technology

Tips on using Google Docs in the classroom

Posted on by Mark Isero

 Google Docs is great. It revolutionized my teaching this year and improved my students’ writing. Here’s what I learned — and some tips.

1. All Google Docs, all the way.
Some teachers don’t want to be pushy and therefore allow a hybrid system. They say: “Sure, go ahead, use Microsoft Word if you want to. It’s OK for you to email me your essays.” This is a big mistake. Go big on Google Docs, and don’t let the naysayers get to you.

2. Shared folders, not shared documents.
The typical way that people share on Google Docs is document by document. The better way is to set up a shared folder for each of your students. When the student wants to submit her essay to you, all she needs to do is drag her document into her shared folder, and voilà, you have it.

Why is this better? A few reasons: (1) A shared folder organizes a student’s body of work for the entire class, (2) Students remember to drag their document more often than they remember to share it, (3) It expedites a revision team. This year, my students had an online writing mentor and a peer editor. Share the folder to those people, and they get each essay, too.

3. Insist on naming conventions.
Unless you tell your students how to name their documents, you’ll get a lot of essays titled “Untitled.” Some teachers insist on including period numbers, first and last names, and assignment title. I’m not a stickler for the specific content of a document’s name, but I do make sure my students learn my system, down to the spacing and the colons. Mine was Assignment: FirstName LastName. Even though I thought it was fairly easy, it took nearly five weeks for students to get things perfect, but I never backed down. Precision, after all, is key.

4. Make comments, don’t highlight.
Some teachers use the highlighter tool to identify grammar mistakes and misspellings, or they type directly on the essay using a different font color. I preferred making all my marks by inserting comments. The keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-Alt-M) came in handy, and I found that students liked it when I didn’t physically write on their paper. It was easier for them to manage.

5. The most important part is reflection.
Google Docs is excellent for collaboration and revision, but students don’t improve unless they reflect on how they’ve grown. That’s why it’s crucial to insert into the process time and space for reflection. I had students copy and paste a one-page template at the end of each essay, which served not just as a record of their growth but also as a place for me to grade their final paper. This was helpful but not necessary. After all, you could just have students insert a comment at the end of their paper, to which you could respond.

I hope those tips are helpful. I plan on doing more posts about my experiences using Google Docs this year. More than any other tool, Google Docs transformed teaching and learning in my classroom. 

teaching

Goodbye, teaching (at least for now)

Posted on by Mark Isero

 I got my first teaching position when I was 5. My bedroom was my classroom. My parents furnished a blackboard and some chalk. My grandmother was my first student. I taught her about George Washington and about how the sun rises and sets every day.

More than 30 years later, I said goodbye to teaching, at least for now, when I congratulated my students at their graduation last month.

A few days before that was my last English class, a perfect 85 minutes of publication, reflection, celebration — and an excerpt from Frankenstein, one of my favorites.

I’ve been a teacher all my life, and it’s been my only job the past 15 years. Although teaching has never come easily for me, I’ll miss my 1,000+ students, and I’ll miss the bustle of the classroom. There are few jobs as fun and as important.

Next year, my focus will be on reading and helping teachers focus on literacy. Ninth grade will be the heart. As an instructional coach, I’ll still be in classrooms and work with students, but they won’t be mine.

Still, I’m looking forward to a year of deep thinking about a topic so critical to urban high school teachers. Without the constant pressures of the classroom, my vision for reading (and my crazy projects!) may develop more quickly. Plus, it’ll be fun to bounce ideas off other teachers, as I’ve done at my last great school; the best professional development, after all, comes with collegiality.

Yes, I’m a bit scared that I’ll lose my teaching edge. But I’m confident that I’ll be back in the classroom soon enough, ready for Round Two.

And please don’t worry, loyal readers: Iserotope will live on. 

technology

5 ways to help your students post to your class blog

Posted on by Mark Isero

favicon I think all teachers should run a class blog. Here’s mine, iseroma.com. I like it. Please check it out and let me know what you think!

Class blogs offer students a place to publish their work and their thoughts. They also build classroom community. Some teachers prefer setting up individual blogs for each of their students, but I like class blogs because they make learning a shared experience.

But for a class blog to be successful, students must find it easy and fun to post to it. Otherwise, it’s just another ordinary teacher blog.

I’ve been investigating some ways to help my students post to our class blog. Here are my current thoughts:

1. Allow students to post without moderation.
Before this year, I moderated my students’ posts before they got published. This was to make sure my students would not post inappropriate content. But I changed my mind this year and decided to trust my students. The result: Many more posts, and no problems whatsoever (besides a few grammar mistakes). My students took the space seriously even when they were being silly. They even began to do a good job categorizing and tagging their posts.

To make this change, all I had to do was upgrade my students’ user roles in WordPress to “author” instead of “collaborator.”

2. Encourage students to tweet about the class.
Sometimes, writing a post just takes too much time. For quicker communication, Twitter is better. I set up a Twitter widget on the class blog’s sidebar that shows tweets that include #iseroma. Although not all of my students tweet, those who do like sharing their thoughts this way. Twitter is great for exit tickets, quick questions, and random thoughts. In retrospect, I could have improved this year’s nightly texting assignment had I used Twitter. In short, it’s a great way to build classroom community.

3. Make podcasting simple and easy.
Audio is great on blogs, and students love to create podcasts and to listen to their peers, but usually, audio is a pain in the butt. After all, who wants to record and then upload and then post? That’s just too many steps. Even though cell phones and services like Google Voice have made audio easier in the classroom, I’ve never considered making podcasting a significant part of my class blog.

Until now. Luckily, my friend and loyal Iserotope reader Wil suggested that I check out ipadio. Just like Google Voice, ipadio lets students record their voice the easy way: by calling a phone number, instead of messing with their own audio equipment. But here’s where it gets better: You can configure your ipadio settings so all podcasts get posted automatically to your website.

That means students can program the ipadio number into their phone and podcast directly to iseroma.com whenever they like. I’m going to try this feature out this September when my students go off to college.

4. Make video simple and easy.
Even better than audio is video. But uploading video to a blog is similarly complicated. But I’m working on a solution where students can automatically post videos from their phone.

The first step is having a shared YouTube account. That’s the easy part. With a common YouTube account, students can record a video and upload it to the class’s YouTube channel. If they have a smartphone, this process can happen without plugging the phone into a computer.

The next step is uploading the video from YouTube to WordPress. I found a plugin called YouTube Posts that makes the process simple. You can configure your settings so that the plugin automatically uploads videos from a designated YouTube account. It’s not perfect — you can’t upload huge video files, and you have to be logged in for the plugin to work — but it beats having to upload your students’ videos manually, one by one.

5. Encourage your students to post from their phones.
WordPress has excellent and free apps on iPhone and Android that allow users to log in to their blogs, write posts and comments, and add images and video. For many students, posting by phone is quicker than going to a computer. All they have to do is run the app, log in, and add a post. They can also post directly from their camera app. Nice and simple.

Next steps: I’m still trying to figure out a way for students to upload large numbers of photos directly to my blog. I could solve this problem by having a shared Picasa or Flickr account and then syncing it with a WordPress plugin, but they slow down my site. Too bad NextGEN Gallery, which I use, does not allow for public uploading of multiple images. If you have ideas about how I can allow students (in a safe way, with a password) to upload images from the front end, please let me know! favicon

reading

Research: Reading changes who we are

Posted on by Mark Isero

favicon We’ve all heard the clichés about reading — that it takes us places, that it broadens our horizons, that it deepens the self.

But researchers at Ohio State University suggest that reading actually changes who we are. In a recent article in The Atlantic Mobile, “How Good Books Can Change You,” Neil Wagner summarizes the study and the idea of “experience-taking.”

According to the researchers, when we read a book, especially if it’s in first person, we identify with the main character and allow the character’s experiences to influence our own.

If the main character is different from us, reading helps us build a virtual relationship across difference, which strengthens our empathy in real life. One of the Ohio State studies, in fact, demonstrated that white people became less racist when reading about an African American character. Similarly, reading about a gay character led people to have less homophobic views toward gay people.

Yes, it’s just one study (of 82 college undergraduates), but it’s a great start in documenting how reading impacts us. This idea of experience taking makes sense to me. After all, when my students talk about characters in a Socratic seminar, it’s as if they’re real. And sometimes, my students are transformed. That’s what reading a good book does. favicon

reading/technology

Findings: A great tool for teachers and students

Posted on by Mark Isero

favicon Findings is a relatively new service that allows you to capture text clips from the Internet or your Kindle and then share them with others.

It’s not exactly like any other service I’ve seen, and because of its focus on digital text (rather than video or images), I think it could be great for English teachers and students.

I love Findings because it replicates the idea of a commonplace book, where you copy down and save little tidbits from all the books you’ve read. The only difference is that it’s online and you can share your tidbits with others.

A bit more about Findings:

1. You install a bookmarklet and then can clip text highlights from the web. Or you can go to your Amazon highlights at kindle.amazon.com and import them using your Findings button.

2. The user interface is beautiful. Similar to the folks at Readability, the people at Findings care about typeface.

3. You can search for clips, or you can follow other people’s clips. If you like a clip, you can refind it and call it your own. Plus, you can comment on other people’s clips.

* * *

Although I am not quick to take on additional Web 2.0 tools, I like Findings a lot, and I think it would be beneficial for teachers and students.

Nonfiction and current events: Everyone in the class could post clips from various articles. Then, students could participate in discussions about the highlights. Because Findings forces the user to clip fairly short excerpts of text, there’s a good chance that conversations would stay text-based rather than off-topic.

Fiction: Findings would work perfectly in classes that have Kindles. The teacher could ask the students to find strong examples of characterization, personification, or anything else. Students can highlight and make notes in their Kindles (Findings captures the notes, too), and before class the next day, the teacher could import those excerpts for discussion in the classroom.

* * *

Sure, as a teacher, you can use other tools for a similar effect. After all, Amazon does collect all your notes and highlights. But its interface is ugly and unorganized. Some teachers use Diigo or Evernote with their students to collect Internet clips and annotations, and while I’m a huge fan of those services, they’re just too work to get set up with students, unless they’re a significant part of your curriculum. Finally, I suppose you could use Twitter or Facebook, but those services usually are not allowed by schools’ filters.

Therefore, I think I might explore Findings next year. Because it requires students to install a bookmarklet, it’s not ideal, but especially if students share one common account (instead of requiring their own), I think it could be a great tool.

If you’re interested, go check Findings out and let me know what you think. Do you think it’s worth exploring more? favicon