Common Curriculum

Ready or not, here they come. Currently adopted in part or in full by 45 states, the Common Core (CC) standards are seemingly on everyone’s mind. At almost every school I visited this year, teachers asked me to address the Common Core in my workshops. Planning lessons with CC in mind presents a challenge, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. New sites and services are popping up on the Web every day with the express purpose of helping plan lessons around Common Core. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Online resource Common Curriculum is designed to help educators align their lesson plans with CC standards. Common Curriculum provides an online plan book, which enables you to keep track of your class schedules and write your lesson plans. Enter a lesson into your Common Curriculum planner, then click “search for standard” to find a match for your lesson plan. Including more text in your lesson will improve search results, I’ve found.

A free application, Common Curriculum also enables users to attach files and links to their lesson plans, which really makes it easy to organize those digital materials in one place. Common Curriculum also has a built-in blogging feature. Once activated, the blog option will automatically post your lesson plans for you.

The heart of the Mastery Connect (see screencast below) service is an assessment tracker in which teachers and administrators can monitor each student’s progress toward meeting specifically selected Common Core standards. That data can be extremely useful in planning lessons. In an especially nice feature, Mastery Connect offers an app for iOS and Android that makes all of the Common Core standards available for immediate access from a smartphone. The app has been used by teachers more than 5.6 million times, according to the company. And you needn’t go it alone when planning your lessons. Mastery Connect offers an online network in which teachers across the country can connect to share ideas and lessons planned around the Common Core.

Need some inspiration for planning a Common Core-related lesson? There are a couple of places to start your search. The One Laptop Per Child project (one.laptop.org) recently created a wiki of elementary school lesson plans aligned to Common Core standards, XO Plans For You. Select your grade level, then a content area to find sample lesson plans. The lessons are archived as Google Documents, which you can download and or save onto your Google Drive account.

Popular virtual penpal service ePals has recently launched its own Common Core standards resource. The ePals Common Core Implementation Center is a bank of free project plans created by teachers and ePals staff. Search for projects by grade level and content area—currently limited to ELA and science. Many of the projects, though not all, involve using ePals. There are alternatives, if you don’t choose to use the service, but it might take a bit more creative effort on your part to make those particular lessons work.

As you plan your lessons in the new year, remember these free resources and take some of the stress out of aligning your plans to Common Core standards.

Richard Byrne (richardbyrne@freetech4teachers.com), a high school social studies teacher, writes the award-winning blog “Free Technology for Teachers.”

Diagram created in GoClass

Regardless of what curriculum areas we teach, observing and assessing our students is something that we all do every day. Thanks to mobile devices like iPads and Android tablets, recording our informal observations and formal assessments has never been easier. Here are some of the best mobile apps and mobile-friendly websites available.

Infuse Learning is a free service that allows you to create and deliver assessments on your laptop, iPad, or Android device and push individual questions, prompts, and even complete quizzes out to students’ devices in private virtual classrooms. Your questions and prompts can take on a variety of formats including multiple choice, true/false, and short answer style; it even allows students to respond by creating drawings or diagrams on their own devices. This would be especially useful, for example, in a biology class, where you could ask students to create cell diagrams on their devices and submit them to you electronically. Infuse Learning is the most universally accessible app on this list because it offers both audio support and multiple language options—the service will read your questions and prompts aloud to students, or translate them into students’ native languages.

GoClass is a free iPad application for creating short lessons and delivering them to your students. Your lessons can include annotated images, freehand sketches, text, and video. GoClass also gives teachers various tools for creating class rosters that they can use to keep track of which students are using which lessons and when. Teachers also have the option to ask questions and poll their kids, then project those student responses to the class without showing students’ names. The image (above), from GoClass, illustrates how a teacher might use the app in the classroom.

Google Documents is a great means to creating assessment forms that display properly both in Safari on iPads and on Android device browsers. I often use Google Forms to create a simple pre-learning skills assessment or prior knowledge survey for my students, using the scale option built into the interface. For example, when I facilitate Google Apps trainings, I ask participants to rank their current skills on a scale of one to five. In professional development settings, I make form responses anonymous. When I use Google Forms in classrooms with students, I require that they enter their names. Then I can mill about the classroom with my iPad, view responses as they come in, and have discussions with students on an individual basis. For directions on creating and distributing a form using Google Documents, check out my professional guide, Google Docs and Google Drive for Teachers.

For totally informal and unplanned recording of observations about my students, Evernote is my go-to app. I have Evernote installed on every device that I use on a regular basis (MacBook, iPad, Nexus 7, Windows 7 on my desktop PC) to jot down just about everything, from interesting sites that I find while browsing the Web to reminders to myself to pick up eggs at the market. The speech-to-text option in Evernote makes it exceedingly handy because you can dictate notes rather than type them; if you speak clearly, the transcription is quite good. Evernote also allows you to tag your notes—which makes it easy to search through everything in your Evernote account—and sort your notes into different notebooks. I create a notebook for each class that I teach so that I can quickly access all of my relevant notes and resources out of the thousands of notes currently in my account.

Finally, if you’re looking for a tool to record your observations of student behaviors while also creating an engaging student experience, give ClassDojo a try. ClassDojo will work on any modern Web browser on your laptop, iPad, or Android device. ClassDojo allows you to record your observations and easily share them with students and their parents.

There isn’t one single system of observation and assessment that works for every teacher, but the tools outlined above have been a hit wherever I have shown them. What’s your favorite mobile system for recording observations and assessments of your students?

Technology isn’t supposed to turn us into idiots—it’s supposed to make us smarter. And yet, these days the phrase “technology addiction” is cropping up all over the place. A University of Maryland 2011 study found that the majority of the 1,000 students who were interviewed admitted that they were unable to abstain from using technology for an entire day. The students I work with seem to have developed nervous tics, constantly flipping out their cell phones to check on texts, messages, or the time.

Rather than bemoaning our fate as teachers battling this new disease, we need to embrace it. If you can’t keep your students from checking their cell phones 50 times each class period, make your students’ devices work to your purpose. A smorgasbord of tools are available to help you do just that. Use Poll Everywhere to quiz your students. You create the questions and your students text their responses using laptops, tablets, or mobile phones. Display the website with your Smartboard or projector and watch the responses roll in, changing the graph on the screen as each student responds. Students can also text comments and questions. This is a free application for up to 40 responders. PollDaddy is a similar tool that provides live web polling and can be embedded in web pages and blogs. Socrative is another polling tool that also runs on laptops, tablets, and smartphones and allows you to take a quick poll of your students through true-or-false, multiple-choice, or short-answer questions.  Socrative also includes exit tickets, a quick way to gage students’ understanding of the day’s lesson; quizzes that are graded for you; and the game Space Race, in which teams of students answer questions as fast as they can to move their rocket across the screen to victory.

Create a class Twitter account and encourage (or require) kids to tweet notes, comments, and questions on various topics that they’re studying. Use Twtpoll,a tool that allows you to launch polls directly from your Twitter account. The class account can serve as a note-taking tool. Assign a different student each day to be the class tweeter and encourage all your students to tweet their comments and questions during class and later when they’re doing homework and need help.

Right before class starts, send out a group text with Remind101 that explains the day’s objective. Remind101 is also a great tool for keeping in touch with students after school hours. Need to extend a deadline?  Text them. Want to remind kids to bring in certain supplies? Text them.

Technology can be an addictive hindrance to education, or it can enhance and expand the ways we communicate with and engage our students. Mobile devices are here to stay. Make them work for you.

ClassDojo

When I decided to become a teacher, the first course I took was on classroom management. It involved all sorts of rubrics and checklists for documenting student behavior—certainly not the most fun aspect of the job, but a necessary one. The records that I learned to keep have come in handy over the years, especially for sharing with students’ parents when we meet to discuss their children’s work. Thankfully, taking attendance and other record keeping no longer require paper, nor do parents and students have to wait until conference time to review this information.

Web tools are a boon to classroom management and make this work more transparent and even fun.

ClassDojo is always a big hit whenever I introduce it to new teachers. The free app can be used for recording attendance and student behavior. Both kids and their parents receive access codes to sign into ClassDojo, which they can do at any time to view their records. Once added to your ClassDojo roster, each student receives an appealing cartoon avatar, which appears each time he or she signs into the tool.

To record behavior in ClassDojo, simply sign into your account and select the appropriate class roster. By default, ClassDojo gives you six positive and six negative behaviors to record. On the positive side are teamwork, helping others, participation, hard work, on task, and persistence. The negative behaviors include disruption, disrespect, no homework, off task, unprepared, and talking out of turn. You can also add custom behaviors for each class. To recognize a student for a particular behavior, select his or her name from the roster and then choose and assign an award.

When I first examined ClassDojo last winter, I thought it was a good fit for elementary school kids, given its cartoonish look. But I discovered that it was being used in middle and high school classrooms, too. High school teachers, it seems, are using ClassDojo to award points during classroom discussions, creating custom awards for students who demonstrate related skills, such as “uses evidence in argument.”

A new service (available by beta invitation only at press time), Class Badges, lets you create custom badges to award to students for completing assigned tasks and projects. The application is best used, I’ve found, on a weekly basis. Rather than bestow awards each day, you might, for example, distribute badges to students for participating in a week- or month-long series of discussions. I created a badge in my classroom to reward perfect attendance for a week and another to honor students for meeting research deadlines.

Class Realm is another new Web tool in beta, this one applying a gaming element to classroom management. When the service is fully launched, Class Realm will assign avatars to students, and only the teacher and the student will know whose avatar is whose. Class Realm can be used to track attendance and class participation, but teachers can also use it to devise “edventures,” which will award points to students for completing a progressive series of activities.

If you’re looking for a new way to encourage positive behavior in your classroom, while also increasing the transparency of reporting, give these Web tools a try.

The first relationship-building tool that I always recommend to educators is a classroom or library blog. In terms of platforms, I’m partial to Blogger because it integrates with my Google account, but there are many other good ones that you might want to try, including Posterous Spaces, an easy-to-start, user-friendly interface for teachers, and EduBlogs.

What’s my number-one tip for any educator who wants students and parents to visit his classroom blog regularly? Blog consistently, even if you don’t think anyone, especially at the beginning of the school year, is reading your posts. It may take a while to get them into the habit of checking your blog for important information, but if you blog each day and consistently refer students and parents to your site from the get-go, I’ll bet that by November, they’ll be regular visitors, looking forward to reading your latest posts.

These days, almost every parent and student has a mobile device. If you’re not taking advantage of mobile technology to engage your classroom community, you need to start right now. There are many excellent, free tools that you can use to connect with students and parents through their mobile devices, and the following are a few of my favorites.

Kikutext uses text messages to keep parents informed about your classroom or libray. The service is an opt-in one for parents. So when you create a Kikutext account, you’re assigned a code to distribute to parents. Parents then send that code in a text message to register, or opt in, to receive your messages. Kikutext keeps parents’, teachers’, and principals’ phone numbers hidden from each other, so they’re confidential.

Remind 101 allows you to send text messages from your computer to groups of students and parents. Like most of the other services I’m recommending, Remind 101 uses an opt-in system. So students and parents who want to receive messages must enter a code to elect to receive them.

For the last two years I’ve given out my Google Voice number to students and their parents, and included it on my printed syllabuses. I’ve also distributed the number by installing a Google Voice-calling widget on my blog. Then anyone viewing my blog can call or text me directly from my site. When you create a Google Voice account, you have the option to select a new number—that’s what I did when I created mine. I hand out that number so that students and parents can text message me or leave me a voice mail. I can reply to text messages from my Google Voice inbox and the other party never sees my real cell phone number.

If Google Voice isn’t for you, there’s always SpeakPipe, which offers a good voice-calling widget that’s easy to add to your blog. With SpeakPipe installed on your blog, anyone can click on the “send voicemail” button and leave you a message. When a visitor clicks the “leave voicemail” button she’ll be prompted to allow access to her computer. Then she can begin recording her message. Visitors can, but aren’t required to, enter their names and email addresses for you. And you can listen to and download any messages from your SpeakPipe inbox.

So don’t wait until the first open house or parent-teacher night to start reaching out to parents. Begin building relationships from the first day of school by taking advantage of the many ways you can communicate with parents through blogs and via mobile.

First, our 28 participants were asked to review three book-sharing sites—GoodReads, LibraryThing, and Shelfari—and vote for their favorite. They ended up choosing GoodReads, which has many strengths, including a strong online presence and an easy-to-use app for smartphones. Then, each class member was asked to create his own GoodReads account. Although I’ve had one for a little over a year, teaching this class really forced me to get to know the site much more thoroughly. I loved browsing through its book reviews, updating the titles I’d read, posting new reviews, and perusing recommendations by other visitors. After one marathon session, I was surprised to see I’d listed 87 books “To-Read.” I love how the app lets me view great selections and find out what my colleagues are reading. GoodReads turns out to be Facebook for booklovers!

In addition to sharing what they were reading on Goodreads, participants were required to blog twice about each title they’d read for the class and share a 250-word review of it. My district generously provides us with Blackboard, and blogging on this site allowed our teachers to see things more from our students’ perspectives, so we could be better bloggers. In fact, several teachers who had never used Blackboard before were so impressed with it that they’re planning to use it with their own classes.

Participants were also required to read education articles on literacy and blog about what they had learned. We also discussed how to get kids excited about reading by using graphic novels, allowing them to choose the books they wanted to read, and how looking at blogs and social-networking sites counts as “reading,” especially for kids who are reluctant readers. Thanks to one of the articles we read, we also had a lively discussion about a sure-fire way to kill the love of reading—by requiring every student in class to read the same novel.

Finally, our participants were asked to answer the question “How are you going to inspire your students and co-workers to read?” This is where my colleagues really inspired me. They talked of actively speaking to students about what they were reading now and what they’d read in the past. A math teacher wrote that he was planning to start a weekly booktalk session so his kids could share what they’ve been reading. One history teacher spoke about including excerpts from nonfiction books in his curriculum, including some from Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling Unbroken, which he’d read this summer. Another math teacher told us he plans to set up a bulletin board in his class, where his students can post book reviews on 3 x 5 cards. Everyone in our group developed their own individual action plan to promote literacy and they all pledged to be ambassadors of the love of reading in our school. I truly believe that as a team, we can make reading—and talking about reading and writing about it—as popular as Facebook or World of Warcraft.

Vialogues home page

As a social studies teacher, I’ve always liked using documentary videos and news clips in my classroom. It’s a challenge, however, to give students the time they need to discuss what they’re seeing. I’ve tried having them jot down their responses and questions. But the pen-and-paper method lacks a mechanism for immediate feedback. I’ve also stopped the video to discuss it, but that disrupts the viewing experience. The last couple of years, I’ve turned to online backchannels or chat rooms in which my students can post their comments and questions in real time. That way, I can respond immediately to their questions—such as “who is that person?”—and interject my own comments.

SynchTube was the first real-time video discussion platform that I tried and three years later, it’s still a solid platform. A free service for watching videos and chatting about them simultaneously, SynchTube was initially only compatible with YouTube clips. But now it also supports Blip.tv, Vimeo, and a half dozen other video-sharing sites. To use SynchTube, find the URL of your desired clip, copy that URL into SynchTube, and start chatting with your students while they’re watching the video.

If you’re working with students who are 13 or older, Google+ Hangouts now offers the option to watch a YouTube video during a live hangout session. Hangouts provide the tools to browse for and watch clips and chat about them in real time. Keep in mind, however, that hangouts are limited to 10 participants. Based on my experience, I’d recommend turning off your webcam while in a session and use the text or voice chat instead.

Watch2gether is a service much like SynchTube, and it’s super simple to use. To get started, enter a nickname for yourself (it could be your first name), then search for a video or enter a URL for one that you’ve previously bookmarked. When you’ve found the video you want, a chat column will appear on the right side of your browser. You can invite others to chat by sending them the URL assigned to your session. One limitation to Watch2gether: it only works for YouTube clips.

The tools covered thus far are limited to videos that are hosted somewhere online. But you may have clips saved on your local hard drive that you want to share and discuss. Or perhaps your students just wrapped up a video production of their own and you’re ready to discuss the project as a group. If either scenario applies, take a look at Vialogues.

Another site for hosting conversation around videos, Vialogues gives users the option to upload a video as the centerpiece of their discussion or choose from the offerings on YouTube. After you’ve selected a video from that service or uploaded one of your own, you can post questions in the form of a poll and add comments, which I’ve done to highlight various points made in the video. Vialogues can be made public or private. Choosing the private option means that only people you approve can watch and comment on the video. If you choose to make a Vialogue public, it can be embedded into your blog or website.

TED-Ed got a lot of publicity earlier this year for its flipped-video lessons, which can be found on or created via the site. TED-Ed isn’t a platform for real-time discussion—it’s a place where teachers can post questions and students can respond to them. Perhaps in the future, it’ll also have a real-time option.

Until then, if you want to provide a place for students to post reactions and questions in the moment, try any of the aforementioned options.