Do you Gooru the SBAC with Graphite? CCSS Resources

It's November, one of the busiest times of the school year. Between holidays, field trips, and parent-teacher conferences I always found this was the time of the year I was most likely to fall behind on lesson planning when I was a classroom teacher. Where can I find a video that will really engage my kids? I wonder if any one has a lesson already created for this topic? And...I have about 10 spare minutes to find it. Sound familiar? If you are in a similar boat check out these three websites for finding high-quality, Common Core (and content area standard) aligned resources. I promise you'll find them handy and useful.

Joe

Gooru Learning

I first heard about this site over the summer, but Rob reminded me about it from the iNACOL conference this week. Gooru is an awesome community of educators who are sharing resources and collections online. Resources are individual tools or websites searchable by topic that can then be narrowed down by grade level, content standard, or media type. Collections are multiple resources aligned to a topic that have been curated and shared by a teacher. Through Gooru you can find resources and collections, as well as create your own collections. Some districts and educational institutions are evening using the site to share curated and vetted material in the Libraries section. To get started all you need to do is create a free account.

Graphite

Graphite is a tool that was released by Common Sense Media in summer 2013 and is being used by teachers all over our school. The site has a Ratings & Review section where you can search for resources by grade level, content standard, or type of tool. You can also use the Common Core Explorer to drill down by a particular standard. However, my favorite area is the App Flows section which contains frameworks created by teachers linking together multiple digital tools through a strong pedagogical framework. Some of our colleagues including Alicia Carter, Cary Zierenberg, and Petra Luhrsen have been part of the team creating these through the National Writing Project. Simply navigate to Graphite, create a free account and you will be ready to go.

Smarter Balanced Digital Library

As part of our transition to Common Core, the California Department of Education is providing access to the Smarter Balanced Digital Library for all credentialed teachers and administrators in California. This site contains a plethora of instructional and professional development resources for teaching these new standards. Resources might include complete lessons to specific tools and websites to use with your students. All of them are searchable by standard, grade level, and many other attributes including media type and intended student population. Waaaayyyy back in July or August you received an email from the email address Smarter-DoNotReply@opentestsystem.org with information regarding how to login to the SBAC Digital Library. Your login credentials should be your school email address and natomas1 if you have not already changed your password. If you have trouble logging in please let me know and I can work with NUSD to get your account fixed.

Creating Producers Instead of Consumers Using Twitter

This is less a blog post and more of a call for ideas. Let me start from the beginning.

Three months ago, Joe Wood CC’d me on an email asking for teachers to be a part of the KQED DO Now project. The email was from Paul Oh of the National Writing Project. I replied yes before I knew what I had gotten myself into. (I mean come on, it was the National Writing Project!) Do Now is a weekly activity for students to engage and respond to current issues using social media tools like Twitter. I was not on Twitter nor had I ever wanted to be on Twitter. I grudgingly signed up and instantly, I saw the potential for students to actively engage in discussions about art, politics, and current events.

However, I think that the most important thing is that students understand the power they have over this emerging digital genre. As part of a discussion about digital literacy with my 9th grade Honors English class, we watched Evan William’s TED Talk about Twitter’s growth.  During one part of the talk he says that he is going to “Twit” something. My students were appalled. Didn’t he know that you “Tweet” not “Twit”? I laughed and said to them, “Wait a minute, he is the President of the company, doesn’t he get to decide what it is called? Their response came with a roll of the eyes, “No because we are the ones who use it”. They were right, in fact Twitter did not start out by using hash tags. That was something the user created and Twitter decided to integrate. Never before has a generation been so involved in the development of a new genre at the age of 14 and had the genre recognized by respected, old school institutions. The Modern Language Association even has an offical method of citing a Tweet.

Twitter may also transform our students into citizen scientists.  Last week Nic Russo invited his students to post their experiment results on Twitter as a way to compare data. As part of an introduction to evolution, Biology students looked at how the human hand has adapted to allow us to use tools and eventually has led us to the advancements that we have made as a species - including using Twitter.  Students did a series of trivial tasks utilizing their hands.  They timed themselves, recorded the data and then re-did the trials, with one minor modification; their thumbs were taped to their palms.  The final task was to Tweet one of their results (without the use of their thumbs) in order to share their data with the rest of their classmates.  Think of the implication. If students are engaged in meaningful observation of real life scientific work and use Twitter to contribute the data then their audience is becomes the Scientific community. Imagine how cool it will be when Nic coordinates an experiment with a class in another state and Tweets the results with the same hash tag!! Twitter allows students to be more than consumers of information. Twitter allows them to be published Scientists.

So what other ways do you think our students can utilize the genre that they have helped to create?  How can we help them to develop a culture that values intellectual thought, research, and discourse? How can we help them find real audiences?

Library of Congress Common Core Resources

One of the biggest challenges with implementing the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts, Literacy in History/Social Studies, and Science and Technical Subjects is finding great pieces of text to use with your students that are rigorous, yet grade-level and content-area appropriate.   Last week the Library of Congress announced new additions to their online resources that make finding these materials even easier.  The Library of Congress updated their Search by Standard tool to now include Common Core standards specific to each state and allow teachers to sort between ELA and Social Studies materials.  If you teach either of these content areas, the Library of Congress is going to be quite handy.  A quick search for California 8th grade Social Studies yielded hundreds of resources including primary source sets, lesson plans, and activities broken down by standard.

If you find these materials handy consider subscribing the the Teaching with the Library of Congress blog.  This site regularly posts great ideas for using primary source materials in the classroom and periodically curates them for you, especially for upcoming events such as Veterans Day.

Joe