Grading during Quarantine

Remote schooling or distance learning or whatever your district is calling it had plenty of obstacles to hurdle. Now that we’ve managed the who and the what and the where and the why, it’s time to get down and dirty and talk about grades.

There are two extreme schools of thought and a middle ground appearing.

  1. Kids should be held accountable for the curriculum. Mastering 9th grade algebra or 6th grade social studies means mastering a body of knowledge and students should be held to that standard. Now that some (many? most? all?) states have thrown away standardized tests, it seems to me that this argument is losing.
  2. This is unprecedented, unusual, and unplanned. Kids are stressed, families are stressed, teachers are stressed. What’s best for everyone is to call the whole thing a wash and give the kids busy work and straight As.
  3. Pass/Fail. If a student maintains a certain work ethic, he or she passes for the marking period. If the student doesn’t hand in a minimum number of assignments or demonstrate some minimum level of effort, he or she fails. Seems to provide the teacher with the most latitude, but is it fair for kids? What about the valedictorian honor bestowed upon the highest GPA? Do GPAs mean anything any more?

We all agree that education is important. Students need to advance their skills and their knowledge, and professional educators know how to help them do that. Now that we’ve stripped it to the bare bones – THIS is important, but THIS can go away – are we looking at a revolution in education?

Can grading be up for conversation now?

I wasn’t ready!

We had warning that this was coming, but we didn’t know when. And then one day we were told not to come back the next day.

My plants are still in my classroom. It’s been nearly 4 weeks.

The first 2 weeks were an absolute blur. Hunched in front of a laptop attempting to make some sense of what to do and how to do it. Worried sick about my students. Worried about my family and friends.

We made it through the first 2 weeks. Somehow. Adapted the lessons we had planned to do. Luckily for us, we are a 1 to 1 district and students all had the capability to connect. I used GoGuardian and email to “chat” with every student every day for 2 weeks.

Eventually I learned Google Hangouts and Zoom and were able to see their faces, judge their needs, evaluate their levels of comprehension, anticipate their questions.

Still logging 11-12 hours in front of the laptop every day. Fitbit stats in the toilet. Students struggling with asynchronous lessons emailing me at 11 pm for clarification. Parents, frustrated and exhausted and scared, emailing me at 4 am for help. Administrators imposing required faculty “meetings” using Google Hangouts, digging into my valuable and essential prep time. Parent meetings, team meetings, PLC meetings, and virtual class meetings all on Google Hangouts.

Now that we’ve hit our stride with lesson planning and sort of have the hang of how this works, I’ve started to get a different type of email. “I need more time to finish my work because my aunt died.” “My neighbor was taken away by ambulance and I don’t know how he is.” “My parents fight all the time.” “I can’t sleep.”

We weren’t ready for this. But one of the hallmarks of teachers everywhere is flexibility. Something not working? Adapt in a heartbeat. Thinking on our feet all day. So I know we’ve got this.

Virtual Field Trips

One way to take advantage of remote schooling is to let your students take all of those field trips your school would never approve or be able to afford.

Here are a few suggestions to get you started.

Museums:

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History -Among its truly fantastic exhibits, this museum’s presentation of the evolution of life on earth is engaging and easy to follow.

Visit the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island via a virtual tour.

Aquariums:

The Seattle Aquarium offers a 30 minute video tour.

The National Aquarium‘s virtual tour is a fun way to see still images of their huge collection. They also offer live webcams of coral reef ecosystems and jellyfish.

Monterey Bay Aquarium offers 10 live web cams of jellyfish, sharks, and penguins, among others.

The Georgia Aquarium has 8 live webcams including sea otters, beluga whales, and jellyfish.

Zoos:

The San Diego Zoo offers 11 live web cams of various animals including baboons, koalas, and giraffes.

Space Science

Learn the night sky with Star Atlas which shows you the stars and the planets in real time and also in the future so you can plan what you want to look for tonight. Take a virtual tour of Mars on the Curiosity rover. The International Space Station recently published a virtual tour here.

Take your students on a virtual tour of the Moon, or Mars, or the Milky Way.

Earth Science

Check in with an assortment of live volcano cams and compare action from one day to the next. Take a virtual tour of Meteor Crater!

Take a virtual tour of the Son Doong Cave in Vietnam.

Look for aurora on Fairbanks AK’s Aurora cam.

Take a virtual tour through the Grand Canyon, Antarctica, the Galapagos Islands, or a rainforest. Tour Easter Island, the Bermuda Triangle, the Himalayas, or the Hoover Dam.

Ocean Science

The Virtual Archaeology Museum offers fantastic virtual tours of 5 different shipwrecks.

Live webcams:

YouTube offers a panda-cam from the Atlanta Zoo, a Shark-cam produced by Explore.org, and a penguin-cam and giraffe cam by the Kansas City Zoo. Southwest Florida hosts an eagle cam which, as of today, has a nesting pair of eagles. Explore.org also hosts a polar bear cam based in the Scandinavian Wildlife Park in Kolind, Denmark. The African Safari cam overlooks the main beach of the watering hole at Mpala Research Centre in central Kenya’s Laikipia County. We saw giraffes, a herd of elephants, hippos, and a crocodile.

National Parks

Using Google Earth, you can take tours of:

Amusement Parks

What’s your favorite virtual tour?

Strange New World

Are your classes being held remotely? Mine are.

Steep learning curve. Students signing in, teachers wifi not working, miscommunication. Bumps. But nothing insurmountable, and today (day 2) was pretty smooth.

Then I went for a walk. To the park. Which had been overflowing with teenagers who were not socially distancing themselves.

Down the block were locked parks.

When people were on the sidewalk coming toward me, I crossed the street to keep from catching whatever they might be carrying. I lunge at the phone, eager for human contact. I do a check on my own health (Any sore throat? Any chills?) all the time, and scrub my hands whenever I see a sink.

How are you handling social isolation/distancing?

File Folder Games

Why do I love file folder games?

They’re easy to make, fun to play, and can be used at essentially any level to review basically any material at all.

After an initial investment of a few hours creating the game, all I have to do is print it and laminate it and it’s good to go for years to come! Kids love it – they ask to play all the time and it gives them a an opportunity to self-assess how prepared they are before an assessment.

My newest file folder game, designed to review basic planetary facts, can be found here.

Are you preparing for Distance Learning?

Whether your State has been hit by the Coronavirus or not, the admins in your district are probably thinking about a contingency plan in case they have to close school.

Some states have approved distance learning as an alternative if the local or state board of health forces schools to close. What are the best ways to maintain some academic continuity while working remotely?

Unless teachers are prepared well in advance and can print reams of paper worksheets and documents for students to take home for the duration, the only reasonable way to accomplish distance learning is going to be digitally.

Here are a few ideas I’ve been throwing around. I’d love to hear your ideas too.

  1. Skype or other video conferencing software. If you have the students sign in to a group call at the regular class time, you can do mini lessons in real time which can be followed up by digital assignments on Google Classroom or via email.
  2. Videotape mini lessons – easy enough using your cell phone. Follow up with a more individualized personalized email or phone conference and/or with an assignment via email or Google Classroom.
  3. Digital activities that work to extend the curriculum:
    1. quizzes
    2. digital Breakouts
    3. games
    4. review activities
    5. Cloze reading
  4. Massive Open Online Courses

I would love to hear how you envision distance learning happening in your district.

A great (free) tool for making Crossword Puzzles

My students love puzzles.

They especially love them when they are easy enough to solve without frustration but challenging enough to be interesting. I’ve always called that the “sweet spot” in classroom challenges and games – easy enough, but not too easy, as Einstein said.

Crossword puzzles are great tools for reviewing vocabulary. I used to make my own using a spreadsheet with each box serving as a letter. It was painstaking and time consuming work. If you haven’t already discovered Puzzlemaker, it’s a game changer. You can enter the words you want in the puzzle plus the clues to guess the words and Puzzlemaker does the rest.

I’ve used crossword puzzles as clues in my classroom breakouts also. Click here to download a list of tips and tricks to creating your own breakout.
Check it out!

You Can Do This (hang in there until spring break, I mean)

The good news? The days are getting longer and the  weather is getting warmer. There are small green buds on some of the trees and a few early birds are tweeting again.The bad news? There are six more weeks before spring break.

Unless you’re one of the few schools that still have February break, it’s been 8 weeks since your last significant break  and you’re fried. What’s worse, the kids are fried. Bad combo to be sure.

What can you do to hang on to your sanity when the light at the end of the tunnel is still so far away? One of my favorite blog posts ever by Captain Awesome on WeAreTeachers has some hysterical ideas, but here are a few of my favorite ways to keep it together.

1. Take a mini vacation on a weekend. Escape somewhere exotic if you’ve got the cash  but even a one or two night getaway to a bed and breakfast an hour away can be rejuvenating and refreshing. 

2. If that’s out of the cards, build small breaks in to your life.  Instead of having your lunch at your desk, go out to the pizza place on the corner. Stop at a park on the way home from work and take a walk. Change of scenery is a change. 

3. Have more fun. Have a few friends over for game night. Go to the Friday happy hour after work. Call your college roommate and dish about your college crushes. Let your students run in the playground an extra 5 minutes if they’ve all done their homework. Sing a song. Do a deep dive on YouTube for videos of kittens or 80s rock bands or polar bears swimming in zoos.

4. Change something. Get a haircut. Rearrange the seating in your classroom. Buy a new outfit or pair of shoes. Monotony causes boredom and frustration. 

5. If all else fails, take a mental health day. Binge Netflix series and eat junk food. It’s only 1 day. A mentally well teacher is a better teacher. Your students will miss you (and you’ll miss them), and absence makes the heart grow fonder.


You can do this. (I really was saying that more for me than for you.) 

Creating a Digital Escape Room

Producing  college and career ready students who can think creatively, analyze critically, and make decisions based on data requires intellectual curiosity, a growth mindset, grit, and outside-the-box thinking.  Game based learning, including the spectrum of activities such as Quizziz.com, Kahoot.it, collaborative games, scenarios like Breakouts, and video games encourages students who are comfortable making mistakes and taking risks so that they can build the intellectual curiosity necessary to be independent thinkers and contributing members of society.  Creating a Digital Escape Room requires a few steps but pays off in student engagement and critical thinking.

There are Breakout kits you can buy, primarily from the Breakout.edu website which has fantastic resources. But, with a little ingenuity and the Google suite of products, you can use the Escape the Classroom concept without physical locks and boxes.

If you’ve never tried an escape activity in your classroom, here is a link to try a free full length digital escape activity which reviews weather vocabulary.

A simple way of creating a digital escape room is to create a Google Form that contains either clues or links to clues. To advance in the form, students must enter the correct password which can be learned by completing the puzzles. After entering all of the correct passwords, students receive a message that they have won the breakout.

To force a password in Google Forms, follow these steps:

  1. Create a Google Form and create your first question. It can be something like “Enter the password” if you want students to learn the password through some other clue, or it can be a review question like “What’s the square root of 144?”
  2. Choose “Short answer” as the type of question
  3. Then, click the three dots in the lower right corner of the question and then select “Response Validation.” This means that students won’t be able to advance past this question without entering what you decide is the correct answer.
  4. You have multiple options for what format your answer should be. You can make the correct answer be a number greater than 7 or a number not between 45 and 120. You can make it a word or phrase, URL or email address. You can also only allow responses of a minimum or maximum size. When you decide what format your answer must be, enter it on the line.
  5. You can enter a custom error text such as “Try again” or “Use your notes packet.”
  6. Finally, to make the response to this question essential to moving on, slide the “Required” toggle to the right
  7. You can add additional questions to the same page so that all questions must be answered correctly before moving on, or you can add new pages so that each question must be answered in turn before moving on. Your game should be hard enough to keep it interesting but easy enough to prevent frustration.
  8. After students have completed all of the parts of your form and gotten all answers correct, set the Confirmation message to be either a clue to another puzzle or to a notification that “You’ve won!” To set the confirmation message, click on the Settings wheel on the top of the form.
  9. Then, click on “Presentation.” On the Presentation tab, you can customize your Confirmation message.

You can share the Google Form with your students by writing the URL of the form on the board (Hint: Use TinyURL.com to create a short and easy URL). Alternately, you can link it to Google Classroom or email it to students. You can add another level of challenge to the escape room activity by hiding the URL in another puzzle that students need to solve before they get the URL.

If you’re ready to try creating your own breakout for your classroom, I’ve compiled a pretty exhaustive list of resources, tips, and tricks for designing classroom breakouts here. 

 

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Digital-Escape-Room-The-Disappearing-Professor-5639729

Escape rooms in the Classroom

Have you ever been to an escape room? Escape rooms are great addition in your classroom.

If you’ve never been to an escape room, they are an entertainment experience in which you and your team of people, somewhere between 2 and 6 is appropriate, solve puzzles in order to escape from a locked room. The puzzles are typically based around a theme and the entire room is decorated to support that theme. Usually the challenge is related to the theme. For example, one I’ve loved is a train ride in which a passenger was found dead and the clues to who-done-it are hidden in the suitcases around the room. Another theme I’ve loved is a submarine on which the captain is missing and you have to solve puzzles to figure out how to surface the submarine before you run out of oxygen. The things I love about them is that they are time limited – you have to solve it in an hour or you fail – and they are usually hard enough to be interesting but not too hard to get the participants frustrated.

The first time I was in an escape room, my first thought was “This is so much fun!” and my second thought was, “I have to adapt this to my classroom!” Adding escape rooms in my classroom helps engage students and lets them practice their learning in a new way.

Of course, it’s illegal to lock students in a room, so I bought lockable boxes and locks that the students need to break in to. Turns out, there is an entire company who developed this idea. They are called Breakout.edu and they sell kits with multiple locks and boxes. Teachers can design their own games, which I usually do, or they can use the games that are available on the site. I’ve used breakouts for review activities before assessments in which the puzzles are all practice questions related to their assessment. I’ve also used breakouts for odd calendar days – times when there is only 1 day before a long break and I don’t want to start something new, or days when most of my classes drop and I don’t want to get ahead in the other classes.After I introduced the first breakout, my students were hooked. They begged for more breakouts and I happily complied.  The trick is to make the puzzles connected to the material you want them to learn. It’s best if the puzzles are hard enough to be challenging without also being too hard and making them frustrated.

Producing  college and career ready students who can think creatively, analyze critically, and make decisions based on data requires intellectual curiosity, a growth mindset, grit, and outside-the-box thinking.  Game based learning, including the spectrum of activities such asescape activities for the classroom Quizziz.com, Kahoot.it, collaborative games, scenarios like Breakouts, and video games encourages students who are comfortable making mistakes and taking risks so that they can build the intellectual curiosity necessary to be independent thinkers and contributing members of society.  

The research on Breakouts and escape activities is overwhelming. Using Breakout or escape rooms in the classroom, students are “immediately curious”  and they use problem-solving skills as they “made mistakes, backtracked, and tried again, moving from one clue to the next” (Goerner,  2016). Breakout activities make learning “more problem-based, more social, more interactive and more physical” (Toppo, 2016). When students must work in cooperative groups,  “even the initially reluctant students gained confidence and began taking active roles in the quest for solutions” (Goerner, 2016). Activities that are appropriately challenging without being too difficult are more engaging for students in much the same way that playing slot machines is engaging – you’re never quite sure if this time is going to get you the prize (McBride & Derevensky, 2016).escape activities for the classroom  “Breakout creates a real sense of excitement with the students and staff. They have to collaborate as a team to solve problems, use logic and communication skills and they need to have fun to solve the breakout games” (Dutton, 2016). 

If you’re ready to try a breakout in your classroom, I’ve compiled a pretty exhaustive list of resources, tips, and tricks for designing classroom breakouts here. If you’ve never tried an escape activity in your classroom, here is a link to try a free full length digital escape activity which reviews weather vocabulary.

References

Dutton, L. (2016). Breakout Edu: http://www.breakoutedu.com. School Librarian, (2). 83.

Goerner, P. (2016). SLJ reviews breakout EDU: puzzle-based challenges are the name of the game in these versatile kits. School Library Journal, (10). 10.

McBride, J., & Derevensky, J. (2016). Gambling and Video Game Playing Among Youth. Journal Of Gambling Issues, (34), 156-178. doi:10.4309/jgi.2016.34.9

Toppo, G. (2016). ‘Breakout EDU’ looks to invigorate education. USA Today.July 6, 2016