#FallCUE Day 1 Report

On the first day of #FallCUE this is what we learned:
American Canyon had insufficient bandwidth for the number of educators and their devices on campus this morning.  By the afternoon, most problems were corrected--either people had logged off or connected to their phone's hot spot. (note: this was fixed by Saturday, I never found out what the issue was)
Past that glitch in the beginning, there was much to learn.  We went to 5 sessions and burned our brains out on google forms, scripts like form Ranger, green screen videos in the classroom, using add-ons to give students feedback on their writing, building my class website and embedding videos in google forms.

I loaded up on plenty of apps, twitter people to follow, and the real winner of the day was the number of new methods for giving feedback on student writing.
I found out that google classroom is only for schools with GAFE so it's not even worth looking at until I convince someone at my school to advocate the powers that be for that situation.

Session 1 was a run down on automating your work flow with formRanger and formMule scripts (scripts by Andrew Stillman) presented by @John_Eick. Here's a link to his resources which included a step-by-step screen shot of how to set up your documents and sheets.  Very useful for a teacher who is new to this type of thing.  This was the session where the wifi was the worst and got better at every session following this.  John was a really energetic presenter and even I, a relative expert on Stillman's old scripts, learned a few tricks to use in practice.

For session 2 and following, +Peter Hyland  and I split up to hit more sessions and because he had different goals for the PD since his classroom situation with technology is vastly different than mine.  I went to John Eick's next session on embedding videos in google forms and Peter went to the Hour of Awesome.
Embedding videos looks like a sweet way to have students take notes while watching a short video, then the teacher is able to quickly look at the notes and give some feedback on the quality of notes, etc. etc.  There are about 3 uses I thought of in my classroom and the only limitation would be technology access.  Could address that by "flipping" the model" and having those that are able do the video notes at home and others do it in class.  That method would require some planning for the kids not actively taking notes in the classroom.
Peter said the Hour of Awesome was awesome and his notes make it sound exciting. Ask me for the link and I'll share the notes with you.  It covered multiple Google products and a few of the case uses for each that could speed up repetitive teacher tasks and improve the speed of student feedback.

The theme of Day 1 was faster feedback to students.  The teacher has to do a little more time consuming prep and setup on the front end, however it's worth it so kids get a faster and better idea of how they're doing with anything from writing to math to biology notes.  Session 3 with +Kristina Mattis (@KristinaMattis)for me covered some add-ons in google docs that allowed collaboration, composition, editing, and publishing of student work with more modes than just text.  Session 4 with +Cate Tolnai (@CateTolnai) showed me some template examples of how to organize my course content around my class website.  This will be most useful to me this year and next.  Finally, I visited the green screen session and got another round of figuring out how to make some videos and--even more importantly--how to use this type of project in my classes to meet standards.

Overall, an awesome day for information.  The spotty wifi and long lunch line were not enough to dampen the good things soaking in to my brain.
More reports later.

Class Feedback Results

To follow Larry Ferlazzo's example, I'm posting my class feedback results from my end of year suvey. I'll put the questions followed by the highest percentage rating, just to save typing since I don't want to take the time to screen shot the charts and graphs that google forms made for me.

 I didn't split these by class period or anything, although I think for next year I'll take the trouble to make a different form for separate classes to get a better idea. This will be really important for me next year since I'll be co-teaching with two different teachers and teaching 4 different subjects. I'm excited for the challenge.

• I felt challenged by this class: 41% neutral
• I felt like Mr. Hyland respected me: 46% agree
• I felt like Mr. Hyland gave me useful feedback: 70% agree
• I felt like Mr. Hyland was fair: 63% agree
• Mr. Hyland had high expectations of me: 50% agree
• I tried my hardest to do my best in class: 37% each (tie) strongly agree and agree
• My grades reflected the quality of my work: 52% agree
• Mr. Hyland encouraged me to do my best: 43% agree
• I felt safe in Mr. Hyland's class: 54% agree
• The class was well organized: 59% agree
• I enjoyed being in this class: 41% agree
• I always followed Mr. Hyland's instructions: 41% neutral

 I also had 5 short answer questions where students could type a response. Some did not, and others made what seemed like sarcastic comments (hard to tell if they were serious). However, there are some gold nuggets that told me what I needed to hear from students (that's the point after all!). Many of these comments referred to our penultimate activity--watching Star Wars after a series of lessons on the Hero's Journey, so if you follow the link below and scan those comments, you'll note some fanboys.

 I also co-teach one period, so I included my co-teacher and co-teach class on the questionnaire. You'll see her name in there as well. Here's the link to my full results, and--as un-scientific as they are--I'm proud of them this year. I always have plenty of room to improve. My goals for next year include inching forward on tech integration in my classroom lessons.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

My time this summer was productive and exciting.  Aside from exploring with my 2 year old son and bouncing my baby daughter around in the back yard, I have managed to get a little work done this summer as well.  This summer for me and my family has centered around food, swimming, and a little bit of professional development.  I owe a big thank you to my lovely wife for taking on the two children while I went to a 3-day long mid-week conference.

Computer Using Educators is a group of teachers who find awesome new ways to use technology in their lessons that make sense for the content and the lesson.  For example, on presenter showed us how he has his history students compose scripts for "news reports from history" and then quickly and easily films them and publishes them within a day.  The students can do most of the work, or just the history side of things, depending on how much tech you want the kids to touch during the lesson (or how much control you want the teacher to have).  I have linked to some of his videos in the posts below:

CUE Conference Day 1
CUE Conference Day 2
CUE Conference Day 3
My Class Website -- thanks to the CUE presenters for showing me some tricks!
Here's a link to my syllabus and,
a link to the rules and first assignments.

On my own, I started some coding at Codecademy (I mostly learned HTML5 and JavaScript). This blog background is Cascading Style Sheets that I learned at Codecademy.  Sadly, my class website and blog have very little on them right now, and may not during this first semester while I get things figured out at my new position.

Notes to Self

Just a brief to do list for my class web site this month:

• I need to create the blurb that goes with my Useful Links page on my class website. Also, I need to add some more useful links from my bookmark bar so there's a few in there to start.
• I need to complete the course syllabuses for Alg 1 and Eng 10 
• get the curriculum maps from the department chairs
• Need to find the permission slips that are used in district for video recording classes (mostly for reflecting on my lessons, but there are a few projects I want to do that would require some student faces in front of the camera.)
• upload that form to website (embed as a google form?)

One of my previous goals was to include pictures with this next blog post, so here's a couple:

First is a screen shot of some summer work I've been doing:

You'll see this again soon.

Next one is a shot of all the faculty in their Master's hoods as we walked out for commencement in June at my last school.