On the 4th Day...4 Digital Tools to Involve Parents

4 Ways to Involve Parents Using Digital Tools



Involving parents in their child’s educational experience is the most important task for teachers. It is important to make sure parents are aware of their child’s success and failures in their educational journey. To ensure students are successful in education it takes a team…the student, the parent(s), and the teacher. This digital tools below can help provide teachers with the opportunity to share the student’s educational experience with their parents.

1.       Remind 101 – Free, safe way for teachers to text message students and stay in touch with parents. The setup for both teachers and parents are easy. I use Remind 101 to update parents on upcoming assignments, assessments, dates to remember, etc.

2.       Micro-Blogging – Twitter is a great way to keep parents update on what is happening in the classroom. Create a class account and invite parents to participate in their child’s daily learning.

3.       EDU 2.0/Engrade – Our school has EDU 2.0, this is very similar to Blackboard. EDU 2.0 provide parents with access to assignments, notes, email, grades, and more. Although not free, it is a great investment provided by our district. If you do not have EDU 2.0, Engrade is another opportunity to grant parents access to student grading. When I first started teaching I used Engrade and it was definitely have valuable tool for my parents.

4.       Video Conferencing – Invite parents in your daily class experiencing using Skype. Parents can see daily learning and interactions of their child through the use of this tool. Invite parents to share career experiences for certain concepts being students to provide student with real world applications.

 

6th Day....6 of My Twitter Favorites

On the 6th day of Christmas, F.I.T. gave to me, 6 of my Favorites from Twitter!

1. 80 Ways to Use Goggle Forms in the Classroom

2. 20 Grading Apps To Save You Time

3. 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teachers Who Use Technology

4. A Cheat Sheet for Teachers

5. Making Your Own Textbooks and eBooks

6. A Straightforward Guide to Using Pinterest in Education

On the Twelfth of Christmas ...12 Digital Exit Slips

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas F.i.T. gave me 12 Digital Exit Slip Tools to use...

This year our district implemented the use of exit slips to assess student daily learning. So, what are exit slips...

Exit Slips are used to help students reflect on their learning and express their ideas and learning about a topic. The Exit Slip strategy also provides the teacher with the opportunity to integrate writing into the classroom.

Exit Slips can serve as 2 purpose: (1) It can be used to document student's understanding of a lesson, (2) as an informal assessment, and (3) the effectiveness of the teacher's instruction.  The strategy allows both the teacher and student to reflect on their daily experiences in class.

 

At first, I was not excited about doing one more thing in my class. After doing a few, I realized how useful Exit Slips were to the overall success of my students.

 

The Exit Slip strategy works extremely well with integrating digital tools in your classroom. You could allow students to write on their own paper or even print-out cute exit slips from online sites. But with so much other tasks we have to do, web-based tools and apps, makes Exit Slips can easy  implemented and analyze.

 

There are three categories of exit slips (Fisher & Frey, 2004):

• Prompts that document learning,
  • Ex. Write one thing you learned today.
  • Ex. Discuss how today's lesson could be used in the real world.


• Prompts that emphasize the process of learning,
  • Ex. I didn't understand…
  • Ex. Write one question you have about today's lesson.


• Prompts to evaluate the effectiveness of instruction
  • Ex. Did you enjoy working in small groups today?

Other exit prompts include:

• I would like to learn more about…
• Please explain more about…
• The most important thing I learned today is…
• The thing that surprised me the most today was…
• I wish…

Fisher, D., and Frey, N. (2004). Improving Adolescent Literacy: Strategies at Work. New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.

 

Listed below are my favorite Digital Exit Slips Apps and Web-based Tools. All are free, with the option to get premium membership. It makes doing Exit Slips easy to implement, analyze, and document. Print the responses and keep them in a portfolio for your students!

 

 

1. Survey Monkey

2. Polls Everywhere

3. Socrative

4. Goggle Docs

5. Email

6. Today's Meet

7. Twitter

8. Class Blog or Wiki

9.  Edmodo

10. Poll Daddy

11. Fluid Survey

12. Zoomerang

 

Have fun with these 12 Digital Exit Slips Apps and Web-based Tools.

Happy Holidays~Please give the gift of sharing this season and Share it! Tweet it! Like it! Google it!

Micro-Blogging and Writing in Math with Twitter

I am so excited to begin writing in math using micro-blogging digital tools. Our class will be using Twitter to begin writing in Math . I created a class Twitter account and came up with 25 writing prompts for students to write on. I will randomly give each student a different prompt to add variety to our Twitter page. Students will tweet their prompt and other students will reply to their tweets.

Step 1: Create a class Twitter account.
Step 2: Have students create a Twitter account.
Step 3: Assign a time to integrate writing into the classroom.
Step 4: Create prompts for your class to tweet on...Click here for a project with rubric: Twitter Math Prompts.

Tips:
~Protect your tweets and make them private.
~Have students create an account using at least thier name, so you can recognize them for assessment purposes.

Other ways to use Twitter in Math!

1.    Data Project: To collect data to create bar graphs and circle graphs. Students will poll followers on Twitter to collect their data.
2.    Polling: Create a twitter poll to collect data for graphing, prior knowledge assessment, etc. http://twtpoll.com/ (Starts at $9 per month).
3.    Closures: Students tweet a summary of what they learned in class on a specific topic/concept
4.    Vocabulary Reviews: Give each student a different vocabulary word and have them tweet the definition, a picture, etc.

 

 

Read more ways on Edudemic's site!