Is Your Learning Space Student Friendly?

Those who know me well are aware of my passion for Fresno State Football. Much of my life has been spent at Bulldog Stadium. Over the past decade, the atmosphere at Bulldog Stadium has paled in comparison to the glory days of the 1980s through the early part of this century. The stadium was usually packed and the crowd was electric. Lately, it's been a pathetic sight to see countless rows of empty bleachers. To make matters worse, the last two seasons have been two of the most successful in school history, yet the fans still aren't turning up.

As we embark on a new school year, I invite you to reflect upon your learning space and how it truly meets the needs of the modern student. Is your space designed for maximum teacher comfort and efficiency or is it designed for that of the students? Is the seating flexible? Are the walls stagnant? Do kids walk in and marvel at the possibilities each day? These questions have guided me in my design of learning spaces. My Google Innovator Project, the Cardinal Innovation Center, is meant to be a model, student-centered learning space. It was designed with the needs of the modern student in mind. Click here for a quick tour.

In the case of Bulldog Stadium, fans complain about the inconvenient locations of restrooms and concession stands. With no tunnels, those sitting in the best seats closest to the field must scale approximately 100 steps to get to the top to access restrooms and concessions. In the Central Valley heat, early in the season, this will definitely make for an uncomfortable fan experience.

Sitting near the field makes for long walk up stairs to get to the restroom or concession stand.

Millenials and younger generations enjoy interacting with the game differently than traditional, older fans. They enjoy following the game stats on their favorite sports apps. They enjoy posting pictures of themselves and friends to social media from inside the stadium. These things are problematic as cellphone reception is extremely poor when 40,000 people are jam-packed into the stadium. The stadium does provide free WiFi, but it isn't a great signal and the bandwidth cannot handle the traffic.

The current state of affairs for fans at Bulldog Stadium, for me, serves a reminder for classrooms and learning space design. Is your classroom designed with your end users', students, needs in mind? Are moving around and accessing learning materials as inconvenient as the restrooms and concessions at Bulldog Stadium? Are you maximizing the use of technology in your room or is it token, surface level like Bulldog Stadium?

These are great questions for reflection. If you feel your learning space is trending towards the current state of Bulldog Stadium at all, contact you friendly, neighborhood tech coach for tips. Giving students a great learning environment is vital to maximizing pedagogy. Without a learning environment that meets the end users' needs, your great lessons and pedagogy will struggle to reach a large audience like the historically successful Fresno State Football Teams of the past two seasons.

Need ideas for improving the "student-centeredness" of your learning space, contact me at goljuarez14@gmail.com or visit cardinalinnovationcenter.org.

Quick EdTech Tips for Starting a New School Year

I hope everyone had an enjoyable summer. I know I did. This summer was probably the most I have traveled ever. Now that summer has come to a close for 2019, the new school year is upon us. Starting a new school year is both exciting and stressful. We are excited to see students and colleagues again, but, at the same time, we can be stressed by meetings, PD and the rigors of curriculum and classroom set up.

Allow me to share with you a few edtech tips I use myself at the beginning of each school year. These tips are Google-centric, but if you are a Microsoft or Apple District, those platforms have similar functions.

Archive Old Google Classrooms

When a new year starts, go to Google Classroom and archive your old classrooms. To do this, on the Google Classroom home page where you see all of your classrooms, click the three dots and select archive. Don't recycle them. If there is an old assignment in an archived class, you can still reuse them in your new classes.

Try One New App/Strategy

If you're anything like me, you're constantly learning through a PLN, social media and conferences. This type of learning inundates you with new ideas and strategies. I advise not trying to implement too many new ideas, apps or strategies at once. Start slow with one at a time. Reach out to your tech coach for support. Once you and your students are comfortable, try another. For me personally, I am beginning the year with a few #eduprotocols and will implement more as the year wears on.

Clean Out Inbox

Early in the year, we tend to get more emails than normal. This can lead to a bloated inbox. Bloated inboxes can result in missed messages. Don't be an email hoarder. Take a few minutes and delete old messages you know you don't need. If there are messages you need to save, create labels (which are like folders) and move them for future reference to declutter the inbox.

Not every communication requires an email. If it can be said via text message, use text messaging instead of email. If you do not give out your cellphone number, use a messaging system like Google Hangouts to keep your number private, but still have a back channel for informal communication.

Clean Out Google Drive

Like the inbox, Google Drive can get cluttered. You may find tons of old files that were shared with you that are no longer needed. Delete them. If you don't want to delete, create an "Old Stuff" folder and move those things there to separate from files you use frequently.  Develop a naming convention system for files and folders. This will help searching Google Drive tremendously.

Unsubscribe from old Calendars

Throughout each school year, we are invited to view calendars from different initiatives, programs, teams, clubs and more. This will clutter your view of calendars in the left side toolbar of Google Calendar making it difficult to see and manage the calendars you need to see this year. If you hover your cursor over an "old" calendar, an "x" will appear. Click it to unsubscribe.

Add Bell Schedule to my Calendar

When working with kids in our classrooms, it is easy to lose track of time. As tech coach in my district, I have added the bell schedule to Google Calendar and shared it with the schools I serve. This was a little tedious, but now the calendars sync to my phone. I set each period to have a 3 minute notification before the end to remind me to start wrapping things up. This notification comes on my phone and my smartwatch. If you don't have a coach like me to set this up for you, feel free to message me and I can give you a hand (goljuarez14@gmail.com).

Set a Simple Reflection Challenge

Reflection is important for educators. The more I reflect on my practice, the better educator I become. This year, I have set a challenge for myself to take pictures of student work every day in addition to pictures of the work I do as tech coach. Each day, I take a few minutes and add those images to a slide. When the year is over, I'll have a 185 slide presentation filled with pictures of the work I have done. This helps me stay mindful to make sure I, the students I work with and teachers I serve are producing quality work. You don't need to do my challenge, but try something like writing a sticky note to yourself each day. Try blogging or even taking 5 minutes of quiet time to decompress.

Make friends with Tech Coach and or IT Personnel

If you're reading this, you have probably connected with this tech coach already. If I am not the tech coach at your site, find that tech coach. Being a tech coach can be a lonely job. We love it when teachers reach out. We have a lot to share and we love sharing.

As a tech coach and teacher, I work closely with IT personnel. This is a hugely important relationship. Making friends with these folks makes my life a lot easier. This relationship means I don't need to wait as long to get things fixed, connected or hooked up. In my experience, a box of donuts goes a long in building a relationship with IT personnel.


I hope everyone has a great school year and hopefully some of these tips were helpful!

Summer Inbox Clean Up Tips

As a tech coach, I have had the privilege of serving hundreds of educators. In that service, I have caught glimpses of some totally cluttered inboxes. Many times, educators I serve tell me they didn't get a message I sent them. Below are some simple, helpful tips to de-clutter your inbox and not miss important communications. If you're receiving this blog post in your inbox, feel free to use some of these tips

Unsubscribe

As an educator, companies constantly solicit their products and services. One way or another, our email addresses end up on their mailing lists. As a result, the inbox is cluttered with updates and promotions. This clutter makes navigating your inbox troublesome and annoying. To begin eliminating your inbox of such clutter, start by opening one of these promotional emails and scroll down to the bottom of the message and, in the small, fine print, look for a place to click to "unsubscribe" or "change preferences".

When you click, you'll be taken to a new browser tab which will give you options to stop receiving emails from the company. Once you've get confirmation that you'll not receive any more emails, go back to your inbox and delete the message. If you have tons of messages like this, the process of unsubscribing will be a bit tedious, but well worth it the long run. As new messages of this sort arise, nip it in the bud by finding the unsubscribe button.

Labels

Think of labels, in Gmail, as folders for your messages. Often, a crowded inbox leads to you missing an important message. When you have a spare moment, create labels and move messages that need saving into the labels. Doing this will lessen the chance an message will get lost in the shuffle of a crowded inbox.

There are a couple of ways to create labels in Gmail. One is to, on the left sided tool bar, scroll to the very bottom and click create new label. Another way is to click the "Move to" button in the top toolbar above the messages. In the search bar that appears, start typing the name of the new label. It will say "Create new". Click "Create new" to create it.

To move messages to a label, when reading an email, click the "Move to" button at the top and choose the label to where you'd like to move the message. To move multiple messages, click the checkbox to the left of each message you'd like to move, then click "Move to" and select the label.

Delete

As educators, we often neglect to delete old messages. Our inboxes often exhibit traits of hoarding. Start with this simple criteria and ask yourself this question, "Is this message formal or informal?" If informal, my advice will be to delete it. Often, colleagues send us informal messages that often could have been a text message and didn't need to be an email. For those messages, delete away!

Google Hangouts, cellphones and informal communication

As educators, we usually want to keep communication among colleagues professional. In doing so, we often shy away from giving colleagues our personal cellphone numbers. I actually do give my cellphone number to colleagues, but totally understand why others don't. I like to give mine to them to colleagues because it provides an avenue for informal communication. Many questions people ask me don't need to be an email. Those types of communications are informal and will clutter and clog your inbox. By informal, I'm referring to messages about "what time" or "where" or any message you might get often in a text message.

If you're not comfortable giving out your cellphone number to colleagues, but don't want to clutter your inbox with informal communication, an app like Google Hangouts is a great alternative. If your school is using GSuite, Hangouts is already part of your account. No cellphone numbers are needed. From Gmail on your computer, on the left, below your labels, there is a "plus" button where you can initiate a private chat between you and a colleague. It is like texting, but through Google. Alerts for these messages appear at the bottom of your screen. If you're good at texting, Hangouts is for you. The best part is that these informal messages will not clog up your inbox.

Slide Into Booksnaps

With what do kids often dislike and struggle? Reading. What are kids these days seemingly obsessed with? Snapchat. Booksnaps take something kids don't like and struggle with, smashes it with something they love, and helps them engage in reading in a manner they didn't imagine. Don't just take my word for it. Check out what some of my students have said about Booksnaps.

"Booksnaps helped me understand a topic more thoroughly. Being able to use Bitmojis, I was able to better me sum up what was going on in the text instead of having to read everything blandly".

- Valerie Guzman, Class of 2020

"Doing Booksnaps, I got to annotate text and insert images that connected to that text. I also was able to explain my understanding in my own words. This really helped me because it made me read the text in a different manner, multiple times until I understood it enough to explain it with words and images".

- Melanie Figueroa, Class of 2020

For Snapchat users, you begin a Booksnap by taking a picture of text that resonates with you or is evidence of a claim or theme. You use the annotation tool to circle or underline the part of the text that resonated with you or is evidence. Use the text tool to rationalize why the circled or underlined text resonates or is evidence. You complete the Booksnap by inserting an emoji, Bitmoji or sticker to support what your circled or underlined and what you wrote as a rationale.

I know what many of you are thinking. We don't allow cell phones at our school. Snapchat is blocked by our network. What's BItmoji? Since Bitmoji is logged into via Snapchat, and Snapchat is blocked, how can we access it? Never fear, there are options for getting around those constraints.

Personally, when I Booksnap a book I'm reading for professional learning or pleasure, I use Snapchat. Actually, this the only thing for which I use Snapchat. When training teachers and students to do Booksnaps, I eschew Snapchat in favor of Google Slides. If Powerpoint is your preference, you can do the same with Powerpoint. If you're working with younger learners in Seesaw, you can do this with Seesaw (Check out this video for doing Booksnaps with Seesaw). For the purposes of this blog post, I'm going to explain how to Booksnap with Google Slides.

There are two types of Booksnaps I use frequently with students. One type I like to call a "Clue Booksnap". The other type I like to call "Picture Surprise Booksnap". Below, you'll find steps for teachers to create and students to engage with both types of Booksnaps.

Clue Booksnap: Teacher

The Clue Booksnap is way to get students to mark text, identify themes & claims, cite textual based evidence, rationalize and support thinking and more.

• Start a slide deck template in Google Slides
• Use Blank Layout
• Screenshot a snippet of text (This requires you to have access to digital or scanned version of text)
• Insert text box for clue (Clue should be what claim or theme of what you want students to identify evidence)
• Insert text snippet image to slide (Be sure to know where on your computer the screenshots are saved)

Repeat steps for each Booksnap within the slide deck. I recommend 3-5 for primary grades, 5-8 for middle school and 8-11 for high school. Once your template has been created, assign via Google Classroom making a copy for each student.

Clue Booksnap: Student

• Read text and scan for evidence of the clue
• Use scribble tool to circle or underline evidence of the clue
• Click line color button to change the color to orange. Orange is easier for teacher to see.
• Click line thickness button and change thickness to 4px. This makes it easier for teacher to see.
• Insert rectangle across width of text. Double click to type 1-2 sentence rationale
• Insert 1-3 images or emojis to support your rationale (png preferred)

Picture Surprise Booksnap: Teacher

The Picture Surprise Booksnap is a way to get students to answer text dependent questions, color code, make inferences and think empathetically. Color coded text dependent questions should look something like "In (insert color), how did the character respond to the situation"? The picture surprise prompt should ask kids to "Copy and paste an emoji or image that represents how (insert character, person, group) might have felt when (insert scenario).

• Start a slide deck template in Google Slides
• Use Blank Layout
• Screenshot a snippet of text (This requires you to have access to digital or scanned version of text)
• Insert text snippet image to slide
• Insert text box with questions and color coding “rules”
• Insert text box for picture surprise prompt and arrow

Picture Surprise Booksnap: Student

• Read text and scan for evidence of the clue
• Use scribble tool to circle the part of text that best answers the question
• Change line color to instructed color and line thickness to “4” (Makes it easier for teacher to see)
• Copy and paste picture or emoji based on picture surprise prompt (png preferred)

Click here to access a slide deck that includes examples of Booksnaps and how to videos for each of the steps above.