Simple Planning with a Dash of Differentiation

Last week a few teachers involved in the Virtual Advanced Placement grant attended the New York State Educational Technology (NYSCATE) conference in Rochester. We spent three days attending a variety of presentations given by teachers from around the country. The topics ranged from getting tech ready for PARCC to Google Scripts to flipped and blended classrooms to assistive technology. It was a whirlwind three days and our group walked away with much to think about.

As I am in the midst of "blending" my classroom (part online, part face to face) I tried to steer my focus to those presentations so if you are interested in this topic, send me an email. I also signed up for a Coursera massively open online course (MOOC) on gamification after attending a particularly interesting session. Again, if you have any questions, gamification is something I will be studying over the next few months and would love to talk about.

I am still processing most of the presentations but I wanted to pass along two simple tools I learned about that might make an immediate impact in your classroom.

• The first, Planboard, is an online lesson planning app. I have been playing with this tool over the past few days and the site has a lot of potential. Planboard provides a cloud based lesson planning platform that basically does what you expect a lesson planning app to do. However, it goes beyond by offering collaborative planning and easily accessible Core Common Standards. If you are looking for a simple planning solution that is available anywhere you have an internet connection, this may be it.

• The second, Newsela, provides nonfiction articles for students to read. The cool thing about this site is that it provides the articles in different lexile range. For example, this article provides versions ranging from a 680 to a 1200+ lexile range. The company hires writers to simply the more advanced originals. This could be an interesting tool to help differentiate your instruction. Cooler yet is the fact that you can set your entire class up with accounts using their school issued Google Apps for Education email account. Students could then visit a specific article, choose a level they are comfortable with and take a quiz to give you feedback on their comprehension. If you would like to use the tool more basically, you can simply print out articles at the varying reading levels.

Infographics and The Smartest Kids in the World

Two weeks ago I mentioned that Diane Ravitch appeared on +Daniel Pink's  podcast Office Hours. This past week writer +Amanda Ripley  was featured on the hourlong show discussing her new book The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way.  

In the book Ripley interviews American high school students about their experiences studying abroad as foreign exchange students. Ripley weaves these anecdotal observations into her research on different educational trends and practices. I have yet to read the book but the podcast was an interesting hour of audio which I offer up for your multitasking drive time or treadmill pleasure. 

Sample infographic from OpenColleges

For the past couple of months infographics have begun to loom larger and larger on my radar. As you know the Common Core literacy standards state that students must "use technology, including the Internet, to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products, taking advantage of technology’s capacity to link to other information and to display information flexibly and dynamically (CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.6)." This is one of my favorite standards but I often wonder about how to craft assignments with a lower barrier of entry than podcast creation or film production. Infographics might be an introductory way for students to start thinking about design and research.

On that note Edutopia had a nice piece from +Sarah Mulhern Gross (@thereadingzone on Twitter) about how students in her class create infographics sharing their reading histories. The article details the specific web tools her students use and she also provides samples of student work.

Before we part ways, just a few more notes. Next week I will be heading off to the New York State Association for Computers and Technology (NYSCATE)(#nyscate13) conference in Rochester along with a couple of teachers and administrators involved in the Virtual AP grant. I will be sure to share anything of note in next week's post.

Lastly, I was wondering if I could get some brief feedback from you regarding possible future professional development courses. I would like to build a few courses for our teachers but I wanted to gauge interest before beginning development.

If you have two minutes*, please fill out this Google form to let me know your interest in learning about four tools (Google Drive, Evernote, Infographics, and podcasts for personal/professional consumption) at possible future professional development workshops.

As always, thank you for reading and keep on keeping on.
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*Seriously. Two minutes might be overestimating. The survey is five questions requiring quick clicks.