Hiking Acadia

Spending the last week of summer on Mt. Desert Island in Maine, we've done quite a bit of hiking in Acadia National Park.  While the paper map we got at the Entrance Station to the park has been our most useful quick guide, being the techie that I am, I wondered what I could find for tools online.

All Trails partnered with National Geographic can be found online, in the Chrome Web store, and in the mobile markets. Search for trails and keep a trail journal, this is a useful resource for hiking. I really like that I can search for trails and filter by difficulty and other

MapMyHike is an app that will track your route, and much like MapMyRun, track your activity.



Cell service is spotty on the island, so I wonder how well these apps will work. I've been able to follow our progress on the roads via GPS and Google Maps, but being on a trail is being off the Google Map.



When on the trail, I've been documenting the hike with my cell phone and GoPro camera.  Thank heavens for digital photography because I would be spending a fortune on film --or at least not taking as many pictures. I've been uploading all the pictures to Google+ in a folder. I think this is the modern version of the vacation slides. Take a look at all 400+ pictures I've taken from the first two days of our trip by clicking on the link or view the preview below.

How to Use an iPad for Academic Use

One of my students, Matt D., created a presentation on how to use an iPad for academic use based on his experiences last year.  We are a BYOD district, but still being rooted in paper, our paperless skills are still emerging.  Part of the delay is that it takes time to figure out an effective workflow with new technology. Well, Matt has taken the guess work out of using an iPad in a BYOD classroom. As a pioneer among his classmates, Matt made it his mission to be paperless in my classroom last year, and this year, he is making sure that others can do it, too.

Take a look at Matt's presentation.  We welcome any feedback and please share how YOU and your students use a paperless workflow. Also, keep an eye out for other posts that showcase the paperless workflow for other devices.

Driving over Tukey's Bridge

This summer I spent time with family and wrote content for titles that will appear in Curriculet's premium store.  One such title was the young adult novel Delirium by Lauren Oliver where love is considered a disease in a dystopian future. 

I greatly enjoyed working on creating questions, quizzes, and annotations for a young adult title, applying all that I've learned from teaching canonical texts like A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Romeo & Juliet, Young Adult literature should have a place in the academic classroom.  Young adult literature is the bait and hook for reading.  Dr. Jung Kim from Lewis University makes the case here for young adult literature in the classroom. There are also some examples of canonical and young adult pairings. In creating the curriculet layer for Delirium, I examined the text just as I would with a canonical text: narration, structure, diction, plot, setting, etc.  

While the syntax of Delirium is not difficult, I targeted Common Core Standard CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.9 in the creation of the questions and annotations: Analyze how an author draws on and transforms source material in a specific work.  Through out the novel, author Lauren Oliver makes allusions to Romeo & Juliet and sets the story in Portland, Maine. While author Lauren Oliver doesn't exactly copy the story of Romeo & Juliet, she does emphasize similar themes and conflicts: forbidden love, man versus society, and personal growth. The main character, Lena, begins to question the restrictive society in which she lives as she develops a relationship with another character, Alex. Not only can I have students make connections between Delirium and Romeo & Juliet, but also to 1984 and any other text where a character realizes that the world in which he/she has lived is not as it seems. If I want my students to be independent and analytic thinkers, I need them to have opportunities to do so by giving them texts that connect to them FIRST and then using the young adult text as a bridge to understand and connect with the canonical texts. 

I applaud Curriculet for working to evolve reading in the digital era and making ALL texts more accessible for readers.  Renting publisher-controlled digital texts for my classroom will be much more budget-friendly than asking my supervisor to purchase class-set paperback copies-- and I don't have to worry about collecting and replacing paperback copies over time. While I could send students to the library to check out individual copies of the book, I would not have enough books for the whole class to read, and even though I could have students choose their own books for independent reading,  what I want is to have students reading more of the same books together.

So back to Tukey's Bridge.... Delirium is set in Portland, Maine, and Oliver continually references real locations found in the city, in addition to adapting them to suit the vision of the dystopic future. The statue of the Governor that Lena and Hana run past in Delirium is really Our Ladies of Victories statue in Monument Square. This connection provides opportunity to discuss how societies memorialize heroes and students can explore the monuments in their hometowns. In addition, if students traveled to locations mentioned in the text, they can walk in the shoes of characters. 

As my family traveled to Maine for a week-long summer vacation in Bar Harbor, following 295 North through Portland, we drove over Tukey's Bridge and past Back Cove.  I craned my next to spot the Promenade and envisioned Lena swimming with Alex on East End Beach. I had a moment of double vision as we rocketed along at 70 miles per hour, I imagined that we were really travelling in to the Wilds.

#Flipclass Workflow: Differentiated Instruction

Chatting this morning with Stacy Dawes on Voxer in the #ELA Flip group, we were discussing ways in which we can differentiate and diversify our instruction for students, especially those who are ESL/ELL immersed in mainstream classes.  Thinking about how to use technology to differentiate instruction in the flipped ELA classroom, we came up with the following ideas:

• In your main Edmodo class, create small groups in which the students are leveled, then post tailored assignments to each of the small groups.  If all students are working with the same content, they will not know that they are receiving different versions of the same assessment or activity. Resources to assist that particular group of students can also be posted. Students can be in multiple small groups, but they can only see the content posted to the groups they are members of. 

• Using Edmodo's quiz feature, create quizzes designed for each small group level. All questions and quizzes are banked in Edmodo, so it is super easy to create custom quizzes for groups of students. Assign the custom quiz to the Edmodo appropriate small group.  Keep in mind that Edmodo quizzes do not have to be used as traditional test assessments.  Thinking about the SAMR model, the Edmodo quiz feature can be used for quick homework checks, group quizzes, and summative assessments.  

• Use Curriculet to differentiate reading instruction. Much like Edmodo, in Curriculet, teachers can create multiple versions of layered annotations, quizzes, and questions for texts and all versions are saved in the teacher library. Teachers can assign canonical texts or upload documents from their files or the web into Curriculet's interface meeting both literature and informational text reading standards. To manage assigning the texts to the students, I recommend creating reading groups by level instead of traditional classes.  Managing classes in Curriculet is very easy and students can be in multiple classes from multiple teachers at the same time.  So rather than having a Period 2 class in Curriculet, name your Curriculet classes to differentiate the reading level. For example, Level I, Level II, or Reading Group A, Reading Group B, etc. Assign the the particular custom curriculet to the particular group and track student performance.

• Newela could also be used to differentiate informational text reading instruction since articles can be adjusted to meet student lexile levels. Newsela is an excellent resource for differentiating current event articles. Where as Curriculet anchors the text with the question and quizzes being adjusted, Newsela enables the text itself to be adjusted to meet student reading ability.  Students also take quizzes to assess their reading comprehension. 

As far as classtime is concerned, students could complete differentiated instructional tasks on asynchronous working days or at home.  Teaching 9th graders, I do not give them free reign, but instead give them small chunks to work asynchronously, usually about 2-3 days at a time.  We will start a task in class and then homework becomes whatever the students need to finish.  If they were productive during classtime, then homework can be avoided.

While the above ideas are focused on ELA instruction, they could also be applied to all subject areas.  What ideas do you have for using technology to differentiate instruction?  Share!