Yes, I’m a nerd.  I like to blog. Obvi.

Imagine my enthusiasm when I introduced blogging today to my students.  I decided over the summer to create our own class website slash blog slash wiki.  The wiki stuff will come later.  I wanted to get them blogging as soon as humanly possible.  But as usual, back to the beginning of my hour.

For their warm up, I had them read a Scholastic Action magazine.  Now, if you’ve never used Scholastic magazines in your classroom, especially with students who lack the motivation to read, I highly recommend them! They are absolutely wonderful.  Today they were asked to read an article about a girl who used a robot to go to school because of a severe food allergy.  At the end of the reading, there was a short, multiple choice quiz based on the article.  We went over the answers as a class and the kids did very well.

For those students that finished early, they were able to read the other articles, which had a ton of interesting stuff.

Ok, so onto our daily objective:  blogging.  I started off by asking them if they’ve heard of blogs or blogging before.  One student said they thought they heard of it.  Before I explained how we’d be blogging in our classroom, I showed them this awesome Common Craft video, called Blogs in Plain English, that explains what blogging is…in plain English.  (*side note: Common Craft is outstanding at explaining things via drawings.  Their videos are short, but give you all the information you need about several different topics. Check them out!)  Once the video was over, we recapped the video as a class and clarified once more what blogging was.  I explained we were going to blog as a class, sharing ideas with each other and commenting on each other’s posts.  I then showed them different examples online of classroom blogs and what kinds of things they wrote about.  Hopefully*, if all goes well, we can collaborate with another school’s class blog and comment on each other’s posts.  Ooooh, I’m getting all clappy and squealy just thinking about it! 😀  (*keep your fingers crossed!)

So before we dived full into the blogging world, I wanted them to become a bit more familiar with the concept.  In the hundreds of hours I spent researching over my summer break, I stumbled across this idea from another educator’s blog, Notes From McTeach.  As soon I read about their Paper Blog project, I knew right away I wanted to do it.  Basically, the idea is to get the kids to create a “snapshot” of a blog post on paper first.  They can write about any subject they want and decorate their “page” however they want.  I showed the class my own paper blog as a model so they could visualize what the objective was.

I had written my paper blog post on music and how much it has an impact on me.  My post was two paragraphs, just like theirs will be.  As far as the page layout I created, I told them they could use mine as inspiration if they couldn’t think of anything.  I even added my social networking share buttons! 🙂  Students, at first, had trouble coming up with something to write about, even though I told them they could write about anything.  When I mentioned some topics (video games, sports, pets, etc.), it got their creative juices flowing and they commenced writing and drawing their rough drafts.

I chose to blog with my students this year because I want them to write more than they did last year, but in a different way that they could find enjoyable.  Blogs can be posted from home, at school, on the laptops, or on their iPads.  It’s a great way to mesh perfecting their writing skills (writing, editing, analyzing others’ work, commenting) with the technological world we live in today.  Who knows–maybe it might inspire them to continue blogging after they graduate eighth grade. No, no…can’t think about them leaving me just yet.  I had these students all last year and will have them all this year.  The thought of them leaving gets me a little misty-eyed.  Because of debris, that is.  I have something in my eye, is all…

Today wasn’t too “exciting,” as far as the technology piece goes in my classroom.  Students got caught up with their Science homework. There is one small, but significant victory I had today.  We had our Open House this evening, and I expected very few (if any) of my students to show up.  The plan was to have parents come into the classroom to see what/how their child was doing in class.  Just in case, and as a last minute idea, I decided to set out my iPad and have a slideshow of all the pictures I’ve taken of the students working so far play for anyone to see who came in.  I was pleased to see one of my students come in with his mother and little brothers and sisters.  (*side note: I absolutely love seeing my students with their little siblings. They have this adorable parent-like characteristic to them that makes them so sweet!)

Anyhoo, I introduced myself to his mother, who I knew from last year, and she noticed the slideshow right away.  My student had explained to her our use of iPads in the classroom and now she had a picture to go with it.  She and her kids giggled at the pics of my student whenever they came up, but you could tell they were happy to see it.  In all his pictures, he was hard at work.  It’s one thing to verbalize this to parents, but it’s another to get a chance to show them.  I don’t know why I didn’t do this before.  I’m so glad I have the chance to use the iPads in my classroom so I can do just that–show the parents that their kids are learning.  In the end, it was only him and another student whose parents came to visit.  However, even if his family was there for a small moment, I was happy to witness that awkward grin he gave when his mom saw what a hard worker he was.

Awkward, with a little bit of pride.

As the saying goes, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Don’t gasp at my pessimism. I feel like being in a pouty mood. What the crap? Everything went so well last Thursday! Let’s start with the warmup for today:  keyboarding.  Right now the students are using the keyboarding component of LearningGamesForKids.com.  I am trying to get the students to practice keyboarding during warmups or if they pull the ole, “Miss, I’m finished with everything! What do I do now?” Granted, they won’t be doing a whole lot of keyboarding, but it would be nice for them to know how to properly type.  Someday, when they’re assigned huge papers to write, they’ll thank me. Or it could just be wishful thinking.  Today our objective was to finish doing the Edmodo Scavenger Hunt, for the students to familiarize themselves with the components of Edmodo that we’d be using throughout the year.  I thought I had learned my lesson last time they tried retrieving it. Just a quick recap for those of you just tuning in:  my MentorMob playlist that was embedded into Edmodo had told my students the videos were no longer available when they really were.  Some last minute thinking had them go onto the YouTube playlist version of it, which took me a while to figure out and set up for the class.  After figuring out shortly after that the YouTube playlist couldn’t be viewed via Edmodo (and I couldn’t locate it anywhere in a regular YouTube search), I purchased and installed a YouTube player app 6 times for all of our iPads.  Purchased. With my own money. Six times. At $1.99 each.

You’re probably thinking, “So what? Twelve bucks for an app for your class?”  Well, here’s the kicker: when they went to access my YouTube playlist for the first time today, the videos didn’t load.  I have no freaking idea why.  It worked last week on my iPad when I was testing it; that’s why I bought the %$#@ app.  I don’t know if it’s a glitch in the app or if it was because my students were all trying to get on that one app at the same time.  I have no clue.  All I knew was that minutes were ticking away and I could feel the Freak Out slowly creeping in my body.  So, once again, I had to go to Plan K and have them do a YouTube search of someone else’s version of basically the same scavenger hunt.

Twelve dollars down the drain.

That’s a night’s worth of Hot and Now pizzas and Crazy Bread from Little Caesar’s for my family.  I don’t take that lightly.

Anyhoo, long story short, I narrowed it down to the four videos to watch before the end of class, since they were the most important to learn.  Tomorrow they get their Edmodo badges awarded to them and will get to come up with their player names for our class, known as Operation X.  Avatars will be created once they finish their tech packets.  I’m hoping by reminding them of the gamification aspects of the class, they’ll keep their motivation to push on.  Also, since it’s Tuesday, it’ll be a Core Class Review day.  More science review and finishing of homework.  Those who’ve finished can watch the rest of the Bill Nye video on volcanoes and finish the accompanying worksheet.  I’m also planning on reviewing English vocabulary with them by using their iPads as whiteboards. Seems like it should be foolproof.  Seems.

On that note, I’m signing out.  If at first you don’t succeed, right? *heavy sigh*

…for today, the technology worked without a hitch.  And it was good.

You should’ve seen how ecstatic I was that there were no issues today with the technology.  Not only that, but things went smoothly and the kids were engaged. No big deal–just everything that I’ve ever wanted.

So instead of telling you the entire plan of the day, I’ll just show you:

So basically, the students needed to complete all the tasks, but had a choice as to what they worked on first, Science or Math.  The QR code that they scanned led them to a YouTube video on volcanoes by Bill Nye the Science Guy which they used in conjunction to the worksheet.  They filled this out as they watched the video.

A student using the Scan app to get to a YouTube video on volcanoes.

Those working on Math were able to use this page from algebrahelp.com to practice figuring out the slope of a line.  I really liked this page because the kids could zoom in on their iPads to count their rises and runs (rise over run= slope) and then enter their guesses in the given box.  They were given multiple different problems to work on, then could check their answers at the end and see which ones they answered correctly and which ones they didn’t.

A student enters her answer to one of the slope problems.

I hope things keep rolling at the momentum they are right now. Even my one student who was mad at me from the day before used his iPad to practice math.  The kids were engaged, they enjoyed it, they were learning, and mommy (me) was happy.   As Ice Cube so eloquently put it, “Today was a good day.”  🙂

Woosah…

This pretty much sums up my day.  How many times can things go wrong? Let me count the ways…

Again, let me start at the beginning and what was SUPPOSED to happen.  They were going to come in, grab their laptops, and I was going to guide them in bookmarking the websites we will be using the most this year.  It started off fine, until two of the laptops froze.  The students had to shut down and get two other laptops from the cart.  And of course, the login process took forever.  Then we got to the Tech Packets, which was embedded as a MentorMob playlist on Edmodo.  For some *expletive* reason, it gave the students an error telling them that the videos were not available.  One student could view them.  The rest couldn’t.  As I went from student to student, trying to figure out what was going on, I finally told them to watch it on their laptops.  Of course, Internet Explorer didn’t update properly on all of them, regardless of me trying to update them the day before.  As a last resort, I directed them to YouTube on their iPads and searched for “Edmodo Scavenger Hunt”.  That worked, but the videos were in jumbled order, so once they finished a video, they had to go back and search for the next numbered video, and hit play.

Then the kids were confused because we were looking at the revamped version of Edmodo and the tutorial videos were recorded with the old version. To top it all off, one of my student’s laptops just randomly logged him out completely out of the blue, so he had to log back in, wait for the whole startup time, then log back into Edmodo, then re-play the video.

What. A. Mess.

Conclusions: 1.The school laptops suck. 2. The MentorMob playlist won’t work; I’ll have to create YouTube playlists. 3. We may have to skip some of the Scavenger Hunt steps since it’s taking forever to move just a skosh. 4. Next year, I will need to create my own, condensed version of the Scavenger Hunt.  In that order.  I’m worried that the constant tech issues/problems are frustrating the students and if they lose motivation, their buy-in is gone.

But wait! My day gets better!*

One of my students decided he didn’t want to do anything today and grew agitated from the fact that I had the audacity to ask him to work.  So I was the lucky recipient of his verbal insults and assurances that he wasn’t going to do jack for me ever. It was a consistent flow of annoyances done purposely to get under my skin until he became so disruptive in class that I had to call security to have him escorted out.  Wonderful. Thank God I downloaded the Pocket Pond app for stress relief purposes.  I love my job, I love my job, I love my job…..

Woosah.

*by better I mean exponentially worse

So I completely forgot that I had planned for Tuesdays and Thursdays to be Core Class Review days.  Meaning, on these two days, we’d review what is being taught in their English, Math, Science, and Social Studies classes.  Today I decided to focus on English and Social Studies, starting with S.S.  I know they are just starting to discuss the 13 colonies, and being that Future Hubby is a S.S. teacher, I asked him for some ideas.  He suggested having the students become very familiar with a map of the United States and what the 13 colonies were.  Being that he taught 8th grade S.S. last year, he had a good idea as to what the kids struggled with then and what he would’ve wanted them to practice more.  I had originally planned to have them look at the map, discuss briefly the Proclamation of 1863, then identify and color the 13 colonies on a worksheet.

Then, a light bulb went off.  Duh–I have iPads.

Out of curiosity, I typed in “13 colonies” in the app search box, and boom:  2 apps that were specific to what I wanted the students to learn showed up.  I was ecstatic! I quickly downloaded JigsawGeo US 13 Original Colonies and Archiving Early America onto their iPads.  They both are wonderful in their own way.  JigsawGeo challenges the students to drag and drop the shape of the state to it’s location on a map in the shortest amount of time.  In addition to this, audio includes a woman’s voice saying the name of each state as it appears.  I really liked that part of the app because the kids were getting a visual along with hearing the name of each state.  This app also has different levels to play, where each level up gets harder. For example, the audio disappears, the clues go away, and the final level gives you the state flag to drag and drop into the correct location.  The students really got into this app.  Best of all, it was free! I kept reminding the students, “Don’t just play the game. Pay close attention to the names of the colonies!” I hoped this would clue them in to the fact that they might need to know some of this information very soon, but it apparently was lost as they continued to play and beat their own score.

Matching each of the 13 colonies to it’s location on the map while simultaneously listening to each colony name being spoken.

The Archiving Early America app offered standard map, satellite, and hybrid views of the 13 colonies.  I really wanted the students to visualize where the 13 colonies were on a United States map as well as where Great Britain was.  The Google Earth-esque component of this app allowed them to do that, giving them a realistic view of those areas.  The students enjoyed zooming in/out of the maps, but were tempted to look for their own houses in the process, so I had to do some redirecting.  This app was also free.  Together, these two apps worked great for their review.

At the end of the class, I asked them to complete an exit slip, which was their ticket out the door.  Their task:  write down as many of the 13 colonies as they could remember.  You should’ve heard all the teeth-sucking and “Aw, man!”s that came out at that point.  Eventually, they all did end up writing down their guesses, with one of my students guessing 6 of the 13 correctly.  Others had 4, some had just 1.  Some of them were correct, some incorrect.

The most interesting guess? New Hamster.  🙂

I was really excited this weekend about getting the students started on their Tech Packets.  I had them all ready to go (well, the Edmodo Scavenger Hunt ready, that is) and was anxious to get it started.  The plan for today was to review the FITCH procedures (thank you, Crystal Kirch!), hand out the worksheet they would be using as a checklist, and then log into edmodo and get started on the scavenger hunt.

I should know by now things never go as planned.

I could tell it was going to be a Manic Monday right off the bat when I logged into my school laptop and went to go pull up the checklist to print off.  My laptop told me it wasn’t happening.  For some reason, I could save it to my desktop and the computer realized it was there, but when I tried to open it, an error popped up telling me it couldn’t be opened.  After my panic mode, I uploaded it into my Google Drive, then printed it off from there.  After another 5 minutes of trying to figure out why my printer wasn’t showing on my laptop, I was able to print off my sheets.  That was a good 15 minutes wasted on just getting my document printed.  Once that happened, though, I breathed a sigh of relief and felt ok about everything once again and knew it was going to be ok.

Wrong-ola.

Before I get into that whole fiasco, let me explain something I used for their warm up today for the first time.  Their first objective was to finish their Science homework from the day before.  I had two students work on that.  For the rest of the class, I had them go to Wonderopolis and use that as their writing prompt.  If you’ve never used Wonderopolis before, I highly recommend it.  Again, I have learning disabled 8th graders who often struggle with writing and lack the motivation to do it.  Wonderopolis  provides a daily question (different every day) with a video, which gets students to think about the topic and then answer it in their journals.  The videos are short and while they range from a wide variety of topics, it helps the students acquire some background knowledge for future use.  Those students who went onto the site seemed to take it in well.

A student using FITCH procedures correctly while watching a video and writing about the given Wonderopolis prompt about wild horses.

Well, we did end up going over FITCH procedures and I explained to them what we were doing.  I even showed them the PowToons video I created to intro the Tech Packets.  You can see that here.  The plus side of that was the kids really seemed to enjoy the video clip, especially when they saw my avatar.  It was a good way to get them motivated about their objective, which was to familiarize themselves with all the edmodo components.  They clicked on the link……..and nothing.

All of their laptops displayed an error that said Internet Explorer was not up to date.  Son of a *****.  I don’t know why I thought the laptops would work fine being that they were district laptops.  If anything, that itself should’ve been the red flag. I was beyond upset, but tried to maintain with the students still in the classroom.  Finally, I told them to just keep their laptops as-is so I could go around after they left class and update their internet for them.  As soon as they left, two things happened: 1. a slew of curse words may or may not have flown out of my mouth and 2. I had a “duh” moment.  They could watch the Scavenger Hunt video playlist on their iPads and do the actual tasks on their laptops.  Problem solved.  For now.  Tomorrow’s another day.  I hope to God things go a little more smoothly tomorrow.  It seems as if it’s just one thing after another going wrong.  I felt as if I had this great idea mapped out just right and that my students’ grades/motivation increase because of it.  But it’s almost impossible for the students to get into the whole storyline/game if the technology doesn’t work.  Everything is based on technology. Again, very frustrating.  Please keep your fingers crossed that tomorrow goes well.  I need all the luck I can get at this point…

I have performed a self-diagnnosis:  I am slightly OCD with a bad case of random freak-outs.

Ok, so maybe that’s not the technical term for it, but I am pretty much a kid in a grown-up’s body.  While this may seem annoying to some people (relatives, co-workers, my children), I think it gives me a pretty good idea of what can go through a middle schooler’s mind during the school day.  For example, I can’t sit still during staff meetings. It’s physically impossible for me.  In addition to this, silence can either drive me insane or it can be my best friend.  Music on when I’m with a group of people, everything off when I’m doing work.  If I’m in a professional development, I like to go at a faster pace, since I’m pretty decent at picking stuff up quickly.  It kills me when I have to sit and wait for others to catch up.  I’d rather they just give me a packet to read or video to watch and I can figure it out on my own.  Knowing this, I try to keep all these factors in mind when I create and give lessons.  WWAD?  What Would Angela Do?

Hence, this blog.  I was fortunate enough be given the opportunity to lead an iPad pilot program for my special ed students, which is a dream come true for me.  I wouldn’t consider myself a technology expert by any means, but it does facinate me (yes, I’m a nerd that way).  I know there are so many programs, apps, and strategies that can be used to help students, especially special ed students, succeed academically.  Who knows? If they improve academically, maybe they’ll improve behaviorally as well.

My plan is to use components of a flipped classroom and a gamified classroom in my Extended Core class (resource class).  This will be the first time ever trying this, and I’ve spent my whole summer researching, planning, and creating videos and blogs.  Do I have everything ready? God, no.  Do I have a general plan of how I would like for things to go? Of course.  Whether they actually go as planned is a whole other story, but let’s hope for the best, shall we? So grab your popcorn…it’s showtime….