Monday, October 16, 2017

Why interrupt your students when you can whisper?



Whisper by EdTech Team
Have you ever wanted to send a message to a student or group of students in class, but didn’t want to interrupt what they are doing shouting across the room?  Whisper instead!


The new chrome extension from EdTech Team allows you to send a message to an entire class or selected students using your google classroom class rosters.  Even if the students are not logged onto the computer, once they log into chrome, they will see a notification from you.  If they are logged in when you send the message, a small notification will appear on their screen.


Best of all, you don’t have to stop the entire class to call out a message!
Oh wait! There’s more!  

Whisper sends the teacher an email message with the details of the message so that you have a record of the message that was sent.  This is great for students that have a consistent habit of off task behavior. If you want to focus on the positive, you can send messages to keep track of good behavior too.
To install it in chrome:
  • Go to the chrome web store, search for whisper edtech team.  Or go to this link.
  • Install the extension.  Your students need to install it as well.
  • The extension icon looks like this.  
  • Click on the extension and follow the directions to login as a teacher and verify and allow it to use your google classroom rosters. Have your students click on the extension and login as a student.
To use it in class:
  • Log into your chrome browser.  Click on the extension in your menu bar.
  • A pop up window appears with your list of Google Classroom classes.
Sends an email to you with a copy of the message and who it was sent to for your records!


Monday, October 9, 2017

Digital Anatomy Classroom


File:Olympus CH2 microscope 1.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
I love finding new ways to incorporate technology into my classes.  When I do use a new piece of technology, I always ask myself a few questions.  One question is always - "is it something that I can now do better or couldn't do before without the technology?"  If I cannot say yes, then I rethink the option.  
I asked myself this question again recently when I had purchased digital microscope cameras for my anatomy class.  When my students use the microscope in class, it is a skill that always needs to be relearned by most because they haven’t used the microscope in at least three years.  The other issue with using microscopes is that only one student can look through the eyepiece at a time. So, inevitably, one student in the pair isn’t doing anything while the other is looking for the specimen.  Additionally, students complain that their eyes get tired and it is often hard to see through the eyepieces.  Finally, I have to squeeze in between lab desks in order to look through the scope in order to offer assistance and check to see if they have found the right image, even though they have a sample on the projector.  We won’t even discuss how hard it is to get the students to accurately draw and label what they saw through the scope!  It has always seemed pointless to me because the drawings do not even resemble what they were supposed to look at.
Free illustration: Question Mark, Question, Help - Free Image on ...

What can I do to make it easier?  This has been an issue for years.
Free illustration: Icon, Head, Profile - Free Image on Pixabay ...

   Enter the digital microscope camera
        connected to a chromebook!
Class savior!  I had one camera as a trial the last two years and it seemed like it would be a viable option.  However, the model I found was expensive.  So, getting enough for all of my students was tough.  In the meantime, I had students take pictures with their phones through the eyepiece to share with me and others.  It wasn’t the solution.  However, this year, I found an inexpensive digital microscope imager that can replace the eyepiece on my microscopes and connect to my chromebooks via USB cable.  We can then use the camera app on the chromebook to view the image, save it and then annotate it in google slides.  


Wow.  Game change for me and even more so for my students.  The live feed from the microscope is displayed on the chromebook screen, so everyone in the group can help with focusing and deciphering what they are looking at.  Being able to save the image and annotate it in google slides is also critical.  Now, students can use the real images from class to study for a test and I can see right away if they are looking at the right section of the slide.  

Copy of colorblind image.PNG
Last year, I also realized another benefit.  I had a student that was color blind.  He couldn’t tell the difference between the shades of pink commonly used in microscope tissue stains.  
But with the digital microscope camera, we could apply filters or use the image options in google slides to recolor the image with a color scheme that he could see.  What a lifesaver for my student who normally felt left out and frustrated.
Why haven’t I found these before?  Why did it take so long to get a solution?  I have no idea, but I’m glad I found them for one main reason - my students.  Once they got the hang of which app to use, switching from the web camera to the microscope camera and taking focusing with the microscope, they all really like it.  I even had one student proclaim - “I’ve never been able to use a microscope, but this way, I actually can do this!”  Thank you!  This is why I do what I do.  It’s for my students.  It’s not about making it difficult.  It’s all about making it easier for my students and assist their learning.  

Now to find another revolutionary tool or hack for my class.  I hope this helps someone else out.

Putting my summer work into practice with HyperDocs and more

This summer felt like a whirlwind of teacher trainings and workshops.  We met, connected and reconnected with so many educators that are eager to transform their teaching this year.  It was an exciting summer to say the least. 

One part of my summer included participating in the MasterClass tour from

EdTechTeam.  I attended the NYC tour with a team from my school that was organized by my husband, Brian Cauthers.  As a team, we learned so much from the authors that guided us through a tech journey throughout the day.  We were fortunate that our tour included a booksmash that included Dive Into Inquiry, HyperDocs Handbook and Google Infused Classroom.  I had read all three books prior to attending and loved them all.  The authors that joined us were so approachable and helpful throughout the day, providing insight on ways to incorporate technology meaningfully into our classes.  

It was great to see how the room varied from newcomers to tech integration to leaders, such as our friend, Laurie Guyon.  Everyone shared and helped out to create lessons that we could bring back and implement this year, which is priceless!  


One of my favorite things that I created this summer with my assistant superintendent, Dr. Adam Pease, is a HyperDoc for our mandated training that we do in school every year.  (Yes, I'm lucky to have an administrator that is not only supportive, but also innovative and constantly learning new things with us.)  I'm not sure how your school does it, but our mandated training on blood borne pathogens, child abuse reporting and the others is just painful.  We watch videos that appear to have been created in the 1970s and just click through each step until we have to take a quiz at the end.  Once we complete all of them, we print our certificate to prove completion and it's over.  Boring.  This year will be different.  Our teachers will have a choice!  This has been a recurring theme in our district since last year - giving students and teachers voice and choice.  As a result of our concerted effort, we came up with a HyperDoc that does just that.  Gives teachers a choice.  They can do the same old boring version or the new spruced up version! 

Here's a preview of what it looks like (click here for a larger view)


The new version serves two purposes: 
  1.  Get staff to think critically about the content while making their learning visual.
  2. Help the staff to use technology tools that they can also implement in their classrooms this year.  
It seems like this should have been done long ago.  With the HyperDoc format, it is all packaged in one clean slide for all six topics.  Teachers will experience:
  • posting in a shared document
  • creating a slide in a shared slide deck
  • posting a video on Flipgrid
  • answering questions in a google form with embedded videos
  • posting responses in a shared Padlet
  • completing questions about a video using EdPuzzle
In addition to simply completing our training requirement, the administrators and clinical staff will now have responses from teachers that they can use for future discussions and training throughout the school year.  


So far, we have tested our HyperDoc with our administrators and our tech leaders with amazing feedback. We have tweaked it slightly based on their feedback and cannot wait to roll it out with the full staff next week.  One simple thing we learned so far is that even though we have done the training every year, most of our testers did not know who the Title 1 officers were in the district.  We have never received feedback like that from our previous format.  Once it is complete, I'll post again with some feedback on how it was received by the staff.  Wish us luck!

Thanks for learning with us!
--Jen