahead of time and have them listen to it on their iPads or on a laptop.  Essentially, it clones me.  And if any of you have ever read a test aloud multiple times over multiple class periods, you know the toll it takes on your voice.  Hopefully, it goes well.  *fingers crossed*

Ultimately, I’ve hit a point where I’m starting to question everything:  my strategies, techniques, motives.  So many hours are put into creating all this stuff for my students, but it seems as if they’re indifferent to it sometimes.  I’m doing it to better explain what they’re already supposed to be learning in class.  Sometimes, (and GenEd teachers, no offense) teachers can present the material a little too quickly with not enough explanation.  That’s where I come in.  That’s my job.  But researching, trying, spending my own money on apps and memberships, taking away time from my own family to help my students has me rethinking everything.  Is this even working? Am I doing all this for nothing? I really, really hope not.  Waiting for the light at the end of this long tunnel….   🙁

I’m not gonna lie–Social Studies was my least favorite subject when I was in middle school.

The teachers lectured and lectured, and every so often I’d get called on without having the slightest clue what the heck he was talking about.  My recollection of class would most accurately described as this.

Fast forward a few decades and here I am now teaching, or should I say re-teaching, my students with IEPs the material they’re learning now in their Social Studies class. Taught, ironically enough, by my fiance.  Back then I wanted to do well but had teachers who were (cover your ears, honey)…well, boring.  Now, these kids have access to all this technology and just lack the motivation.  I’d kill to have someone like me back then.  But then again, that’s why I do what I do now.  I’ve experienced the ugly before.

So they’re wrapping up their unit on the events that led up to the Revolutionary War.  I found this app called American Revolution History.  It’s an interactive timeline that lets students scroll through some of the events.  There are interesting tidbits as well as some awesome pictures that the kids can click on to read more about.  Right upon opening it, one of my students said, “Aw, cool!”

The students seemed to enjoy using this app.  While I did ask them to focus mainly on the points they were going to be tested on, they did check out the other interesting tidbits this app had to offer.

One other task I was finally able to do today was to record the test into an audio format using Chirbit.  If you’ve read my earlier post, you’ll remember that I had recorded an audio file on an app that I had downloaded onto the iPads.  It worked for the one student taking the test, but then I thought to myself, “What about the times that will inevitably come up where multiple students need to have a test read aloud to them? How do I transfer that recording onto multiple iPads?”  I did some research and found Chirbit. So, today I connected the Go Mic by Samson that I bought over the summer to record my (upcoming) flipped videos.  I’d been so antsy to finally use it.  One thing about Chirbit:  if you record from their website, you are only allotted 5 minutes of recording time.  I needed more than that, since it was a multiple choice test with 22 questions.  However, if you record from your Mac or PC and then upload that file onto Chirbit, your audio file can be up to 2 hours long.  Yeah.  So I recorded my test in around 13 minutes and uploaded it to my Chirbit profile.  Dunzo.  I’m excited to see the kids take it.  🙂  I so wish I had iPads to help me with Social Studies when I was a kid.  Maybe I wouldn’t have found it so boring.

Maybe.  Sorry, honey.  😉

This is exactly how I felt today.  Let me tell you why.

So first of all, I was told yesterday afternoon that our new principal should be dropping into my classroom* to observe the iPad pilot we’re doing.  Of course, knowing this, I try to plan something that the kids will use their iPads for.  Being that today is Core Class Review day, I decide to introduce them to a new app to review their Math.  Lately, we’ve been going over how to write an equation of a line with a given graph.  I happened to stumble upon an app a while ago called Geometry Pad.  Basically, this gives students the ability to graph lines, coordinates, and other figures onto an x and y axis.  What I did was give them an equation, such as y=2/3x-4, and they needed to graph it.  I had to give them some brief instructions on how to use the app, but they caught on fairly quickly.  They graphed their line and we went over it as a class.  We did this two more times and they seemed to enjoy it.

After this, we went onto Wonderopolis so they could write their ten lines about the topic of the day, which had to do with nomads.  Before they began, I showed them the Speak feature on their iPads, which allows the user to tap and select any portion of text and have it read aloud to them.

I then showed my students how to tap and select the text on Wonderopolis.  I demonstrated it to them, showing them the process on my ELMO, then had them do it themselves.

After a bit of tweaking with reading speed rates, they were able to listen to the selection.  I explained that this would be a valuable tool to use when it came time to do research projects in a few months, which will require them to read material from several different websites.  All students in my resource room are below grade level and motivation is always an issue.  I’m hoping this is a useful aide to them when the time comes for them to read a lot more information on their own.

I let my student use my personal, pink-cased iPad for this one. 😉

After class, I had to have a student take a make-up test.  Her IEP requires her tests to be read aloud to her.  I decided to use the iPad to record the test at home and explained to her how to pause and un-pause the iPad so she could answer the questions.  It went nicely, and she did well, considering it was a pre-test.  I used the app Audio Memos, but plan to switch to Chirbit, which is an online audio recording tool.  This way, several students can access the test recording at once, rather than just one recording on one iPad.

And, of course, I had to save the best for last.  Thanks to the wonderful Edmodo community, I posted if someone would be interesting in doing pen-pals with my students.  I had a few people respond that they were resource teachers as well, and would love to get their students to practice writing.  So, beginning next week or the week after, we will be doing, E-Pals, or electronic pen-pals.  My students will be e-mailing their pen-pals, and hopefully, get to Skype with them later down the road.  You have absolutely no IDEA how excited I am for this! At the moment, I’m in the process of doing some brainstorming as far as grading, frequency, format, etc.  I wanted to wait until tomorrow to tell my students about this project, but instead I told them I had some exciting news that I would share the next day.  Dumb mistake.  They twisted my arm and I gave.  At first, they weren’t sure what I was talking about, then as it sunk in, some of them remembered they did something similar in elementary.  But when I explained that they’d be corresponding with other 8th grade students from another state and may possibly be able to Skype them, they started to get excited.  It’s pen-pals suped up.  🙂

Poor Future-Hubby.  He’s been letting me chew his ear off about all this while we were supposed to be sleeping.  Brace yourself, honey….this is only the beginning.  😉

 *Of course, after all that prep…he never showed. Oh, administration.  

…………………

Occupational hazard, if you think of it the way I do.

As much as I LOVE administering the MEAP, I can honestly not wait until they’re over.  Ugh.  But, gotta keep a happy face on for the kids, right?  🙂

As for my Extended Core class, yesterday I introduced them to the world of Dropbox.  I was the only one excited about it.  I was  like, “Don’t you get it? You can save your work to the Cloud and never have to worry about hauling your thumb drive everywhere!”

And they were like,

But it’s all good.  They’ll learn to appreciate it more when we start research papers.  The actual sign-up process didn’t take very long at all, which was awesome.

I hope to have them blogging on our class blog next week.  Also, I will start them on their very first “flipped” lesson of nouns.  Hoping the technology is merciful that day.  🙂

First and foremost, let me just say I am not a good public speaker.

Having said that, imagine how shot my nerves were this morning before giving my half of the presentation.  Just a quick recap:  I was asked by my supervisor to give a presentation about the technology I’m using in my resource room, namely, the iPad program I’m leading.  I would present about middle school resource for half of the hour and another SpEd teacher, who teaches elementary resource, would do the other half.  I quickly put together a Glog to show my ideas.  Here is the Glogster I created for my presentation this morning.  Add on top of all this the fact that I have a head-splitting migraine, and you can see how today was already not going the way I would’ve liked.

So, I get to the building early and enter the room I’m going to give my speech so I can set up my laptop.  The guy who presented first (we were 3rd)…I felt so bad for him! Technology glitches galore! Needless to say, it didn’t help my emotional being at all.  Fast forward to our presentation.  I think it went very well.  My co-presenter and I were able to show our audience the different ways we use technology in our rooms, at different grade levels.  Each of us had our own, unique things to talk about.  What’s more, I was pleased to hear how well we did from different audience members!

The rest of the conference offered several different topics held in different rooms about all kinds of different technology resources.  I learned about a lot of new apps I can’t wait to tinker with and try in my room! My head is still pounding, but I still plan on charging my iPad and brainstorming different ways I can incorporate some of these apps in my room.  As soon as I try them, I will keep you posted! 🙂

In the left corner, we have the iPad: sleek, engaging, and fun to use.  In the right corner, we have the school laptops: bulky, slower, but more familiar.  Which will come out on top for our next lesson on grammar? Let’s look at the reel, shall we?

I was excited to use this new website I found from my teacher friends on Edmodo called NoRedInk.com.  If you’ve never heard of it before, go check it out! Basically, students can sign up for a free account and join your class after you create one.  When they create their accounts, the site asks them to choose three things that interest them, ranging from actors, movies, music, even inputting their own friends’ and pet’s names.  You, as the teacher, can choose from different areas of focus to assign your students.  For example, there is the apostrophes option, which focuses on the correct use of apostrophes in sentences.  The site will give students a sentence in either correct, or incorrect format.  If it’s correct, they hit “Submit” and go onto the next question.  If there’s a correction, they click on the part of the sentence that needs correcting and fix it.  A table located above their sentence shows the progress they’ve made and which questions they’ve answered correctly after a certain number of attempts.

What’s great about this site is that students can actually click (or tap, if using the iPad) the sentences and modify them.  Also, the website incorporates their interests that they chose when they signed up and uses those things in their sentences.  For example, my student entered “Rocky” as his pet name.  On question 4, his sentence mentioned Rocky as the subject.  He gave a little squeal and *gasp* even a small smile when he worked on this sentence.  If the students are working with punctuation (commas, colons, semi-colons, etc), you can click or tap the correct punctuation and drag it over to where it belongs in the sentence.

So, back to our lesson.  I posted the link on our classroom’s Edmodo page and had the students use their iPads to practice their grammar.  Not the best idea I’ve ever had.  While the iPad is more engaging for the students, clicking and dragging the various punctuation marks to the correct location in the sentence proved to be a hassle.  Most of the time, students had to attempt several times clicking and dragging.  It was enough to mildly frustrate some of the students.  And we all know, we cannot afford to “lose” our students in a lesson and have them check out due to an incompatibility with the technology.  The laptops, even though they are sooo last year, would’ve been a better idea to use for this website.  It really would’ve saved a lot of time, and my guess is the students would’ve enjoyed it more.

The moral of the story (for me, at least) is don’t completely abandon what you’ve used in the past if it works just because you have something new to use now (in this case, the iPads).  I’ve been so gung-ho on using the iPads for as much as possible, I think I was in denial with the fact that maybe the iPads weren’t the right choice every single time.  Laptops won this fight.

Lesson learned.

So, it’s not really like me to post things on a weekend, but I decided to give you a peek into my classroom.  Now that iOS6 has given us the panoramic option in our cameras, I couldn’t resist testing it out and found out I absolutely LOVE it! It’s fantastic! With that said, I snapped a couple shots of my room so you can see what my students see every day.  It changes with the seasons (for example, it will be all kinds of decked out for Halloween).  Talk soon! 🙂

Ok, so just to reiterate from yesterday, here was the plan for today: the students’ warm up was for them to use their Google Form that I made for them while they went on a gallery walk around the classroom, reviewing material from all four of their content area classes. I was really excited about it this morning. Here’s how it went down:

Issue #1: Fire Drill
As antsy I was to get started, we were e-mailed about the fire drill we were going to have at 0900. No worries. We went back inside fairly quickly. I explained to them that they were each going to go to each of the “stations” that coincided with the numbers on their Google Form. There were nine questions total. The rule was, there couldn’t be more than one person at each station. Finally, I said, “Go at it!”

Issue #2: They Didn’t Know How To Go At It
My bad. There I go assuming again. I thought I had explained the directions fairly clearly, but that’s subjective. They didn’t understand how to use the Google Form. I was almost instantly bombarded with, “Wait, Miss! I don’t get it. What are we supposed to do?” They didn’t realize all they had to do was tap on the box for each number and input their answer. If it was multiple choice, they simply had to tap their choice.

Issue #3: Twitchy Fingers
I keep forgetting that for most of my students, this is the first time they’ve ever used an iPad before. I had embedded the form onto Edmodo as a post, so when they clicked on the link, the form came up as a pop-up window. A lot of the students kept grazing their thumbs on the screen, bringing them back to Edmodo, which was greyed out in the background, and losing their work. A few of them had to upload the form again and couldn’t figure out why they were getting kicked off. I had to explain that the screen is very touch sensitive and to use the holding straps located on the underside of the iPad covers to hold their iPads.

Issue #4: Not Paying Attention In Class
Each station was in direct relation to the material they had already learned in their core classes. For example, I posted two stations where they had to figure out the slope of a line, which they’ve learned how to do in Math. The Science stations reviewed the different characteristics of volcanoes. The English stations reviewed punctuation and grammar, and the Social Studies asked them about the Stamp Act. Again, stuff they should already know. They didn’t remember most of it. But that’s why we’re reviewing in the first place, right?

Issue #5: Traffic Jams
Sooooo, I had mentioned to them that I didn’t want more than one student at each station, since there were more stations than students. That seemed to have slipped their minds a few times, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I had wanted them to think for themselves so I could see what they remembered without help, but whatever.

Conclusion:
1. This was a good practice for using Google Forms on the iPad for the first time. I will have to remind them to be aware of their fingers, since several of them had to start over a few times.
2. Next time I will change the form so that all the questions aren’t “required”. For those of you not familiar with Google Forms, you can make it so that your questions are required, meaning, your students HAVE to answer them and won’t let them submit the form until they all are. This prevented all of them from hitting “submit” at the end, because most of them didn’t know how to answer some of the questions and left them blank. Again, blank answers equals no submissions.
3. Regardless of all the issues mentioned above, I think it was a good exercise. The kids were up out of their seats and moving. They were using iPads. They were reviewing the material anyways, even if they couldn’t input their answers.

The rest of the hour was dedicated to studying for their Science quiz, finishing any homework they had missing from their classes, and working on their paper blog posts. They worked well for the rest of the hour, some with their headphones plugged in, listening to to the relaxing sounds of Pocket Pond. 🙂 So, in the end, everything was ok. This was a learning experience for me as much as it was for my students. It’s a journey we’re taking together, and as long as they can be patient with me as much as I am with them, we’ll be good to go.

Rivas, out……

Ok, this may be silly of me, but I’m excited to share with you what I’ll be doing with my Extended Core tomorrow.  The majority of the hour will be dedicated to reviewing and catching up on Science (the kids have a Science quiz tomorrow).  However, I decided to try something different with their warm up.  What I did tonight was create a Google Form with 10 questions, each one in either short answer or multiple choice format.  I will have 10 different stations across the room where they will be directed to.  All four subject areas will be covered.  To see the form I created, click here.  There will be pictures posted in some areas, sentences in another.  I tried to narrow it down to 2-3 questions for each core content area: Math, Science, English, and Social Studies.  I wanted to get the students a bit more exposed to Google Forms.  I had them fill one out at the beginning of the year when they filled out their Student Information Sheets on the first day of school.

On top of getting the students out of their seats for their warm up, I get to see their answers instantaneously on my spreadsheet.  I only wish there could be a way to use pictures on the actual form as well, but this is good for now.  I hope all goes according to plan.  I will make sure to take lots of pics tomorrow and post them. I hope the technology is nice to me!