Blessed are the rich, for they shall inherit technology…

We all like to comment on how much technology has taken over the lives of the younger generation, how we never had iPhones, laptops, and tablets to entertain us but rather had imaginations. Whether or not you believe that the younger generation are spoilt and also restricted because of their increasing reliance on technology, there is still a divide within the younger generation itself, not just between the older generation and the younger.

 Money still plays a big part in what students have access to and their exposure to new technology. While most schools are encompassing BYOD in their classrooms, the decile, and the income of the parents, will often determine the quality of the technology the students are exposed to. At my first placement I was at a reasonably high decile school which was co-ed and out in the country. Some students had laptops, some students had tablets and smart phones and some students had nothing. The school had computers for the use of the students, interactive whiteboards and what is now considered the “basics” of the technology kit. Due to the mix in technology and non-technology users in the classroom, this could make it difficult to incorporate a whole lot of technology if it was meant to be used on the student’s devices. On placement at a private school has shown me a completely different side of the spectrum. All the students have laptops, smart phones and/or tablets. It is easy to incorporate the use of technology in the classroom because all students have access to it. I think these students are being exposed to more of the new types of technology such as editing tools for Media Studies, interactive websites like Khan Academy, script writing tools and more. 

These students have the advantage over their less wealthy or privileged counterparts in other schools as they are learning to use the tools of the future, whilst their counterparts are often still using those of the present. This presents a problem for both students and teachers as we want to prepare them for their future, and if their future consists of these advanced technological tools and devices, then they should be learning with them and about them. The challenge for us is to come up with innovative ways of bringing a range of different technologies to the classroom and making it accessible for all. Blessed are the less wealthy, for they shall be a challenge for new teachers. 

Storm your Brain with Padlet!

Teacher: “Let’s Brainstorm your ideas on the board!” Class groans. “I’m kidding, that’s too much effort for me, get on Padlet and write it yourself!” Class cheers. Padlet, the brainstorming sensation that’s gripping the nation! No it does not consist of a mini paddle for minions, nor is it a small pad of paper. It is an online collaboration tool (yes I know I love talking about these) where you can set up pages for students to ask their “burning questions” (sorry, had to use it), you can set up a quiz of sorts that they can all participate in, you can upload videos and images and really it’s just a nice collaboration space that everyone can use at the same time! You can share it with anyone and it is a fun tool for students to use. Rather than wasting 10 minutes trying to write every student’s ideas down on the board, missing someone and then wanting them to copy them all down, just get them to go on Padlet and put all their ideas into one ‘document’ so that they can see each other’s, you don’t have to risk your messy board writing and the students are entertained with technology! 

Be sure to read the fine print. Having a tool which allows students to post anonymously can lead to disaster if you haven’t set up the classroom environment to be respectful and appropriate. You need to make sure that the students are able to act responsibly and appropriately when using this tool so that you don’t have a huge quagmire on your hands with parents ringing in to complain about what Johnny said about Timmy on a Padlet. Use the technology to your advantage, not to your detriment. 

Google may have swag, but Microsoft has Sway…

Yo yo my homies,
 I’d like to give a shout,
to my friend Bill Gates,
 for all his work to help us out.

First you’ve got Word,
Saving us from spelling;
Giving us synonyms
To make our words compelling.

Then there’s PowerPoint,
That master in disguise.
Taking notes are easy,
When you’ve got them all on slides.


 Moving onto One Drive,
the Power of the Net.
You won’t lose a thing,
Just upload it, don’t forget!

Google tries to tempt you,
 Its icons on your right.
But to the left, to the left,
Yoncé and Gates shine the light.

Now we’ve got Sway,
Making it profesh.
With designer style flair,
Don’t settle for any less.

Upload your lessons,
A PowerPoint or Word.
Sway will give it swagger,
Street cred will be earned.

So Sway is the new Swag. It’s hip and happening and saving you hours of work. Got a PowerPoint that looks a little dull? Maybe some photos and ideas you want to share? Sway with the wind right over to Sway. It’s an easy to use tool to help spice up your lessons or resources by giving them the animations and effects that you don’t have time to add. Students are away and missing important stuff? Upload your lesson resources, PowerPoints and/or documents onto a Sway doc and if you can’t be bothered to make it look nice and easy to navigate through then Sway will do it for you! Your PowerPoints will look a lot less boring, your popularity among students will increase* and you will have gained technology experience points! You can add videos, links, tweets, images, pretty much anything, to your Sway, click on the emphasis, design, and remix button and voila, you’ve got Sway (better than Swag). You can then save it, copy and paste the link into a class OneNote notebook or wherever you share things with your student and they can access it so long as they have WiFi. So when your students are chilling in Maccas with the free WiFi, they have no excuses not to be looking at your Sway. Sway out.

*Conditions Apply: If you are not a good teacher, the guarantee does not hold.

Kahoot, the lesson saviour since Jesus couldn’t make it

Totally didn’t know what this thing was until a couple of months ago. All I was hearing was “Do a Kahoot with them!”, “I use Kahoot all the time!” and “Kahoot counts as using technology!”. Having participated in a few Kahoots before this second placement I decided it was time to try my luck with the little bugger. For all you amateurs that have no idea what Kahoot is, prepare to be amazed and enthralled as this totally non-amateur enlightens you. 

Kahoot is basically a time filler or waster for teachers to use in lessons. It can take from 5 minutes to an entire lesson and it will guarantee you a place on the “favourite teachers” list and also book you a place in the principal’s office, informing parents why their child is being beaten by someone called madhattersdragon in an underground fight club called Kahoot. Ok it’s really not all that sinister. It is an online multi choice quiz site which allows you to either create your own quiz or cheekily use someone else’s pre-created one and present it to the class as an aspect of a lesson. It is great for reinforcing knowledge, establishing prior knowledge and giving students a break from their essays on why Edward sparkles and why Jacob smells. 

It is also a way to include a bit of that technology stuff in your lessons as students need a device to participate. Students also have a time limit on each question and the slower they are, the more likely they’re gonna get their asparagus whipped by madhattersdragon. Kahoot brings the classroom to life as you can include video segments, audios and pictures to help move your quiz along. You will have no problems with student participation because they actually think it’s a game! That’s right, you can trick them into doing work! If you are not sure what to do to start or end a lesson with a bang, Kahoot it. If your students need to release some pent up energy, Kahoot it. If you have no idea how to make Calculus fun, Kahoot it. Alright it might not work for Calculus but nevertheless it is a fantastically engaging tool which teachers need to take advantage of if you’re going to get some street cred and keep your students of the street. Peace. 

OneNote to rule them all and in the darkness bind them...

The OneNote. If you thought the One Ring was badass then you have not been living. OneNote – the dream collaboration tool for teachers. Ok it’s not the newest tool on the block but when it comes free with the Microsoft 365 package, you’d be a fool not to take note of it. With the growing use of technology in the classroom, OneNote is an excellent tool for teachers to use a collaboration space for students to upload articles, documents, links and so forth. Sick of photocopying a million practice exam papers or just feeling like a greenie? Upload it on OneNote. Students missing out on the lesson? Upload it one OneNote. Want students to bring the resource you handed out yesterday with them? Upload it on OneNote.

                                       

Sure we haven’t got to the stage yet where we don’t need paper but OneNote is a sure as Pikachu way to save some! All of my classes have an OneNote folder which makes planning and teaching a dream compared to having bits of paper floating around the classroom and coming out of students books. The beauty of OneNote is that you have separate folders within the folder, and can add pages within the pages of these folders. The sky is the limit. The Collaboration Space is a great tool to use when you are wanting students to share notes with each other or you have questions that you want the whole class to answer and have those answers displayed to everyone. The Content Library is teacher controlled which means you upload whatever you want and the students aren’t able to change or delete it. So be sure and put those delightful Year 9 photos of them up….I’m kidding, that’s not ok. There are also opportunities for the students to have their own page within the folder which only the teacher can access. This is great for when the students are doing individual work, assessments or internally assessed standards. The teacher is able to comment and give feedback on student work which can sometimes be a lot easier than writing them on each essay. If you are wanting students to do something constructive with the devices that they bring to class EVERY lesson, then get them doing something on OneNote. A delightful learning location.

                                

Video killed the Cranium’s job….or did it?

In my teaching I have used video clips from YouTube and others sources in order to emphasise a point or help enhance students’ understanding about a particular aspect of English. Many may think that watching a bunch of Asian men and a female, prance around shooting tomatoes at trees would in no way help develop a student’s learning. 

Well in fact, clips from Mulan helped to introduce the students to aspects of irony, feminism, metaphor, rhyme and juxtaposition. Now who said that English wasn’t fun?? 

Film and animation is such a big part of this generation’s world that it would be futile to ignore its value and stick with the old and battered ideas about teaching, and especially about teaching English. Keeping a student engaged will inevitably promote their learning, and making a topic relevant or relatable to students is just one way of doing it. Technology has many advantages in teaching and one part of it is in film/video. Using video clips in my teaching has helped to break up the teaching episodes and uses the entertainment value to teach students. From Disney clips to comedy shows, all of these forms of video entertainment that our students have access to and are exposed to on a daily basis more often than not, can be utilised to extend their learning and make teaching that much more exciting than it already is. Sarcasm could have been implied there… SO…. Don’t forget the value of technology that you may view as merely useful for entertainment purposes; this is the stuff that our students love, use and are engaged with, so take advantage of it!

                                                  

BYOD

Now stop right there, this post does not refer to alcohol in any way, shape or form... except for the fact that I just mentioned it then. Moving on. At my school they have a system called BYOD which stands for Bring Your Own Device. Back in my day (not that far back), phones and the like were frowned upon and were for personal use only. The only time you could get away with having them out, was if you had a reliever and convinced them that you needed the calculator on your phone in an English class.

This school (and I am sure many others) encourages students to bring their own digital/technological devices such as smart phones (yep they all have them), iPads/tablets, laptops etc. for use in the classroom. As the technological age is advancing, the education system has finally caught onto the fact that it might be useful for students to know how to use said devices effectively. I walk into a classroom and more often than not, at least 2 students will have their iPads or laptops out ready to partake in the lesson (or so it would seem). Some students work faster and more effectively using these devices rather than pen and paper, and it is also helpful having someone ready to Google a question that the teacher can't answer (we don't know everything ok?!!).

This system has its negatives as well as its positives. Some teachers who have not yet faced the reality of technology taking over the world, do not allow their students to use devices in their class or very minimally. Other teachers have no qualms whatsoever about their students using them in the lesson but it is hard to keep tabs on who is actually using them to good effective and who is playing MiniClip Free Games (I don't know if anyone but me actually still does that). Therein lies the issue of using devices in the classroom. Some students are responsible and will do the work without getting off task. Other students, will abuse the privilege and this is evident when they have done minimal work for the lesson. It is also difficult for teachers to monitor their activity because if they go and hover over students, the students will immediately appear to be doing what they should be. The teacher may not observe the Facebook tab that is still open next to the OneDrive page that they appear to be doing work on.

Consequently the BYOD idea is effective in allowing students to develop practical knowledge about technology. It also appeals to students who struggle with pen and paper, however, many teachers have difficulty in monitoring students' use of their devices and they are not always required in the lesson. Students need to learn how to write with pen and paper regardless especially in exams (NCEA hasn't cottoned onto technology quite yet). An effective way of controlling the BYOD is what my associate does which is to allow the students to use the devices when she says so, and put them away when they are no longer needed. Technology definitely has a place in the learning environment, but it is not always required.

Planning your day? How about plan the year? Use Plan board!

Planning. We’ll be sick of it by the end of our placement but it’s got to be done…apparently. Trying to work out how to plan effectively, whether to use paper and pen, or Word, your brain or Google’s, can be a nightmare at times à the one where you wake up glistening and you’re trapped in your sheets because you decided to become a mermaid.

The nightmare is over…Planboard is where it is at!!! Both of my associates use it to great effect to plan out their lessons, not just for the week but for the entire year!!! It is a handy wee tool which has its own wee calendar thing going on so that if you decide you want to plan ahead (haha), you can go right ahead and do it by clicking the day, week, month or whatever! It’s not the most advanced tool in the technological toolbox, but it’s simple and super easy to use. 

My associates use it to organise their brain, work out what their lesson outcomes are and how they are going to teach that to their students. They list out their ideas for the lesson 1, 2,  3 and just take it from there. It’s adaptable and you can edit any of the lessons at any time so they’re not set in stone. It is a great piece of technology to use in teaching as it is in a safe and secure location, easy to find and great for refreshing your brain as to what you’re going to teach. Planning made simple…not easy, just simple. Maybe a little bit easy… 

Chalk and Cheese

Observing two different teachers and their approaches to technology in their teaching was like a contrast between Google and the hardback Collins Encyclopaedia. My associate for Year 9 English mixes a lot of writing, reading and digital use. The students are studying the film War Horse which is clearly going to make use of digital media. In order to engage the students in the topic, the students were asked to research three questions about the film using the internet. This can be a potentially risky move as students could get off task or take advantage of their internet use. My associate managed this by booking a library computer room where she could observe them as they were researching. 

The students were required to save their answers in Google Docs, so that my associate could see that they had actually done their work. She was able to access the Google Docs page during the activity which meant that she was able to see who was on task and who wasn’t. Using Google Docs was certainly effective as the students’ work was saved to a secure location, the teacher could observe the task without much effort and it would help the students compile their ideas as they worked further into the unit. My associate for this class also liked to make use of the projector and PowerPoint. Her PowerPoint for the lesson showed the task at hand, and she was able to get ideas from the students and draw them on the whiteboard around the PowerPoint slide. She said she likes to incorporate a fair amount of technology in her lessons in order to accommodate for the digital students that come through her class, and also to build the computer literacy skills and research skills of the students. 

       The lesson could not be more different in terms of technology with my other associate. Where a projector was in use in the previous lesson, the whiteboard was blank and ready to take on its rightful position as technological leader… My associate made great use of it, make no mistake, what with brainstorms, listing and statements, the board looked like a colourful scatter graph of words –as colourful as black and white can be. The students used their writing and reading skills but without digital means. My associate said that as they were a Year 11 class, the focus needed to be more on preparing them for their 3 hour exam where they would have to write essays. Tapping away at a keyboard was not going to help their hand with cramping in an exam. 

The students were allowed to use phones or other devices IF they needed to research something briefly but as a whole, my associate preferred to limit that use. She also mentioned that a reason behind board writing over PowerPoints was that the students wanted to see her doing the work as well. They can potentially get resentful of taking notes from a prepared PowerPoint because they see it as the teacher not doing any work – an interesting perspective on my beloved PowerPoints (see previous blog).

Two different teachers, who have two different styles, make different uses of technology. Both have valid reasons behind their technological use which draws attention to the fact that it may be effective for particular students, but not all. It may also depend on the class, the content and the purpose or outcome of the lesson. Use it, don’t abuse it.

The Power of Points

Recently I have used and created PowerPoints in my languages class for both micro-lessons and teachings on particular readings that we were required to do for the class. I enjoy using PowerPoints as they are reasonably straight forward to create and can be effective in getting a point across (no pun intended). When learning a second language, I find it effective to have written and visual cues to establish communication and learning. In my PowerPoints for my micro lessons, I often wrote the headings in French with no English translation, but had images to help the class identify what the headings or words meant. For example, when talking about the French culture I referred to its formality and politeness and put this sentence in the slide: "Le mythe que les français sont impolis". I followed this with this image -

I had the class pick out what they could understand from the sentence (myth, French, impolite) and then combine this with the image to gain an understanding. I found this was an effective way to engage the class and help establish understanding in the target language.

Using PowerPoints are an effective way of incorporating both written and visual language and a way of helping the lesson flow (just go to the next slide!). It does take a little bit of extra time, especially if you want to add transitions for effect so that can be an issue when there are a lot of lessons to plan but otherwise I see them as a great piece of technology to use in teaching. 

Plus, using them means I don't have to expose my terrible board writing skills...