Teaching with Technology

In honor of finals week and first semester ending, you may be guilty of going with the traditional finals presentation. While this always seems like a fantastic idea to me, halfway through the period I'm reminded of what it's like to sit and listen for such an extended period of time. The Tech Tip for this week may not save you this time around, but will prep you for a great end of the year activity. We are mostly familiar with Google Slides (or at the very least PowerPoint), but you may not be familiar with Pecha Kucha! While difficult to pronounce, Pecha Kucha is where presenters create 20 slides that will automatically advance every 20 seconds creating a 6:40 minute presentation. The goal is no more "death by bullet point" and students staring at the screen as they mumble through every slide. Instead slides are more graphically driven and contain very few words to serve as a jumping point for their 20 seconds of engaging storytelling or points for e...

Flipgrid  is a website that allows teachers to create "grids" of short discussion-style questions that students respond to through recorded videos. Each grid is effectively a message board where teachers can pose a question and their students can post video responses from a length of 15 seconds up to 5 minutes that appear in a tiled "grid" display. It's a great tool to truly see what students understand!   This video  does a great job guiding you through the use of Flipgrid.   If you think this is something you'd like to use and would like some assistance, please feel free to ask a tech coach! 

For those of you who didn't know, I taught Social Studies. One of the classes I taught was U.S. History 3070. Once second semester came, I had to find new ways to engage my students, because the course was becoming too much of the same. Let's face it. Despite our best efforts, m ore often than not, our planning can result in something that ends up being very teacher centered, because it's the easiest or we fall into the trap of teaching the same way over and over .  This is where I discovered hyperdocs.  If you've never heard of a hyperdoc, it is a digital document  which  contains a  lesson or series of lessons that is very student focused. The lessons are c ontained in one document  and  students take part on a learning journey.  Here is the  example  I made for my US History Course. I was so happy with the way it turned out.  Here are some other  examples:      Cult of Pedagogy has written...