Arts Education

This month I taught a PD class called "Using Blended Learning to Enhance Vocabulary Instruction." I was looking for a FREE simple service to host the materials and serve as a digital classroom for my face-to-face class and I found it in Chalkup . Chalkup calls itself a "class collaboration platform" and it is very easy to use. Log in (with Google single sign-on or create an account with an email address) and do the typical new account stuff. Click "my courses" to join or create a class. After you create a class, you can invite students to join with a class code. The picture at the left shows most of the options for the class once you are ready to get started. Click on Materials to add links, files, videos and more to your class. You can organize it all into folders to make everything easy to find. It is very intuitive with drag & drop functionality. Creating assignments is very easy. Click Assignments and fill out the particulars. Upload a file or atta...

Here's a fun thing to try. Make a list of vocabulary words. New ones. Ask students to write short definitions - one-word definitions if possible. Assign each person one of the words and ask them to introduce it to the class by acting it out. After each student portrays the word, everyone else can guess at which word is being acted out. I tried it last weekend during a vocabulary class with a list of challenging adjectives. Participants wrote one-word definitions for each word. Then class members introduced themselves while trying to portray themselves as the adjective they were assigned. While listening to the introductions, class members tried to guess each word. When we were finished with all the introductions, we reviewed the one-word definitions and our guesses. Some were very easy to guess; others were more difficult. Here is the list of adjectives we used: affable, capricious, diffident, disconsolate, ebullient, erudite, garrulous, incisive, insipid, jocular, languid, loquaci...

Last weekend a colleague and I taught a professional development class about teaching vocabulary. He suggested a technique called "Story Impressions" to introduce a reading assignment. Here's how it works:  Give the students a list of words in the order they appear in the reading. Ask the students to write a story that includes these words in the order given. Ask the students to share their stories. Students read the assigned reading. Talk about the use of the vocabulary in the stories and the reading assignment. Since we were teaching a class about vocabulary, our assigned reading was an article about vocabulary. Our list of words was: Systematic,  Principled,  Cornerstone,  Comprehension,  Element,  Methodology,  Consensus,  Condensation,  Indirect,  Receptive,  Exposure,  Facilitators Our participants wrote wonderful stories. Five people shared their writing in class. Each story was different from each other story, but the...

I first wrote about Quizizz almost a year ago. I saw a tweet and was using the tool in class about 5 minutes later. It is about the easiest tool I have ever tried and I was able to test it out with a class without even having an account. In short, I love this tool. I reread my original post tonight and wanted to update because so many things about this great tool have gotten even better: 1.  Homework Mode - you can play/use Quizizz LIVE in class, but as of last fall, you can also assign a Quizizz for HOMEWORK. What I love about that is that you can assign it for homework, but also that you could use it in a classroom as a station and by the end of the class or day you will have data for all students without leaving a LIVE session open all day. Want to try it? Just click on the quiz title and then click on LIVE or HOMEWORK for the pin you give to students. Easy! Plus, a student can start a game at school on one device and resume it after school . 2.   Google Classroom integr...

This weekend I wrote about three rubric add-ons for Google Apps. Today I used one of them, Doctopus and Goobric , to grade lab reports. I first wrote about Doctopus and Goobric two years ago when I started using them to grade lab reports. There have been a number of improvements since then and I have wanted to highlight them here for some time. If you haven't used Doctopus and Goobric , they are definitely worth a look. Doctopus, an octopus for your documents, is an add-on for Google Sheets. With a little bit of work ahead of time and by following the excellent instructions in the tool, you go from a spreadsheet to every member of a class having his/her own copy of an assignment. Along the way, you can also create folders in your students' Google Drives where you can drop things for them to view or edit. Doctopus does lots of other spectacular things too - like allows for group assignments to be copied, allows you to turn off student access to documents, and allows you to s...