Arts Education

Have you tried Flipgrid yet? Based on the activity and love they are getting on Twitter, it seems like just about everyone is trying Flipgrid! My students and I tried out this tool in a lesson this month. Flipgrid allows users to create and submit a short video in response to a prompt. The tool works on laptops and also as an iOS app. Videos can be recorded within the webtool or app, but they can also be made with a different tool and uploaded to Flipgrid. That feature has some great app smashing potential! Once videos are made, they can be watched by the teacher or by other people who have the address of the "grid" or topic. Viewers can "like" videos too. I wanted to give my students practice interpreting scenarios in terms of some basic gas laws. Flipgrid was perfect for that. In groups, my students completed one of six experiments. Then they did the experiment a second time but they explained and recorded it in response to my prompt. Here are a couple of sampl...

I wrote three posts in January about the PBL that my PLC is trying out this year. Students are creating infographics about any topic in chemistry that interests them. Read more about the project here and here and here . With half of our PBL-designated time behind us, we revved into high gear with Week 4. Week 4 was primarily designated as work time for groups. However, in an effort to provide a checkpoint for students, we wanted to design an opportunity for targeted feedback by the students.  We took our project rubric which is broken into four categories and we created a feedback column. We assigned one category of the rubric to each person's role in the group and sliced the rubric into four strips. We placed the strips into baskets on each group's table. Following a class period work session, each group displayed the rough draft of the infographic on their laptop. All the students moved around and viewed the work of their peers but only through the lens of their particular ...

Here they are: Thanks for reading! I used elink to make the page I embedded above. It looks pretty cool, doesn't it? PS I know I need to update some of these comparison posts. That is on my to-do list!

Last night I tried out elink , a tool that allows users to curate web resources and share them as a newsletter, a web page, a link, or embedded in a page. It's VERY easy to use. Ten minutes after I signed up, I had created my first elink . Here are the steps to creating one: 1. Click Create New and choose a layout. Some layouts are only included in the PRO version but there are several in the free version that appealed to me.  2. Paste in a link. 3. Edit the link or upload a different image if you want. 4. When you have all the links you want, click done. Then you can add a header and publish your page. It couldn't be easier. Today I used elink and my blog analytics to create a summary of my most popular blog posts from last year. I have embedded it below: What I like about creating elinks is that this visual representation of weblinks is much more interesting than a boring bunch of links written as text. Have a project for your students? Providing resources? Why not do it l...