Classroom Management Tips & Tech

Classroom management can seem daunting, especially when integrating technology. Below are some helpful tips for helping create a positive, consistent, and focused classroom while using tech (thanks for the example lesson, Jeff!).

1. "Ask Three Before Me"

This is a helpful reminder for when students have a question. It encourages them to ask three peers, or check three resources (online, book, instructions) before they ask you as the teacher. This helps protect your time as a teacher and also encourages them to interact with their peers and practice being resourceful. I am a fan of this method and am excited to use it in my world language classroom because it also rhymes in French: Demande à trois, avant moi :) 

2. Limit Time (and Award Bonus Time)

One common mistake is giving students too much time to complete a task online or using technology. It is quicker to type than to handwrite and especially if students are familiar with the website or technology resources they are using, they may be able to accomplish a given task quicker than students have in the past. When they get done early, students will find other things to fill the time and may get distracted. 

Instead, underestimate the amount of time it will take students, and then award bonus time if it looks like most students aren't done yet. This helps them stay focused (and makes you the hero!). 

3. Physically Remove Screens

Even as adults, it is difficult to avoid the temptation of checking a screen when it's right in front of you. Help your students by physically separating them from their screens. This does not mean taking away your students' devices. Rather, have them set their phones face down or laptops closed on the tops of their desks. Or, have them turn their laptop screens completely away from themselves so they face the front of the class when you are speaking.

4. Exploring New Tech

When introducing a new technology tool, students may become distracted, wanting to explore and push the limits with how they can use it. To avoid losing control of the class, allow intentional time for students to play around with the new technology beforehand. This can even be just 3-5 minutes in class and then you can even allow space afterwards for students to share with the class what they learned. 

5. Clear Expectations and Explanations

Establish a consistent routine and clear expectations for students. You could start every day with the same entry slide on the screen that outlines what materials students need. For example, is a laptop needed today or not? Headphones? Pencil and paper? This helps students know what to expect and whether it will be appropriate to get out their computers each day. 

Another way to set clear expectations is to use timer on the screen when students have a certain amount of time to get a task done. This helps gives students ownership of their time and practice pacing themselves. 

6. Review Established Procedures

Help students out by practicing already-established procedures periodically throughout the year. For example, before you begin a lesson, you could ask students to demonstrate what good listening looks like (closing their laptops, looking at the you or at their notes, not talking to neighbors). This helps remind students what is expected and makes them feel confident that they know what to do.

Here is a great article that highlights some additional tips for integrating technology into your curriculum.

What are other classroom management ideas that you find helpful when using technology? Please feel free to comment below!

The Mindset of Change ~ Creating a Better Classroom

     Think back to your high school days for a brief moment. Who were your most memorable teachers (good or bad)? What specifically did they do that made them great (or terrible)? What do you think their mindsets were when it came to teaching; did they continually adapt or did they stick to their script? Hold onto this thought.

    Now, I want you to think about a class that you don't remember well or don't have any memories attached to that class. What made this class unmemorable? Can you remember who your teacher was? Was the content too boring or did the teacher not love the subject matter?

    The reason I ask these questions is that I want you to imagine what your teachers' mindsets were. Each teacher has a different view on education, different ways of teaching, and different processes to teach information. From my experience, my most memorable teachers (the good teachers) had great mindsets, they adapted, and they cared about building relationships with students.

    This leads me into talking about the three most important mindsets teachers should have if they truly want to change what learning looks like in the classroom. These mindsets are:

1.    Create a simple structure for students to use (and update) to gain insight into how to best collaborate and learn together.
2.    Build better questions together.
3.    Learn from your mistakes by exploring them together.

    Whether you like to or not, life is about figuring out to collaborate and communicate with others if you don't agree with them. The classroom must reflect this and allow kids to figure out ways to work with each other. As the teacher, it is important that you understand how your students learn and use that to create learning groups. As the year goes on and each kid gets better at working in groups, then you can create a group of students who are complete opposites in learning styles. This structure is simple, go from groups that work well together and slowly create groups of kids who have to figure out how to work together. To gain insight, you can have students reflect on each group member and reflect on themselves. 

    Helping students build questions is extremely important not only in the classroom, but in their everyday lives. Building questions can follow a process, such as the "what, where, when, who, why, how" model. As the students start a topic, they can start by answering the questions in this model. As they progress in that topic, you may model some questions they may have and then ask them to write down questions they have.

    Exploring mistakes through reflection is extremely important. If we do not reflect on our mistakes, how can we improve? This is what your students have to understand in the classroom. Everybody makes mistakes, but how are you going to change your approach so this mistake will not happen again? Mistakes shouldn't be celebrated, but rather treated as a learning moment. Many mistakes, especially in math, tend to be calculation mistakes, and students may have developed a process that can help compute problems for other classmates.

Math through SAMR

    Being part of the first wave of Chromebooks in my high school, I thought it was really interesting how little we used them. The Chromebooks never left the classroom and we only used them for researching topics in history, science, and English. For math, we never touched our Chromebooks, like EVER. Everything in my math classes was done by hand whether it was a homework assignment or not. Fast forward to college and EVERYTHING was online. Since I was used to doing work on paper, it was a huge struggle for me when assignments were all online while the tests were on paper. Let me tell you, online math homework SUCKS especially when it grades only your answer and not your process.

    So, what is the common ground? Strictly online math assignments are extremely unbeneficial, but there is still technology not being utilized in the math classroom. The truth is that math is everywhere but we are commonly taught that math only exists in the classroom. Every day we see sales at the grocery store saying up to 35% off, we see houses for sale stating their square footage, and we see gas prices per gallon. The mathematics classroom HAS to transform and connect to the world around the students. This can be video calling a math class in Europe to see what they are learning. This could be picking your favorite state/country on google maps and using it to find the total area of the state. This could be tracking the ocean tides and graphing its position on the beach relative to time. What I am saying is that math is not stagnant and it is not contained in a classroom. It is everywhere and kids need to understand that it is an amazing tool to see the world through. Technology is our friend if we choose to use it properly and it has the power to take students to places they never thought possible.

Forget Purdue Owl!!!

     To me, the most mind-blowing thing from this class is the fact that Google Docs can generate footnotes and citations FOR YOU when you insert a website link. After I learned that, I could automatically see my future students' lives becomming easier when citing sources. Not only do you have to go over Purdue Owl anymore (sweeeet!), your students won't have to struggle understanding how to format citations or with dealing with citation machine that will absolutely kill their battery life

    This being said, it is equally as important to teach your students what proper sources look like. This citation tool on Google Docs should NOT be used willy nilly for any website, students must understand how to find proper sources. To do this easily, you must teach your students about "site:" when using google. This gives them the ability to search for credible sources, while at the same time giving them good sources to use in their research.

Flight Patterns as Polynomials

    After our lesson about teaching through google maps and google earth, I thought it was super interesting seeing how flight patterns actually look. This got me thinking about how I could utilize this technology in my math classroom, and I thought that teaching my class about quadratic equations using flight patterns would be super interesting. 

 

    Using maps to teach quadratic equations can allow kids to choose their starting point and destination, learn about latitude and longitude, and use the flight pattern to generate an equation given that the starting point is the origin. This could then lead into cubic equations by treating the above destination as a layover and then picking another destination.

    Teaching polynomials through maps allows kids to apply mathematics to the real world, which helps them understand how the world works around them.

Am I Media Pre-Literate?

    Media literacy is the ability to accurately analyze and evaluate media, which can be social media, books, videos, etc. For a crash course you can visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIaRw5R6Da4. (I will not be using the 5 questions from this video). In my adult life, I haven't had to consider how media literate I am. I look up what I want to know, either find an answer or don't, and I move on. But this class has made me question; what is my media literacy level? Since I'm thinking about it, I should answer that question using a few more questions.

Can I assess who created the media, what they are trying to do with it, and what they want to get out of it? Yes. One point for me.

Do I assess who created the media, what they are trying to do with it, and what they want to get out of it? Sometimes but not when I am in a hurry. .25

Do (or did before yesterday) I know how to restrict my searches to give me more trustworthy sources. No, 0

Do I restrict my searches? No, 0

Do I move on to the second page of found sources? No, 0

Do I look for a diversity of opinions in media? Sometimes, I typically just look at the first couple of sources that fit what I am looking for. When I am researching a product or something that has specific relevance to me I will look at a variety of opinions and try to discern what I am seeing. .5

Can I assess media	1pt
Do I assess madia	.25
Do I know how to restrict searches	0
Do I restrict searches	0
Do I continue to 2nd page of results	0
Do I look for a diversity of opinions	.5
	1.75/6 Low Literacy

Looks like I have a small problem.

    I remember that there used to be discussion a few years back about how technology was flooding people with stimulus and an unprocessable amount of information. The discussion was mostly negative from people who didn’t grow up with all this information and connectivity available to them. They were right on many details and many were pragmatic to say that these technologies are not going away and that kids growing up now will need to be educated on how to navigate the world with all of these distractions and mass of information.

    The new generations need to be taught what they are seeing, why it is there, how to discern what is worth noting and what is not, and how to produce content in a time where production is at its easiest. And it looks like I, as well as many others slightly more removed from the age of information, need to work on literacy as well. I look forward to the capability this era gives to individual people, and I accept my responsibility to get informed and literate for myself.  

Just Google it

 Reflecting on the topics that we discussed in class today, I was struck by the amount of options for learning are integrated into the Google learning experience. Between Google classroom, Google maps, Google news, Google earth and the like, teachers almost never have to leave Google. I grew up just before classrooms started getting a large number of Chromebooks that students had extended time to work on. For us, the school had one computer cart that our teacher could book for a class period. We would check out a computer, work on our assignment, put it away, and then never see the computer again.  

Entering college, we started to have more homework and assignments that we had to work on digitally and to be able to submit or work on with our own computers. I became a Chromebook user for cost efficiency, mainly using Google Docs and Google Slides; not much more than that. I only used the basic functions and got my work done on the computer solely because we didn't do it on paper or by a different medium.  

Computers were never my source of high tech, technology use. In part because I was never required to use highly interactive materials; a copy and paste image here and a PowerPoint animation there is as far as I went. But even doing that was using Google's resources well. Now-a-days things have certainly changed. Google classroom has created an interactive environment jam packed with hyperlink and embedding options. Student's can interact on the same documents and materials of different types that are all set up in advance and controlled by the teacher. 

Today's teachers have an incredible resource in front of them. A resource that their districts are already paying for and their student's are already equipped to thrive with. I am personally terrified of and exited about this technology. I have so much to learn and catch up on to use this tool effectively, but I see how I can teach students in a much deeper and more meaningful way with it. 

Wish Me Luck!!