End of Year Reflection

We have actually been out of school for a week now, but as soon as I turned in grades and finished cleaning my room, I immediately headed up to Santa Barbara for a bachelorette party and a mini-vacation. Now home, I finally have some time to write a post to wrap up this school year and reflect on some of the tools I have tried this year. Here goes...

Top 5 (in no particular order)

1. Google Forms (1, 2, 3) - I love Forms. 
2. Focusing on "difficulties" while reading - I love this method because it really allowed me to remove the scaffolds I had been using all year with my students. I plan on introducing this earlier on next year, because it really helps to create a student-driven and student-centered classroom. 
3. Socratic Seminar - I know... it's kind of funny that I avoided this for so long, but I really enjoyed it. More importantly, my students really enjoyed it. On my end-of-year evaluations, one student wrote that I should do more activities that force the entire class to interact together (as opposed to just working in small groups); I think this is a perfect activity for doing just that. 
4. Doctopus and Goobric - Oh my goodness, the amount of time Doctopus and Goobric saved me in grading essays this semester! I can't even begin to express my love. 
5. Google Classroom - This one doesn't excite me that much, but since it is so easy to use AND it allows me to easily use Doctopus and Goobric, it is in my Top 5. 

Definitely Using/Trying Again

• TextHelp Study Skills
• Group Thesis Writing on Mini-Whiteboards
• Allowing students to choose their method of "active reading" - I like this a lot. However, I will not rely as heavily on it next year because I will move more quickly into focusing on "difficulties." BUT I think I will give students choice in marking/noting their individual difficulties, which is why I kept this in this particular list.
• In-class 1-page summaries to hold students accountable for their reading
• SparkNotes Reading Quiz
• Problem and Solution Projects
• Attending and maybe even presenting at the CATE Conference - We have all been through professional development that is not at all applicable to our classrooms. The beauty about CATE is that it is comprised of English teachers talking about the best things they are doing in their classrooms, so I was able to apply what I learned at CATE to my teaching almost immediately. Also, I think I eventually want to go into teacher training, so making sure I keep up my resume by presenting at these types of things is in my best interest. 
• Stand-Up Quiz
• Cognitive Strategy Snowballs
• The UCI Highlighter - Helping students SEE just how much they were relying on summarizing in their writing was a game-changer. I will use this with almost every writing assignment next year.
• Refocus Form
• Teaching students how to apologize
• The 20% Project
• TED Talks as a form of presentation

On the Fence

• Peardeck - I liked this a lot when I first used it, but then the second time, it didn't go as well. I think you just need to really know what you are doing and be sure that this is the best method of presentation to match your purpose. Also, this isn't something I would do all the time anyway, because part of its appeal to students is its novelty. 
• Newsela - Newsela has partnered with some big names in news, such as the Washington Post, which I like. I just have to figure out a better way to use this and present it to my students. 
• The rhetorical précis - I need to be honest: I absolutely hate the rhetorical précis as it has been stuffed down the throats of both high school educators and students. I hate it. I do. I am not against the real rhetorical précis as it has been used in higher ed institutions, and I understand that, in some disciplines, students are expected to frequently write them. For example, when my husband was in a Master's program at CSUSM in History, he had to write them weekly. However, what he wrote (and always earned A's on) never looked anything like the 4-sentence ridiculousness we feed to high school students. Now... since I undoubtedly will have to teach the précis in the future, I will use the method I used with my ELD 2 students. But I will still hate it. 
• Independent Reading Program - Don't throw virtual tomatoes at me. I like having an independent reading program. I just need to figure out how to better implement next year. That's all. That's why I'm on the fence. 
• Sentence Wall - I kept this up for a few weeks and then slowly started forgetting to highlight student sentences. I like this. I just need to make sure that, if I use it again, I implement it with fidelity from the beginning of the year.
• Fiction Jigsaw - Eh. I like this when in a bind, but I would much rather have students read the entire text.  
• Virtual Question Box - Only 2 students made use of this. I can't decide if I want to bother next year or not. It's not really hurting me to do it, but... I don't know... I need to decide.

Won't Bother

• Google Docs Websites - These were extremely easy. However, I mostly teach 11th grade, and my students are fairly proficient with other forms of technology. Next year, instead of allowing them to use Google Docs, I am going to force them to use something a little more complicated like Blogger or Tumblr. 
• Teacherspayteachers.com - Don't get me wrong. The lesson I got off of teacherspayteachers was awesome. My problem is that I don't really have time to peruse the website to find other resources I may want to use. They frequently send me emails about 10 free downloads, but I haven't taken advantage of any of them. I think it can be helpful, but... like I said, I won't bother using the site in the future. 
• Turnitin - This was the BIGGEST disappointment of the year! I had been rooting for my school to get Turnitin because I really wanted something that would catch plagiarism for me and save me time in Googling suspicious sentences. Unfortunately, it didn't catch everything (or even close to everything), and I still had to spend my time researching on my own. I had my online class use it throughout the semester, but I didn't bother having my English 11 classes use it after the initial assignment. 

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Next year, I will be at Fallbrook High School again. I plan to continue this blog, but I may introduce some changes. For now, I will be on a summer hiatus. I will see you back here in a couple of months. -Annie :)

Week 20: Doctopus and Goobric with Google Classroom and the UCI Highlighter

Doctopus and Goobric with Google Classroom

This week, my students wrote on-demand essays as their final task for our unit on The Awakening. Since they will have to take the SBAC in a few weeks on computers, I decided that I would have them write this on-demand essay on Chromebooks instead of by hand. 

First, let me point out the one problem I always run into whenever I have my students write on-demand essays on computers instead of by hand:

Yes. That's right. In my first period class, I had 16 students who did not finish and/or turn in the assignment. When I have my students write on-demand essays by hand, they do not leave unless they turn in their essay, which means I get work from all of my students. Fortunately, in this case, I can see what those 16 students worked on because all the files were shared with me; however, I still had more than a handful of students who did not write more than an introduction.

In any case, I've started grading the assignments. I decided to try out Doctopus and Goobric, two Google Add-ons that help by auto-generating a class spreadsheet and connecting a rubric to each student assignment.

The first step was to create a blank spreadsheet. Then, I went to "Add-ons" and selected "Doctopus." After selecting the class that I wanted, a spreadsheet that looked like this was created:

It includes all of my students's names and links to their assignments. 

Then, I opened up my rubric through Goobric. (It took me a little while to figure out how to do this, so I decided to watch a couple of videos on how to do it.) Opening my rubric through Goobric linked a rubric to each of the assignments listed on the spreadsheet above. When I open up one of the assignments in Goobric, it looks like this:

The rubric criteria and scores are at the top, and the assignment itself is at the bottom. This allows me to read and grade each essay in one screen. When I'm done, I simply hit "submit," and the scores are automatically saved in the student's copy of the assignment and in the spreadsheet created by Doctopus. In the past, I used to have to make a copy of my rubric for each student and then share it with the student. It wasn't too difficult, but it did add at least 1 or 2 minutes onto grading each assignment. That might not seem like a lot, but it is anywhere from an additional hour and a half to 3 hours of grading when I am working on grading an assignment for my 11th graders. This method cuts all of that time out of my grading. Yay!

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Ease of use: As I said, it took me a while to figure out how to link create the rubric and link it through Goobric. I highly recommend watching some of the videos I linked above on YouTube. Once you figure it out, it is a piece of cake; it's just that you have to format everything correctly in order for it to work.
Would I use this again: Yes. I really like these tools. There is also an option for me to record some of my comments, so I've been creating audio-recordings for each student, explaining what they need to fix. This saves time for me in typing, and I feel like it helps since I am not going to have time to sit down with each student and conference with them about what they need to work on.
Downsides: I don't really see any downsides with the Goobric and Doctopus, aside from having to be sure you have the formatting correct. Also, if you want to create an audio-comment, you need to make sure you don't have a two-year-old talking about who has a penis and who doesn't have a penis in the background...
Applications: You could use this for any assignment you have students turn in through Google Classroom that you use a rubric to grade. I think you can use these tools without Google Classroom as well, but then you would have to put the information into the spreadsheet yourself.
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UCI Highlighter

This is a tool I learned about through some of the professional development I'm part of this year. It is a website that lets students highlight their essays and automatically calculates how much of the essay is summary, commentary, and evidence. I found the tool extremely helpful in talking to my students about how they should not just be summarizing in their essays.

In order to use the tool in class, I gave my students handouts with a sample introduction, body paragraph, and conclusion from an essay I wrote in college. As a class, we worked through underlining the introduction. We used yellow for summary, green for evidence, and blue for commentary. As you can imagine, most of the introduction was either yellow or blue. Then, I had them work in groups to underline their body paragraphs. Once they finished their body paragraphs, I had them nominate a group member to get a Chromebook and go to the UCI Highlighter website. In order to log in, all they had to do was go to www.ucihighlighter.com and then type in "lewis comparison" in the box. (This was the name under which I created the sample assignment.) They then found and highlighted their sample paragraph in the longer essay. Like Google Docs, each student's screen updated in real-time, so they were able to see what the other groups were highlighting. After every group finished, it looked like this:

We talked about the percentages over on the side.

They noticed that "Commentary" had the highest percentage, followed by "Evidence." They also noticed that there wasn't very much summary. 

As a follow-up to this activity, I am going to have them highlight the essays that they just wrote to see where they fall in these different categories. The goal is to get them away from summary and into using evidence to support their commentary. 

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Ease of use: This was extremely easy. The only kinks we ran into were when students misspelled "highlighter" or did not enter "lewis comparison" correctly.
Would I use this again: Yep. As I mentioned above, I am going to do another activity this week using the same tool.
Downsides: The website doesn't keep the formatting, so I had to go through and make sure my paragraphs looked okay.
Applications: Writing and revising essays
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Bonus!

Inadvertently, I made a discovery with the comments in Google Docs. I have always been a little annoyed that you can't bold, underline, or italicize words in the comments. Therefore, in order to add emphasize to one of the words in one of my comments, I put stars around the word. When I posted the comment, it turned bold! Look:

So cool!