Connecting to Students' World: Learning with Emojis, GIFs, and Memes.

Whatever your feelings are on Social Media, the reality is most students will automatically be reeled in by anything that is similar to what they are used to seeing on their social networks. Why not harness that power to hook and engage students in fun ways that connects with their everyday world. This means emojis, animated GIFs and memes.

Emoji Learning

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Emojis are fun images that students (and many adults) are probably very familiar with. Text messages are filled with these little pictures that can be used with any age level to grab student attention and make learning relatable to their lives.

The G Suite of Apps has a library of emojis that can be used easily by teachers and students. Emojis can be found within the “special characters” tab under the insert option on docs, drawings, slides, and sheets. (special note: you must create a text box first to access in drawings and slides)

Resize emojis by highlighting and changing the font size. Each emoji acts like a letter of text.

Use them to introduce variables in math. Before you get to x and y have students solve for an emoji. It is a fun, non intimidating way to transition to higher level algebra skills.

Or create book summaries out of them!

Charlotte’s Web

Click here and here for more creative ideas from Eric Curts (@ericcurts) on ways to bring emjois into your teaching.

Animated GIFs

GIFs are those little moving pictures that our world loves to share on social media sites and in text messages. They are a huge phenomenon right now, and very popular with students.

Using a tool like Make A GIF is a fun and easy way to create GIFs from pictures, YouTube videos, or video you have recorded yourself. There is also a webcam option to record quickly on your Chromebook/Laptop.

There are lots of ways to use GIFs in your classroom. A few include...

Visually calling attention to something important.

Or giving feedback to a student.

Once created, GIFs work like image files. They can be e-mailed, pasted into documents, added to websites, etc. You don’t need to do anything to activate the animation in them.

Click here to explore more ideas from Matt Miller (@jmattmiller), author of the book Ditch that Textbook.

Memes

Memes are similar to GIFs, only they use a still picture with accompanying text. They are enjoyable and engaging for students. Often memes involve humor, and as Digital Learning Specialist Ryan Clark (@healthteacherRC) tweeted out last week, “If I get my students laughing, we’re halfway to learning.”

Use a tool like Imgur to create memes...

• As an icebreaker or launch for a lesson

• To create class rules

• To learn new vocabulary words

• To Emphasize a historical event.

Click here to watch a video on how to use Imgur to start creating memes for your own students.

Be careful and thoughtful if you have your students search for, or create their own GIFs/Memes on any of the sites above. Not all of them found on the internet are appropriate. Stress good digital citizenship.

Please contact your Digital Learning Specialist if you would like additional information on anything mentioned above.

SMART Notebook Express, Google Expeditions, Where in the World is my DLS

SMART Notebook Express is a website that allows you to open SMART Notebook Files without having SMART Notebook installed on your device.  This also gives you the ability to save SMART files to your drive and still be able to open them.  You can open them at home, at the coffee shop or wherever you have an internet connection.  As many of you transition to using slides for presentations, you then have the ability to open and copy your SMART files as a PDF onto your presentation.  SMART Notebook Express link.

Google Expeditions gives students virtual reality field trips to many places in our world.  Mr. Guyard, French Teacher at Central Middle School, and Ms. Holman, Spanish Teacher at Central Middle School took their students to places around the world this week.  As often as possible, Google Expeditions comes with a DLS to co-teach with you the first time.  Google Expeditions are great learning experience for all grade levels. Here is a list of available Expeditions. If you would like more information please let your DLS know.


Where in the world is my DLS?  Your DLS may be leading a Google Expedition but they also may be co-teaching a lesson, explaining a digital tool, planning a project, planning a unit, researching new ways of differentiation, prepping for PD, leading a co-hort of learners, assisting you during your observation, integrating the 4 C's into your lessons, collaborating with you on setting digital learning goals, but most of all, we are your partner in doing what is best for our students.  We want to be wherever you are!  Let us know how we can assist you.

Google Classroom Updates!

NEW Google Classroom Updates:

FOR STUDENTS: Individualized Work for Differentiated Learning

Classroom makes it a lot easier for teachers to assign work to individual students and groups based on their unique needs. As they’re creating an assignment, post or question, teachers can choose whether to share it with the entire class or just with a subset of students.

FOR TEACHERS: New Notifications to Manage Student Work

Teachers will now receive two new types of Classroom notifications—one when students submit work after the due date, and one for when students re-submit work!

You can read the full blog post here.

Google Classroom Extension: Get your class on the same (web)page, instantly!

Save time and create a more interactive class with the Share to Classroom extension. The extension allows you to push webpages to any of your Classroom classes, so they open instantly on your students' computers. With this extension, you can get your students on the right page, quickly and reliably every time. You can also post announcements, create assignments, or save webpages to post to Classroom later. For more click here.

Form Publisher + Flipgrid One

Form Publisher

Google Forms is a powerful data collection tool, but it does have its limitations. As you may know, the responses to a Google Form are all recorded in a spreadsheet. Working within a spreadsheet is great when you need to do calculations with the data or if the information you are collecting is for a small audience and individual responses don't need to be shared. One of the questions that I am often asked is if there is a way to take the spreadsheet data and turn it into a more useable format. The answer is YES! With Form Publisher, you can create an individual Google Doc, Slides presentation or Google Sheets spreadsheet for each response to your Google Form. These merged documents can automatically be shared back with the respondent or sent to someone else via email.

Form Publisher is an add-on for Google Forms. See the image below to learn how to install add-ons within a Google Form. 

After Form Publisher is installed, click on the puzzle piece in the top right corner of your Form and select 'Form Publisher'. A menu will appear in the bottom right corner of your screen that will walk you through the process of creating your template document, slides presentation or spreadsheet. The video below has more detailed directions. 

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FlipGrid One

Flipgrid is a tool that allows students to submit video responses to a question. This platform, developed by a professor and graduate students from the University of Minnesota, now has a basic free version for all educators.  Check it out here.

Click here to sign-up for your free account.

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Twitter for Pofessional Growth: Part 1 - Getting Started

Twitter: Twitter For Professional Development (Part 1)

Twitter can be an amazing resource when thought of as a Personal Learning Network (PLN). Teachers can use twitter to develop their own personalized “network” of fellow educators and resources designed to make them a better teacher. If you are not on Twitter yet ... get there. There are far too many great discussions happening for you to keep missing out. 

How To Sign Up For Twitter

Start Building Your PLN With ISD 624 Employees

To encourage teachers to build their PLN, promote collaboration across our district, and to expand the digital reach of our educators globally, we are creating a resource of twitter handles from ISD624 teachers to share across our district. This is an optional activity, but connecting with other great educators on twitter could be transformational to your teaching practices. Twitter handles collected from this form will be available to ISD624 employees via this blog and emails from your Digital Learning Specialist. Fill out this form if you are interested in sharing your twitter handle for other ISD 624 teachers to follow:

Click Here To Join Fill Out The ISD 624 PLN Twitter Handle Collection Form

Twitter Best Practices 

• The purpose of this twitter account you will create is for professional purposes - to make you a better educator.
• Do not use Twitter like facebook - No pictures of food, posts about your family, or political rants.
• No profile eggs.  Make sure you upload a picture of yourself for your twitter profile. It brings legitimacy to your profile. 
• Unless you’re at an education event, do not say where you are at.
• Do not be afraid to UNFOLLOW people.  If they are not making you a better educator, unfollow them. 
• Your description is important, make sure you describe yourself as a teacher and other characteristics to get people who you want to be part of your PLN will want to follow you.

Identify Your #Hashtags 

Hashtags are a tool to make words searchable. Hashtags allow Twitter users to tap into a twitter-wide conversation. Discover the trending conversations, and decide which ones you want to be included in by clicking on a hashtag. This will help you connect with users who have similar interests. To create a hashtag, place # before a word or a combination of words without spaces. One very popular education hashtag is #edchat and our district technology hashtag is #isd624tech.

Find Some Educators To Follow