Managing my PLN

If you have read some of our previous posts you understand how we value our Personal Learning Network (PLN). There are so many different platforms available to connect with others online from all over the world. It is even better when we are able to meet people from our PLN in person. I just got back from the iSummitMN a little of a week ago and I am looking forward to the ITEM conference up in Duluth on March 15. My friend Andrea and I will be running the unconference in the afternoon.

Back to managing your tools for your PLN. I use HootSuite to watch hashtags (#) , follow certain groups of people and post to multiple accounts.

Have you heard of Twitter Chats? Here is a list of Twitter chats by day of the week and time
bit.ly/officialchatlist 
If you are solely using the Twitter application, these chats will be hard to follow. HootSuite allows you to make a stream following a hashtag of your choice. Sunday night at 7pm Minnesota educators are using the hashtag #MNlead to discuss leadership in education. If you want to follow along in the conversation, I would recommend using a service such as HootSuite. 

Typically when you participate in a Twitter chat there is a moderator or two who lead the conversation. They will post a question and  people will respond to the question. To stay organized and make it easier to follow the moderator will use some thing along the lines of Q1) or Q1-  which means "Question 1" and when others respond they will use A) or A1- which means "Answer to question1". If someone posts something of interest, that you would like to comment on, you can reply to the tweet. It is important for you to remember to include the hashtag so that others in the chat will see your comment.

My HootSuite view

In my HootSuite account I have multiple pages and each page has a different purpose.

• One page has the top people I follow and interact with. This allows me to easily navigate their Twitter posts and interact with them.
•  Another page is just for information about me. I see when someone Direct Message (DM) me, posts at me (@), and a stream of new followers. 
• My third page is a page of conference hashtags (#). I love to connect with others via Twitter while conferences are going on. If I am in a great session I will Tweet out what I am learning, when I attend EdCamps I typically tweet my notes for the day, and if I am leading Professional Development (PD) I will share my resources. 
• My last page brings us back to the Twitter chats. I went through the list of daily chats and chose one chat per day. If I ever have some down time, I will got to this page and read through previous chats or contribute to a live chat. (Picture above)

My Personal Learning Network has influenced me immensely as a teacher and learner. I have connected with so many wonderful people over the past few years, whom I would have never had the chance to connect with. 

iSummit

A little over a week ago I had the privilege of presenting at the iSummit in Minnesota. I am always excited when a new learning opportunity comes my way, and even more excited when it is with this wonderful group of people.

I lead two sessions.

My first session was an iPad Refresher session. People who were new to iPads and people who were looking for more from their iPad attended. I would say there were around 30 participants in the room. I had extra help from the Hopkins Genius Team.
Here is a link to my presentation. http://goo.gl/OyCQKu 

My second session was on Elementary Engagement. I shared to ways for teachers to use their iPad to help with management and assessment. I used Reflector to reflect my iPad onto my laptop to demo a few parts of the apps. The second part of the session was for people to explore different ways for their students to use iPads and extension activities.
Here is a link to my presentation.  http://goo.gl/vCHGpE 

As always, after a session at a conference it is great to leave feedback for the hosts. So.... if you attended my session and didn't leave feed back you can do that here Session Evaluation ! It is not too late!

I look forward to Flipped Education's next event in May: Minnesota Google Summit aka #MNGS

If you would like to know more about my day at #iSummitMN please visit my personal blog.
Here is the link to my personal blog. http://goo.gl/yN7tgb
  -- Angie--

App Review: Stick Pick

Stick Pick has become a must have app for my classroom and I believe it can truly help any classroom teacher no matter what age level! I first heard about Stick Pick at an Anita Archer workshop (she's great by the way!) when she was discussing formative assessment for today's classroom. Stick Pick is a teacher tool that has transformed my whole group differentiation and excelled my students' comprehension and academic achievement.  This app beats calling on students using the old 'pull a stick with a name on it from a can' method (although that is essentially what this is but with a whole lot of awesomeness in that can!) Priced at $2.99 it is an app that is definitely worth its weight in popsicle sticks! We feature this app in our formative assessments utilizing iPads classes for educators and here are a few (okay many) reasons why and the basics of Stick Pick:

• Create as many classes as you want within the app. This is great for tracking progress across multiple academic areas or for teachers who have many classes/small groups that they see in a day. I know of an interventionist who uses this app and loves it!

• You can use it as just a can with sticks with names on them if you want, or you can have question stems assigned to each student that will appear when you pull their stick.

• The question stems are categorized into three modes: ESL, Bloom's Revised or Bloom's. 

We love that we can set what
type of questions to ask students!

• You assign each student within those three modes. The breakdown of the modes are:
• ESL: Beginning, Early Intermediate, Intermediate, Early Advanced, Advanced
• Bloom's Revised: Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, Creating
• Bloom's: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation

• When you notice that a student is either struggling or excelling, you can easily go into the student's profile and adjust their question stem level.

• Once you have all your students entered, you can easily copy an entire class with or without the scores, saving you time on re-entering each student again if you have the same or similar roster. You can also choose if you want to be able to pick a stick by tapping, shaking the device or both and if you want the sound on.  And for all you lefties out there, there is also a left-handed mode! 

• When you choose your class you will be taken to a screen with all your sticks in a can. From there you can choose to 'peek', allowing you to choose a specific student to assess. Or you can tap/shake your device to let the app randomly choose a stick for you.

• When a student is chosen (either by you or randomly) a screen appears that shows you their name, the options to assess, reset the stick and mark it as used.  You will also see 10-20 question stems from that student's assigned learning level. We love the options within the question stems and have found them to easily work into whatever content we are discussing.

Just like when we want our students 

to pick 'just right work' this app 

helps us ask 'just right questions'

• After the student answers you can track if they answered it correct, incorrect or assign them a score of 0-5 on a preset rubric. For Bloom's and Bloom's Revised modes it is a Critical Thinking Rubric. For ESL mode it is a Degree of Elaboration Rubric.

Critical Thinking Rubric

• Once you score the student you can either mark it as used so it goes into a different 'used can' or reset the stick to put it back in with the other sticks to be chosen from again. 

What the main screen looks like

• The teacher gets to choose what can to pull the stick from, so even if you mark it used you can still access those students' sticks before resetting the entire class. At any time you can reset the class so that all the sticks go back into the main can. 

• Student's responses and progress is recorded within the app. You can easily go into each student's profile to see their history (super helpful when grading time comes around!) and you can send the information out via email. 

Being able to see student's past results
allows us to reflect on student progress

Whoa! That is a ton of information! It may seem overwhelming to read about, but it really is a simple, easy to use app.  If you are wanting to improve your formative assessments, classroom discussions, and differentiation of instruction this app can help you!

One of my first ever principal observations suggested that I work on incorporating more higher level thinking questions into my whole group instruction. Working with a group of students that included those who were new to the country with little to no English all the way to gifted and talented students made that goal huge and daunting.  Wish I would've known about this app then, as it really takes all the work out of higher level questioning at the right level for each student! 

Upper grades can even use this app within their small group work, allowing students to ask each other questions, making their work more on point and productive.  We highly recommend Stick Pick as a top teacher app! Let us know how you are utilizing Stick Pick in your classroom!

Running Records with iPads & App Review: Levelbook

Levelbook by Von Bruno is a great app for teachers to use when testing their students' literacy. We love that Levelbook is designed, developed and maintained by a professional certified teacher. As of right now Levelbook costs $4.99.

Gone are the days of making copies and carrying around a binder of running records (yahoo!). Teachers now have a tool that combines their basic running record format with a calculator, stop watch features, and the ability to record the student reading and play it back at a later time. We are big fans of this app because it allows us to go back throughout the year and listen to our students' reading progress with our students! We can share these recordings with other teachers who are working with our students or with parents at conference time. The developer has added many great features in the latest update, and through our conversations with him it sounds like there are many more wonderful features to come!

Here are some of the other main highlights of Levelbook:

• Simple and clean format of this app makes it easy to use and access daily.
• Cloud storage available now so you can access your student's information across multiple devices.
• Student's audio and running record information is recorded and saved, along with scores, notes and flags. These can be easily seen and accessed under each student's profile, listing them in chronological order. They are also color coded based on whether that book is considered independent, instructional or frustration level for that student.
• Students are color coded according to their achievement to the benchmark data that you input. When viewing an entire class you can quickly see who is at grade level or below. See picture above.
• 5 different reading level systems are supported, inlcuding Fountas & Pinnell (what our district uses) as well as Reading A-Z, Reading Recovery, DRA, Lexile, and PM Reader.You select what reading system you are using when setting up your class accounts.

• You only need to input book titles and information once. The app then remembers it and stores it in a drop down box for you. You can input all your book information ahead of time, or you can add books as you go. We've done both and are big fans of each aspect of this feature! See picture to the left.

I presented at our district's staff development day on Utilizing Running Records with Your iPad and featured Levelbook during that class. Here is a part of that presentation reviewing running records basics as well a simple how to guide we created for Levelbook. At the very end there is a slide with some of the possible updates coming to Levelbook! As we've said before, we LOVE it when developers take feedback from educators and use it to better their products! 

We've discussed utilizing your iPads for your classroom running records before in our review in Record of Reading, and we continue to encourage teachers to make the leap from using the old fashioned paper route to using a great app such as Levelbook! It will streamline your running records by freeing up time, space and hopefully a little bit of your sanity! Well we can't promise that last one, but know that we've found Levelbook to help us stay organized, portable and minimize the time we spend assessing--leaving us with more time for teaching! Let us know if you are using Levelbook in your classroom!