Happy Halloween! 4 Resources to Help You Make it Through the Week

For teachers, Halloween is often filled with excitement and fun, but also anxiety about what to do with a whole room full of students who are definitely thinking way more about trick-or-treating than they are about anything you're teaching. Here are 4 resources that can help pass the time until the big day! They are ordered from "most academic" (in my opinion) to "least academic."

1. Halloween Articles and Texts Sets from Newsela

Newsela is a website that provides high-interest news articles to students. Teachers love Newsela because they can level articles according to students' reading needs.

2. Halloween Lessons on Nearpod 

Nearpod is a very popular multimedia presentation tool. With a paid subscription (either individual or through a school license), you can access these pre-made lessons having to do with math, history, and ELA.

3. Halloween Kahoot Trivia

Kahoot has an extensive list of Halloween-themed trivia games.

4. Halloween Mountain Games from Dimension's Edge

Halloween Hangman is an all-time classic, and now they have even more fun games to offer! This site does use Adobe Flash, so if you are using an iPad, you will need a browser like Puffin to play them.



Whatever you decide to do in those tricky days leading up to Halloween - good luck to you!

5 Tech Tools that Are Just So Random

Nothing generates creativity like randomness! Mouse pad! Tire swing! Broccoli! Delaware!

Here are five websites dealing in randomness that help teachers (and students) think creatively and organize efficiently:

1. Random Emoji Generator

This simple site is filled with potential for creative applications in a variety of subjects. Think about a writing exercise in which students had to incorporate the list of emojis successively into their stories! Perhaps students could complete an art assignment in which they needed to depict of scene involving random emojis. Maybe in an improv, acting, or movement class, students physically embodied those emojis. The great thing about this too is that it was created by a teacher who had the good sense to filter out the questionable emojis, like the happy poop one. Sorry, kids.

2. Random Name Generator

Do your students need a character name for an upcoming story, movie, or script that they're creating? Look no further than this random name generator. Older students can certainly utilize the "generate life story" option, in which other facts about a character are created, like their birthday, age, location, blood type, and cause of death (these are not graphic, but try it out just to see if it will work for your students...).

3. Random Group Maker

A few years ago I would play an online game with my students that happened to randomly group them into teams. I couldn't change this feature, and initially I was nervous that I would need to give up the control I desperately clung to while I tried to pre-make teams that were balanced and conflict-free. Of course, there were inevitably conflicts and "stacked" teams, and the students often protested my motives in making the teams I did. When the computer randomly sorted the teams, I saw that many conflicts disappeared. There was no one responsible for grouping the team together, and no one felt left out. A random grouper works well for games or activities that are fairly short in nature and those that have the potential for many different groups, so if a team doesn't work out so well, it's not a big deal.

4. Random Name Picker

Like the Random Group Maker, the Random Name Picker neutralizes the often onerous teacher task of picking students to do something. There are endless ways to apply this tool, and chances are that if you're a teacher and you're reading this, you've thought of at least a few already. This name picker has a suspenseful carnival-spinner-type interface that makes it especially exciting.

5. More Random Lists

This site is dedicated to all things random. Here you can find random generators of all kinds, such as the random animal generator, the random word generator, and the random NBA team generator. This site has great potential for creative writing endeavors. It could also be used to get your students thinking about how to connect seemingly different things and building arguments. Be aware that this is a fairly ad-laden site, and you will need to sift through some of them that seem like part of the site to get to the actual content.

Have any more ideas about random generators that would be of use in an educational setting? Leave a comment below.

How Can Your Students Become Digital Citizen Superheros? Start this Week!

October 15-19, 2018 is Digital Citizenship Week!

This week is a good time for teachers to reflect upon their teaching of digital citizenship and how the topic affect them and their students. 

Check out this page and video from Common Sense Media, as well as the week's official webpage from the California Department of Education. Their Digital Citizenship Week Plan contains some useful resources and ideas.

Have some time to listen to a podcast during your morning or afternoon commute? Check out Vicki Davis's 10-Minute Teacher podcast. In this episode, she discusses 5 ways to teach Digital Citizenship, as well as her "9 Key P's":



Along with Common Sense Media's curriculum, both BrainPOP and Teaching Tolerance also have great lesson resources on the subject.

But why should we devote so much time and effort into teaching students about Digital Citizenship? Check out these eye-opening statistics from Common Sense Media:

 

Among 0- to 8-year-olds, 98% live in a household with a mobile device (2017).

The average 0- to 8-year-old spends 48 minutes of time on a mobile device. This is up from 15 minutes in 2013 and 5 minutes in 2011 (2017).

70% of teens (13-17 year-olds) report using social media many times a day (2018).

74% of teens believe that tech companies manipulate users to spend more time on social media platforms (2018).

85% of parents say that monitoring their children's media use is important for their children's safety (2016).

41% of parents say that they check their children's devices and social media accounts "always" or "most of the time" (2016).

44% of kids (age 10 to 18) feel that they can tell fake news stories from real ones. 31% of kids who shared a news story online in the last 6 months say they shared a news story that they later found out was wrong or inaccurate (2017).

Happy Teaching!

A Way for Students to Actually Understand Your Feedback

As a former English teacher, I have spent hour upon hour writing feedback on students' work and papers. There was a point there where I'd set myself up at my desk at home with a cup of tea or coffee and my favorite purple felt-tip pen. I'd end my comments with smiley faces with the hope that students would see my good intentions in my constructive criticism and be motivated to make the changes that I suggested. I hate to say it, but I would take it a little personally when students did not read my feedback, let alone make actual changes to their work according to my suggestions.

I should also mention that I work in a school for students with dyslexia, and therefore reading and writing are a challenge for most. Perhaps giving students a paragraph of handwritten feedback wasn't the best way to communicate with them in a meaningful way. But then, time just didn't allow for me to have an individual conference with every students every time a big writing assignment came around. What was I to do?

Technology is a beautiful thing. It allows teachers to be in many places at one time in meaningful ways. If I was still teaching students how to write essays today, I would definitely use more tools that allow me to give video feedback to students. Research is starting to prove that video messages are more effective that written ones because they carry more nonverbal cues, such as tone of voice and facial expressions. Check out this article from KQED's MindShift blog about the effectiveness of video feedback. You can also read the article on The Hechinger Report.

There are many simple and free tools that can help with video, or even audio, feedback. The middle school teachers at my school use a workflow iPad app called Showbie. Within the app, teachers can leave voice comments on students' work with the click of a button. Teachers can also use the screen recording feature (available in iOS 11 or higher) on their iPads to give video feedback as well. You can find it in the menu bar that pops up when you swipe up from the bottom of the screen.

On computers, teachers can also use free online tools like Screencast-O-Matic or Screencastify for the Chrome browser to create simple and shareable videos quickly.

Whatever the tool, it's important that teachers make sure that video feedback stays manageable. Develop an efficient system for sharing video files with students and make sure that you're okay with recording okay-quality videos that won't win you any Golden Globes. As the saying goes, perfect is the enemy of the good.

Trying out video feedback? Leave a comment below. Bonus: Send me some video feedback about video feedback! Whoa!