Public Domain Image Search

Students of all ages are often tasked with projects that involve finding and using pictures and digital images from the web. Ensuring that our students are using images that are free to use (what we call "public domain" images) respects individual copyright and creative work - and allows for teachable moments about these themes. Finding public domain images can be limiting, however, so I share with my students the following list in order to maximize their search options.

How to Cite a Textbook

One of my goals this school year is to blog more often, in much smaller chunks. So it begins, a splattering of random information on teaching history, using technology in the classroom, and whatever else.

Submitting Digital Assignments with Google Forms & Screenshots

Google recently updated its Forms to allow embedding of images and videos opens the door for great possibilities with surveys/quizzes/etc. It's especially helpful in one area: using Google Forms to submit student work. (Credit to +Greg Kulowiec for opening my eyes to this!)

My 7th graders completed timelines on major events of the Civil War using the program Timeglider. In order to share them with me, they would need to change the sharing settings and find an obscure link to their timeline. Knowing the confusion caused by this from past experience, I created a simple form where they would only enter two pieces of information:

1. Their name
2. The link to their timeline

In order to get this information, I now used screenshots to show them exactly how to share it correctly. Since the screenshots can be embedded in the survey, it simplifies the process for the students.

The result? Zero questions. Nearly 100% of links correctly submitted within 4 minutes of the start of class. (Realized I was missing one step that through off a few students... always learning!)

To create the images, I simply used my Mac's built-in screenshot feature (command + shift + 3), then cropped and annotated the image using Mac's built-in pdf viewer, Preview.

Since Google Drive also allows for embedding of videos, this would be an easy to way to incorporate screencast video tutorials for the same reason. I use these often to show students how to use the various online tools we utilize in class.

Ukraine: Teaching Perspective through Current Events

As a history teacher, relating the past to the present is integral to my success. If the name of this blog - and it's origin, Faulkner's quote - fail to acknowledge this point, perhaps the project below will.

For our (extremely short) unit on Europe, we will focus our attention on the ever-changing situation in Ukraine. There are a number of reasons for choosing Ukraine besides its relevance to the news, including its connections to the USSR, World Wars, and Russo-European relations, as well as protest movements, imperialism, and democracy in general. For our sake, however, the unraveling crisis/unrest/protest (whatever you prefer to call it) in Ukraine also provides an important opportunity to analyze perspective.

Our project is outlined below. We began by having our 8th graders read background articles on the conflict, as well as articles from sources chosen to intentionally reveal bias. Our students have been assigned groups based on three perspectives - pro-Russian Ukraine, pro-EU Ukraine, and international. Within those groups, they will create content that will ultimately become a website representing the conflict from their group's perspective. Within each group, there will be seven different assignments. While wee are assigning the groups, we are not assigning the specific assignments. This is purposeful so as to allow students to asset map and identify strengths and weaknesses within themselves and the group. The final product will be a digital website created by each group sharing their work - a kind of digital magazine from their perspective.

So what do you think? What are we missing? How would you change it? How could we do it better?

Our hope is that this project can be recycled and tweaked for years to come in order to analyze perspectives around whatever current protest movement is occurring - wherever that may be...

What has me thinking - March

Beg, borrow, and steal quickly became my mantra as a young teacher. And I'm still young. So I'm still stealing. You get the idea. Thanks to +Patrick Larkin  and +Steven Anderson for the idea behind this. I'm going to try sharing (occassionally) a few blog posts, articles, videos, or other media that have me thinking this week. We'll see how it actually turns out. 

6 Lessons from Daniel Pinks #ASCD14 Session by +Joe Mazza
Dan Pink is well known for his research behind motivation (hence the name of his bestseller, "Drive"). His focus at #ASCD14, however, seems to be persuasion. Joe's post highlights key aspects of Pink's keynote that you can use immediately in your day-to-day life as an educator, all geared around motivating those around you and moving the dial forward. Lots of great takeaways - will be referring back to this often. (As someone who did not attend #ASCD14, I still enjoy accessing the great people and content from the conference.)

The Overprotected Kid by Hanna Rosin
The research on the importance of independence, risk-taking, and play experienced during childhood is quite clear, from Rosin's article. This (long) fascinating read is filled with nostalgia for the explorative-nature that childhood used to embody. It raises thoughtful questions about what it means to allow our kids to face challenges - to experience and therefore overcome fear - and how heavy pushes for playground safety in the past 3 decades has yielded little-to-no change in injury outcomes. As an educator, this article validates what I think of as the struggle: letting kids work through an issue on their own, without much intervention, with a healthy amount of failure and challenge. Lots of connections here to the maker movement, as well. Having taught both in public and private schools, I am especially interested in what we consider to be "good" parenting, and how much of that involved letting go.

Teach Kids How to Code And You Give Them A Skill For Life by Nick Morrison
As of September of this year, "England will be the first country in the world to make computer programming a compulsory school subject at all levels." Raises the question: what are we doing here in the US? Lots of interesting references to programs around the country. While addressed far less than it should have, the fact that coding teaches vital life skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and understanding cause-and-effect should be the number one reason for teaching coding in schools. Interested to see how the US responds to the UK's innovative decision.

Reading PSA by 9th graders at the Emma Willard school
The power of the PSA (Public Service Announcement). Such a great example of the creativity our discover find when given the opportunity (or responsibility). We ask our students to create PSAs multiple times during the year, but this video is pushing me to expand my understanding of what one can/should look like.

Rethinking Learning: The 21st Century Learner
This video captures such a critical aspect of education technology use that goes ignored all to often: kids need to be creating. They need to be less of the consumer and instead be the ones using the technology to create (whether it be videos, presentations, games, infographics, timelines, maps, games, fliers, simulators, etc etc etc). The push for edtech in schools is too often focused on how it is changing the teaching and not the learning.

4 Tools for Sharing Your Story Beyond Social Media

How to ensure your story reaches all community members

With more and more schools moving towards digital marketing via social media, many schools are looking for ways to share their story on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Google+ (among others). One important question to consider is "how will community members who are not (yet) using social media access the same content?" Just because a parent is not on Twitter does not mean that they lack interest in the exciting updates we are sharing on social media. With that, here are four tools to help you share your story by reaching those stakeholders who are not engaged through social media.

Tagboard

http://www.tagboard.com

Tagboard acts as a website that curates all the current posts associated with a specific hashtag. If your school has a hashtag (which it should!), you can direct traffic to this site as opposed to forcing community members to pay attention to a specific social media feed. Just like Storify (see below), Tagboard pulls posts from multiple sites (Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Vine, Facebook, and App.net).

Tagboard is automatically updated with the most recent posts for the selected hashtag. As opposed to sending out the link at the end of the week, parents can check the Tagboard throughout their day to see all posts as they are posted. You can even set up the tagboard page with your own cover image, avatar, and description - making it feel like your own website. To check out your school's hashtag, simply type it into tagboard.com, or go to tagboard.com/yourhashtag. Our school's is tagboard.com/trinityNOLA.

One of the best examples of an effective tagboard is PS10 in Brooklyn (http://www.tagboard.com/ps10bk). Led by +Chris Casal (who first introduced me to tagboard on his website), their tagboard includes posts from teachers all over the school, as well as others who use the hashtag #ps10bk. This provides a glimpse into classrooms from all the different grade-levels, plus visitors, parents, administrators, and other community members. The brand of PS10 shines clearly and genuinely through their tagboard.

Tint

https://www.tintup.com/

Tintup - or Tint - is a highly professional, made-for-the-big-screen version of Tagboard. NASDAQ used Tint to display social media posts for their hashtag... on their giant, winding billboard in Times Square, NYC. But schools can find Tint useful, as well. Tint pulls posts from all the major social media outlets using a hashtag (or specific account). You can add up to 2 streams of content for free; for schools, this would allow you to display the school Twitter feed along with the school hashtag as an effective way to share your story.

Tint works great as a display in multiple places - including on a localized TV monitor, embedded on a website or in an email, or viewed on a mobile device. As more schools put up TV displays in their admissions or welcome centers, Tint seems like an obvious choice to share your story and establish your brand for visitors. Additionally, the service could be used to share social media posts on a school's website, no longer limiting the website to carrying just the school's individual Twitter or Facebook feed.

Twitter Fontana

http://twitterfontana.com/

If the constant flow of social media feels overwhelming, Twitter Fontana could be a good way to slow down and focus on content. This service displays posts one at a time, on top of a blank window, allowing viewers to read each post individually. Viewers can even pause the stream, as well. There are a few slight personalization options, which include changing only the color scheme and the transition-effect for each post.

The simplicity of Twitter Fontana is what makes it worth your time, though. Share it via email or display it on a TV monitor to allow community members to engage with your story. The "full screen" option makes Twitter Fontana a great option for large displays. Keep in mind that Twitter Fontana, as the name implies, only includes posts from Twitter (by hashtag, Twitter handle, or general search).

Storify

https://storify.com/

Storify is a platform that collects social media into a singular feed that can be embedded in a website or email. You decide which posts are shown, what order they come in, and which platforms you use. It can pull posts from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, and Flickr. You can even embed a URL to a separate page or promote a specific social media feed; the latter is a way to convert more community stakeholders to follow your feeds, especially when they see the great content they would be able to see in real time. Use Storify as a weekly newsletter to parents about what happened this week at school, or to share all the posts from a recent, exciting event.

Here's a recent example I created for our school at the end of an exciting week. It includes Tweets from our school account as well as teacher accounts, Instagram videos, pictures, and links.

The link to this Storify can easily be shared, as well, for easy access on the web.


These are just four tools to curate and share your social media content. What works best for your school will depend on the content you are displaying, the brand you are trying to convey, and the audience with which you are communicating. How are you using these tools currently? What other tools can schools use to be effective marketers of their brand? What am I missing?? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks!

How do we teach empathy? The 6 Stages of Moral Development

Effective teaching leads students not to an understanding of material but rather a way of thinking, learning, and doing. Character education is no different - we want our students to be better people, not just understand what being good means.

Two weeks ago I introduced Lawrence Kohlberg's 6 Stages of Moral Development. The research has been around for four decades now, and used by educators for just as long. After reading about them in Rafe Esquith's Teach Like Your Hair's On Fire, I was drawn to their alignment with the 'growth mindset' that we hammer home with our students - that they have the power to affect change in themselves, in this case with what kind of a person they are. Taught with a reminder about malleable intelligence, I began down the road with my students with the understanding that we are all on individual levels, joined by our common desire to be better.

The 6 stages are remarkably simple and straightforward.  which is why many of my colleagues seemed intrigued by the experiment I was proposing. Teaching them, however, has not yet made the impact I'm hopeful it will have.

We began with the connection to malleable intelligence (or the 'growth mindset' as we call it) - Want to get stronger? Lift. Want to get smarter? Work harder. Want to become a better person? Think of others. Reviewing the stages, I asked the students to consider what stage they themselves were on, but also to try to identify people in their life who are on the respective stages. I used the following Prezi to give a basic overview:



After our discussion, as part of their homework, I asked the students to self-select their current level and explain why. The responses gave me hope. While determining how to invest them in the stages has and will continue to be tricky, it became clear that my students understood how they could be better. Their responses (or some of my 7th graders), viewed here, provide a glimpse at how my students currently operate.

Many of them are able to articulate that they follow the rules and look for guidelines; that they like to please their parents and others; and generally that, as is common for a 7th grader, they're not always thinking of others over themselves.

In class, I continually reference the 6 stages. "Quiet down" is replaced with a reminder to be considerate of others around you while you're working. When they need another reminder, I'll remind them that those of us operating below a Level 5 need to remember that the rule is to talk quietly for those Level 4s, or that I really like it quiet for the Level 3s. The question then can become, "how many of you need a specific reward or punishment to stay quiet?" My students know that, by 7th grade, they should be beyond Levels 1 and 2, but most importantly, they can see that we're still coming back to the why. Don't be quiet because of a consequence, be quiet because it's the right thing to do.

The next step for us is to find ways of motivating the students to move up. Selling them on "stages of moral development" is not easy, and incentivizing would defeat the purpose. So instead, I'm constantly looking for examples and nonexamples (the latter of which is always easier to come by), and reminding the students to be considerate of others.

What it comes back to, for me, is why are students behaving the way they are. Rafe explains how his students are quiet in the hallways, for example. But unlike my students, they're not quiet because they might get yelled at, or because it's the rule. They're quiet because they understand they might disrupt another class. They understand why being quiet is the respectful, responsible thing to do. They get it.

Have you taught Kohlberg's 6 Stages? Do you have a different way of teaching character? Would love to hear feedback on how to make this really stick with my students, and to help them strive for level 6.

For more information, check out this slideshare:

Lawrence kohlberg's moral development theory from Virginia Sevilla

Skip to 21 minutes to hear Rafe describe the 6 stages.

My links page: http://goo.gl/tqQivr.
6 Stages document: http://goo.gl/wIhh3V.

Why I'm using Mailbox for Gmail

The goal of Mailbox: "Inbox zero"

Disclaimer: I do not do paid endorsements, nor am I paid to write anything on this blog. My posts are my views and nothing else.

Teaching leaves minimal time throughout the day to check email. Most average days go by with barely enough time for a snack, let alone a full meal, or a chance to purge your inbox. So this week I decided to try out the Mailbox app for the first time - an iPhone and iPad app for gmail that leads you to deal with your email every day in a smart, effective, and uber-efficient way. It came highly recommended by a teacher I have great respect for, Dave Crumbine. After my first week using the app, I'm starting my weekend with a grand total of 9 emails between both personal and work accounts - a ridiculously manageable number that pails in comparison to my average weekend load.

With Gmail's new tabs layout, those of us hyper-organized, folder-and-tab loving users found a solution that weeded out the social updates (Facebook, Twitter) and daily deals (Groupon, Gilt) from the more important emails of the day. But instead of ending up with a clear, constant flow of important emails, it allows for a lot of piling up.

Mailbox's key feature is getting you to "Inbox zero." Instead of letting that meaningless sale offer sit in a "Promotions" inbox, Mailbox forces you to read, delay, or trash immediately and easily with a single swipe on your phone. No need to check a box or open the email. Just swipe it directly from your inbox - and it's gone. 

There's a strong argument for getting rid of tabs and folders altogether, and Mailbox demonstrates the beauty of it. The need for organizing your emails is unnecessary in Gmail given its search function (let's not forget where Google's roots are). Mailbox keeps all your old, read emails in Gmail's "All Mail" folder. Swipe across in the Mailbox app, and the green arrow puts the email in the "All Mail" folder immediately. Gone from my inbox, but not gone forever. 

Where Mailbox really nails it is in its ability to let you delay or "put off" emails for a later time. If I get an email in the middle of the day from a parent, I want to respond thoughtfully, after school's out. Swipe the email to the left, and I can choose "later today" to have the email put back in my inbox later that day. This allows me to get to "Inbox 0", without needing to respond immediately to every email all day. Can't deal with it until tomorrow? The weekend? Next week? Next month? Just swipe to the left and choose - it'll stay in your "Later" folder on Gmail until the time is right.

As a teacher, time is your most valuable resource. Instead of spending it slogging through emails, use it to improve your teaching. Mailbox is a great app for those of us who use Gmail. Any ideas for the rest? How do you get to "Inbx zero"?

Taking the 'Do Now' to the next level

Word cloud of responses to our text-to-text connections
with a current events article from the BBC on banning slang in school.

The "Do Now" might have been the first teaching strategy I ever was subject to in teacher-training. While many of the strategies and activities I learned early on have since been left by the wayside, the "Do Now" has remained. It's impact on classroom management cannot go understated - how you start class is how you'll spend class, so the saying goes - as it pushes students to urgently dive into an academic task that gets their mind humming and spirals in and reinforces prior lessons. 

Allowing for students to share, compare, and relate their work on the do now, however, is typically limited to turn-and-talks and share-outs. To take this a step further, I wanted two specific outcomes - to allow students to see their classmates responses to a question on the projector (without getting out of their seat and walking up to the board to read a sticky-note, which could have been effective in their own right), and to examine the answers we developed together as a whole body of students. 

To do this, we used a combination of old-school and new-school: annotate a short article using text codes with paper and pencil, and identify a text-connection to the title of the article on Polleverywhere.

Polleverywhere is a web-based assessment/inquiry program that allows students to respond to a prompt via the web, a smartphone or device, or even via text message. It runs similarly to Socrative, another such assessment program. What makes Polleverywhere really stand out, however, is how it allows the teacher to use answers in more useful ways. Instead of discussing answers individually, we’re able to aggregate answers and analyze at a deeper level. 

For our do now, as the students' answers came rolling in each one appeared on a large screen on my laptop, each with its own box. When most of the class had contributed their thoughts, we looked at the board of answers now being projected for the class to see. Students shared out what connections they made to other students' answers, and we identified themes among all the answers. 

Beyond making connections to each other's answers and identifying new answers to the prompt, we were also able to easily export a word cloud of the entire group's answers via Tagxedo. Many students connected the article (about censoring the use of slang in a school) to our study of Banned Books, specifically with Nat Hentoff's wonderful novel The Day They Came to Arrest the Book. 

Unfortunately, since we were moving into the next activity, I waited until the end of class to create the word cloud - a missed opportunity, in my view. However, there was an obvious next step that we will take on Monday (which would have been made all the more effective had it followed the activity immediately): analyzing why certain words were used by the class more often than others. What connections were classmates making? Which ones were they missing? One wonderful feature of Polleverywhere is the ability to have students simply go back to the same question and answer again given their discussions. Asking students to identify a second connection they had not noticed, or pushing them to fill in the 'missing connection', could have pushed us even further up Bloom's. And all that in just the do now.

One piece of caution here is obviously timing. Do nows are meant - in most classes, on most days - to take up no more than 5 minutes of class time. I believe this number to be a pretty smart limitation. This activity can easily push 20 if you're taking it that far. But who knows, maybe that's exactly where you want to take your lesson.

What do you think of this activity? How would you change it? How are you taking your do nows to the next level?

We can do better

There are so many charlatans in the world of education. They teach for a couple years, come up with a few clever slogans, build their websites, and hit the lecture circuit. In this fast-food society, simple solutions to complex problems are embraced far too often. We can do better. I hope that people... realize that true excellence takes sacrifice, mistakes, and enormous amounts of effort. After all, there are no shortcuts. 

Rafe Esquith  

Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire

Before beginning to discuss the ins and outs of my teaching life through this blog, I'd like to start with Rafe - and a dose of humility. I have much n common with the 'charlatans' described above (minus the clever slogans and lecture circuits), and I can't help but address the inherent complication that arises when non-experts such as myself decide to promote their beliefs and experiences to the world at large. 

As Rafe explains, "true excellence takes sacrifice, mistakes, and enormous amounts of effort", all of which can only be achieved through experience and time - two areas lacking in the 'teach for a while' world I've existed in thus far. My father is a testament to this, a teacher of 40-odd years in the classroom, a man with volumes of sacrifice, mistakes, and effort on his shelf. It is only through the true grind that we actually come to understand - a lesson, I've learned, that applies quite well to our students, of course. 

And yet it's just that reason that I find myself not-so-humbly publishing my (not-so-genius) thoughts to the web. While I feel that my years in the classroom have thus-far given me a small wealth of experience and knowledge to at least fill a short chapter of my father's volumes, I write instead in an effort to be better. Reflecting on my experiences as a young teacher will only push me to be better (as it's been shown time and again the importance of taking the time to reflect). And perhaps in the process, my sacrifices, mistakes, and efforts can benefit others reading it.

"We can do better." I couldn't agree more.