The end is near, and with that is the opportunity to have your students do a fun, collective, collaborative retrieval. In this latest post from Pooja Agarwal, she shares a new retrieval activity called, Leave One, Add One wherein students begin with a blank piece of paper and write one sentence about something they learned in your class. It could be about a specific topic, something from the semester, or the entire year. When they finish writing, they get someone else’s piece of paper and they add something new to it. You can read more about how this works and try it with your students. It’s not only fun, but a great way for them to think back on all they’ve learned with you.
For summer reading on the science of learning and how you can apply it in your classroom, check out these books:
A few weeks ago I shared the idea of making AI work for you, not against you. In this 15-minute TED talk from Sal Khan of Khan Academy, he explains how ChatGPT is like having your own personal assistant (if you are a teacher) and a personal tutor (for students) and how his company uses the generator in their own Khanmigo to solve the Two-Sigma Problem. “We all have to fight like hell for the positive use cases,” [Khan] said. Through responsible and innovative AI applications like Khanmigo, education has the potential to undergo an unprecedented transformation, accelerating learning and fostering human potential like never before.
In case you needed another reason to bookmark Pooja Agarwal’s site, Retrieval Practice, Agarwal has recently added several new resources, downloads, and videos for your use. This includes Women in STEM citations on the science in learning so that you can not only teach students about how their brain stores and retrieves information, but can also highlight the diverse scholars who have done this research and more. Agarwal also shared the link to published reviews of findings of over 50 classroom experiments on retrieval practice spanning from elementary school to grad school.
In a recent conversation with a teaching candidate, I was reminded of a video called, “My Favorite No”. It is a form of error analysis that allows students to see and learn from common mistakes in a whole group setting. Coincidentally, this week’s Marshall Memo shared a summary of an article from April 14th’s Eduptopia, A Collaborative Approach to Mistake Analysis that similarly shares the idea of students thinking through and solving commonly made mistakes. The article speaks to the importance of having students do several types of thinking and the benefit of having students working in collaborative groups, standing up, and moving around solving problems together, something Peter Liljedahl speaks about on his Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics website and in the book of the same name. If Peter Liljedahl’s name and book sound familiar, it’s because I wrote about him in this post.
I have been participating in some lunch and learns hosted by Global Online Academy. These one-hour webinars are timely, relevant, and provide food for thought. The most recent webinar was entitled, Rethinking Assessment in the Era of Artificial Intelligence, and spoke about Chat GPT. Here are the following takeaways:
AI is not just getting going, innovation in edtech is not new (calculator, Google translate, Siri)
We need to move at the speed of trust
We need to involve students in the conversations around AI such as Chat GPT
Teachers should talk with the students about the limitations (ex. Chat GPT, at this moment,- it is already improving- does not provide citations; it only has information through 2022)
We should teach students the mechanics of how Chat GPT works and talk to them about how it coincides with the ethics of academic integrity
We can ask students to use Chat GPT to get their inspiration going and then improve on it
And then there were some questions posed:
Is it time to have a multi-modal essay?
Is it time to evolve the essay?
Does assessment place too much emphasis on products and not processes?
Does assessment truly measure and provoke future learning; are there other ways to measure learning?
And finally, some suggestions on what teachers can implement with their classes tomorrowto dip their toes in the AI arena:
Pick a difficult concept in your course and ask Chat GPT to explain something 3 different ways for different grade levels. Use these as prompt for discussion in class
Ask Chat GPT which authors’ styles it can do really well
Give something you have written to Chat GPT (a class newsletter, course description, student comments, school mission) and ask it to make it more engaging, make it for a 3rd grader to see how else you could communicate these ideas
Ask students what they think should be done with this tool
Reverse engineer with it: put in a prompt then have students rework it for voice, sources, etc. to make it better
If you can’t beat it, join it . . . or at least learn about it.
In a recent GOA webinar, “How do we cause better learning through feedback?” the folks in the session offered several excellent tips. Today I am sharing the top 10:
Define what we are looking for and then use that language with our students
Ask students to note (reflect) when turning in a draft or assignment, “what are two things the teacher should know that I did effortlessly and”/or, “two things that I did that took a lot of effort”; 0r-” it’s not ready, I really struggled”
Once feedback is given, have students use highlighters in a subsequent draft or assignment to show where they think they are doing x feedback well and in another color where they are doing y feedback well
Use the rubrics in the middle of the assignment so that it can inform the learning
Offer a variety of feedback:
Read through the whole batch and then tell the whole class what you are seeing/noticing
Tell students that you will give them each 2 sentences of feedback (especially when you have a lot of students)
Offer to look at one aspect of the draft before grading, BUT the student must ask for two specific things for which they want feedback
Create a feedback bank that you build for each assignment
Use vocal (mote) or video (screencastify) feedback
Design for feedback- think about the pivotal points in the unit where kids will need that feedback
Remember that you cannot give feedback on every single task for every single student so design for feedback that will be the most beneficial for the learning
For feedback to make a difference to the student, it needs to be actionable and timely. If it’s too far from when they turned something in, they will have forgotten what they did in the first place and may no longer care
“There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing.”
Brian Tracy
Learning takes time and time is something that is elusive and often lacking. That’s why I am sharing these items with you- they can be viewed or read in 5 minutes or less.
First is a 3-part video series from McRel International (What’s McRel? Read here): Making Learning Stick: A Teacher’s Guide to Student Memory. In less than 3 minutes each, you will learn what kinds of information our brains pay attention to, what happens when information enters our short term/working memory, and how to get information from our short term to our long term memory. In less than 10 minutes, you will get an idea how to best design learning experiences for your students so that what you teach them will stay with them for the long haul and not be forgotten after 30 days. Learn, practice, extend, apply! For more on the science of learning, and Making it Stick, you can check out Pooja Agarwal’s Retrieval Practice site, and to further extend your understanding with the aim of making your classroom brain-friendly, you might want to read Upgrade Your Teaching: Understanding by Design Meets Neuroscience by Jay McTighe and Judy WIllis, M.D.
Continuing on the “science of” theme is this 3-minute article on the intersection of reading and writing, 4 Ways Reading and Writing Interlock: What the Research Says. Geared towards our elementary folks, this article speaks to the importance of the explicit teaching of writing and its inclusion while students are learning to read. For additional articles (some 7 minutes, some 11) on the science of reading . . . . and writing, click here.
Have you heard about all the great lessons and resources you can find on PBS Learning Media but don’t know where to start or how to find it? This is a video tour of the site’s features including how to easily share content with your students. Again, you can do this in 3 minutes or less.
If you are looking for a bang for your buck, then EduTips might be just what you are listening for. I wrote about them here and they are worth sharing again. In 5 minutes Jennifer Gonzalez gives you a quick tip (she calls them microtips) that you can try right away with your students. Her latest is about the importance of and how to get students to learn each others’ names. Other ones to listen to first: Distract the Distractor, Stop Popcorn Reading, and Do a Smooth First Read First.
You knew it was coming, this tool from Common Lit (free high interest books, passages, poems and activities for K-12) and Quill.org (free literacy activities, tools, resources to build better K-12 readers and writers) will tell you if a piece of writing was “written” by AI or a student. It’s free and it detects AI 80-90% of the time. It’s basically something you can use in tandem with knowing your students as writers until something more advanced comes along. Copy and paste text up to 400 words at a time. And this tool, ChatGPTZero was created by a Princeton student, will also do the same. You can read about it and the student who created it here and here.
And now for a little lunch time learning, you can sign up for this webinar hosted by Common Sense Media. ChatGPT, to Ban, or not to Ban on March 13 from 12-1.
This week I am sharing things that I have recently liked on Twitter, read in an email, or saw in an article that I think others might also find useful. Sharing is caring!
This first one is something that I saw posted on Twitter. Rewordify takes your text: sentences, paragraphs, pages and highlights the challenging vocabulary “rewordifying it” by inserting synonyms making it easier to comprehend. You can paste any text and have the option to leave it as is and have rewordify highlight the vocabulary making it clickable for definitions; it can completely transform the text using simpler vocabulary; or it can do an in-line adaptation using both the original text with synonyms. It’s pretty cool. You can learn vocab, create printable learning activities, and even search their bank of texts and public documents. I know our students read Macbeth so I did a quick search and chose to see the rewordify of Act II. I can see teachers having their students “rewordify” a challenging text on their own and then seeing how rewordify would do it and compare. Try it out.
CommonLit is a free (for teachers forever) resource with thousands of high quality, high interest reading materials for grades 3-12.including texts and text sets to book pairings and Spanish content. You can search by grade level, Lexile level, content area, genre, theme, literary device and language. Their 360 curriculum is a complete scope and sequence for grades 6-12. Here is an example of a poem by Billy Collins that has the students notice the figurative language used throughout. It offers a guided reading mode which if you choose to enable. will have your students interact with questions along the way while reading. Some of the cool things that Common Lit offers is the option for paired texts to go with a selection like these for the poem linked above; related media, a teacher guide, and parent guide. Common Lit is free to use.
Speaking of books, I was scrolling around Instagram when I came across Reading with Red and the Magpie’s post about inclusivity and diversity in children’s literature. Here is what she says about why she created the site:
“I created Reading with Red and the Magpie in February 2022 as a way to share the beautiful inclusive books that we were enjoying and learning from. I wanted this to be a space where I could share my knowledge, to learn from the experiences of others and to connect with other people who value representation in children’s books.“
Seeing that this is something I know will be helpful to others, I went to her profile to learn more about her and scrolled through some of her other posts. She is a former teacher, now homeschooling her own two children and she is a “children’s book reviewer and blogger who loves diverse and inclusive picture books about social justice”. Peeking at her instagram will lead you to her suggested book lists for kids who like (fill in your own descriptor) book lists around different themes, holidays, and heritage appreciation months; and so much more. Kristin is part of a virtual book shop that partners with local booksellers where she shares books with diverse characters, authors, and themes. There are books for all ages, including adult, that you can find descriptions, reviews, and if you’d like, can purchase and support a local book shop. Reading with Red and the Magpie focuses on children’s picture books but a quick perusal of the site shows so much more. If you are looking to include more windows, mirrors, and sliding doors in your classroom libraries and English classrooms, you definitely want to check this out.
Everyone has different ways of beginning class: some jump right in, some start with a check-in, and some begin with some must-dos. I start with a moment of mindfulness and an SEL mood check in. After reading about the importance of openers in this Edutopia article, I followed a link to teacher, Jess Kirkland who talked about how she creates and uses attendance questions with her high school students. In her We Are Teachers article, she shared her growing document of AQs that you too can use with your students or make a copy and add your own.
“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”
~Albert Einstein
This week I learned about a new addition to Adobe’s creative suite of apps. It’s the ability to turn your voice into an animated character and you can try it using the beta version, Animate from audio. It’s really simple to use, you just choose your animated character, set it on a background, and record or upload your audio. It’s fun, easy, and I can see many ways of adding this to your students’ and your own creative repertoires. You can learn more about ways to inspire creativity in your students in elementary through high school and beyond, across all curricular areas by checking out the Adobe Express Education Exchange like this creative challenge for Roald Dahl day; browse and filter grab and go lessons here; and find tutorials here. And, it’s all FREE!
Continuing along the creativity lines is CoC: Being Creative Together from the MIT media lab, the same place that brought us SCRATCH. What I like about what I read and viewed, is the ability for creators to co-create, build, collaborate on a shared project, game, piece of digital art, or code whether they are in the same room or in separate places. You can join the invite list by scrolling down on this page.
This last one is from Trevor Muir, author of The Epic Classroom, blogger, and podcast host. Muir has a couple free of free resources on his site including the collaboration toolkit which includes a group project set of agreements, a collaboration rubric, peer and self-assessments; and a PBL Toolkit with everything you need to plan and get started with project based learning. For more on PBL, you can also check out this post I shared earlier this year.
It’s been a minute since I’ve posted. Not that I did not have anything to say, more that I had other responsibilities to attend to. So this will be a post of favorites: the things I have had open to share or that I have <3ed on Twitter that I think are worth sharing.
Focusable This is one I have wanted to share for some time now. It’s an app to remind us to stop and take a pause- a brain break if you will- so that we can then re-focus our attention where its needed. We all do it at times: daydream in the middle of reading something, stop to check our social media, or forget what we were reading because our attention was elsewhere. Focusable helps by reminding us during the day to stop, take 5, settle our minds, so that we can return our attention to what is in front of us.
Five Ways to . . . no, it’s 5 ways to make chicken. It’s a PDF of 10 classroom practices like reading, building confidence, having a discussion, and more that you can do five different ways.
Completely unrelated to the above aside from the title, Five Ways to Stop Thinking for Your Students from Edutopia which gives practical ways to turn the thinking back over to your students.
It’s DITCH Summit time again. From now through January 6 you an get your learning on on your own time. There are nine different speakers who will be featured over the course of the Summit, each sharing tools, practices, and tips as their video is released. When you sign up, you will have access to not just this year’s slate of speakers, but also those from previous Summits. You can download a PDF of resources that come along with each speaker’s video, along with notes and a certificate of completion. The whole thing is completely FREE. I have shared about them before and cannot say enough about how valuable it is to be able to learn from people from all over the world. Separately, this is a link to dozens of FREE templates for you to use in your classrooms right now (or after winter break)!
This next one comes from Richard Byrne and it’s this year’s, The Best of the Web featuring this year’s newest edtech tools along with others that just keep getting better (like Canva and Flip). Each tool Byrne shares comes with a video showing how it can be used. Coincidentally, this first one he shares is Focusable, which was the number one in this email (and I did not hear it from him). I think our science and math folks will really enjoy these simulations and resources that they can use with their students when they register!
25 Days of Digital Tools and Ideas is exactly what it says it is. It is a slidedeck with a tool, website, or resource and a video about how you can use it with your students. This list is brought to you by Future Ready Librarians and edtech specialists around the country, and compiled by Shannon McClintock Miller. Check out Biblionasium ( it’s like Goodreads for kids), Mote (shared preciously, it allows you to make voice comments on any Google app- think docs, slides, forms, sheets, Canva (also not new but if you don’t yet use it, try it), and Empatico (connect and collaborate on meaningful projects with classrooms around the world and build understanding and empathy along the way). Of course there are 25 different things to look at, this is just a glimpse.
If you prefer to multitask (like I do at times), then you may want to check out some of these podcasts: Cult of Pedagogy; ASCD Learn, Teach, Read hosted by BAM Radio Network; Bright Morning Podcast; Making Math Moments Matter; or Teaching Hard History from Learning for Justice. Of course these are ones I have recommended numerous times and that is because each time I listen, I learn something useful. Curiously enough, I shared a list of podcasts for every subject and many interests the same time last year in this post. At least I am consistent!
The Incidental Techie 