I Stepped Back

Around this time of year, EduTwitter is flooded with end of year reflections, goal setting for the next year, and #OneWord blog posts. I even did one in 2015. I contemplated writing one for this year and went back and forth on it for a few weeks. As I sit here on New Year's Eve day, I suppose this serves as an end of year reflection post.

Students working together to create a new flip video

To be quite honest, I have not done anything "new" in my classroom this year. Many of my mainstays have remained constant, but analyzed to a higher degree and implemented better. Most notably, my ability to do flexible grouping in small group instruction has improved. I regularly switch up my math groups as we enter into new units, based on informal pretests. Right before we let out for winter break, I assessed all students' reading progress through Fountas and Pinnell and will make some changes to groups as we begin 2018. I've been fine tuning my flipped classroom videos instead of just recycling old ones, in addition to having students create videos for their classmates, which was something I never got around to last year.

Technology integration continues to be a focal point of my classroom, but with one major change: I am no longer 1:1 Chromebooks. I have to share a Windows laptop cart with another teacher. At first, I hated it, but now I am learning to embrace it, though I do still hate how slow the laptops are. It forces me to be more intentional in how I am using the technology, which is always a good thing.

I've used Breakout Edu boxes and digital games, a handful of HyperDocs, and other things I love using while teaching. I continue to connect with my students on a regular basis and truly love my class and all their unique qualities. The families are very supportive this year and engage through Remind frequently. Within the walls of my classroom, things are par the course, which is totally ok with me.

A major change has occurred outside the school building in my life. If you're a regular reader of Mr. B's Blog, you may have been disappointed to see that there was only one post published this school year. Technically speaking, that wasn't even a new post; it was a holdover that I just published late. Besides not blogging about education, I've also stopped tweeting about education. In November 2017, I opened a new Twitter account for educational tweets, but really don't use that one anymore.

However, I haven't stopped writing entirely - I just write about a different subject matter now, namely men's health and testicular cancer awareness. As you probably know, I was diagnosed with cancer about a year ago, underwent chemotherapy for three months, and was cleared in remission in March 2017. I've been sharing my journey at my testicular cancer awareness blog, A Ballsy Sense of Tumor. My original Twitter account was retooled to focus on testicular cancer awareness. As always, I highly encourage you to check out both the website and the Twitter.

Is this to say I am not passionate about education anymore? No. I certainly still have very strong feelings about education and what needs to improve about it, but I'm focusing my energy on what I can do in my own classroom with my own students in my school. Those kids deserve my 100% effort while I'm there and I will give them my best. Furthermore, I needed better balance in my life. Education was my day job and my night hobby. EduTwitter was turning into an echo chamber, with platitudes and more of the same, and losing its luster with me. I needed to make a change.

There are literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of teachers who are tweeting and blogging about education. I don't feel like the community needs another voice, least of all mine. This isn't a vie for headpats or attention. I know I have some cool ideas, but writing about it and endlessly promoting it isn't necessarily how I wanted to spend my time anymore.

While there are countless educational blogs, there is a huge lack of testicular cancer awareness sites. In writing about my experiences and raising awareness, I've found a passion that does not relate to my profession (although I do have a project in the works that blends the two, so stay tuned) and I feel it has improved me as a person to have separate interests. It makes me a more well-rounded person and a real individual.

If education is your job and also your hobby, I'm not disparaging you. If it works for you, that's awesome. This is what works for me. I'm also not saying that I won't be writing or tweeting about education ever again. I still have over half a school year to go, and some ideas are swirling around that I want to try out, and may write about when the mood strikes.

So this is probably a different kind of end of year post than the norm that is being shared on Twitter today, and I am well aware of the irony that I'm writing a post about not wanting to blog about education and then tweeting it out. For now (and the foreseeable future), I've made the decision to spend my non-working hours working on my own passion project and dedicating my time and energy into doing a different form of good.

When it comes to educational blogging and social media,

I stepped back.

Hot Off the Press: Student-Created Newsletters

"A magazine or a newspaper is a shop. Each is an experiment and represents a new focus, a new ratio between commerce and intellect."

-John Jay Chapman

Authentic experience is an important element in teaching students to become good writers. In schools, many writing prompts and assignments lack meaning to students and aren't applicable to real life.

Another problem in education is keeping parents informed of what's going on in the classroom. We design awesome learning experiences, but students may still go home saying “We did nothing today.”

This year, I killed those two birds with one stone* - a student-created newsletter.

Click to enlarge - Note the level of detail in Monday

Each day, a student writes a one page summary of our day. I start at my first student and work my way down the class list alphabetically. By the end of the year, each student produces around six daily reports. Some choose to work on it bit by bit throughout the day, while others do it all at the end of the day during read aloud.

We don't have a fancy template - just a single piece of loose leaf notebook paper. Originally, I had no maximum limit, but then one student wrote four pages - front and back. After that, I implemented the "one front of page max" policy. This helped tremendously, since it forces the students to write the most important points down without too much flowery, overly descriptive, verbose, repetitive, unnecessary, and irrelevant wordy expressions of written language. (Do you see what I did there?) Identifying main points that belong in a concise summary is one of the reading standards my students struggle with, so this is a good way to give them extra and real practice by flipping it to generating a summary.

Having them write without a rubric or outline to follow also helps me to glean what the students found most valuable and engaging in class. They may quickly detail the standard math centers, but different learning experiences might be explained in more depth. If I thought something was going to be mind-blowingly cool, and it doesn't even net a sentence in the summary, I usually examine why that is. The one direction I do give was to write as if the reader had no idea what they were reading about. If we're playing Cutthroat Cornhole in class, they need to explain what the game is so the readers know what it is.

Once I have a week's worth of daily summaries, I type them into a Google Form. I don't correct any errors or add any details. I want their parents to see exactly what they wrote, so it prompts discussions at home. I work with a student's mother and she said that their family would use other students' writing to help guide him in what he should write when it was his turn. It makes them more accountable as a writer, as it is solely reflects them.

From the Google Form, Autocrat (which I set up in the beginning of the year) generates it into an actual newsletter. I didn't have to use Autocrat, but it saved me a bunch of time instead of making a copy of a template, typing, formatting, so on and so forth. I use a three column table - a column each for the day, the summary, and the author's initials. Using a table is helpful so it resizes itself automatically.

I also had Autocrat tags on the page for the date. A newsletter spanned from Friday to Thursday, so I can type them on Friday morning and not rush to get it done at the end of the day on Friday. The footer also includes my contact information, so the parents have an immediately visible reminder of how to get ahold of me, while the header has our classroom motto ("we don't make excuses, we make changes") as a constant reminder of what we stand for in our classroom.

There's a section on the newsletter of "Important Information From Mr. B" for assessment dates (and ways to prepare), special events (such as Readers Cafe), upcoming units of study, or other exciting information. Instead of sending numerous Remind messages throughout the week, I tell the parents to look at the newsletter. This forces them to look at the newsletter and hopefully appreciate their students' hard work.

A physical copy goes home with each student and it's also posted on our classroom website under the Classroom News page. This way, parents have no excuse to not see it! In the future, I think I'll include a higher-level math task related to our current unit or a discussion prompt related to our class read aloud after the "Important Information" section (if there's extra room) to help promote discussion at home.

A student-created newsletter is easily adapted for any subject area or grade level. It'll empower your students to be mini-journalists, keep your parents in the loop, and give you an inside look at what your students feel is valuable in your classroom.

As for me, volume two of the Mr. B’s Agents of SHIELD Classroom Newsletter will be hitting the stands in September. I didn't win a Pulitzer last year, but I'm holding out for one this year!

*Author's Note: If you've ever genuinely killed two birds with one stone, you have earned all of my respect.

Creating Their Own Adventures

"I'm still a kid inside, and adventure is adventure wherever you find it."

-Jim Dale

A personal favorite activity this year has been using Choose Your Own Adventure stories that go beyond the point and click variety. I first tried a method with Google Slides during my medical leave (detailed here) and then stepped it up to the next level by using Google Forms (explained here in my guest post on the EdTechTeam blog).

Getting started on the paper template

It's fun to make them and read their arguments, but ultimately students are still consuming the material more so than creating. I wanted to take it further - my students would build their own Choose Your Own Adventure story in Google Forms.

My students have never created any Google Forms and their exposure is limited to using the ones I've created for them. For this reason, I decided they would first map out their storylines on paper and then transfer it to the Google Form.

I provided them a template and gave minimal directions to them. Some students jumped right to it, while others struggled. I found many students couldn't grasp the divergent thinking associated with managing multiple storylines. Here are a few tips I found helpful in providing aid to these students:

Fixing the template. Yes, my desk is a disaster. 

• Be intentional with your word choice. Sometimes I would say, "Finish this section with two choices." Some took this as "You can have pizza or chicken and the pizza can be cheese or pepperoni." Technically, this is two choices. I shifted to saying, "Give a choice with two options."
• Physically pointing on the template was a giant help to some students. I would point at one column and say, "This can go here or here. What choices would make sense in your story?"
• A few students found it helpful to list all of their choices options first, and then go back to fill in the details in the story. If they chose this, I encouraged them to put the options on the top of the grid for that template. 
• Sometimes, students benefited from just starting over entirely. Keep plenty of extra copies on hand. 
• Some students needed more guidance than others, and that's totally ok. While some grasped the branching immediately, others didn't. A few students wanted to just write a linear story, while others were making choices and neglecting other paths. I worked with them to understand it for the first few steps and gradually pulled back the scaffolds.
• On my side of things, the template definitely needed work. The cool thing was I was able to modify the template as the students went along, incorporating their feedback immediately. For example, originally the template just had a bunch of boxes with designated sections it would correspond to on the Form. I realized more directions were needed. One of my students helped me make these changes, including typing more clear directions (such as, "Start with option 1 from section above" and "End with two options") and simple formatting. The final completed template can be accessed at this Force Copy link.

Transferring from paper to Form

Once students were done with their paper template, they moved onto the Google Form (accessible here at this Force Copy link). On the paper copy, each section had a marker on the top corner that said "S1, S2..." These corresponded to the sections on a Google Form. I had already linked the sections in the "Go to Page Based on Response" settings, so students didn't need to worry about that. (In the future, if students were more comfortable with Forms, I might teach them how to do this themselves.) Again, some tips for success:

• First things first - it wasn't smooth sailing to start. Some students had a hard time figuring out what to put in what section of the Form. There were two camps, both of which ended up being successful:
• "The Scrollers" who would put in a full storyline (visiting Section 1, then 4, then 18, etc) and then go back up to the top to do the next path
• "The Straight Liners" who matched section numbers on the template directly to the sections on the Form
• Students will delete sections, and the proper branching along with it. Generally speaking, they could figure out where to relink it by consulting the template, but they needed to learn how to do that first. Overall, they picked up on Forms very quickly, which is awesome because some adults struggle with it. 
• They loved adding pictures and it led to a good conversation about copyright and using the images Google provides right in the search tool in Forms. 
• Again, this template needed work on my part. Originally, the section titles said "Choice 1, Choice 2, End of Path 1, etc" since I just modified the template I used. I realized that I needed to match it to what their template said, so I replaced them with S1, S2, etc. This didn't help students who had already made a copy of the Form template, but helped other students after I made this change. 
• One student made the suggestion to replace the S1 with "You chose..." as a way to make the story more cohesive. I really thought this was a good idea and many of the students went back to edit to reflect this idea. 

When they were all done, I had them submit their hyperlink, their name, and title of the story on a Google Form. I used the =HYPERLINK and =IMPORTRANGE formulas in Sheets to make a master list of all completed games for students to try each other's stories (viewable here).

Testing and making edits

This was the really cool part. I saw students paired up doing each other's Forms and giving feedback as they traveled through the story paths. The "player" caught mistakes like incorrect title formatting, misspellings, unclear paths, improperly linked choices, or other things and the "builder" would open their copy to edit for changes. It essentially removed me from the feedback loop, and I am 100% ok with that. Peer feedback is crucial and critical to growing as a creator. 

How long did this all take? When all is said and done, students had a maximum of two and a half mornings to work on it, or roughly four to five hours. We're at the end of our school year and had some end-of-year assessments and projects to finish. Rather than defaulting to the "Free Read" when they were done, this was the "Fast Finisher" work. It's a really good idea for this because once a few students are done, they have more to explore on by completing other's adventures. In my class of 29, if everyone created a Form with 16 possible outcomes, there would be a total of 464 different variations before students completed all of them.

This was just the first experience and I know further iteration is needed. Next year, I plan to delve into this more and earlier in the year. I think it can be a really incredible for experience for the students and get them thinking in different ways. I definitely saw students being pushed and strive to improve their craft, which is awesome when you consider we were at the end of the school year.

How can you implement this in your classroom? What modifications would you make?

Choose Your Own Adventure: Active Engagement Edition

"Life is either a great adventure or nothing."

-Helen Keller

One of my favorite genres to read as a student was a Choose Your Own Adventure book. In these books, you read a page and follow the directions at the bottom. Maybe you would have to choose to eject from a falling aircraft or chance a crash landing or perhaps you could shoot a laser beam at the alien or try to run away from it. Either way, I usually ended up dead, kind of like my experiences playing Oregon Trail. Luckily, you could always start over.

As I became a teacher, I found out you could do similar tasks with Google Forms and Slides, either through "Go to Page Based on Response" or linking to different slides, respectively. However, my issue with that was the same I had with the books: It's a passive experience. While the reader needed to make a choice, there was little active engagement beyond that.

Bringing it into 2017

While I was out being treated for cancer with chemotherapy, I wrote to my students every day. After a few weeks of this, both the students and I needed a change from back and forth conversation. I thought back to my obsession with Choose Your Own Adventures as a fourth grader and wanted to mimic this, but with more of an active role.

I realized I could use Slides, but give them the story piece-by-piece each day. This way, they were making a choice and also engaging with the story beyond a mouse click. Before they would get the next part of their story, they would need to make a choice AND defend it. This helped build argumentative skills and persuasive writing elements. The "Master Deck" of The Winter Expedition can be found here.

The students didn't disappoint. They crafted strong arguments for why they chose to pick up the ice pick instead of the flashlight (my favorite being, "With an ice pick, I can break things and breaking things is kind of my thing") or why they thought going towards a mysterious odor was better than a growling ("I could just cover up my nose to block the smell, but the growling might be a bear." Plot twist - the odor was a monster. Sorry, kid.)

While I was struggling to get 2-3 sentences in response to "How is your day?" I would get two paragraphs solidifying their choices. It definitely helped improved their writing skills, especially their skills of persuasion.

The final slide asked them for their feedback on the experience. Of my 28 students, about 25 of them preferred this activity to their normal writing to me, with many of them saying they enjoyed being put into the story and having to make a choice. Some even mentioned how they enjoyed having to defend their pathway.

I realize as a classroom teacher, it might seem overwhelming to have to paste in new parts of a story each day, but it could easily be done during part of a planning period, during lunch, or in the evening. In total, once it was set up, it only took about half an hour to read each response and paste in the next section. I'll trade half an hour a day for more active engagement in writing.

So how do you do this with your class?

I've developed this Doc for planning it all and this Slides template for designing each slide. (Clicking on those links will give you a force copy of each document.) Both templates have directions on what to do. I recommend starting with the Doc and then transferring to the Slides; that's how I laid it all out.

Once you are done with the "Master Slides," make a copy and delete all but the starting few slides. That's what your students will start with and you'll add to it from there. Attach this new Slidedeck onto Google Classroom as "Make a Copy for Each Student" so they each get their own deck to work on.

I also made this screen cast to explain it all, since I wasn't sure if the written directions were enough.

One student already started on making his own
versions on Google Docs

Try it out, tweak it, do whatever you see fit. The students will enjoy it and I will be challenging mine to develop their own CYOA stories to send to partners. If you have questions, feel free to reach out via Twitter, email, or the comments below.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Check out a second (and easier to manage) iteration of this project, using Google Forms, here. 

Now it's your turn to make a choice:

Do you share this article through Twitter to your online PLN or email to a colleague in your school? Why did you make that choice?