The Bulldog's Adventure

The Bulldog's Adventure

Back in May 2017, I read a post by teacher Lisa Davis on Google+. She was seeking teachers who would be interested in participating in her "Bulldog's Adventure" project/activity.  You may ask yourself, what is Google+?  It is a Google-based social networking platform where people, including thousands of teachers worldwide, connect, share ideas and begin their collaboration with others.

I contacted Lisa and asked for more detail in regards to her project.  After reading her response, her project reminded me of the "Flat Stanley" projects our 3rd-grade teachers and students at Ballard have been doing for many years.  The thing I liked about the Bulldog's Adventure was that it was going to allow our students to see this similar project from a different point of view.  Instead of being the person who begins the project, students are participating and collaborating with another class to help them complete their project. At the same time, they also learn about their own state and other places around the world.

The month of May can be, let me rephrase that, the month of May is one of the busiest months for a classroom teacher, yet I went out on a limb and wanted to share this idea with our Ballard teachers.  I was hoping this would do one of two things: 1) allow teachers to see and hear about this opportunity or 2) inspire a teacher or two to participate.  I did receive three responses from different teachers stating that they were interested in participating in this activity.  I thanked them and wished them a fantastic summer break, while also sharing that I would be in touch at the beginning of the 2017-2018 school year with more details to follow.

Just like clockwork, summer break flashed in front of us for a brief moment and then we found ourselves back at school.  In August 2017, I received another email from Lisa Davis.  This email was addressed to all those who showed interest in her Bulldog's Adventure project.  She shared the finalized planning stages and included a shared Google Doc that combined the directions and ideas for the project.  The basics for each teacher/class were to contribute at least one slide to the shared Google Slide journal that shows a picture of the Bulldog in a significant location near their school (or in a classroom) and a short narrative about the picture.  (Monument, landmark, a body of water, mountains, historical location, national park, etc.) You can also include a picture of your school on a new slide or picture of your class that is participating!  Partner classes were also asked to mail the Bulldog to his next location which will be noted on the shared Google Sheet.  

The originating classroom planned to log the Bulldog's journey on a large map with push pins and string while reviewing the travel journal (Google Slideshow) each week on the morning announcements (the originating school records their announcements).  They also have been asking a weekly math question for the students to answer (ex. how many miles did the bulldog travel between point A and point B, if the UPS truck gets 10 miles per gallon of gas, how many gallons of gas did it use to bring the bulldog to his next location, etc.) 

Lisa shared a link to the postcards she used for her map.  Thank You, Lisa!

Other possible activities that could be done with this project include but are not limited to the following:

• Use the Google Slideshow to share information about each location.
• Have a weekly math challenge related to the miles the Bulldog travels. (how many miles did the bulldog travel between point A and point B, if the UPS truck gets 10 miles per gallon of gas, how many gallons of gas did it use to bring the bulldog to his next location, etc.)
• Have students participate in a Genius Hour and research a location that they would like to know more about.  Present some interesting facts about what they find out to their classmates.
• Make a travel board and include the interesting facts they researched as well as pictures of those locations students may want to visit!
• Participate in a Google Hangout with a partner school to compare and contrast communities.

Similar to May, August is nonetheless another time of the school year where there is definitely not enough hours in a day for teachers, administrators or parents.  Yet, once again, I dared to do the unthinkable and reached out to the three teachers that had shared an interest in participating in the Bulldog's Adventure this school year.  In this email, I  shared the original and newly developed details in regards to the project and the tentative, most things are tentative for educators, Bulldog arrival date of April 2018. 

Unfortunately, the Bulldog had a rough winter break and found a new home in which no one quite knows his address yet.  So, as all teachers do (day in and day out), Lisa was flexible and made adjustments to her initial plans.  She purchased a few more "Bulldogs" and readjusted the "itinerary" for the Bulldog's travels.

Here you will find a shared doc of all the different locations the Bulldog will/had travel(ed) this school year, here. (http://bit.ly/2rM4L48 )

Due to the fact that the Google Slide shares pictures of students around the world, I will not be sharing this part of the project.  I did share it with each classroom teacher who participated in the project. Below are the slides from the two Ballard third grade classes (Jordison and DeHamer) created together.

Digital Citizenship at the High School Continued

Digital Citizenship at the High School Continued

Since the Dec-Jan 17-18 Dimension, when we shared the “what” and the “why” about the implementation of digital citizenship lessons at the high school, teachers have presented a total of six digital citizenship lessons related to online safety. We have received positive feedback from students, staff, and parents, and we look forward to building on this foundation. As this school year is coming to a close, we want to share the resources presented to students and staff.  Below are the lesson presentation titles and links to view the lessons.

You Share It, You Lose It

Online Safety: Protect Your Identity    

(http://bit.ly/2qWzNpK)

You Share It, You Lose It

Online Safety:  Who Is Behind the Other Screen? Protect yourself and your property

(http://bit.ly/2qXrKsN)

Think Before You Assume

Self-Image and Identity

(http://bit.ly/2qZg6xl)

You Share It, You Lose It

Online Safety:  Sexting and Relationships

(http://bit.ly/2qVPSff)

Cyberbullying

Why We Should Care - Part 1

(http://bit.ly/2r0EPl8)

Cyberbullying

How to Make a Difference - Part 2

(http://bit.ly/2qZhQGT)

Family Tips

(http://bit.ly/2qZf2JM)

Note: Due to the fact that these lessons were specifically designed for our Ballard students, in order for a parent/guardian to view these lessons, please have your Ballard student log into his/her Ballard account on a Chrome browsers before selecting the link or entering the URL in a Chrome browser Omnibox (address bar).

Moving Forward

The HS Technology Team will analyze and discuss the Clarity BrightBytes data in May to assist with guiding high school teachers for the 2018 - 2019 school year. This data will be presented to high school teachers and will be followed by discussions regarding a direction they would like to go for the 2018 - 2019 school year.  We all are looking forward to determining a focus to directly impact our high school students.

Thank you

At this time we would like to thank the following people. These lessons would not be a success without them.  

Ballard HS Teachers for presenting these lessons, providing a safe environment for discussions and providing insight to help guide the development of lesson topics and design.

Ballard Student Council for creating a Google Form to assist students with reporting bullying incidents.

Chief Pote for all his helpful insight in regards to lesson topics for our students

Assistant Story County Attorney/Lead Criminal Prosecutor, Ms. Meredith, for all her insight in regards to the legality issues and sharing her resources.

Ballard HS Technology Team members (Ms. Mein, Mrs. Endres, Mrs. Ronca, Mr. Steenhagen, and Mr. Smith) for volunteering all their time (a true testament that you deeply care for our Ballard students, staff, and community) to analyze and discuss data, communicate and collaborate with high school teachers, and to see the importance of our students learning how to think critically, behave safely, and participate responsibly in our digital world.

Ballard Administration (Mr. Ronca, Mr. Deason, Mr. McGill and Mr. Maxey) for their indefinite support.

Ballard Students for discussing these topics with their advisor, classmates, and parents, taking the time to complete surveys that provided a student voice to help guide the development of lesson topics and design.

Ballard Parents/Guardians for reading your emails from the school and discussing these topics at home with your child/ren.

Proud to be a Bomber!

Pear Deck: Engage Students While Presenting Information

For those days when you need to front-load students with information, the days when it seems like you do a lot of talking, the days when you worry about whether students are "getting it" — for those days — you might want to consider Pear Deck.

Types of Responses. The starred
options are not available on the
free account.

Pear Deck is a presentation tool that increases engagement by adding student feedback opportunities within each slide. Each student can respond to the question on their own device. The teacher can choose whether to share the responses with the class (names are hidden). The presentation can be lead by the teacher, or students can move at their own pace through the slides.

An example of a slide with a free text response option.

Creating the Presentation

The first step is to plan your presentation, then add the questions based on your goals for each slide. There are three options for creating your slides and adding questions:
1. Upload an already created Google Slide Presentation into Pear Deck.
2. Create your presentation within Pear Deck.
3. Use the Pear Deck Add-on within Slides.

Presenting

When it comes time to lead the class, you will choose to present your slides within Pear Deck or through the add-on in Slides. Then, you will simply have students go to joinpd.com. The students will enter the code that is displayed on the screen. Once all students have entered, their screens will reflect the slide you are on as long as you have selected Teacher-Pace, instead of Student-Pace. This video gives you a feel for what using Pear Deck in a classroom looks like.

What is Free?

Pear Deck has a free option as well as a premium option. Here is the pricing comparison. I have used PearDeck several times over the last two school years, and the free option has been adequate for my needs. I did sign up for the premium trial and the draggable option is nice, but not necessary. (See image below to see how I used this.) Also, I have hit my 5 uploads from Google Slides, so now all of my presentations have to be created within Pear Deck, which is limiting.

Draggable Slide: A Premium Feature.

Interested? Send Mrs. Dovre an email to talk through ideas for using Pear Deck or for help with getting started.

Digital Citizenship Conversations at the High School

Digital Citizenship: the ability to think critically, behave safely, and participate responsibly in the digital world.

"My students were amazed at
how easily people gave out their passwords."
Teacher Feedback

On November 15th, the high school building held our first Digital Citizenship lesson for all students in grades 9-12. Moving forward, approximately every other week advisory teachers will lead a discussion about a digital citizenship topic. These topics include: Online Safety and Privacy, Recognizing and Preventing Cyberbullying, Legal Use of Web Content, Digital Footprint and Reputation, and Evaluating Online Information.

“This was a good lesson, and I think the
majority of the students gained awareness of online safety.”
 - Teacher Feedback

We chose to spend time on digital citizenship because data collection from the past two years has shown there is a need. Annually since 2015, students, parents, and teachers representing our HS building have completed a survey, designed by Clarity BrightBytes, about technology access, use, and knowledge. Our High School Technology Team met several times at the beginning of the school year to analyze the data and discuss areas for improvement. Digital citizenship was identified as one of these areas, and the team determined to focus our attention there because research shows digital citizenship is important for our health and success and it closely aligns to our District Mission Statement. The High School Technology Team presented the data and team reflections to all high school teachers, and teacher insights have since guided the development of lesson topics and design.

After the first lesson, each student was emailed the Protect Your Identity presentation link* along with a link to complete a student survey. Both links require the student to be logged into his/her Ballard Google account in order to be viewed.

Below, you will find a family tip sheet in regards to the Protect Your Identity discussion.

Family Tip: Scams and Identity Theft

*Note: Due to the fact that these lessons were specifically designed for our Ballard students, in order for a parent/guardian to view these lessons, please have your Ballard student log into his/her Ballard account on a Chrome browsers before selecting the link or entering the URL in a Chrome browser Omnibox (address bar).

Hour of Code - Computer Science Week

One of our all-time favorite weeks of the school year is quickly approaching us, the celebration of Computer Science Week with  “Hour of Code” will be December 4th - 8th.  In the past 5 years of celebrating the "Hour of Code" the quality and quantity of activities have more than doubled.  Check out the Hour of Code Activities to locate the best one(s) for you and your class or group.

Never participated, no worries we have you covered.  Feel free to use the links listed below to help you get started.

Show one or all of these videos below to inspire students:

What Most Schools Don't Teach ( 5 min ) - http://viewpure.com/nKIu9yen5nc?ref=bkmk

2014 Message from the President (1:17) - http://safeshare.tv/w/GQJpuhlVtK or

                                                                                                              http://viewpure.com/6XvmhE1J9PY?ref=bkmk

BrainPOP Video:

BrainPop on Computer Programming - https://www.brainpop.com/technology/computerscience/computerprogramming/

Beginner Coding Games:

Star Wars - https://studio.code.org/s/starwars/stage/1/puzzle/1 

Code Breakers - http://pbskids.org/oddsquad/games/codebreaker/

Frozen Anna & Elsa -   https://learn.code.org/s/frozen/stage/1/puzzle/1

Angry Birds - http://learn.code.org/hoc/1

 Print Sticker for students  

Certificates for participating - https://code.org/certificates

Games of All Levels - https://hourofcode.com/us/learn

Also, Khan Academy celebrates Hour of Code - Computer Science Week.

Hour of Drawing with Code: Students will learn to program using JavaScript, one of the world's most popular programming languages via two great options:

• Drag-and-drop: block-based coding for younger students with less typing experience and students on tablet devices (ages 8+).
• Typing: keyboard-based coding for older students (ages 10+).

Hour of Webpages: Students will learn to make their own webpages using the basics of HTML and CSS (ages 10+).

Hour of Databases: Students will learn the fundamentals of databases using SQL to create tables, insert data into them, and do basic querying (ages 12+).

You may ask, "Why try computer programming?".  

According to Code. org:

*It is estimated that over the next 10 years there will be over 1.4 million (yes million) jobs/careers in Computer Science and only 400,000 grads that will be qualified. That is a shortage of a million people.

*Programming helps one understand computers.  A computer is only a tool.  If you (and/or your students) learn how to write simple programs, you (and/or your students) will gain more knowledge about how a computer works.

*Writing a few simple programs increases your (and/or your students’) confidence level.  Many people find great personal satisfaction in creating a set of instructions that solve a problem.

*Learning programming lets you (and/or your students) find out quickly whether if you (and/or your students) like programming and whether if you (and/or your students) have the analytical turn of mind programmers need.  Even if you (and/or your students) decide that programming is not for you (and/or your students), understanding the process certainly will increase your (and/or your students’) appreciation of what programmers and computers can do.

Please keep in mind, you can code/ computer program all year long.  It doesn't just have to take place the week of the celebration of "Hour of Code".

 Hour of Code Blog from 2015

Happy Coding!

Powtoon Potential

Are you looking for presentation options for you or your students that go beyond the Google Slides presentation? If so, PowToon might be of interest to you. With this tool, you and/or your students can create animated video presentations to share a message and grab attention. Using audio/video rather than standard presentation tools moves students away from over-reliance on text to convey ideas leading to a more engaging experience for the audience. They provide templates to speed up the design or you can start from scratch.

Example uses:

Instructional Videos (Flip your Classroom)

Demonstrate understanding of a topic. Biology Example.

   -show math processes, explanations of complex concepts, review new learning

Summarize main idea. Drama Example.

Commercial (have to know it to sell it): Book, Product, Idea

Storytelling: Informational or Creative Writing
Reflect on learning -Example: Where I was, Where I am, Where I'm going...

Present research findings

I'm sure you have more!

An elementary teacher from Virginia said of her experience with PowToon:

 "Getting my students to write has always been a struggle, especially at such a young age. After implementing PowToon into my instruction, my students now enjoy writing and beg to write and create stories. They enjoy writing because they are able to see the results of their final product. PowToon has truly made a huge impact in my classroom."

PowToon has a free version, but right now PowToon is giving way Classroom Basic plans (usually $96/year). You get 60 student accounts through this plan. Interested? Claim yours for free here!

Reach out to a building technology lead or Jody Kelley if you would like to kick around ideas or if you would like some assistance with implementing and using PowToon.

From Power Up: Making the Shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning by Diana Neebe and Jen Roberts, "...many assignments and projects involving 1:1 technology take a little longer than their paper counterparts. Often this is because students are doing more work to complete higher-quality products. The difference in the outcome seems worth an extra couple of days" (p. 33). 

Are you already using PowToon? Please comment with an example or a description of how you/your students are using it!

Flipgrid @ Ballard

Flipgrid is loaded with possibilities, but first, we must ask why? Why learn about it, why spend precious class time having students use it? 

My favorite reason is that every student is given the opportunity to have a voice. Additionally, here are some ideas brainstormed by our instructional coach, Mrs. Auffert:

In ACTION:

In the Spring of 2017, through a collaboration between Economics teacher, Mrs. Baumgardner, Instructional Coach, Mrs. Auffert, and Teacher Librarian/Tech Lead, Mrs. Dovre, the senior Economics students engaged with Flipgrid, a video discussion platform. The seniors had been reading The Wal-Mart Effect by Charles Fishman. As a follow-up to the reading and their individual work on an outline of the reading, students chose a subtopic (Local Communities, Competition, Suppliers, Employees, etc.) and shared their views about the impact of Walmart on that subtopic.

Twitter post from April 28.

 What we saw: nervous students, excited students, students redrafting their outline responses, students tucked away in corners of the library and commons, students reviewing their videos and doing retakes, students watching and listening to their peers' videos, and of course, students taking their selfies. There was energy.

More recently, Mrs. Dovre has created a Flipgrid for the Ballard HS Book Club. Students are busy and they can't always attend the meetings, so we are opening up Book Club to Flipgrid in addition to our face-to-face meetings. She shared the link to the Flipgrid via our Google Classroom stream.

Here's a Google Classroom post used to share a Flipgrid topic.

This is what the Flipgrid topic looks like for this month's book:

No videos yet, but it won't be long, hopefully.

Want to jump on board?

Getting started is simple, and your technology lead or instructional coach will gladly assist you with the setup and the rollout to your students. Just ask!

If you want to get started on your own:

     1. Login via the email directions. (We can send them again if you need them.)

     2. Create a Grid.

     3. Add a topic to the grid. Students will respond within the topic framework. 

     4. Share the topic with students.

     5. Don't forget to add this to the Pineapple Chart in the PD room so others can visit.

Resources:

     Intro Presentation used last year to introduce Flipgrid to students.
     Student Guide - Links will need to be adjusted
     15 Ideas for Ways to Use Flipgrid
     Updates to Flipgrid since last year
     Video Tutorial and Tips from Flipgrid