MACUL 22 - Complete!

Not gonna lie. Driving to MACUL 22 was nerve-wracking. I was definitely feeling the anxiety trying to take over, and my brain filled the closer I got to Grand Rapids. I checked in, dropped my bags off in my room, and headed over to my first session (Google Updates) for the conference. As soon as I crossed the threshold from the hotel into the covered walk to the conference center, my heartbeat was louder than any other sounds.

And it all went away as soon as I got my badge. 

It was as if I never skipped a beat. And you know why? Because MACUL never skipped a beat. The conference check-in was more streamlined and the chairs were a little farther apart than in the past (thank you COVID.) The energy was the same, if not a bit louder, actually, because everyone was so excited to be back together!

(Well, that's not completely true. MACUL, like all of us, skipped a lot of beats and made a lot of side steps and alternate plans over the past two years. And I did wear a mask except when eating or presenting. But when we all got back together at the conference center? It. Felt. Great!)

As usual, there were SO many sessions from which to choose and every single one I attended was full of tidbits and fun. I learned a few years ago that while notes are really helpful (and yes, I still took a ton) if I tweet my notes, it keeps me more concise and focused, and then those #NotAtMACUL can get some tidbits, too! After all, I get so many nuggets of wisdom from others on social media.

Highlights:

• Reconnecting with some of my favorite presenters - Leslie Fisher, Nick Provenzano, and Joe Sanfelippo to name a few. I attended Leslie's Gadget session and Cup of Joe with Dr. Sanfelippo and felt so inspired, motivated, and happy!
• Meeting up with friends from past MACUL conferences, meeting some of them for the first time since we "met" at the MACUL virtual conference last year!
• Learning from new-to-me presenters like Jennifer LaGarde - so many amazing tidbits about living and learning in this "infodemic."
• Meeting Joe "Mr. D" Dombrowski (Remember that teacher who had the amazing April 1st spelling test? Yep, that's him!)
• Live music when I was still half asleep was a great way to wake up!
• Kilwin's within walking distance....
  And last but not least:
• Being among my colleagues again - being in a department of one has it's benefits, but it's always nice to connect with those who are in similar roles elsewhere.

More tidbits will be unpacked over the coming weeks, but for now, enjoy my MACUL22 experience in under two minutes:

Stuck in a Rut

I've been in a bit of a rut lately.

Yes, lots of fun tech learning has been happening.
Yep, I'm teaching all my classes and working with all our staff.
Work continued at it's typical pace, I continued checking things off my to-do list on a daily basis.
We even held our first in-person (mostly) school-wide event last week and it was Ah-May-Zing!

But.

As March 13 loomed closer, I started getting lost in the past two years. While Covid may have sucked the life out of a lot of things, I also learned more than I could have ever imagined during the pandemic - about life, about teaching and learning, about tech, and about me.

source-ish

As a highly sensitive person, I feel everything around me, in addition to what's going on in my head. Sometimes that is a totally badass skill to have! I mean, I can read a room like nobody's business, and can adapt to what I'm walking into.

Combined with anxiety and depression (well treated, thankfully,) sometimes things get incredibly overwhelming... especially around milestones that weren't so pleasant to begin with.

As March 13 loomed closer, and finally arrived, I finally recognized why I was feeling so slumpy, and once I recognized what was going on, the struggle dissipated. 

This coming week is the MACUL conference (Yahoo! My favorite!) and I know that as I'm driving there on Wednesday, there will be flashbacks of the conference two years ago, when I was en route, and turned around to head back to school to crisis-plan-how-to-teach-remotely technology tools. Instead of sinking into the gloop, my goal (hope!) is to think about all the amazingness that DID come out of the pandemic.

For example...

• The whole school is now tech savvy enough to teach remotely using a variety of tech tools! (I'd been trying to get many on board with tech basics for years!)
• We are now 1:1 in all grades, which has enabled so much more personalized learning for our students!
• I learned that while I am an excellent problem-solver, my brain finds multiple solutions to any given problem before most people processed the problem itself. Because of that finding, I have learned to become a much better listener and team member.
• Bonus family time, without realizing how much I actually needed it, created new family routines that I love.

So. March 13 is here, and with it came daylight savings. As this post draws to a close I actually feel lighter (and not because it's still still light outside while I'm drafting this!) and am feeling even more excited for the coming week, and beyond. 

If you happen to be attending the MACUL conference, consider adding my sessions to your schedule! I promise they'll be worth the time! (And there will be giveaways! Lots of giveaways!

Docu-what? Using Document Cameras in the Classroom

When I was a classroom teacher, I would have been completely lost without my document camera. By the time I left the classroom in 2015, the document camera I had was considered vintage, but it still was better than not having one!

I used it for everything! We filled out our planners under the doc cam so kids could see what to write, practiced handwriting, played math games, built puzzles, showcased student work, did group editing - you name it, we used the doc cam for it.

Let me back up for a moment. If you're not familiar with a document camera, it's basically a modernized version of the overhead projector. But instead of having to copy things onto transparencies you can use regular paper. Instead of having fingertips blackened from erasing the vis-a-vie markers, you use whatever writing utensils you have nearby (crayons? markers? colored pencils?) and maintain clean-ish fingertips. Instead of having to purchase special, transparent manipulatives for the overhead, you can use whatever you already have.

And as I said before, I couldn't teach without one. So imagine my surprise when I got to my new (current) school and there were only THREE document cameras in the whole place. Three out of 35+ classrooms had document cameras. They were all in the middle school classes at that! It was a bit of an educational culture shock to me, to be honest, especially knowing that my previous school had them in every single classroom, including the preschool.

Yes, every class had a Smartboard and projector, which is really handy (and I can't live without!) but a document camera serves a completely different purpose.

Teaching little ones how to properly form letters? Use the document camera so they can see your hand movement, your pencil grip, and the letter formation. Practicing with shape recognition in the real world? Collect real objects, place them under the document camera, and look at the shapes (verses looking at pictures of the objects on the Smartboard.) Building numbers in math? Counters, Unifix Cubes, even base-10 blocks work right under the camera, and are projected in all their glory supersized on the Smartboard.

For older grades you can edit writing- stud
ent samples or printed work, showcase highlighting strategies, even conduct experiments, all under the camera using actual classroom materials (as opposed to the specially created transparent items.) Use actual math games, art materials, real text books - you name it, it will go under the camera and be magically projected to the screen.

Source

Today, every classroom has a document camera in my school. And every teacher in K-4 uses it daily. When COVID hit, most schools (including ours!) scrambled to get document cameras so teachers could use them at home, that's how powerful of a teaching tool they are. Teachers everywhere got creative in their self-designed document cameras using their phones, iPads, and even CDs. Platforms like Osmo released a projector app for their system, and IPEVO released their Mirror Cam, a little gadget that slides on top of the built-in webcam for laptops.

Post COVID, those doc cams in each classroom double as webcams, making it possible to connect to every classroom for school-wide assemblies, pointing the document camera not at a document, but instead at the students themselves. 

If you haven't used a document camera, you have lots of options to explore in trying one out in your classroom.  My personal favorite is the IPEVO, though we have a bunch of the HUE cameras as well. Whatever you choose, document cameras are powerful tools that are definitely worth investigating!

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Tech Tip Take Two!

Last week was a rough one in my community. The number of COVID cases are climbing drastically, and the stress level for everyone is reaching peak levels.

And yet, we're still plugging along, because that's what we do as educators!

Parent emails were plentiful, with some students going remote for the first time, and parents trying to help them get online and whatnot. I found myself writing the same response over and over. And then on Friday when Google Meet went down?! With so many remote students, the emails multiplied like bunnies!

Cartoon by Glasbergen

Thankfully, I love using the custom dictionary on my phone and in Google. It is one of the few times I like auto-correct, actually! I have created my own "codes" so that when I type in a shortcut, say, plmkq, auto-correct automatically changes that to please let me know if you have any questions. Which means as I copied and pasted replies to parents, it was easy to just drop in plmkq, and the other custom dictionary codes I've created, into the emails to expedite the process!

This Week's Tip: Play around with the custom dictionary to make auto-correct a helpful time-saver!

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Learning Loss?

I don't know about you, but I am getting a little tired of hearing the term "learning loss" in reference to students and school and COVID.

Has the education world (along with the rest of the world) been rocked by the chaos of COVID?  Absolutely.  Have schools flipped to remote, some for more than a year?  Absolutely.  Have kids struggled?  Absolutely.

But learning loss?  

What defines loss?  

If you're thinking about the benchmarks and standards, which are not necessarily appropriate to begin with* then why does there need to be any loss?  I mean, the whole world was impacted, why couldn't there be some sort of standards adjustment to accommodate the different type of learning that has been taking place everywhere.  Every.  Where.

Kids might not have been "in school" in the traditional sense, but there was definitely schooling.  Math might not have been pencil-paper algorithms, but there was still math.  Symmetry, recipes, calculating costs... reading might not have required the regurgitation of a summary, but there was lots of reading, even if it came in the form of cheat codes for video games.  Science?  Gardening.  Chemistry?  Cooking.  Learning.  Is.  Everywhere.

There was SO much learning that happened during this different type of school day.  Some of it may have sucked, especially for kids who were in less than ideal settings, caring for younger siblings, struggling to take care of basic needs.  I'm guessing, though, that many kids in those settings still learned a lot - life lessons and not book lessons, maybe - but still learning.

And the family time?  I know my nieces had family meals every single day during lockdown.  They loved having mom and dad around - walks, games, reading, crafts - so much learning.

So maybe we as adults (especially non-educators) need to think about this situation differently.  Instead of trying to catch kids up from the lost learning, let's look at what they did learn, and build from there.  Let's leverage the 1 to 1 technology that most schools now have to differentiate for kids so they can build upon their individual needs, instead of a one-size blanket lesson.

Let's look on the positive side of this situation.  Change does not have to mean loss.  After all, without change, we'd all still be using typewriters.

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*When what used to be considered a first grade skill, is now all of a sudden a kindergarten skill, these standards and benchmarks are messed up.  I mean, kindergarteners brains aren't all of a sudden ready for first grade skills just because someone said so... but that is a whole different post...

GooseChase!

Today was So. Much. Fun!  Fifth grade got to partake in a GooseChase this afternoon as a wrap to March is Reading Month!  It wasn't a typical Battle end, but-

Oops.  Gotta back up a moment here.

Every year, our fifth graders participate in a Battle of the Books.  They are placed in teams, given a stack of 21 books to read (everyone on the team must read a certain number of books, and the team must ensure all books are read), and a variety of tasks (team song, team colors, team cheer, team name, etc).  The month culminates in this huge battle that takes an entire afternoon and is So. Much. Fun.

Enter Covid.

But.... thanks to GooseChase, Battle didn't exit!

GooseChase is an online scavenger hunt platform that has a special edu version perfect for schools.  The teachers modified the questions so that they would work with the GooseChase Platform, turning questions into missions that the kids had to complete.  GooseChase is an app, so we added it to the iPads and gave each team an iPad.  We set up the teams on GooseChase in advance, so the kids only had to click "play as guest" and enter the game code and password.  Super simple!  (and since no information was collected, safe!)

Instead of the standard "write the answer and race to turn it in" the teachers modified the questions so that kids had to type answers, submit photos, and submit videos.  Instead of questions being one at a time, every group in the same place at the same time, GooseChase allows you to set up automations.  That meant that questions were released in groups at a set time interval, and teams worked through as many questions as they could during the battle.  Instead of everyone being in the cafeteria, each team at a table, judges sitting across from the teams, we used Zoom.  The teachers were in Battle Headquarters, each team was in their own room with a teacher supervisor.  And thanks to the set-up, even the kids at home (who had "battle buddies" on site) were able to be actively engaged in this year's Battle!

Every educator can set up a free GooseChase EDU account and create unlimited games.  You can only have one active game at a time, and no more than five teams.  If you need more than that, you need to upgrade your account.  (Note: We did the whole battle on a free account!)

Like I said earlier.  It was So. Much. Fun!

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One Year Ago Today

The MACUL Conference happens every March in Michigan, and it is one of the highlights of my professional year.

Last year, I was very excited to see some of my favorite presenters, friends, and to present two sessions.  I love the MACUL setup when it's in Grand Rapids, it's so nice to be able to walk from my hotel room to the conference workshops and vendor hall.  I love being immersed in educational technology for 48 hours straight!

I was scheduled to leave Wednesday morning, my bag was packed and in the car, my tech was packed and ready.

But, like many others, I never made it.

As I headed into school for a Distance Learning meeting Wednesday morning to plan for the "if we have to close" scenario, my hopes were high.  It was comfy-cozy day of spirit week, I was happy.  I left that meeting around 11, as I had a quick doctors appointment before heading to Grand Rapids.  I was going to join the staff meeting after school remotely, and teach the staff how to use Google Meet.  After I left my appointment, I jumped on the express way only to jump off one exit later and return to school instead.

The next day, we squeezed in a more detailed training with each grade level on the ins and outs of the technology that would become the lifeblood of learning.  I emailed to cancel my sessions at MACUL, apologizing for not being able to come.  

That was the beginning of the end of education as we knew it, life as we knew it, really.

Here we are, one year later, and while there is so much that has sucked about this year, there are some rainbows that came from the storm, too.

• Our whole staff is now fluent in teaching via Google Meet or Zoom
• We finally rolled the 1:1 program out in K-4, instead of just 5-8
• All our PreK - 4th grade teachers are now Seesaw Pioneers
• All our 5th - 8th grade teachers completed the Google Education Training Level 1
• So many of my colleagues have wonderfully integrated technology into their teaching (after several years of me modeling, hinting, nudging...!)
• I spent many, many Friday evenings with Leslie Fisher, one of my favorite conference presenters, and guests that joined her for enlightening and engaging professional development, offered for free, because Leslie is just that awesome.
• My toolbox had to be expanded because of all the new technology opportunities

Andy Grammar said "Only rainbows after rain."  I don't think anyone expected the rain to last this long... it's nice to see some of those rainbows, finally!