Category: teaching audaciously

Student Engagement With MultiMedia Text Sets

Posted on April 6, 2019 by Jennifer Wolfe

Have you heard of multimedia text sets?

Student engagement is definitely an education buzz word right now! All over the country, teachers and administrators search for tools, activities, and lessons to increase student engagement and create classroom opportunities for kids to respond actively, not passively, to instruction. For the last 18 years, we’ve been talking about 21st-century education. It’s time for educators to hop on board and create lessons that start with student engagement and center around the 4 Cs of learning: creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration.

Since they launched in 2006, I’ve used Google Suite (formerly known as Google Apps for Education). These tools have TRANSFORMED my teaching and allowed my students to learn more richly than ever before (and I’ve been teaching for 28 years!).

A huge shift in my teaching came in 2016 when I met Lisa Highfill, Sarah Landis and Kelly Hilton, the creators of HyperDocs. They managed to wrap strong educational pedagogy with the 4 Cs of learning into super high-engagement lesson packages that revved me up to begin sharing, creating and learning about new ways to use technology as a tool in my classroom.

I started with multimedia text sets – a ‘gateway’ to HyperDocs, but not a true HyperDoc. Multimedia text sets are ways for teachers to start the learning process with engagement. They help kids explore and engage with provocations related to the topic of study. I connect this step with Trevor McKenzie’s work on inquiry-based learning – it’s the provocation (hook) that ignites imagination, interest, and incites students to dig deeply into their studies.

Here’s an example of a multimedia text set I made for textbook unit on ‘Risk and Exploration’:

I share this on Google Classroom and give the students a class period or two to explore the different stories, articles, videos, photo galleries, and podcasts. They LOVE it! It’s amazing how focused they become, and how they begin to engage in conversations about what they’re learning. It’s hard to get them to stop! In fact, they ASK if they can do it at HOME!

A key element of multimedia text sets is the share and reflect portion. Just by adding a link to a Google form to let students share their learning, create ‘wonder’ questions and let me know what they enjoyed most! This helps me to direct the next steps of the lesson, as well as ‘hook’ the kids into a direction for their learning.

Thanks to Lisa Highfill and Genevieve Pacada, this template is super easy to use and modify for each unit of study we do. It takes a bit of time to put the explorations together, but it allows me to not only get my class excited for our study, but also to be right alongside them as they discover new ideas!

Sometimes I use multimedia text sets as a smaller exploration.

Here’s one I created for my AVID classes prior to a career research study:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RGx_nSZqOFEPr3kguuTHQaCUc6iefO6VK6sH15ezbEM/edit?usp=sharing

This multimedia text set was super fun and easy to create – I even took the personality and career tests with my class so they could see if I really was matched correctly to my job – of course, I was!

I’ve got lots of more examples I’d love to share with you. If you’re interested, leave a comment or email me at mamawolfeto2@gmail.com and I’ll help you out. Another great resource for multimedia text sets is the Hyperdocs.co website, as well as @TsgiveTs on Twitter. I believe we’re #bettertogether! Feel free to make a copy of these two multimedia text sets and try them out!

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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Time To Let It Go: Poetry by Mary Oliver

Posted on January 18, 2019 by Jennifer Wolfe

Time To Let It Go and Tell About It

In honor of our beloved muse, Mary Oliver. Thank you for living fearlessly, sharing openly, and loving fiercely. Your words have meant volumes to so many of us searching for living an authentic life and striving for an authentic voice.

I know for me, Mary Oliver spoke the words about life and nature and love and fearlessness that I needed to hear, and they came to me at precisely the right times. Her poetry gave me those life instructions that I so often wondered about, in such a simple, yet eloquent and precise, manner

I hope these two Mary Oliver poems do the same for you.

May we carry on with her words forever in our pockets and our hearts, and continue to share them as the spirit moves us.

Mary Oliver’s initial instructions to me:

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

Mary Oliver’s final instructions to me:

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

~ Mary Oliver

Thank you to all those who share, and have shared, Mary Oliver’s words across our Universe, particularly A First Sip and also “Sometimes” (via Chris Duffy)

Jennifer Wolfe

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Each Day In Life Is Gratitude Training

Posted on January 4, 2019 by Jennifer Wolfe

Each Day In Life Is Gratitude Training

Are you in gratitude training yet? Not sure? Consider how important is it to you to be in the moment. Do you think about every day like it’s a training day for living your best life?

Can you graciously enjoy your day, or do you find yourself in the evening wondering what happened?

It almost seems a paradox to not be present in your day; to me, being present means that there is hope. And with hope, I can take one more step. I can do the hard things that arise. I can breathe, take in the perspective of others, and make good choices.

Each day in life is training
Training for myself
Though failure is possible
Living for each moment
Equal to anything
Ready for anything

I am alive
I am this moment
My future is here and now

For if I cannot endure today
When and where will I?

~ Soen Ozeki

I’ve been journaling my entire life, filling boxes and boxes with spiral notebooks, clothbound mini-books – even notebooks scorched and burned from when my house burned down at age 16. They’re some of the only remnants left of what I was thinking during my school years.

I started gratitude training about eight years ago, trying to get out of a slump that was driving me further and further away from living the life I wanted.

It was hard. Some mornings I’d struggle to find three things I was grateful for – outside of my relationships with my children, life sometimes felt a bit like I was wandering around, alone.

My children remain a staple on my gratitude list.

But eventually, with diligence to reflect on what was gracious and kind in my days, I managed to write more. My gratitude training entries became longer than a few words scribbled because I had to – I wrote and wrote about WHY I was grateful.

Some days the entries made me push myself – coffee with cream, candles, a quiet home repeated over and over.

But I kept writing.

I learned how to twist the challenges into gratitude, the fears into faith, to remind myself that I am alive. I am here, now.

I made myself write, to subscribe to feeds for sites like gratefulness.org, so every day I’d be alerted to phone reminders with prompts to help me think, to keep my gratitude training strong.

Questions like, “What relationships am I thankful for right now?”

And words for the day, like “Stay true to your deepest intuition that an extraordinary and miraculous life is possible” – Craig Hamilton.

There’s nothing wrong with needing (and accepting) a little nudge from the Universe.

No one said gratitude training was easy – but I’ve found, pages and pages later, that it’s definitely worth it.

I found this mindful poem by Soen Ozeki on A First Sip – have you checked it out yet? It’s a fabulous blog full of inspirational reminders. Do yourself a favor and have her words sent daily to your email – make it step one in your own gratitude training!

Jennifer Wolfe

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What If You Were Guaranteed To Succeed?

Posted on December 7, 2018 by Jennifer Wolfe

What might happen if you knew that every day you were guaranteed to succeed?

What do you think would be different in your life? Would you be more adventurous? Would you check your vulnerability at the door, step out of your comfort zone and SEIZE THE DAY?

Yep – cliches intended.

We talk a good talk about being successful. We say the right things, read the right books and make sure we have a positive mindset.

Or at least that’s what we say we do…

But we know when that shadow creeps in, that little voice that tells us it’s never going to happen. There’s a part of all of us that believes that our success isn’t limitless. That the boundaries between what that person does and what we can do are tall and unbreakable and topped with barbed wire. We might feel that it’s too late. That we don’t have the energy, time, resources…..fill in the rest of that sentence.

We don’t believe in our own ability to reach our dreams.

I feel it too, that curse of the monkey mind. I battle the ‘fatigue demon’ all the time, feeling raw and frustrated and dubious and wonder if my limitations are going to get in my way.

And then I tell myself to shut up.

Or sometimes, I let it ride. I just sink under the covers with a lusciously written novel and shut off the world.

And then the next day, I tell myself to show up.

Have you ever heard Maya Angelou talk about being a ‘rainbow in someone’s cloud’?

I listen to her words all. the. time and treasure the moments I was in her presence, in an audience completely engulfed with her wisdom. The recordings of her words sustain me.

Teaching is one of those professions where it’s impossible to hide. We’re on display, performers expected to push down our outside lives and ‘turn on’ in the presence of our students. And some days, that’s really, really hard. It feels darn near impossible to believe that the world is truly designed for us to succeed. I often think about how so many of our children come to school feeling the very same way…and spend day after day wondering if they will ever succeed in life.

I had one of those days recently…when the kids started wiggling my classroom doorknob before I was ready to perform, one of those days when I had to take a deep breath, push open the door and smile.

No one comes in my classroom without a handshake, high five or hug.

I want to be the first contact my kids have before they enter our learning space. I started this routine the first day of school…and I don’t think I’ve missed a day of smiling at every kid as they pass the threshold; high fives are most popular, followed by handshakes…and then hugs.

There are some kids who come in for a hug every single day. Sometimes for more than one. Some do the side hug, or barely get their arms around me. And sometimes, they don’t say a word, just open their arms, tip their head slightly, and wrap themselves up. I love that they love to see me.

There was that day last week, a morning when I was feeling defeated and depleted and like I couldn’t make it til 3:30 without taking my pain out on someone else. It was a morning if I heard something nice I might just burst into tears… and they hugged me. Not every kid, but enough, and I transformed.

“Prepare yourself so you can be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud,” Maya Angelou taught us. I wonder if we all prepared ourselves every day if we might be able to guarantee success, even for just one someone’s cloud.

You might just be the rainbow that someone needs today. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful way to spend your day?

Jennifer Wolfe

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Want to Dive Into Inquiry With Our Flipgrid Virtual Book Club?

Posted on December 2, 2018 by Jennifer Wolfe

Dive Into Inquiry With Our Flipgrid Book Club!

To be honest, I’ve struggled with the traditional book club model. Reading a book because I ‘have’ to, planning a meetup, bringing snacks, making it to the book club night on time…it’s not because I don’t WANT to talk about books. I love reading! It just always seems that life gets in the way…and most times, the book club turns into a drinking club (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but when you’re an English teacher and you love analyzing writing…well, not many people want to skip their Chardonnay to get into the intricacies of plot development and character dynamics.

I’m trying again, anyways. This time, I’m making my own virtual book club using Flipgrid. Wanna join my Dive Into Inquiry book club?

See, last summer I joined an online book club for Inquiry Mindset, the new book by teachers Trevor Mackenzie and Rebecca Bathurst-Hunt. It was AWESOME! We used Flipgrid to virtually share our thoughts, experiences, and lessons about developing an inquiry mindset in our classrooms – and within our own way of thinking as educators. I loved reading a chapter a week, thinking about Trevor and Rebeca’s chapter provocation, and then sharing QUICK thoughts with the Flipgrid group. Not only did I learn about how to promote an inquiry mindset, but I also met lots of new thinkers from new locations and backgrounds.

It’s also a perfect introvert kind of thing…

So…I decided to create my own Dive Into Inquiry book club to share the love with my middle school teaching staff in California as well as all of you! I’d love to have you join us for the next several weeks as we read and discuss Dive Into Inquiry.

The book is available in Kindle or paperback format…it’s 117 pages of thoughtful reflection on how to ‘amplify learning and empower student voice’ and I am POSITIVE you will love it. I’m not earning anything from this – I just love Trevor’s ideas and his clear, easy way of making me think about pushing my students to engage in their own thinking processes and create meaning in their own way.

Check out the author’s website: TrevorMackenzie.com.

If you want to join our Flipgrid book club, all you need to do is jump on our Flipgrid and share your first welcome post! I’ll be adding the Chapter 1 provocation and it’s all fun from there!

There’s even a Flipgrid app so you don’t have to use your computer…and remember, you can show up in your jammies for this PD – and no one has to know you’ve got your Chardonnay on your bedside table!

And honestly, if you’re scared to record yourself and would rather just watch from afar…well, it’s better than nothing. But PLEASE – step out of your comfort zone and join! If nothing else, you’ll read a great book and learn how to use Flipgrid in your classroom….but I have a feeling you’re going to get much, much more!

Come on over and join us on Flipgrid! Hope to see you on there today!

Jennifer Wolfe

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