Arts Education

Two weeks ago I got to participate in a Nearpod Summit for their PioNears . One of the main purposes of the summit was to see the projects they are working on and will roll out this year. I wrote about some of those when I returned home. Another of the purposes of the summit was community building. The PioNears are an amazing group of educators and we spent a good portion of the weekend working in teams. Many of the activities were very fun and easy to replicate in classrooms, so I thought I would share them here: The Living Camera Working in pairs, one person is the camera and one person is the photographer. The person who is the camera stands in front of the person who is the photographer. The camera has eyes closed and is directed around an area by the photographer. When it is time to take a picture, a signal is given (tap on the shoulder) and the camera opens her eyes. It was hilarious to see "photographers" line up perfect shots and modify the signal to take panoramas...

Here is the third installment in a series of posts that will reflect on the chemistry PBL my PLC is trying this semester. Our students are creating infographics to explain the relevant chemistry of any topic they choose. The topics they chose are listed above in the word cloud. You can read the first two posts here and here . So far we have used a BreakoutEdu challenge as our entry event and used a BuzzFeed quiz to form groups. During our third week, it was time to settle on a topic, choose an infographic tool, and start researching. Before we got down to the nitty-gritty of the topic, I wanted to do a quick group exercise to encourage group collaboration. I read this post on Sara VanDerWerf's blog and it sounded awesome, so I decided to give the 100 numbers task a try. It was awesome!  As she reports, all the groups were able to identify more numbers the second time through the task. In addition, I observed that the groups were quieter with heads closer together and using s...

Last week I wrote the first post in a series about the chemistry PBL that my colleagues and I are piloting this year. Here is the update for Week 2! On our second day devoted to this project, we asked students to read the article that was the springboard for this project. Instead of reading it in its original form, I pasted it into Prism and asked students to read and highlight one thing they agreed with, one thing they disagreed with, and a reason we might be doing the project. After they submit their highlights, they can see everyone's highlights. Want to check it out? Take a look at the Prism article here . We wanted our students to choose groups and begin thinking about a topic. We have identified four roles for each group - Project Manager, Researcher, Web Designer, and Graphic Designer - and we wanted to help students choose groups that would allow them to draw on diverse strengths instead of just relying on their pals. Since we are working on relevance, we decided to use ...

I spent this past Saturday and Sunday at the second annual Nearpod PioNear Summit in Austin, Texas. It was great to see the 30+ people that I met at last year's summit and to connect with 60 more PioNears from all over the world. We started the weekend with a keynote address by Guido Kovalskys. During his inspirational talk, I created the sketchnote above. He focused on the important ways that Nearpod is used to provide context, improve content, and build connections. The data is impressive: 5.4 million virtual field trips have been taken using Nearpod. 1700 virtual field trips per day!  The people and conversations in this community were the greatest part of the trip, but a close second was hearing about all the cool things coming down the pike from Nearpod. Here's a closer look: Ready to Run PD Nearpod is creating professional development modules on topics that teachers need to be successful in the classroom, like evidence-based writing in math. If your district doesn't h...

My school has a PBL focus this year. Every staff member is expected to try one out, so my PLC and I have designed one that I want to document here. Our students will work on it on 5 consecutive Tuesdays in January and we started last week on our first day back from vacation. This fall I read this article that explains that though many chemists would say students dislike chemistry because it's difficult or boring, people actually don't like chemistry because it doesn't feel relevant to their lives. To a chemist, this is hard to believe. After all, our "central science" is the heart of every other science. What in the world, after all, isn't chemistry? Using this article as our springboard, we developed our driving question: How is chemistry relevant to an aspect of your life? In the project, students, working in teams of four, would investigate the chemistry of something that interests them. We love the infographics we have seen at Compound Interest , so we de...

I'm not quiet. There, I said it. I talk too loud, I've been kicked out of libraries, and sometimes I realize a few seconds too late that I shouldn't have said what I did (as loudly as I said it). This quality makes me a big participant and an incessant questioner when I am a student in a classroom. As a result, I find kids like this easy to teach. I understand what makes them tick. The ones that have me stymied are the quiet ones. This isn't a new phenomenon. For as long as I have been teaching, I always react with surprise when the quiet students thank me for a good year or ask me to write their letters of recommendations. My fallback position is that if students are quiet, they hate the class. Or, at the very least, are counting the minutes until it's over. I know this isn't 100% rational, especially this many years into my career where many quiet students have expressed satisfaction or gratitude. Still, this many years into my career, I still don't think ...