Summer Reading

This summer I made it one of my goals to read all the PD books that I've been wanting to read but just haven't had the time during the school year.  I had heard a lot of good things about these books, and they have not disappointed!  Here's a brief summary of each one that I read this summer:

The Classroom Chef  by John Stevens and Matt Vaudrey

In my opinion, this was the best PD book I've read in a long time!  It was full of inspiring ideas that I can't wait to put into action.  While it's geared towards math classes, I think anyone could apply this to their content area as well.  John and Matt use the cooking analogy to help teachers spice up their lessons.  They give tons of great ideas from "Preparing the Kitchen" and "Setting the Table", to "Appetizers", "Entrees", "Side Dishes", "Desserts", and even "The Bill", "Reviews" and "Take-Home Containers".
How many lessons do we all have that are just plain boring and unmotivating?  Pick one, and make it more exciting for your students with these recipes for success!

Total Participation Techniques  by Persida Himmele and William Himmele

This book is loaded with ideas to get each and every one of your students involved.  No longer will they sit there like bumps on a log waiting for someone else to answer your question!  The shy kids as well as the "answer hogs" (you know, the kids who wants to shout out the answer to every question you ask) will have their own say in the conversations with these TPTs.  What I'm planning on doing is putting a little technology spin on these great ideas since my students have 1:1 Chromebooks.  I've set up a "Template" class in Google Classroom where I can "reuse" my different question types easily.  I have the standard multiple choice, true/false, short answer, and likert scale questions ready to go whenever I need them.

Mathematical Mindsets  by Jo Boaler

I got to hear Jo Boaler speak at NTCM 2015 and was hooked on the idea of helping my students develop a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset.  Her latest book is filled with ideas on how to do just that.  While I love hearing the science behind what happens in your brain when you make a mistake, having the classroom vignettes was invaluable to help me figure out how to help my student (and collegues!) develop a growth mindset.  I want my students to change the way they look at math - start to enjoy it and have confidence in themselves.

Making Thinking Visible  by Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison

Metacognition has been a big buzz word for quite a while.  But besides students 'thinking about their thinking', teachers need to know what they're thinking too!  This book was filled with strategies (they call them routines) to help make students' thinking visible.  There are thinking routines, routines for introducing and exploring ideas, routines for synthesizing and organizing ideas, and routines for digging deeper into ideas. This is so important in order to know where your students are at and whether you can move on or have to reteach.  The authors talk a lot about 'understanding' and that we need to make sure our students are not just memorizing information for a test only to be forgotten a week or so later.  They need to deeply understand concepts so they can apply what they'e learned to other situations.

Teaching Student-Centered Mathematics  by John A. Van de Walle, Jennifer M. Bay-Williams, Lou Ann H. Lovin, and Karen S. Karp

[I just started this one - I'll update this post when I'm done to let you know how it was.  I've had a lot of people recommend this one to me.  I wanted to get the rest of the reviews out to everyone while there's still a few weeks left of summer break.]





I highly recommend all of these great books!  Try to squeeze in a little time each day to get in some PD in what's left of the summer!

Chromebook Training Week

Photo via us.acer.com

If you've read any of my recent blog posts, you'll know my district will have 1:1 Chromebooks (Acer C720P's) for grades 7 through 11 this coming school year.  To prepare the teachers for this new adventure, we were given the opportunity to participate in four days of Chromebook training, with teachers from our district leading the sessions.  Whenever I attend a workshop or conference, I like to reflect on what I have learned, and I'm happy when I can walk away with having learned one new valuable idea.  The purpose of this post is to do just that, and share my favorites with you, my readers.


All attendees met in a large group for each day's opening session, then we broke out into individual sessions based on experience and interest.  After our lunch break, we met with our content area colleagues to discuss how we can apply our new technology to our curriculum.  We ended the day back in the large group to answer any questions from the day.  Here's the overview of each of the days' sessions I attended and what I feel was the best thing I learned on each day.


Day 1

Photo via www.bettshow.com

The sessions I attended on day 1 included Hapara, Google Add-ons, and Best Practices for Google Docs.  I'm really intrigued by Hapara and I'm excited to be able to try it out with my new group of students in September.  For those of you who aren't familiar with Hapara, it's a Google Apps for Education add-on that consists of two components, Teacher Dashboard and Remote Control.  Teacher Dashboard allows for workflow management and monitoring of students' activity.  Remote Control gives teachers the power to remotely open or close tabs on students' Chromebooks as needed.  With the new Google Classroom being release August 11th, just in time for the new school year, it will be interesting to see if it can be a replacement for the Teacher Dashboard portion of Hapara or if they will just work well together.  I plan on comparing the capabilities of the two applications by using Classroom with one of my Pre-Algebra classes, and Teacher Dashboard with my other Pre-Algebra class.  I still plan on using Remote Control for both classes since Classroom does not have that functionality (yet).


Day 2

Photo via techsmith.com

On day 2, I attended a session on Flubaroo, another on Socrative, and one of screencasting with TechSmith's Snagit and Movenote.  I was already familiar with the first two applications, but Snagit is what caught my attention on this day.  I have been using the iPad app Explain Everything to make videos for my students (and for my students to make their own videos as well).  While I absolutely love Explain Everything, sometimes I need to do a screencast of something on the Chromebooks, so Snagit will be my go-to app for this purpose.


Day 3

My "Do Now" mini-NPP

Day 3 was all about tools for our content areas (math for me), differentiation, and sharing learning.  My math team worked with Nearpod.  Since I had experience with it, I demonstrated how to use it.  I had the other teachers take the student role so they could see how it will look to our students.  They absolutely loved the "Draw It" feature, especially since our Chromebooks are touch screen!  I shared my favorite stylus with them (TruGlide) and one of my team jumped onto Amazon right away to order one!

Photo via lynktec.com

 After I showed them how to create a quick Nearpod Presentation (NPP), we brainstormed how to use "mini-NPP"s for our "Do Now"s, homework checks, and even exit tickets (thank you to Cathy Yenca for that great idea!).  I have used Nearpod for full presentations in the past, but never for these shorter snapshots of learning.  What made us decide to use Nearpod over some of the other tools we tried was the "Draw It" feature and the fact that we can save the data from each session.  We also liked InfuseLearning, except that we couldn't use the draw feature during a pre-made quiz.


Day 4

Photo via blogger.com

On the final day, I attended sessions on backchanneling, Google Sites and Google groups, and blogging.  We played around with TodaysMeet for backchanneling, which had my wheels spinning trying to figure out how I could use this tool in my math classes.  (Any ideas? Please let me know!)  But the most exciting idea I took away from this day was having my students using Blogger for their math journaling.  I had set up a Google Sites with the announcement style pages for my students to blog and keep all their blogs connected under one site to make it easier to monitor all of them.  But during the blogging session I found out that Hapara will monitor my students' posts and comments as long as they use Blogger as their blogging tool.  This is definitely the way I will go.  Now I just have to plan a digital citizenship/how to blog lesson.  I'm excited to try this new way to improve my students' writing about math.


On the last day of training, everyone who didn't already have a Twitter account signed up for one.  Eisenhower Middle School and Roxbury High School teachers will be busy tweeting now!  All-in-all, the week of Chromebook training was terrific!  I found a new tool to experiment with during each of the four days.  As much as I am enjoying my last few weeks of summer break, I look forward to my new "Tech Adventures in a Middle School Math Class" in September!

PD via FaceTime

Yesterday, our wonderful technology teacher, Ruth Davis, who has been attending my professional development class, approached me and asked if I would be open to going a little more high tech today for my class. I asked her what she had in mind. She explained that she absolutely had to be at home at 3:30, but didn't want to miss my class, so she asked if I would be opened to having her FaceTime into the class. "Of course, I would love to try that!" was my reply.


We did have some connectivity issues - we lost connection approximately every 15 minutes for some reason - but overall we feel it was very successful. She was able to see my presentation and me on her Mac. She also had the slides for my presentation which were on my website open so she could scan the QR codes and see the slides better. It was like she was in the room with us - everyone was able to interact with her - she asked some questions, gave some input on certain topics to the rest of the class, and we even got to hear her dog drinking water from his bowl!

Ruth and I spoke this morning about how well we thought it went, and about the possibilities this could lead to for our district's professional development. We are a Google Apps for Education school, but because this is our first year, the district hasn't opened up to us all of the vast options that GAFE offer, such as being able to participate in a Google Hangout. This would be a great improvement over using FaceTime. We could have a professional development session recorded for others to view at a later time if they could not participate live, and participants who had to be elsewhere could still participate in the live sessions.

If anyone else has used this concept of remote professional development, whether with FaceTime, Google Hangouts, or something else, we would love to hear about your experience. Please let us know!