 Some times with tools in the classroom, you just need something that is multiuse. You want to have that one tool that can fill multiple needs. Maybe it could be a turn in tool, an assessment tool, a creative tool, and so much more. When I think of that, one tool comes to mind: Padlet. It’s always a great one to have in the back of your mind.
Padlet is basically an online cork board. The basic idea behind it is that you get a URL and you can then add post with text, links, photos, and even video. It means that the board can be almost anything you want, and it just takes a little creativity in using it. Some ideas for Padlet include: faking social media, using it as reflection method, turning in projects, and whatever other creative method you can come up with. Padlet is the perfect place to fake social media post because you can put everything in a time order feed and add multimedia through posts. Students could be historical figures! From a turning things in perspective, Padlet allows students to post items and reflect, and it does not have to be just individual reflection. You can use it for peer reflection to! The possibilities of Padlet are endless and just takes some creativity. Padlet is one of those tools you just put in your back pocket and use when necessary. I encourage you to explore it, and see what else you can do with it!
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 We did video last week, so now it’s time to do audio! Audio tools are great creation tools, and usually take a little bit less time than videos to put together. Students can create things like music, commercials, podcasts, and spoken word projects to show what they know. Many students fashion themselves to be future musicians and this is a way for them to start!
The challenge with a music/audio tool usually is that it can be both as complex as you want it while also being simple for simple projects. That perceived complexity is what drives many folks off, but you can use these as simple audio and recording tools. It just takes a little bit of time and effort. For audio tools, I think there are two that stand out and both are from bigger companies so you know their ability to stick around is longer than most. The first of thoise is probably the oldest standing audio tool in schools, GarageBand, and the second, Soundtrap, is owned by one of the biggest music services in the world (Spotify). As you look at both, they have neat features that make them stand out, but for practical school purposes they both have the simple record audio and edit feature. Garageband is one that makes this easy, especially on the iPad. You can just record and cut. It also has other features such as instruments that allow you to go deeper. If you use Garageband, you may want to have some requirements around those features so students don’t get too deep into them. Soundtrap also has the ability to record and cut. You can add other sound pieces into it as well, and it has some great podcast features. The key though is that you can record, cut, and export that sudio which means you can put it anywhere. You could even publish it on podcast platforms like Apple podcast. I think as you think of audio projects, just remember they have some of the same efficacy of video projects, and if you don’t get too deep in the features of a certain tool they can even be a bit simpler. They are an amazing way for kids to show what they know, and I recommend trying them today!  Let’s hit that creativity peace again, and talk about video production. Creativity through video is so easy to do in almost any class. You can do storytelling creatively, and video also allows you to build multiple scenarios that students create to. It really is a powerful creation tool.
I think what video production tool you use depends largely on both the grade level you are using it with and what device you have. For the younger kids, Adobe Express makes a ton of sense. If you have access to an iPad, my favorite tool is called Touchcast Studio, and if you are on a Chromebook one of the best tools out there is likely WeVideo. Adobe Express is great for the younger kids because of its simplicity. The basic idea is that students can create videos based on putting together slides. They can then record voice over with it as well. I have seen students as young as third grade use this one successfully! My favorite tool is actually Touchcast Studio though. It’s a free iPad app that gives you almost every tool you want in video production including greenscreen, titles, and a whiteboard teleprompter. It also has a key aspect called vapps which allows you to add news style graphics with all kinds of multimedia, and that multimedia is even capable. Students can use it to go to other places on the web! Creation on a Chromebook can be a tricky thing. There aren't a lot of direct creative tools, but there are some good ones on the web. Adobe Express can for sure be used in that vein, but you also have WeVideo. With WeVideo, think of it as the next step up if you want to do some video editing. It lets you add video clips that you can merge, trim, and edit in the style of other video editors like iMovie. If video creation becomes a major part of your class and you're limited to Chromebooks, WeVideo is worth a try. No matter what tool you use, video can be a base creation tool on any project. You could have students do things like news broadcasts, interviews, documentaries, music videos, commercials, paper slide videos, and so much more. The possibilities are endless, and you can get creative to include it in any classroom. You could even do storytelling around math concepts. The tools in this blog are just 3 of many. I encourage you to go out and find others if they don’t fit your needs. There are tools that are more general use, and there are tools that were intended for a specific use. They key is that you can repurpose them for whatever you need to do in the classroom. Try adding that video component to your classroom today!  Classrooms should be places of creativity. As you plan how students learn, you can give them conten, but you soon come to a place where students need to show you what you know. Often, this comes in the form of tests and worksheets, but that learning can be deeper. Students can create new videos, animations, audio, stories, games, and so much more. The beauty of this is that it not only gets to the richness of your content but it also brings practice with both soft and future ready skills.
One of those future ready skills that seems like it doesn’t apply to every class but it does is coding. Students can create games, animations, stories, simulations and much more by coding projects that have your subject area content in them. Through those projects students can also practice things like problem solving, critical thinking, resilience, collaboration, and show much more. If I had known the power of coding at the time, I would have used this extensively in my own classroom. I was a Social Studies teacher, and I had students creating things like video, audio projects, and more. Several times, I encountered a student who was adamantly against putting themselves on video, so I had them animate to tell their story. Today, I could easily put them in a coding project to build that animation giving them an additional future ready skill. My favorite coding tool is easy, and it’s Tynker. Nothing comes close because it’s the only tool that gives you a K-12 experience, with multiple coding languages, and physical computing. It also starts incredibly easy for teachers. If you know how to create a classroom and assign lessons, you can make it happen. The free courses are there to be those lessons and get your students started. The key though in this context is what they call the STEM lessons. These are pre-built coding lessons that are in Social Studies, Science, Math, and ELA. They can be all you need to get started, or you can use the DIY library to make your own. Really, the possibilities are endless. Are you a little nervous about allowing coding in your classroom? Does it seem to complex? Well, if you can create a class and assign lessons, it isn’t. The key with all of it is that you can always make it a choice in your classroom, and then you can see the students take off with it without being an expert. It’s truly something anyone can do.  The next tool on our list is one that has been around for a long time, but most teachers don’t know you can use it in the way I am going to describe in this blog. One of the challenges of giving choice in the classroom is it becomes next to impossible without technology. Technology gives you the option to organize and present that choice in ways that make sense, and there is no better tool for that than Symbaloo. When most look at the base level of Symbaloo, they see it as a digital bookmarking service. The basic idea is that you save links in a tile based format, and then you can add the grid almost anywhere. It can be a great avenue for younger students to access sites at this level, and it can even be the homepage for browsers. At that base level, it is still incredibly useful for schools. The level that takes it up a notch is knowing that you can embed Google items onto the grid. This allows you to turn Symbaloo into a digital choice board. You can write different creative project directions in Google Docs, and then you can organize them on the Symbaloo grid as a choice board. That choice board can then be embedded almost anywhere including on your own website and in an LMS. Symbaloo may seem basic, but it does one of the core things technology is great for in the classroom: presenting choice. Making it useful may mean you have to change your mindset on choice, but it turns creativity on its head in your classroom. I recommend trying it today!  Students have to have a place to write. That place to write can be a place to plan projects, do assignments, and create writing projects. It seems so simple, but it is definitely a tool that both every student and every teacher needs. Guess which one is the best in my books? It’s Google Docs. I know that’s simple, but let’s discuss why.
Google Docs at its core is a word processing program. That core function has been around for what seems like forever in things like Microsoft Word and others. Google came in 2006 with a version of word processing that could be shared and collaborated on. That core function is what makes Google Docs so appealing, and they have just built on it from there. If you want to plan a project, Google HyperDocs are an amazing way to do it. The idea is that you plan out activities, questions, and resources for students to work through as they plan their project, and then students can collaborate on that document. The easy share function also means teacher feedback works well. Things like Microsoft Word have tried to come up with this functionality,. but Google still does work a bit better. That easy sharing means that Google Docs is also a great place for student creation. Students could write blogs, essays, letters. Books, pamphlets, and so much more directly on the platform. With Google Docs design it is much easier to do, and it also allows the teachers to provide Google Docs worksheets as needed. Google Docs sounds like such an easy call, but it’s one that is necessary. If you are in one of the fe3w districts today that does not provide it, you can do many things in Microsoft Word. It is just much more tedious. Google also has things like search directly built in to make your life easier, so if you can choose Google, I would.  Video is a powerful tool, and there is a massive library out there of them with YouTube. There is great content on there about history, literature, science, and tutorials on a ton of different subjects. There is also bad content there too. So, how do we use that powerful content? Thankfully, there is a tool that helps us do it called EdPuzzle.
As we start with YouTube, we quickly come to several very specific challenges that EdPuzzle is built to solve. The first is that we need to ensure the content is accurate and viable for a class. We also need to be able to assess what students learn from the video, and we may need to cut down the video to bring the content we want to the surface. EdPuzzle solves all of those. With the teacher initiating the video, and then assigning it to students you are testing the content viability right from the start. The teacher can then use EdPuzzle to add assessments to ensure students are learning. It is even likely that the video may already have some pre-built questions that another teacher has already added. If you want to cut down the video or make it more clear, you can add voiceover and clip the clip. It’s a very simple tool, but it is one that every teacher can use. EdPuzzle also has the added benefit of changing the YouTube URL to an EdPuzzle one. While it may not work specifically in your district, this can be a way to make YouTube work for your students, and if it does not, it’s an easier conversation with your leadership. Give EdPuzzle a try today!  The next thing you need in your teacher tool kit is a way to deliver content. Even though there is a variety of strategies out there to deliver content outside of the teacher, straight up direct instruction is still incredibly valuable. Many students learn better that way, and students who have seen that direct instruction approach through their days of school are so trained in it that changing is incredibly tough. The challenge for any teacher in doing direct instruction is to make it engaging.
Direct instruction is actually the way schooling has gone for years. The teacher takes the content, splits it into chunks, presents it, and the kids take notes on it. Through the years, things have shifted to most of the visual cues with this being in a presentation rather than a chalkboard, but overall things have not changed much. The challenge with this approach though is that lack of engagement. As students take direct instruction, it’s easy to get bored. It’s easy to not really know what you are writing down. It’s easy for things to get tedious. How do we change that? It is possible, but the challenge is that many teachers don’t know how. The two tools in this post work to change that, and they are incredibly easy to implement. It’s just a matter of moving past that initial fear. Nearpod and Pear Deck work to make presentations more interactive. The basic idea behind them is that you take the presentations and put them on the screen in front of the student. Then as the teacher moves the presentation it moves on the students screens as well which makes it inherently more personal. That personalized learning is a huge plus, but what brings up the engagement is all of the activities that you can intersperse in them. You can add things like questions, response boards, website, VR, simulations, and more. It means that as students are taking in the content they also have to apply it making that learning stick just a bit more. Both of these platforms are fairly easy to use. It just takes adding your existing presentation slides to them and then interspersing the activities in between the content. That ease of use means anyone can do it, and it also makes it a great entry point for most teachers (and a good starting place for tech coaches.) Nearpod even has pre existing slides to get you started, and Pear Decks Google slide integration makes converting those decks easy. ` Are there other ways to present content? Yes, but none go as easy as these too. These are both platforms that any teacher can use. They also have the added benefit of being able to run in a student mode at home. I highly recommend adding one of them to your toolkit!  It’s time for us to start a new series since the school year is back in, and I thought what better one then building the ultimate teacher tool kit. The whole idea here is to give you 12 tools (or sets if two are popular), that you need to get started in making your class an amazing, creative, interactive place, and the first one in the series varies widely by what your district requires. That requirement brings mixed emotions in my eyes, but we all know teachers need a digital platform so let's talk about it.
Districts know digital platforms are important. Most have either purchased one or aligned with one from the major players in technology (Google, Microsoft.) I however would prefer to build my own website. Why would I want to do that? Well to start, I was doing this before LMS systems were really a thing. I had to design my own out of pure necessity. That necessity brought possibilities though. When I designed my own website, I could also design the flow and learning experience which meant I could be creative with it. It was what drove my ability to create a historical newsroom as my class experience. It could have a theme. From a website standpoint, I think there are two ways to go. You can go all in on something like Weebly or you can use something like Google sites. I personally prefer Weebly and have been using it for years. I just think it is a little more feature heavy than something Google Sites and it gives me that added flexibility. They are however discontinuing their education version so you would need to build it in the commercial version. If that makes you nervous, just use Google Sites which is available in every school district that has Google enabled. As you think about a website, also think about how building one can be a great activity for students, Google Site is free available to the students too. This allows you to design scenarios where they build the site of a literary, historical, or scientific organization to show what they know in your class. You could also make that organization a little more imaginary if you teach something abstract like math. Building your own site may be next to impossible in your district though. They may have spent a ton of money on something like Canvas or Schoology, and they expect you to use it. If that’s the case, you could always build a site that has supplemental learning journeys in your class or you could be extremely careful with organization to send students down a path. For example, topics in Google Classroom could be used creatively to tell kids where to go. Whether it’s a website or an LMS, in the long run does not matter. You just need to come up with a creative organization structure that can make your classroom expansive and creative. Your site or LMS is the base for that, and that’s why it is the first tool on our list. The next one will dive straight into delivering content!  Innovation is the lifeblood of the business world and American society as a whole. It’s what keeps the US ahead of the competition and makes business both grow and change. The problem is we don’t see it in school enough, and one of the ways we can make US schools different is to add innovation there. There are schools and models that are doing it, we just have to nurture them, duplicate them, and help them grow.
As you look at innovative practice, this definition is incredibly broad, and it is generally easy to move anything into the bucket of innovative practice even though it may not be. Just think of STEM schools. While some are doing it well, there are others who take that title because they pass every student through a STEM class not because all of their teachers are participating. When we think of these innovative life changing practices, they should be an all school movement. It should permeate what every class is doing. There is an easy way to start here too. Just make creation the overarching theme. Can students create to show what they know? This should be the question that comes up in every class because it can drive that innovation. That creative attitude can come in different shapes and forms, but as long as it’s there you know the students are doing something different and what they are creating will often be an innovative way of publishing your standard content. So, what can this look like? It could be in the models of PBL, cross curricular projects, or just designing great scenarios that are up to you as the teacher. It’s whatever brings creation to the classroom, and you could even mix strategies just by giving students the choice in creating items to show what they know. By including these strategies, you can also give students practice in future ready skills like coding and video production. Bringing those practices to any class is truly innovative. From a school perspective, this can get even more creative because the idea of a standards based content does not necessarily apply. You can add innovative practices that support what teachers are doing and that whole idea of creativity, but they can be more creative ways to build students up to where you want them to go. Things like maker spaces, internships, speciality labs, and anything else that fits both the school persona and that creativity atmosphere are incredibly valuable. Almost all of them can also be funded by grants or reorienting a school to that specific purpose. No matter what you do, the key is imagination and creativity. If you are implementing a schedule and a mindset where students have to be creative you are innovating. If you are Imagining innovative approaches for the school and strategies, you are innovating. Students deserve that innovation because it will be what prepares them best for the future, and hopefully you can give them some future ready skills along the way. |
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