Vokis Can Bring out Student Creativity

(this piece was also posted at: Voki Guest Blogger/)

I still remember the first time I was introduced to Voki, I was at a tech conference. The presenter was showing a number of different fun, new, tools, but Voki stole the day. Honestly, I can't remember the next 20 minutes of the presentation because I was so busy having fun playing with Voki, recording myself, giving myself new outfits, sending emails back to my boss saying things like "Vokis are so much fun!" I was immersed in learning the new tool and practicing my digital literacy and fluency. It is the same for our students.

Voki opens up a world of hands-on creativity for your students.

Show any classroom of students Voki, and you will immediately see them trying it out in a myriad of ways. I had the pleasure of joining a student tech club after school one day and I did a quick demo of Voki. The teacher and I had a plan that they would use their Vokis to introduce themselves to me (a visitor for the day) and then we would share what each student did. It was a nice plan, and the students would have done it. But we quickly realized, we had set the bar way too low, these kids had more ideas about what they wanted to do!

Voki lets you have your Voki speak in several languages.

Some students immediately started playing with the language feature of Voki. While this tech club is in a richly diverse school, where many languages are heard every day, these students still had a great time listening to phrases spoken in languages they had never heard before.

Voki allows you to re-record until you like how it sounds.

Some students probably practiced what they wanted to say 5-7 times before they saved their Voki. This repeated practice is fantastic for English Language Learners and other students working on their oral language skills. Asking a student to re-read passages can be tiresome, but ask them to make a Voki and they will repeat the passage until they like how it sounds, over and over again.

Voki lets students play around with identity.

Let's face it, not all students are pleased with their self-image. I've seen students change their avatar dozens of times to find a "look" that they want to project. Don't overlook the importance of this! As students travel the weary path of adolescence and pre-adolescence, they crave opportunites to try on different looks and personas. Using Voki to do this is a safe and fun way to change your hair color, add an earring or see how a British accent sounds. Letting students play with these avatars as they complete a content-based assignment is as developmentally appropriate as free play in Kindergarten.

Voki is a great way to discuss Digital Citizenship.

Our students might not need our guidance when it comes to figuring out how to make a Voki, but they do still need our guidance about what makes a good and appropriate Voki. Voki is a fun way to get students talking about what make a quality presentation. If the assignment is to have an Abraham Lincoln Voki talk about three of the most important parts of his presidency, showing him with sunglasses on isn't the best way to convey your message. Likewise, students should never use Voki to share too much information about themselves or to embarrass others. It is imperative that we have these conversations with students and why not do it with a tool they love!

Voki can be used in any classroom:

Science: Make a Voki to explain the outcomes of a lab. (I've seen students do this for their Science Fair presentations!)
Social Studies: Choose a Voki of an historical figure and have them give three important facts about their lives.
English: Make a Voki that represents a character from a novel. Have them "saying" the theme of the novel.
Math: There is a lot of vocabulary in Math. Have a Voki provide definitions for key terms.
World Language: Provide a description of a person in the target language, see if the students can make a matching Voki.
Physical Education/Health: Let a Voki give facts about staying fit and healthy.

To get the most out of Vokis, make sure you give your students time to play when making their Vokis, you'll be surprised with the results!

Look! We got Nooks!

More and more eReaders are becoming the go-to devices for readers everywhere. We love the ability to carry 50 books at time with us on the airplane, to never lose our place because our bookmark fell out and to search names of characters to find when they were first introduced. That is why I was so excited when the English Language Arts department at the school where I worked decided to buy Nooks!

We decided to launch the Nooks in a 6th grade co-taught classroom. A number of the students in the class have Individualized Education Programs and many do not think of themselves as readers. Our goals were to get the students more excited about reading and to choose books that closely match students' lexiles (reading levels).

Our first day in the class, the reaction was more than positive. Students loved the layout of the device and had fun discovering all the features available to them. We all love to personalize our devices and Nooks are no different. Students learned (and taught each other) how to change the background image, adjust the font size to suit them and even adjust the orientation to the style they liked best. The ability to make a book their own was a new experience, and it makes a difference, having a book that you can change and modify increases student ownership in the device and increases their interest in reading the text.

Beyond the personalization of Nooks, students were able to practice a number of different during reading strategies. Students can highlight passages that they find significant, much the way readers in a book club will underline sections they want to share of come back to. Students can also use the embedded dictionary to look up words they don't know. For reluctant readers, the ability to find out the definition of new words without asking the teacher or physically using a dictionary (and thus showing the whole class you don't know the word) is a gift. Watching the students read on their Nooks, you can see them smoothly using all these techniques and empowering themselves to be better readers.

As this first class tests out the Nooks and we see the progress they are making, we look forward to expanding the use of the Nooks to more classes and for more novels. Students will be able to check out eBooks from the school library and the public library. We will be able to load novels that specifically match individual student lexile levels and increase their access to non-fiction texts. As we move forward, these devices will continue to give students access to relevant devices, literacy skills and personalized details which increases their interest and engagement with a wide variety of texts.

The Next Generation of Presentation Tool

The other day I had the fantastic fun of working with two math teachers and their Algebra and Geometry classes to kick-off their year-long personalized learning textbook project. These two brilliant teachers have crafted an innovative way to both present information in their math classes and have students create meaningful products that show what they’ve learned.

First I’ll focus on the presentation tool. I can take zero credit for finding this tool or realizing its potential. That all came from Mr. and Mrs. Math. In fact, the first time Mrs. Math showed me Nearpod, I didn’t really get it. But now I do!

Nearpod lets you create a presentation on your teacher laptop that is highly visual and interactive, both features we’ve come to expect from 21^st century presentation software and apps. But Nearpod takes it to the next level by giving you the ability to send your presentation out to a classroom full of iPads. As you swipe your screen, students’ screens change too. No more squinting at the SMART board, no more craning your neck around the tall kid in the front row, no more turning off all the lights so kids can see the screen. With Nearpod, the presentation is right in front of them, on the iPad screen.

Even better than each student having the presentation showing right in front of them, is the interactive capability of Nearpod. Today when I presented, I put an interactive slide after each content slide I made. In other words, first I talked about using technology appropriately in school, then I asked a polling question where the students decided whether or not a behavior was appropriate or not.  I loved being able to do this all in one device and app! And, once each student had entered a response, I could share the results out to the students. Immediately they could see how their answer compared to the class much like the “clickers” many other classrooms are using.

(Quick math aside: students immediately asked and questioned the use of percentages to display the results – we had a quick, relevant, engaging math lesson on percentages, yea!)

Nearpod also has interactive tools like open-ended text questions, allowing you to ask deeper and more probing questions. As students answer these, you can see each response next to each student’s name. And, if there is a particularly poignant response, you can share that response (anonymously) out to the class. What a quick and easy way for students to see models of the kinds of responses they could craft.

Math teachers will particularly like the ability for students to draw as an assessment. Teachers can upload an image, say, of a graph, and each student can draw over that graph, say, calculating slope. As they submit you see a tiny screen shot next to each student’s name. And, again, you have the ability to choose one of those drawings and share it out to the class. Because it is anonymous when you share, you can easily share common mistakes as well as exemplars. Students really liked this feature. They liked being able to draw their answer (and personalize it with color, etc.) and they liked seeing what their peers did. Let’s face it, in a middle school class, they are so much more interested in what their peers are doing than in what the teacher does!

I think the best part of Nearpod was when students said this after the lesson:

“Can we do that again?”

In terms of explicit instruction and the I do, We do, You do, model, Nearpod rocks the house. I’m really excited about exploring its possibilities for the times when you need to do whole group instruction because it feels so much more collaborative, interactive and personalized that even the most amazingly fantastic Prezi.

More coming on what we did next, and how these students are going to build their own interactive textbooks!

"Ask yourself, would you do this offline?

This isn't the tagline from a digital safety website, this is a submission for a new laptop background from a 6th grader at my school. Each 6th grade submission was full of great advice like this. Reading these submissions was so satisfying because it was clear that kids now understand a great deal about what is and what isn't okay to do when online.

I was thrilled that my school elected to spend 4-5 lessons of an advisory period on digital citizenship. Digital citizenship has become more and more important to me as I've watched my own children experiment and explore digital media and as I see more and more teachers using Web 2.0 and social media tools in the classroom.

I am a tech geek so I am excited about the digital world our children and our students can explore. The possibilities for young people to impact the world and to leave a positive digital footprint are unlimited. But we also know that there are many misteps along the way as well. Many a student will upload a silly-to-the-point-of-gross YouTube video of themselves or leave a comment that they think is funny but is actually hurtful. So we need a chance in school to get them thinking and reflecting about what online posting is all about. These 4-5 lessons were a great start.

We wanted a curriculum that was developmentally appropriate and that would loop each year, exposing all students to important topics each year of middle school. Sixth graders would study Internet scams and cyberbullying. Seventh graders would consider copyright and fair use issues in a unit called "Yours, Mine or Ours?" Eighth graders would delve into the murky world of social media and discuss what staying safe online really means. We were able to adapt all of our lessons from Common Sense Media, an organization devoted to educating and advocating for sensible use of today's media.

Common Sense Media's K-12 curriculum was the perfect starting point for our lessons. They had great activities and resources for the kinds of topics we wanted to pursue. We adapted the lessons to fit our time and format and then referred teachers to the website if they needed more ideas or information. Teachers appreciated having the lesson materials and kids liked the updated and relevant activities.

But what I really loved about our units were that each one ended with an authentic assessment. The 6th graders were asked to design a laptop background. The top winners across the school will actually become the background of our school computers next year!

The 7th graders produced "Creator's Checklists" - a list of items students should consider when creating with digital content. Again, the best examples will be used to make a creator's checklist that will become part of the published student agendas for the next school year. That's right, the best checklists will actually be printed in the student calendar/resource that every students carries around every day, all year long!

And finally, our 8th graders were asked to make Public Service Announcements (PSAs) about staying safe online. Now, I have to say that asking 8th graders to take on a task like this in the spring was a major challenge. I am looking forward to moving this digital citizenship unit into the fall for next year when I think we'll get much better responses. *smile*

I am really proud that the staff and the administration at my school understood that we needed a systematic approach to teaching digital citizenship at our school:

• lessons that every student were exposed to,
• tasks that were engaging, relevant and authentic, and 
• materials that any teacher could use and that any students could understand. 

If these desktop background submissions are any indication, our kids have learned a lot about how to be digital citizens now!

Website of the Week: ZooBurst

Easily create your own 3D pop-up book, great for lots of uses. The site is free, but requires an email address for registration.

The books are super easy to create, can include a mix of pictures and text. Pictures can be imported from your computer so you can use your own pictures or download pictures from the internet. When you create a book the owner can specify the privacy settings. See the Zooburst gallery for some interesting examples.

I have already had teachers try this format for Science presentations on how the sun creates energy, I could also see using it to:
1) Tell a fractured fairy tale in Language Arts
2) Detail the life of a famous figure from History
3) Give a tour of a cultural region in a World Language class
4) Have English Language Learners tell a story using new vocabulary words.

Website of the Week - Pixlr

Need to make some quick adjustments to a digital image but don't have Photoshop? Try out Pixlr, a free, online photo editing website. Pixlr has three levels: Playful, Efficient, and Advanced to suit your editing and tech savvy needs. Want to get rid of wrinkles? Airbrush out that antenna you didn't notice? Add text or a border? Pixlr can do it all. Perfect for student multimedia projects.


See if you can find the antenna I airbrushed out of this picture! Pixlr is so eary to use, editing this photo only took me about four minutes. This is a great solution so students that want to do editing to images for their digital stories, prezis or animotos!

Games + Global + Math = Excited Students!

My school just had the wonderful opportunity to participate in World Maths Day. World Maths Day is part of the World Education Games which is "an annual global online challenge to get all students (4-18 years of age) excited about learning, and to give the top students in all schools an opportunity to see how they measure up against the best in the world."

Basically, for free, you can enroll your students at http://www.worldeducationgames.com/. Then the fun begins. Students log on and play one minute games with other students in their age group from around the world.

As students play, they see an avatar and the name of the country of the student they are playing. As students answer questions correctly, a bar moves across the screen showing their success. Students can also watch as their competitor's bar moves across the screen. Each game is only a minute so students stay motivated as they try to keep up with their competitors.

After one day of play, I got the following email from a math teacher:

OH MY GOODNESS! The kids are SO hyped about World Math Games!

Yesterday another teacher said to me.

If we could play World Maths Games everyday, my kids would know their math facts perfectly.

When I went into a classroom to watch students play during the live event (which runs from March 5th to March 6th), it didn't look (or sound) like a typical math class. Kids were partially standing at their computers, talking excitedly across the room, and were deeply focused on achievement. I have written before about the power of games to engage students (see Videos Games Could Save Schools and Running to Get to Math Class) and these games were no different.

While I had been attracted to the World Maths Game for its potential for students to make global connections, I was fascinated by the different ways students were engaged with the games. One student really want to compete against her peers. She would call out "One, two, three" and students would all start a game together. They loved competing against the other students in the room. Others were intrigued by where other students were from. I heard many students commenting on the countries of their opponents and occasionally a student would just call out the name of a country. Other students really wanted to know how they measured up to students around the world and continually check the Hall of Fame board set up in the game.

Despite a snow day on the second day of the event, World Maths Day was a huge success for our school. Over 52,000 correct math questions were answered, over 400 students participated, and hundreds of students had fun doing math. I look forward to expanding our involvement in the games next year, including fundraising for the UNICEF School-in-a-box program. Until then I will continue to look for opportunties for students where they:

• experience success
• have fun while learning
• make global connections