Tag: hyperdocs

HyperDocs and SEL: A Mash-Up at Fall Cue 20!

Posted on October 20, 2020 by

Fall CUE 20 is around the corner – are you going? If not, why not? It’s VIRTUAL this year, and you don’t even need to leave your couch!

This year I’m mashing up two of my favorite teaching topics – HyperDocs and SEL – with two of my favorite educators – Nicole Beardsley and Sarah Landis – and we’ve got 60 minutes of ways to connect hearts and minds!

Here’s a Fall CUE 20 session teaser:

Are you looking for authentic, relevant ways to integrate Social Emotional Learning into your curriculum? Do you want to create meaningful lessons to connect the hearts and minds of your students? Have you built HyperDocs? This session will help you increase academic achievement, improve student engagement, and build SEL into your classroom using HyperDocs! Using CASEL’s five core competencies we will explore, explain, and apply SEL using technology tools – and your students will see huge results!

Participants will design HyperDocs using templates and exemplars to build an understanding of and commitment to Social and Emotional Learning in their students.

Participants will explore their understanding of CASEL’s five core competencies, their impact on and importance to students, and apply them to building lessons using educational technology tools to increase academic achievement and improve student engagement.

– Don’t miss this session on Saturday from 11-12 – sign up at http://cue.org NOW!

Looking for inspiration?

To begin, this session at Fall CUE 20 will have TONS of free HyperDoc resources and ideas to engage students and build relationships! One of my favorites is this All Are Welcome lesson to help my students understand the concept of empathy. Also, students will connect with each other in a low-risk environment, and build narrative writing skills. You can make your own copy of this All Are Welcome Hyperdoc. Just remember to add in your own links to slides and the Padlet to personalize your copy.

Finally, you’ll feel GREAT after exploring resources to help you build more social and emotional connections in your teaching space!

Hope to see you this weekend at Fall CUE 20 – and remember, I’ll always share resources for FREE here on jenniferwolfe.net. And if you want to explore more about HyperDocs, check out the website hyperdocs.co!

primark

Jennifer Wolfe

Jennifer Wolfe, a writer-teacher-mom, is dedicated to finding the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of life by thinking deeply, loving fiercely, and teaching audaciously. Jennifer is a Google Certified Educator, Hyperdoc fanatic, and a voracious reader. Read her stories on her blog, mamawolfe, and grab free copies of her teaching and parenting resources.

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distance teaching

Distance Teaching & Learning: The 4c’s for Making It Successful

Posted on August 2, 2020 by

Distance teaching and learning is different from face to face teaching and learning. It’s the truth.

I’ve spent the entire summer facilitating courses for educators on Digital Teaching and Learning. I’m seeing many educators start to panic about not knowing how to start thinking and planning about beginning a new school year online.

The COVID chasm I wrote about a few weeks ago is real, and it’s terrifying. Teachers everywhere are trying to rethink, remake, redo all that they’ve ever known about teaching. We know this may go on for a semester at more.

What are the 4 C’s of distance teaching?

In California, most districts are starting the year virtually. This requires us to reimagine our back to school routines. I believe there are 4c’s to define the best practices of distance teaching and learning: community, connection, collaboration, and competency.

Taking a look at each of these will help teachers breathe more easily. It will help parents trust the school system and ensure students have the best possible start to the 2020-21 school year.

Distance Teaching = COMMUNITY

So many teachers are frightened about never having met our students face to face and trying to create a classroom community. But think about it – how many virtual spaces are there where we connect with people we don’t see every day? Do you participate in social media groups? Have you taken online classes or done Zoom yoga groups? Did you ever use a VCR to do a workout, or maybe you’ve even done online dating?

Today’s kids see virtual communities differently. Fanfiction groups thrive and survive on the social connections and dedication of members. Classrooms can be the same! Social-emotional learning is important at the start of the year. It’s also crucial to embed into EVERY SINGLE lesson and student contact.

What does SEL mean?

Check out the CASEL competencies for detailed info, but in summary, pay attention. Ask questions. Listen to your students. Comment and give feedback. Show your personality. Crowdsource feedback and ideas from your students. I’m a huge fan of HyperDocs. I make sure that as I design every learning cycle I’m embedding deliberate entry points for student choice, voice, and feedback.

In synchronous meetings, use icebreakers, polls, discussion questions, photo sharing, read alouds, videos and games EVERY TIME.

It’s a ‘pay it forward’ way of thinking – that first five minutes you spend intentionally connecting with students as they enter your virtual class, while they’re ‘getting ready’ and as you end the session will PAY OFF BIG TIME! The conferencing space IS your classroom space – do what you’d do face to face.

Distance Teaching = CONNECTION

Connection goes hand in hand with SEL, and also should be extended to TEACHER connection and PARENT connection.

Teachers need to feel supported. They need to learn self-care strategies, how to set work/home boundaries, how to develop routines, and where to share their glows and grows. One way to create teacher connection is to curate spaces – my favorites are Google Classroom and Wakelet. Using Google Classroom to set up a safe space for virtual PD allows teachers to enter on their own or during virtual meetups. Housing articles, videos, tech tips, and discussion threads help teachers focus on pertinent topics while having access to resources and reflection time.

What’s Wakelet?

Wakelet helps curate collections of resources and can be shared, and/or curated as a community. I love sharing my collections on Assessment ideas, Google Classroom Tips, HyperDocs, and Diverse Reading Lists.

An added bonus of using Google Classroom and Wakelet is allowing teachers to explore new systems that can then be transferred to student use or creation.

Parents need connection, too – Wakelet would be a powerful tool to share tech training how-to videos, Google Calendar appointment sign ups, websites – really anything that you want parents to use to ‘see’ inside your classroom!

Distance Teaching = COLLABORATION

Distance learning shifts the way we collaborate. Students NEED to connect with others – collaboration on projects allows for shared critical thinking, communication, and a deeper connection with school – as long as WHAT they’re collaborating on is engaging, relevant, and rigorous. consider tech tools to foster collaboration like Padlet and Flipgrid. Check out this fabulous collaboration resource created by Steve Wick!

For teachers, collaboration through Professional Learning Communities, not just in your school but worldwide, offers opportunities to share academic, pedagogical, and personal ideas. Many social media networks like Facebook and Instagram are turning to groups and hashtags to connect educators; my favorite collaboration site is Twitter.

Educators find ideas via hashtags searches, groups, direct messages, and Twitter chats – in fact, I hosted a WeVideo Twitter chat on ‘Podcasting and Student Creativity” in hopes of sharing and collecting new ideas for student podcasting projects!

If you’re interested in podcasting you can see the archive of ideas here.

What else can teachers do?

Taking an online class, webinar, or book study helps teachers connect and collaborate over topics of interest. Also, it puts teachers in the point of view of students – what better way to ‘feel’ what it’s like for our own students to be in a virtual classroom! Consider getting Google Certified (Kasey Bell has great resources here) or taking tech tool certifications. Perhaps join your local CUE affiliate, or attend virtual conferences or edchats – all ways to not feel so all alone in distance teaching while making new friends at the same time (see, I told you community is built online!).

For students, authentic collaboration needs to happen in synchronous and asynchronous time. In web conferences, consider using breakout rooms, if possible. Many face to face strategies, like give one, get one, can be done in with the chat feature. Utilizing UDL lesson design with HyperDocs allows the teacher to build in collaboration within a lesson or unit using a variety of digital tools. Sarah Landis created a compilation of UDL resources in this slide deck!

Distance Teaching = COMPETENCY

Competency means taking a look at how we not only train teachers, administrators, counselors, and support staff in best practices for digital teaching and learning, but also onboarding our students and parents with digital basics. We need to intentionally TEACH structures, tools, and systems to ensure student success. Also, creating a standardized design for students to access assignments in your LMS, writing, and recording directions for each assignment helps create strong organizational systems. Creating a teacher website to share access points also helps students achieve systematic competency.

Then, ensuring consistent lesson design that features frequent, familiar strategies like those found in EduProtocols can help students move from feeling overwhelmed with new strategies and content every time. Students know when a teacher says “Iron Chef” how to approach content. One of my favorite sites is using Google’s Applied Digital Skills. I can either use or modify their lessons, embedding digital tools into the curriculum, and building up my student’s digital toolbox.

How many tools do teachers need?

Teachers don’t need to have a new tool for every lesson. Just like cooking meals for the family, you don’t have to try a new recipe 365 days a year. Take the one you like, use content in a new way, and continue to modify. And always have a solid fall back – I call that lesson the ‘macaroni and cheese’ for when I need something solid and tasty to fall back on, that doesn’t require a lot of creativity on my end.

I hope sometime we can stop calling this experience ‘distance teaching and learning’ and just remember it’s TEACHING and LEARNING. Yes, our methodology may look different, but we need to remember that we have good strategies we already know – the trick is to switch them into a digital space. Trust your instincts. You can do this. You WILL build community in your virtual space. Your students are looking for you to show up and SEE them…whether it’s through a camera, on a screen, or face to face.

We’re teachers – it’s our super power!

Jennifer Wolfe

Jennifer Wolfe, a writer-teacher-mom, is dedicated to finding the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of life by thinking deeply, loving fiercely, and teaching audaciously. Jennifer is a Google Certified Educator, Hyperdoc fanatic, and a voracious reader. Read her stories on her blog, mamawolfe, and grab free copies of her teaching and parenting resources.

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Harmony: A Teacher’s Work-Life Balance

Posted on December 29, 2019 by

Finding harmony, or a ‘work-life balance’, is not always so easy. Teachers work in environments where we are on display, constantly being asked to flex one way or another, to group and individualize, to plan, execute, reflect and regroup.

Most of the time it’s doable – we find a rhythm to our classes and our workflow and especially after November harmony just happens.

Until it doesn’t. Usually because of an interruption. Or a disruption.

Or a life event that reminds us that being ‘on’ all day without anywhere to hide, without a place to retreat, leaves us very vulnerable.

As an educator, I feel like this sometimes:

In my part of the world, this is the treat in our fall and winter skies – murmurations of starlings, dancing in and out of formation. Their harmony is mesmerizing, only broken by the intrusion of a predator or a decision to rest.

When my dad died last month, this is what came to mind. A disruption of harmony. An intrusion. A storm of emotions and decisions and realities that threatened my equilibrium and pushed me out of teaching. It’s just impossible to face forward at times like this, looking into 120 sets of eyes that hunger for recognition and caring.

This time, I didn’t have a choice.

I just stopped. I focused on what I could do to make me happy, knowing that if I could recenter and regain a little bit of life harmony, the work harmony would fall into place.

A few days in, I heard a knock at my door ten minutes before class started. I hesitated to answer, afraid of how I would react to any sort of request. Surprisingly, when I pushed open the door a tiny little girl on crutches, blond braids slightly askew, chimed, “Mrs. Wolfe, can I show you something? I wrote my hook last night and I think it’s really good!

How could I say no to that? And as she read aloud the few sentences she’d crafted the night before, I smiled. What we’d been learning in my first period English class stayed with her overnight, urging her to write and create and share…a teacher’s dream.

I set an intention at that moment, seconds before the bell rang, to look for more.

“After a storm comes a calm”

Harmony appeared nearly every day after that. Rather than getting caught up in the needs of everyone else, I looked for tiny glimpses of hope that what we were creating in room A-1 meant something. I stepped back from worrying about being behind, and pushing to finish, and settled into the process. Watching the joy in students’ eyes when they ran over to me during reading time, novel in hand and exclaiming they noticed an example of dialogue written just the way we’d been learning about…or pointing to a character’s thinking and wondering why it was or wasn’t italicized.

I helped them push past perfectionism in their publishing and find a platform that best enhanced their narratives, challenging their creativity and showing them that they, too, are published authors.

As my flexibility increased in the classroom, the joy showered down on me and I feel the harmony easing back in. Teaching is hard if you do it right – just like parenting. It’s much simpler to look the other way; easier to take the path of least resistance. This month is teaching me to honor the ebb and flow of my life and of my classroom. I’m consciously practicing creating harmony in my personal life as well as my profession, and the navigation isn’t always smooth. Life cycles don’t always follow a predictable pattern. Stress builds, minds close, and boundaries grip us tightly.

Like the starlings, I’m learning how to rebalance. Practicing mindfulness so when harmony is disrupted, when an ‘intruder’ shakes up my center and pushes me out of bounds teaches me I can handle it. I can harness my power, listen to my rhythms, and swoop low when I need to.

I know I’ll rise up again.

If you’d like a copy of the narrative writing HyperDoc with lessons we’ve been doing, click here.

If you’ve got some ideas for bringing more harmony into our lives, please reach out – I’m confident there are many of us who could use a bit of help.

Jennifer Wolfe

Jennifer Wolfe, a writer-teacher-mom, is dedicated to finding the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of life by thinking deeply, loving fiercely, and teaching audaciously. Jennifer is a Google Certified Educator, Hyperdoc fanatic, and a voracious reader. Read her stories on her blog, mamawolfe, and grab free copies of her teaching and parenting resources.

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WeVideo – Creating Audio and Video Projects on Chromebooks

Posted on June 23, 2019 by

WeVideo is one of my favorite EdTech tools – I’ve written about how I used WeVideo to record student podcasts with my 8th graders – you can read it on this post. Now, there’s a new WeVideo book called “WeVideo Every Day: 40 Strategies to Deepen Learning in Any Class” by Dr. Nathan D. Lang-Raad, and my podcasting lesson is featured!

WeVideo for podcasting

WeVideo makes podcasting super easy, especially with their new ‘audio only’ feature. I love that when students use WeVideo they are learning the technical skills applicable to any type of audio/video production and will transfer those skills as they move forward in their educational and work careers. Students feel empowered and important when they are learning about layering tracks, adjusting sound, transitions. They learn collaborative skills, creativity, and critical thinking to create an engaging project, and communication skills to transmit their message to listeners and viewers.

Kids have FUN making podcasts!

Ready-to-go lessons

One thing that really stands out in Dr. Lang-Raad’s new book is that he’s created 40 lessons that are ‘ready-to-go’. He’s got everything from easy beginning projects to green screening, newscasts, book reviews/reports, math explainers, and podcasting :). As I was reading through the projects, however, I realized that WeVideo can be used for so much more than just the obvious. For example, the Frayer Model. Instead of creating a one-dimensional view of a vocabulary word or concept, what if students were asked to create and record definitions, examples, non-examples, and facts or characteristics of a concept? How fun would it be to BECOME that concept and tell their story from the first-person point of view? I started thinking of all the EduProtocols I use, and am excited to layer in elements of audio and video with WeVideo next year!

Podcasting isn’t the only way I use WeVideo in my classroom. Another fun lesson with my AVID students was a problem/solution unit. I challenged them to dream up a product that solved a problem and create an infomercial video to ‘sell’ their idea. To make it a little more challenging, I used the card game “Mock-Ups” to require a particular audience, specific element, and a ‘twist’. You can see the entire assignment in my Create A Problem-Solving Product Infomercial HyperDoc. Feel free to make a copy and use it in your classroom; please, keep my name as the creator and add yours as the ‘adapter’.

Infomercial HyperDoc

Kids Take Action with WeVideo

I did switch to 7th grade ELA last year and decided to keep podcasting. The students LOVED it! As a performance assessment, students created a podcast centered on something they felt strongly that adults needed to listen to. It also had to be something that they could get other kids to take action on. Topics were climate issues, ocean pollution, the need for arts in education, gun control and safety, and how animals can be emotional support providers. I created a new HyperDoc to help take students from idea to research, planning and scripting and production with WeVideo. You can make a copy of the Kids Take Action HyperDoc here. But just know – there will be a lot of activity and FUN going on in your class. Just check out my video below!

I’d love to connect with you and share WeVideo lesson ideas. Please leave a comment or email me at mamawolfeto2@gmail.com and let’s CREATE!

Jennifer Wolfe

Jennifer Wolfe, a writer-teacher-mom, is dedicated to finding the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of life by thinking deeply, loving fiercely, and teaching audaciously. Jennifer is a Google Certified Educator, Hyperdoc fanatic, and a voracious reader. Read her stories on her blog, mamawolfe, and grab free copies of her teaching and parenting resources.

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Wakelet – A Cool Tool For Student Work Submission!

Posted on April 24, 2019 by

So what is Wakelet?

Wakelet is a relatively new technology tool that, while not originally designed for education, has become the HOT ticket in curation, collaboration, awesome sharing of ideas, projects and big dreams, and most recently, a cool tool for student work submission! Think mash-up: Pinterest, Padlet, Google folders…it’s ‘a way to save, curate and share the things you love’.

And I love sharing student work. Thank you, Wakelet, for making it so easy!

Here’s the link to my Wakelet profile. I’ve created wakes about all sorts of teaching topics.

https://twitter.com/wakelet

One of the key pedagogical components of HyperDocs is the importance of sharing student work with an authentic audience. Kids work harder when they know someone is going to see their work. They think more deeply when they know another person can comment on their ideas. To me, using Wakelet to share student projects makes total sense.

How I use Wakelet

In my AVID 9 classes, we’ve been working on a commercial project to answer the question, “What makes AVID great?” This project was more than just off-the-cuff filming; we actually dove into the art of commercial storytelling and what makes a commercial compelling and persuasive to the viewer. I modified a super cool HyperDoc originally created by Sarah Landis and came up with this:

AVID 9 Create-A-Commercial HyperDoc

We all had fun learning about how to build a strong commercial – we analyzed the elements, looked at digital shorts, and then students loosely scripted their own commercial stories. Next came filming, editing, and then after a few weeks, the big reveal!

Using Wakelet to share student creations is SO simple! First, I created the ‘wake’ and set it to allow contributors via a sharable link, and set it to ‘Public’ so we could all view the finished projects. Then, I copied the link to the wake and embedded it onto my HyperDoc. Done!

If you go to my account, you can view and copy lots of teaching resources: https://wakelet.com/@jenniferwolfe3929

Wakelet makes it super easy to share links via Google Classroom, Facebook, Twitter, and anywhere else you can add a link. If you’d like to make a copy of my Create-A-Commercial HyperDoc, here’s the link. I’d love to share with you!

But wait…..I love this tool so much, I want to share more!

I’ll definitely be sharing more about how I’m using Wakelet in my classroom – and in my writing life, too!

Have you tried Wakelet? I’d love to follow you – please leave your profile link in the comments!

Jennifer Wolfe

Jennifer Wolfe, a writer-teacher-mom, is dedicated to finding the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of life by thinking deeply, loving fiercely, and teaching audaciously. Jennifer is a Google Certified Educator, Hyperdoc fanatic, and a voracious reader. Read her stories on her blog, mamawolfe, and grab free copies of her teaching and parenting resources.

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