Friday Matinee: Effective Breakout Rooms and Group Work: 3 Tools to Take Collaboration Further

Example of using Jamboard in the classroom

As remote teaching and learning continues, creating breakout rooms and other activities where small groups can work is an important part of today's "classrooms."  This not only allows students to see their classmates in a small group setting, but it allows them to work through problems and projects together as they would have in a regular classroom.  To better understand what each group is doing in their breakout room, Holly Clark discusses 3 technology tools that give groups a chance to see and hear what other groups did and what ideas came out of their collaborations.

Effective Breakout Rooms and Group Work: 3 tools to take collaboration further

The tools that Holly discusses are Socrative, Jamboard, and Flipgrid.  Take a look at each one in the blog, then try just one.

Friday Matinee: Using Padlet in Your Class

Padlet is a great app for discussions, formative assessment, sharing documents, brainstorming, and more.  It looks a lot like an online bulletin board with a bunch of sticky notes!  The free version allows you to create 3 walls for free.  If you need another one, just delete a previous one.  Students can upload just about any file, add a link, search and add images, videos and more via Google, take a picture with your computer's camera, capture video from your camera, record their voice, record the screen, doodle, add a place/location, or link to another Padlet.  Wow!  That's a lot!!  What's more is that students can respond to other students.

I've used Padlet for years to have students give feedback on an article they've read, review a Chrome extension that they have tried, as a backchannel, or as a way to share a document with the class.  I've asked a question and had students respond.  I've even had them introduce themselves and add a video or image to show something that they are interested in.  The possibilities are endless and it is easy to use in a hybrid teaching environment.

Check out this video on how it works.  Want to try it?  Here's one I created asking about what the characteristics of effective feedback are.

Friday Matinee: Using Wakelet in Your Classroom

Wakelet is a curation tool that allows you to save items (anything with a link), organize them, tell stories, and share content from around the web (Kathleen Morris, 2019).  Curation, evaluating resources, and collaboration are necessary skills for our students.

It will help you understand more about what Wakelet is if you look at a collection.  Here's a one on (drum roll please . . . 🥁 ) WAKELET!  Check out these resources, many of which have been written for K-12, but that doesn't mean that they can't be used in higher education.  It's a great way for students to keep up with their research and they can work together in groups to find and organize their information.  Their curated information can then be put into a Google Site, a research paper, a presentation, or a digital magazine as a way for them to show what they have learned.  Here's another one that you can actually add to!

Wakelets can be private, unlisted (only people with the link can find it), or public, where anyone can find it when searching the web.  It's easy to get a link to share a collection or add collaborators.  Wakelets are an easy to share resources with students, differentiate learning, create digital portfolios, and more.

Watch as Holly Clark (she's amazing) shows how to use Wakelet in the Classroom.

Click on the above image to read more!  

Remember to check out our Remote Learning Resources website for more ideas on collaboration.  

Want to know more about how technology is infused into classrooms around the world?  Attend the Virtual FETC Conference in January for FREE!

Friday Matinee: Google Jamboard for Online Collaboration

Google Jamboard is a physical digital whiteboard (our college has one!) but it is also an online digital whiteboard that is collaborative.  Online you can share, view, and create Jams with your students to engage them during class time.  All "jams" are saved in Google Drive and are accessible via Google Chrome.  You can add images, sticky notes, text, and drawings.  

Let's try it out!  Open this file and scroll through the frames at the top.  You can have a total of 20 frames in one Jam.  Go ahead and add to each frame.

To create a file, just go to Drive>New and find Jamboard, find Jamboard in the waffle, or type jamboard.google.com.  Like a template, but need to make a copy?  Open the template and go to the 3 dots in the upper right and choose "make a copy".  You can download PDFs and images from there as well.  Use the Share button to get a link or share via email.  There's an app for your phone or tablet that will let you add files from Google Drive.

 Want ideas for using it in your classroom?  Matt Miller's article includes 20 ideas for using it in the classroom.  

Here are a few idea templates that you can copy and use.

Blackout Poetry

Brainstorming

Thinking Routines

The Ultimate Collection of Jamboard Templates

Jamboard Templates and Information

Let's Jam: Google Jamboard Resources in a Wakelet collection.  We'll keep adding to this wake.

You'll be jamming in no time!  Here's a video if you want to learn more.

Friday Matinee: Engagement With Digital Escape Rooms

Digital escape rooms (also called digital breakouts) are a spin on the popular Escape Rooms and are a great way to bring game playing, group work, collaboration, and problem solving into your classroom.  They can also be done remotely!

Jason Reed, the Digital Learning Coach at Marshall County Schools, has created this great tutorial on creating and using digital escape rooms in your classroom.  

EscapeRoom PD

He's embedded an example on slide 2 and more ideas on slide 3.  If you are a math nerd, I highly recommend this one: Shape Escape.

Here's an easy Halloween Haunt Escape Room.  Click in different places in the image to get your clues.

For more ideas on creating or using an digital escape room (there are many shared examples online) for your class, check out these additional resources:

30+ Digital Escape Rooms (Plus a Step by Step Guide for Creating Your Own

40+ Digital Escape Rooms

Creating your clues is half the fun!  You can even have your students help you with these and put them all together in an escape room to challenge your class.

How to Create a Digital Breakout for the Classroom (has great ideas for clues!)

Breakout EDU Digital Resources (great sites for sites to use to create your clues)

Your "locks" should be created in Google Forms using response validation.  Here's a helpful post on using response validation in a Form.  Remember that they have to get the answer right in order to submit their form and breakout!

KATE challenges you to create an escape room for at least one of your classes and we would love for you to share it with us!  Need help?  Let us know.

Friday Matinee: Using Google Slides: Jigsaw Activity

 

It's Friday - and it's a long weekend!  That gives you plenty of time to create a Jigsaw activity to use with your class in the near future.  What is a Jigsaw activity?  It breaks your students into groups and your topic into pieces, allowing for each group to work on a given subtopic.  The students then bring their part of the topic puzzle back to the group to put it all together.  You can use the attached Google Slides Jigsaw file as a template to create your own Jigsaw activity.  The video shows you how to edit the file and make it your own. 

The Jigsaw template: http://bit.ly/SlidesJigsaw

The video on how to edit the template:  https://youtu.be/MGTwR2HtX3c

This activity can easily be used during remote learning!  All of your students can edit the file at the same time and communicate with their group using messaging or a video call.  Be aware though that if they are going this during class time that they will have to move to different places to not have audio feedback from multiple microphones and still maintain their social distancing.

Friday Matinee: Collaboration Ideas for Remote Learning

Take a big sigh of relief!  The first week of classes is over.  As you start to think about next week, you might try adding an activity where your students can collaborate digitally.  On our website on Remote Learning Resources, we have added several ways to have your students collaborate during class time (or after) using several digital tools.

One of the easiest to try is Padlet.  You can join with your MSU (Google) account and sign up for a free account and quickly set up a discussion wall.  I love using Padlet with inservice teachers to get their ideas or feedback during professional development sessions.  

Another is Wakelet.  Divide your students into groups and let them create a Wakelet on what they've learned, adding resources from various sources on the topic to share with their classmates.  It will take them less than 30 minutes to put together a great Wakelet (or wake) on a given topic.

Collaboration Ideas for Remote Learning

Friday Matinee: Learning for All Conference Resources

Last week The Friday Institute at North Carolina State University held the Learning for All Online Conference with many wonderful educators presenting on a variety of topics including innovation, collaboration, blended learning, and more with the intention of bringing great learning experiences to all students.  They have shared a document with links to the recorded presentations and resources, although some links will be added shortly.  Feel free to browse through the presentations and watch the videos that you feel will benefit you as a classroom teacher and try a few that just sound interesting.  I have watched 3 so far and am looking forward to watching more!

Learning for All: Engaging All Students Through Innovative Learning Experiences

Friday Matinee: Using Collaboration Slides in Your Classroom

Welcome back and I hope the semester is off to a good start.  I wanted to share with you a way to create a collaborative template that can be used in many ways with your classes.  We demonstrate it with Google Slides, but you should be able to do the same thing in PowerPoint.

The video will show you how to create 2 master slides, one will have your directions on it and the other will be the slide that the students will add to share their answer.  Once students have answered their question on their slide, they can then read and comment on other students slides.  This is great for discussions, for a quick assessment to make sure your students got what you discussed in class, or even to review for a test.  Once you have done this, you can make a copy of the file, quickly edit it, and used it again.  Be sure to give your students editing access to the file so that they can add their slide and comment on others.

The video will start part way in at the point where I discuss this method.

Using Collaboration Slides in Your Classroom

This file will show you how students responded after reading 3 articles on teaching remotely.  We recommend that once you've created this file, that you call this your template or master and make a copy of it each time you want to use it.  That way you'll always have your template that is blank.

I Have Some Money for a Makerspace. Now What?

Guest post by:  Heidi Neltner | Instructional Technology Specialist, Certified Librarian
FORT THOMAS INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS

I’ve been primarily working with elementary on the makerspace format for the last 4-5 years.  I would say the first thing you might think to do before buying anything is conduct a needs assessment see what is lacking for the kids and consider the kind of programming you might implement to help fill needs.  (we needed some tools to support NGSS so I started with Legos and Snap Circuits, then branched out from there.)  Also consider your school’s mission and vision and the CSIP.  Tying purchases and plans to those things goes really far in giving your movement credibility.

You might talk to teachers you consider to have an innovative mindset and ask them what they would need to support really taking kids to new places in thought and practice.  Look to see what kinds of projects get done each year and things that might support those projects – (for example if kids are making a lot of displays, maybe a circuit machine would be a good addition).   

I would also check in with the kids to see what they feel like they’re missing.  It might be that students need space to collaborate, so large white boards or writable surfaces would serve you well; or kids might need a place to make really good resumes, so workstations with tutorials on how to use sites like Canva to build really impressive, visual resumes might help.  Or kids might just be really stressed out and need a place to relax and work together on cool projects like collaborative art that could be donated.

If reaching out to teachers and students to find out what they need seems too time consuming for your timeline, another approach would be to establish a theme for next year and base your purchases around that theme.  For example you might consider a theme that includes the word “light” then you could focus on purchasing things and organizing events that would allow students to do things like create wearable LED projects, or your theme might have something to do with “bringing ideas to life” and center your purchases around things that would allow kids to create videos or cartoons (green screens, iPads for easy editing) or you could have a totally different view on that and buy kits that would allow kids to grow things and create green spaces in your school.

I do have some resources and suggestions here that might spark some better ideas: http://learninprogress.blogspot.com/2015/09/makerspace-on-budget.html

Ultimately whatever you purchase, it helps to have a general plan for how you want to use it and programming you might do with it – try to sketch out a rough calendar of how you would implement or use the items, or make a list of teachers you might reach out to for collaboration ideas, so you feel good about whatever you purchase.