Skills Tutor

I'm in a brief mid-session break during training on Skills Tutor (www.skillstutor.com), an AIS addition for our district.  This actually looks as though it will blend well with a flipped classroom -- the goal is to assign on-line sessions for students in their weak areas.  The sessions include a diagnostic, focused tutorial lessons with immediate feedback, process quizzes, and final assessments.  Students are instructed that if they do not achieve mastery (80%) success in two repetitions of a session, they should go to their teacher for further instruction.

Whoops, we're back in session.  Will update later.

UPDATE (as promised):

Well, the presentation sort of fell short when the host site crashed, but I'm assured by our trainer that this _never_ happens and is a fluke.  I hope he's right because I really want to use this program

Skills Trainer is easily customizable for individual students' needs, and it provides a bevy of reporting options.  (Read: Really helpful for demonstrating intervention efforts and effectiveness at parent-teacher meetings and on APPR assessments.)   I'm eager to incorporate it into my classes this year.

If any of you have used Skills Trainer, please comment about how it worked.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Old and New

Okay, the last few days I've been doing decidedly non-technological prep.  Well, it's technological to the extent that it involved the computer and the printer and the copier, but you know what I mean.  So anyway, I've finally finished setting up 125 two-pocket folders for my incoming students, with the class letter in the left pocket, lined paper in the right pocket, and my business card in the slot.  (I'll be adding pens to the folders as close to last-minute as I can stand.)  I'm hoping that providing them with a minimal organization baseline on day one might help some of the more helpless among them.

I've also finally gotten around to sketching out my lesson plans for the first week.  This includes planning what they're going to do online.  I'm going to get them blogging as quickly as possible -- day two -- and start giving them videos to watch at home on the evening of day three.  The video they'll be watching will give them tips and tricks for the following day's listening and notetaking diagnostic, plus a secret word.  If they can write the secret word on the top of the diagnostic, they get bonus participation points.

Okay, yes, this is lightweight content and involves a reward economy, but I think that's how I'm going to get them into the idea of watching these videos.  Most of my students are nothing if not mercenary!

As for blogging, I need to put together a guideline page for blogging directions and expectations.  My starting ideas are that students are expected to write once a week in their class blogs, the entries must be relevant to the class material, and the students must follow appropriate language guidelines.  I'm not going to start assessing blog entries yet; just doing them will be a good place to start.

I plan to research class blogging a bit more before school starts.  I want to see what other people have been doing.

Frustrated Grumbling

It is difficult to compose a confident letter to new students and parents about the technological advances in the classroom when I can't even get the printer to work!

Socrative

I wasn't planning on exploring Socrative today, but I was reminded of this site while going through materials I got at a recent EdCamp.

Socrative works to engage students by encouraging the use of texting, rather than discouraging it.  It's also surprisingly easy (and free, which is a very good thing, in my opinion).

I went to the main page -- socrative.com -- and signed up my user name, password, and email contact.  It then took me to the lecturer screen, where there are several options for question formatting and an automatically assigned room number.  It also advised me to log in as a student on another device in order to test the program.  Accessing m.socrative.com through my iPod Touch, I got a prompt to enter the room number provided by my teacher.  So far, so good!

The student screen then told me to wait for a prompt from the teacher.  On my teacher screen, I selected "True/False" which then prompted me to ask a question orally for students to answer on their devices.  This screen also showed me a count of 0/1 -- the number of student responses out of the number of students signed into the room.  When I selected "True" on the student screen, there was a brief lapse before the count switched to 1/1...and then a chart appeared showing that 100% of the respondents had selected "True."

There are many options for how to present questions, including pre-written questions and short-answer responses.  Some of the formats allow students to vote on the responses once the initial questioning is done.

So far, I'm feeling positive about this, but I have some questions:

• I know this works on Smart phones, tablets, and similar devices...but I'm not sure how it would work with students seated at desktop computers.  I think it should be the same, but would networking bollux the tracking?
• I need to make sure that students who do not have a compatible device are able to participate without feeling left out.
• This probably wouldn't be a good thing for actual graded work, as integrity could easily be compromised...but for informal review and other types of discussion prompts, it seems workable.

 I'll need to do more pre-semester testing, and see how it works in practice once schools starts...but so far, Socratic has a tentative thumbs-up from me.

Getting Past the Basics

I once had a professor who had been my elder brother's professor in the same subject, some fourteen years earlier.  Before I went to that class for the first time, my brother asked me to say hello for him, and to ask the professor if he still used the same note cards for his lectures.

I didn't need to ask.  The age-yellowed, bedraggled index cards had clearly been around for those fourteen years, and perhaps longer.

It seems to me that being able to just pull out the same materials, year after year, and present them in the same style would be a wonderful time saver.  I envy teachers who can do that.  However, I am not one of them, much as I'd like to be.

If you're a teacher (and if you're reading this post soon after I've written it), then you're likely wrestling with the Common Core and APPR requirements.  Among other things, both of these demand competency with "21st Century Skills."  At first, I found this a nuisance...but I've since gotten the bug.  Now I'm curious to see just how well I can implement new technology into my classroom.

I am not a technophobe -- in fact, I am one of the more technologically-comfortable members of my department -- but once we get past the user-friendly consumer stuff and into open-source materials, my mind starts to get a little boggled.  So this should be amusing.

In the future, I'll post about my investigations and experiments with various technological developments.  At the moment, my topics are likely to include innovative uses of the SmartBoard, how to "flip" a classroom, developing and awarding digital "badges," and using technology to bridge the teacher/parent gap.