Project PLN - December Issue #edchat #ElemChat #EngChat

For the December Issue, we want to do something AWESOME. We want to hear from students from across this country and around the world. Educators, politicians, parents and many more have been telling everyone what schools should look like to best serve students. Well, we had the crazy idea of actually asking the students what they would want their school to look like if they could design it! These can be group projects or a collection of smaller projects. If you send it, we will publish it.

Using this Google Doc, please sign up for the grade level you teach and have your students draw, write, film, animate, etc what they want in their dream school. In all, we would like to have 13 posts representing K-12.

We would love to have all submissions by Monday December 19 so we can put them up for Tuesday December 20th before the Holidays get the best of us.

We are still looking for teachers to sign up for 1st - 4th, 7th, 10th and 12th grade. We will still take anyone from any grade, but those are still empty as of November 28th. Please share this post with teacher in your building and see if they would be willing to sign up and share some amazing work.

If you have many different projects to share, please feel free to share a folder with us on Dropbox if that is easier. You can share with us at ProjectPLN10@gmail.com. We will take the documents from there and place them on Project PLN.

As always, if you ever have questions or ideas, please feel free to contact us at ProjectPLN10@gmail.com or @ProjectPLN.

Best Wishes,

Nick (@thenderdyteacher) and Kelly (@ktenkely)

Co-Editors

Project PLN

19 Pencils - A Review #EdChat #ElemChat

I first heard of 19 Pencils from Kelly Tenkely's amazing site iLearnTechnology.com. It intrigued me and I signed up to see everything it had to offer and was impressed. That was months ago and I got caught up in other tech endeavors and let it sit for a while. The creators of 19 Pencils asked if I would come back to the site and take a look at their new features and share the site with my readers if I liked what I saw. I went back, liked what I saw and am here to share it with all of you.

19 Pencils is a customizable site for teachers that allows them to share websites, quizzes and videos in one location. The best part is that the links are shared visually on 19 Pencils. Instead of a page filled with URLs, 19 Pencils presents the uploaded links as icons students can click.

Once a student clicks on one of the links, they are not taken from the site, a separate box opens on the page that opens the link.

I love this feature because young kids can quickly get lost on the web if they are constantly taken from one page to the other. This allows all of the students to stay on the teacher site and freely and easily move from one resource to the other.

19 Pencils also allows for teachers to upload assignments for students to follow and provide links to the sites they want students to access to complete the assignment. I posted a question for my students on Transcendentalism and provided 8 sites for them to reference. After their research, students can post their responses on their blog. It was very easy to quickly create the assignment and upload the site links I wanted the students to access. The UI is great for beginners to website creation. 

Another little feature I think is very cool is the teacher's note. There is a little spot next to the class title, that is a note from the teacher. I think it can be a great place for reminders for the students. It could be a note to remember to bring their book to class or get a permission slip signed. Little touches like this really make 19 Pencils a nice tool for classroom teachers.

 

19 Pencils also offers a quiz feature that teachers could utilize. A teacher can enter in questions and answers to a new quiz. Then, the teacher would load their student's first name and last initial to create login and passwords to give the students. Once the student has the login and password, they can access the site and take the quiz. What the login and password allows the teacher to do is track the student's use of the site. There have been more than enough times where students are not accessing my site for materials they need, but insist they are on the site all of the time. This feature allows the teacher to track the site's use by students. This information could prove very valuable during parent conferences. 

The last feature I want to mention is The Playground. The Playground is a place on the class page that allows students and teacher to communicate. These could be longer messages left by the teacher or questions left by a student. They could even be messages left by parents using their child's login. 

In a class setting, questions could be quickly asked and answered using The Playground. The 19 Pencils website also looks awesome on iPads which is great news for teachers that have class sets of iPads. Students could do a complete backchannel using The Playground feature. The best part of that, is that the conversation will be saved on the site for students go back and check and students who were not in school that day could follow along with the conversation from home. 

I recommend 19 Pencils to teachers that are looking to easily and effectively:

- integrate a website into their classroom 

- save websites and videos with visual representations

- monitor their students online activity

- create assignments with references to relevant web resources

- add a teacher's note so that students have a clear understanding of what's expected of them

- create quizzes from scratch or use pre-made flashcard quizzes

- get instant feedback from your students with the social media Playground feature

Here's a link to the full set of features at 19Pencils:

http://www.19pencils.com/overview

If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line at @TheNerdyTeacher.

19 Pencils is a paid sponsor of The Nerdy Teacher

What Makes Project Based Learning Effective? #Edchat #EngChat

By von_brandis

I've been meaning to write about my adventures in Project Based Learning for a while. It's a topic many teachers are interested in, but are unsure of how to implement it or know if it is working. After much thought, I have broken down Project Based Learning into the 5 parts that make it effective in the classroom.

Long before my Epic Romeo and Juliet Project, the first major project I created was during my student teaching 10 years ago. I thought it would be a great idea to do a mock trial in my class after reading Huck Finn. I wanted to have the students put Mark Twain on trial for being a racist. At the time, there was some more uproar across the nation on whether or not Huck should be taught in schools. We had discussed the topic in class and I thought this would be a great way for students to explore both sides of the issue and make up their mind.

As I look back at the project (and ahead as I prepare to bring it back), I notice all of the things that made this project work that lead to deep understanding. Here are 5 major parts of Project Based Learning that make it valuable to the classroom.

1. OWNERSHIP is key. For this project, the students were not listening to me on why Twain was or was not a racist, they were showing me and the rest of class what they thought. They were invested in winning their argument. They knew that their work was going to determine if he was guilty or not. Although I gave the assignment, the students were in charge the rest of the way. It was their project and they wanted to do it win. When students feel they own what they are doing, they will work harder. When the audience is larger, they want to impress everyone. These are not crazy ideas, they are the results of owning the work they are doing. OWNERSHIP is a major factor in the value of PBL.

2. CREATIVITY is the another major part of the PBL and is closely linked with OWNERSHIP. Students were allowed to be creative in their work as a lawyer or witness. Witnesses needed to stay within character, but could add their own elements on the witness stand. Allowing the students to create gives them a bigger sense of OWNERSHIP.

3. Another part of the PBL is the COLLABORATION. Students were working with each other trying to decide the best plan of attack. Witnesses would meet with their lawyers and discuss how the questions they were going to ask and how they should dress. The Jury worked on group projects researching the previous public opinions on Twain and his writing. Students were sharing ideas freely with one another. I had three sections of American Lit at the time, so I had three trials running. Lawyers would help others in the other classes and trash talk the opposing lawyers as well. It was all in good fun, but the collaboration had students working hard with one another to accomplish this goal.

4. Depending on how you set up your project, CRITICAL THINKING, is also an important part of PBL. With my Twain Trial, students needed to think about both sides of the argument. Students needed to prepare their witnesses for potential cross-examination questions. They needed to anticipate problems each witness presented and be prepared to counter them. In a world were homework can be tedious and memorization rules supreme, PBL is a great way to get kids thinking critically.

5. Lastly, Project Based Learning has to be FUN! It seems obvious, but I have seen many projects that are very tedious. They have kids go through the motions and leave very little room for FUN or CREATIVITY. Projects are a chance for students to break the regular routine of reading and writing in some classes. Most kids are excited to do a project because they finally see it as a chance to express themselves in a format other than a test or essay. The FUN comes from the freedom students feel. Working with their friends (COLLABORATION), taking charge of their learning (OWNERSHIP), solving real problems (CRITICAL THINKING) and allowing students to create (CREATIVITY) all lead to the students learning in a FUN environment.

Next week, my students will be creating their own Transcendentalist Society. My friend and I tweaked a lesson from Gwen S. Price. I'm excited because this will be the first major project my students have done this year and they will be using the iPads for the first time. My kids are excited to get to work on the project and I can't wait to see what they create. I look forward to sharing their work with all of you.

If you have any thoughts on bringing PBL to your classroom, please do not hesitate to contact me.

- @TheNerdyTeacher

Quick Hits #3 - App Edition #Edchat

I hope everyone had a very wonderful Thanksgiving or a pretty good Thursday for non-American readers. :-)

I wanted to share some quick thoughts on some apps I have been playing with lately.

iAnnotate PDF - $9.99

I really like this app. I have been looking for apps to use on my iPad since I knew I was getting a class set and this app has been very useful. It allows the user to take any PDF and annotate it freely. You can use a variety of tools to highlight, underline, strike-through and even stamp. Once you are done annotating the document, you can save it with the annotations and email it to yourself or others. I like the app because it would allow students to annotate pieces I send to them and they could send it back to me with their thoughts.

The app also allows for Dropbox integration which I love. I can pulls documents from Dropbox and annotate them and send them back to Dropbox. I recently uploaded my class list to the app and used it to enter in grades while I check writing assignments. After I had completed all of the checking, I was able to quickly reference the grades on the app and enter them into the online grade book. I can keep the PDF there and continue to annotate it over time. I have found it to be very valuable.

The app might seem a bit pricey, but I think it is a fair value for how I want to use it and how I hope to use it in the future. If you are looking for ways to annotate PDFs of the go, I suggest you take a look at iAnnotate PDF for your iPad.

The Tower Pulse - Free

For those of you who do not know, I am a co-adviser to the the school's new online newspaper, The Tower Pulse. We started last year and have picked up steam this year. I help on the tech end of the paper and my co-adviser works on the journalistic end. It's been a great marriage and the kids have turned out an amazing product. I thought it would be cool if I could turn the paper into an app for the students to download for free to access the content on the go. After some searching, I found UppSite.com. UppSite takes your WordPress site and converts it into an app. It will create a free Android app and help you set up an Apple Developer account so your app can be made available on OS Devices. I already had a Developer account, so I was able to create Android and Apple apps. After two weeks, the app was ready to go on all devices. The kids are excited and I cannot wait to see how many people download the app. If you have a WordPress site and are looking to create an app, take a look at UppSite.com.

Charlie Brown Christmas - $4.99

This cartoon is one of my all-time favorites. There is no question about it. I love every part of this cartoon. I stumbled upon the app looking through the store and downloaded it without question. That is not the wisest of decisions for app purchasing, especially at $4.99, but I was not disappointed. It is the complete story told by the original voice of Charlie Brown and has all of the original voices from the cartoon. It is the complete cartoon with many different interactive elements. My son, Leo, is only 6 months old and he was mesmerized by the app. He would touch the screen and turn falling snow into giant snowflakes or touch one of the Peanuts characters and they would dance or talk. He loved it and that made the app priceless in my mind. If you loved the cartoon growing up, you will love this app, and so will your kids. Here is a video from the creator of the app with more details. 

 I wanted to share some cool apps I've been using the past few weeks. I will have some more app suggestions in the near future as my class set of iPads sees more action with the students. I hope all of you have a great weekend.

- @TheNerdyTeacher