SANTHA WALTERS
  • Blog
  • Santha
  • Gretna Technology
  • Doodles and Bullet Journal
  • Resume
  • Contact Santha
  • Wholesome Memes

Finding my way...

Geometry in Augmented Reality

9/15/2019

1 Comment

 
Picture

The Idea...



When Ms. Taylor and @math_teacher41 approached me for an idea to integrate technology into their geometry classes for their amusement park projects, I immediately knew that augmented reality (A.R.) could be a perfect solution.

With the objectives being to force students to include higher order thinking skills and consider issues of scale, ratio and proportion (in addition to the original objectives of calculating distances and midpoints  on a coordinate plane), I knew this could be a a great fit for this activity.

The pre-stage of the iPads was a heavy lift.  Thanks to @esu3pl and @21centtech, I was able to borrow 10 iPads with the scanners that would enable to project.  After that, I used @tearagon7's innovative @Keynote hack to create the rides that we would import into the amusement park.  When I finished loading the rides, I turned to the organizational challenge of creating the teams and the jobs for the teams.  Knowing this tech might be a harder sell to this specific population, I tired to focus on giving everyone in the group a job that was essential to the success of the project. 

We did make one change on the fly in between the first two classes.  We changed the measurements from just inches to inches times two to make the surface a little bigger.  This resulted in projects that were much easier to see and manipulate.  

​Thanks again to @keynote and @armakrapp for making these awesome project possible.   Always remember: #everyonecancreate!

Link to Lesson Plans Here

Picture
Picture

Link to Park Organizer Worksheet

Picture
Picture
1 Comment

Computer Programing in Summer School

7/23/2019

3 Comments

 

I did a "brave."

I've taught English and writing based curriculum for many years now (well, a few more than twenty). The farthest I've branched out is journalism at the high school level.  

I had been itching for a change before I got the job as the technical coach for Gretna Public Schools.  To feed that desire the switch things up, I applied to teach computer programming in summer school for Logan Fontenelle Middle School.  Luckily, I was approved and I started working with the Apple "Learn to Code 1" materials to design a four-week course. 

Picture
The GOOD:
  • Wow, I had some awesome kids.  
  • The curriculum from @Apple went relatively smoothly with slight adjustments for temperament and age of the class. 
  • This was a big step up from Scratch and block type codes and the kids really responded to it.
  • I had fun.
The INTERESTING:
  • Incoming 7th graders are 6th graders (seems intuitive, but I was absolutely surprised when reflecting on differences in behaviors, attention, gaming, and cognition. 
  • The curriculum provided by @Apple needs augmentation for a group as young as 6th graders.   I relied on @Flocabulary, @Kahoot, @Quizizz, @Quizlett, @Classkick, @Piccollage, @Parrot, @WonderWorkshop to give the lessons the needed "pop" and reinforcement. 
3 Comments

Winner of the End of the Year Projects!

5/23/2019

0 Comments

 
Every year, students create end of the year projects where the only guidelines are to be creative and do some writing.  Some students did "8th Grade Survival Guides" while other put together scrapbooks of the year's highlights.

Brianna took a different route.  She wrote a song about the highs and lows of being an 8th grader and pretty much hits the nail on the head.  I have to say that I was worried about the disclaimer she gave, but after listening, I think the football players can stand a bit of ribbing (and also the second period trumpets).  

So, please enjoy the musical commentary of Ms. Brianna's end of the year project.  

0 Comments

April's Word Study...

4/29/2019

1 Comment

 

...that's not really a word study.

April. That wonderful time of the year when all middle school students and teachers lose "they" minds.  As evidence, I give you things I've said in the last week alone:
  • "No.  I do not want to see the banana in your pants."  (After being asked if I'd like to see the banana in his pants--from a student who started a black market fruit business during guided study by taking the leftover fruit from the cafeteria and selling it for a nickel during study hall). 
  • "Please do not eat pancakes in the bathroom, ladies."  Yes, they had syrup and everything.
  • "Do you really think if the FBI were coming tomorrow to Logan in order to confiscate phones, they would be kind enough to give us all a 24 hour warning?" (Responding to the out of control rumor that the FBI would descend on our school on the morrow and working themselves up into a tizzy about the whole thing).  
  • (This one was not said out loud: Please stop eating your dandruff).  
Guys, gals and non-bianary palls, it's only the first week of May.  

No one has every accused middle schoolers of being exceptionally logical humans.

​However, there are some bright spots to the end of the year.  
Picture
Here's one of them.  This kid.  He is my tech genius of first period.  Yesterday, he turned me on to a website called @PaperRater (www.paperrater.com).  How can this company have been around since 2011 and I've never found them? (Luckily, I have kids like this dude).
@PaperRater uses A.I. to analyze papers.  Granted, it's a little clickbaity and  I have only used the free version, but things I LOVED were:
  • Vocabulary and style analysis
  • Plagiarism alerts (although not as savvy as turnitin.com)
  • Comparisons for papers written at the same grade level

Picture
This service will never replace peer editing or writing conferences correction; however, it does give the kids a good place to start doing their own revisions. 

Each alert is clickable giving more information about the errors they made and how they can fix them. 

It also rates each paper compared to other papers of the same grade level to give students an idea of how they are writing compared to their peers. 



The literature says that this program is powered by A.I..  As I said earlier, I don't think this will take the place of a teacher or peer feedback, but it is a great place to start in the revision journey.  
1 Comment

@ARMakr <3 <3 <3--Lesson LOVE

3/29/2019

0 Comments

 
 The video above was taken using @ARMakr as an example of a dynamic vocabulary lesson for the ELA classroom

I have not been this excited about technology in the classroom since I discovered automated grading on @Flubaroo five years ago.

Augmented reality is about to take us to the next level in education.  Why?  Because it's cool and fresh and has limitless potential across the curriculum.  Imagine this tech in a science classroom.  Students could put the entire digestive system on their body and then point out the parts.  What about a tour of Jupiter?  For mathematics, teachers could make equations life size and ask students to explain each section by standing in it and pointing.  History?  What about interviewing a historic figure by having a student hiding behind the image doing a ventriloquist act with the picture?  

So.  Many. Applications. 

​Here's an instructional video showing how to use Keynote to get rid of backgrounds with Instant Alpha made by @tearagon7, an Apple Distinguished Educator out of California.  I found her examples on twitter during a wild search for ideas.   This easy to follow tutorial has so much potential to revolutionize interactions with material.  Check out her video and then see what she's going in her school on her website and in her  e-book!



0 Comments

Hour of Code at Logan Fontenelle Middle School

2/11/2019

0 Comments

 
Here's Tauren to tell us why Hour of Code at Logan Fontenelle Middle School is fun!
It is always a pleasure to work with the teachers and staff at Logan Fontenelle Middle School to put on our annual Hour of Code event.  This year was no different.  Even though we had to rearrange due to a snow day, we were successful in introducing an opportunity to participate in the Hour of Code programing regime to all of our 400+ students.  By leveraging student ambassadors, we brought twenty five guided studies coding fun.
As always, my thanks go out to @SchaeferDoug,  @VanhesscheTracy, @BellevueSchools and @LFWarriors of making this a coding project to remember.  
0 Comments

Poetry Analysis--Now with Rap Music

1/31/2019

0 Comments

 

"And since we all came from a woman
Got our name from a woman and our game from a woman
I wonder why we take from our women
Why we rape our women, do we hate our women?
I think it's time to kill for our women
Time to heal our women, be real to our women"
"Keep Ya Head Up"--Tupac Shakur

Ah, poetry.  It's the unit that all students love to hate.  This has always confused me because the students (for the most part) listen to poetry on Spotify or the radio almost every day, and music is one of my hottest "selling" items during independent work time.

Back in Virginia, I used Bob Marley's "No Woman No Cry" to introduce John Donne's "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" and it spread through the English department like wildfire.  Here in Nebraska, I'm working with a younger crowd on different goals.  According to the NSCAS, these are the major goals:  
Picture
AND
Picture
To get student buy-in (which is difficult with poetry), I started using popular music.  We start by analyzing the lyrics for literary devices and then move to summarizing the main idea and then finally conjuring up a theme. At first we do this worksheet together as a class analyzing "The Message" by Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five. 

Then, we move to independent analysis.  As always, this is a blended lesson where students can choose what they want to work on by genre.  The classes were asked to pick ONE of the songs to analyze.
Picture
Picture
Picture
Finally, they pick an individual assignment to work on independently (and then self-check answers in a peer group).   Finally, they work t to choose one of five poems/songs.  These become the basis for our comparison contrast essays.    
Picture
Link to Lesson Plans
0 Comments

Drones in the ELA Classroom

12/27/2018

1 Comment

 

The Objectives:

When I was featured on Vikki Davis' amazing podcast "Ten Minute Teacher," I was asked how any of this relates to ELA objectives.   My response was which objectives does it NOT related to because it would be a shorter list.  I was not kidding.  Here's annotated list.

Station Rotation--BlendED in Action:

This was a down and dirty station rotation (as is popular in the #BlendED learning community). Because our classes are only 43 minutes long, I opted to have the groups draw lots for which station they would complete that day.  We had a total of five stations, but only four days for the unit, so one group did not get to do the flyers.  When we have our next robot unit, that group will be first for flyers. 

Groups were student formed without my guidance.  There was only one class where I had to intervene and make group decisions (because they wanted to have seven in a group and the stations work better with a max of five).  

The Plans:

This link has a quick summary of all the stations and their functions.

The Deployment:

This is the first unit where I employed my newly purchased NearPod GOLD to deliver instructions (Shoutout to all my peeps at the Bellevue Public Schools Foundation @BPSFNE who purchased the software for us). Since it was station rotation, the students would come in, draw lots to see which station they were doing, and then launch @Schoology to get the codes to the @NearPod (s) to complete what I called "Flight School."  
​
Picture
As you can see here, every station had a flight school @NearPod attached to it.  All students had to complete the flight school before they were allowed to grab their drones and head to their location.
​
You can see the big 2 written under the SpheroRaptor unit!  
​
Picture

The "Guidelines:"

Just a quick homage to Pirates of the Caribbean, because the students really took the initiative when some of the bots misbehaved and they had to find a creative way to use their time.  Here's links to all the instructions for each station:

Flyers
SpheroRaptors
Ozobots
Dash Maze
Hidden Jumper Maze

Standing on the shoulders of GIANTS:

The SpheroRaptor station was based off of this lesson from Sphero.edu.
​The Ozobot Olympics was brought to you by Sandova Hankov @Ozobot.edu.
Huge shoutout to these amazingly supportive education companies and humans--I could not have done this unit without the help of:
@NearPod, @Schoology, @Tynker, @SwiftPlayground, @Blockly, @Parrot, @Apple, @SchaeferDoug, @MrsJCarlson, @AmandaMonk, @AnnFeldmann1, @NicoleFoxBPS, @TeachLoomis, @choglund87, @ramoore92, @BPSFNE, @BellevueSchools, @Lfwarriors, @lambertclass, @Dunlapbps, @CoolCatTeacher and the ever inspiring #ipadacademy


1 Comment

Robots in Transition

11/15/2018

2 Comments

 
I've been asked by students and by other teachers, "Why robot coding?  How on Earth is that related to English?"  

My response is usually "How is coding NOT related to English and writing?" This year, I decided to let my kids answer that question. Here is what they said:

Corwin:  "It i
s similar to writing a paragraph because you have to outline everything beforehand. As well as the fact that you have to make an intro and conclusion in a sense. Essentially it’s like writing a paragraph in a different language."

Alina: "
I think programming a robot is like writing a paragraph because you need to use the correct codes just like how you need to use correct punctuation and spelling.You have to read and test it to make sure it works correctly.You can always fix it to make it work more fluidly or have better punctuation."

Bailey: "For coding a robot the first thing needed to do is to have a basic outline of what you want it to do, much like how in an essay there is an outline. After that the codes are put together like how the body paragraphs are. Finally, you can edit the coding like how you revise an essay."

Here's the winning video for Team Courage 2018.
The lesson plans were pretty straight forward and can be found here.  If technical lesson plans aren't your thing, the process went pretty much like this:
Picture
This year was the second year to run this lesson.  In addition to being better organized with the grading and releasing kids into groups, I was also able to ask for feedback from the students.  They gave me some great ideas for next year including:
  1. Give groups formal lessons on coding with Blockly (@nearpod maybe?)
  2. Allow more time to film and edit.
  3. Find a way to separate the groups and give them more space to program and work.
I think these are all great suggestions and can't wait to use them to help structure the upcoming full week of drones and robots.  
2 Comments

Fake News--Using Schoology to Deploy a Semi-Autonomous Fake News Unit

10/12/2018

1 Comment

 
I have an app called Papier.  It's an awesome little bit of code that lets you have a new tab window turn into a notepad.  Last year, I had two quotes come out during our fake news unit  that I have on that digital notepad to this day.
Picture
Since the day last year, I have known that I have a duty to teach how to figure out what's true online.

​I believe fake news education should be mandatory for every ELA teacher on the planet.  English teachers have the unique objective to "analyze and evaluate information" (LA 8.1.6f)  There isn't a better platform than that really.

Here's the lesson plan for how I tackled the issue of fake news. I did place this week long unit after students had generated the first drafts of their descriptive essays; we were on a brain break from writing. 
I cant decide if I like this lesson more for the hysterically funny results or it's easy for compartmentalizing and digitalizing the results.  

Organization and Deployment of Lesson

The first thing I did was to create all the folders U would need in Schoology to  organize all five days of lessons into folders.  This is different for me.  I will normally group by topic only.  However, since I was going to be gone for two days of these lessons, I felt the chronological order helped keep things on track.  
Picture
When the students click on the above folder they see this: 
Picture

Nuts and Bolts of the Lesson

Objectives:  
LA 8.2.1.c Gather and use relevant information and evidence from multiple
authoritative print and/or digital sources including primary and secondary
sources to support claims or theses. 
LA 8.1.6.f Analyze and evaluate information from print and digital text features to
support comprehension.


NOTE:  I took about four lessons off the internet and put pasted them together for this lesson--LINK TO THE GOOGLE DOCUMENT PLANS

Day One--discussion with the driving question of what is fake news and how sure are we that we have good sources when researching on the internet. Discussion of visual pre-test for fake news from Stanford History Education Group.   Use THIS as a link for those classes to practice if there’s extra time or perhaps as homework.  

Day Two--kids come in practicing spotting Fake news with the Schoology Quick Quiz. . Then, they move on to Independent Work Time where students are watching two videos in edPuzzle to explain what (insesrt edPuzzle Link) Fake News is and how it affects them. Then, they take a “no-fail” (Google Form) Fake News Quiz.  Finally, at ten till the end of the period, we close with a Kahoot reviewing all the material we went over that day.

Day Three--NearPod of C.R.A.P. Method. Practice telling real news from fake news using this worksheet, a group of kids, and iPads (stipulate they may “use their resources--including the iPad”). This lesson ran long.  Extended it to the next day. I do print out the articles in the worksheet. :-) Articles: Trump Bumper Sticker, Dog Shoots Man, and Man Dies When He Shoots Hurricane.
Day Four--Give groups time to finish up (mine averaged between 5-15 minutes).  Discuss the answers to which are real and which are fake. Allow them to debate and show their proof.  Close with a return to the question from the first day about who susceptible are we to Fake News. See if answers have changed or stayed the same.

Day Five--I was absent for this day as well.  Had a sub. Had students use this time to create Clickbait using “Cooking up Clickbait” from Newseumed.org. Then, after working on paper, have the students use websites like BreakYourOwnNews.com to make their clickbait titles come to life! (show examples).  
1 Comment
<<Previous
Forward>>

    Santha Walters

    I'm a technology curriculum facilitator, and I'm excited about integrating technology in the classroom.

    Archives

    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    October 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    November 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    April 2016
    February 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Blog
  • Santha
  • Gretna Technology
  • Doodles and Bullet Journal
  • Resume
  • Contact Santha
  • Wholesome Memes