Desmos - Interactive and Engaging Math Tool

 There has been a lot of discussion around the Desmos app this week at my school. Many of the math teachers have been using it for a long time, but, as with many apps, our tech team is unaware so we have to go through the process of having it vetted for regular use. There are so many tools available to educators, but because Desmos is free, interactive, and engaging, a lot of the math teachers I know use it in their classrooms.

Even if you haven't used Desmos activities, you have probably guided students to use their graphing calculator. It's easy to use and creates simple graphs which I've used to build assessment questions for my classes. Last year the Colorado state assessments starting using Desmos as their built-in calculator for testing, and the school encouraged us to expose students to it before testing season.

Desmos activities are a whole other ball of wax. They usually come with some visuals for the teacher to explore and assess before deciding if it's right for their classroom. Topics are arranged by grade-level and at high school level they are arranged by course name (i.e. Algebra 1 or Calculus). Their search bar also makes it easy to browse for a topic and check out various leveled activities. With a teacher guide and a student guide for the activity students can work independently to explore the topic you've chosen on reflect on their learning.

In a school that is spread across the state, where the majority students are virtual, Desmos is a great tool to ensure students have time to explore, create, and reflect on math topics that build foundations for future learning. Would recommend!

Facilitating Online PD Sessions for Educators

 This week I was reminded about how challenging it can be to facilitate an online session for adult learners. My school learning & development department has created an incredible training to support those of us teaching educators. They are working on some updates and revamps, a few of us were asked to participate in some discussion questions so there will be something for newbies to see and respond to when taking the course. The questions go along with some great articles, but of course I didn't even read those until after I answered the discussion questions :D Leave it to me to make things harder than they have to be!

The questions for those taking the training ask them to dig deep and plan ahead - like What brings you here? Participants in the training are volunteers for the most part, so this is such a great question that ensures they know what they are getting into! Then there are some discussions asking participants to provide tips for designing engaging visuals, discuss how their planning changes when it's virtual or in-person, and provide tips on facilitating blended learning sessions.

Just engaging in these discussions made me really think about the skills I have acquired over the past few years and how I can continue to hone them. I'll be honest, I'm prone to using PowerPoint for conveying information, and you may thinking, really?!?! In this day and age? But yes, I think there are some great benefits to using PPT when facilitating a sessions in Teams - they talk to each other. Teams has this great feature called "PowerPoint Live" that allows you to share your PPT on the screen but it also makes it interactive for participants. They can click on links in the PPT and watch videos directly on it during the presentation. I can allow them to move around in the slideshow, or restrict them to seeing just what's currently on the screen. 

'Graphic Organizers' becomes a live link when presenting PowerPoint Live in Teams.

PowerPoint also provides some really great visuals including templates that can fit a theme or just look professional. The Designer button will also give suggestions! I love this feature because sometimes I have an image I don't know how to place well, or have some wonky word spacing. The Designer usually comes up with great suggestions and makes the presentation more engaging and professional looking. 

Screenshot of Designer with the given suggestions.

I didn't think I would go on-and-on about this topic so I will stop here for now and continue later. Check out the features of PowerPoint in your Microsoft suite or create a free Microsoft Outlook account to see the online features (not as great but still really useful)!

One of my favorite templates.

Guess who back? AI is back...

 Okay, it never went away, but we are piloting some versions of Microsoft Copilot that are embedded in their apps, like Excel, Word, and Teams among others. This has been going on for just a few weeks, so there are ups and downs, and limitations we are discovering.

First off, it's nice to have Copilot inside the app you are working on so it can read your document and respond. A colleague sent over some survey results for a survey she gave last year. It had 175 responses and I did not have time to comb through them all. I exported the results to Excel and asked it to summarize each column of answers. It was quick and easy, plus it gave me some wording I used in my presentation that included the survey data! 

There have been other times when I've asked Copilot to summarize some data or help me to collate it, but it doesn't like the headings. Yesterday when I was working with an Excel report from ALEKS (our math support platform) it refused to do anything until I fixed the headings and spacing, which I refused to do haha

Now when I open up Word, Copilot is already prompting me. If I want to write a reference letter for a colleague I can easily ask Copilot to help me write that letter. Of course, that's just one example and I'm excited to try out other ideas.

As I continue to play around with the features I will try to update here. Please leave a comment and let me know about your experiences with AI!

New Year New Goals

 It's the start of the 2024-2025 school year and our school has some new goals. It's not to say that we scrapped the old ones, just revamped how we are attacking them - taking a new direction. This year there is more of a focus on integrating all of the methodologies we've been using instead of taking each one as its own entity.

AI generated me

As a school we have been focusing on SIOP - Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol - as a way to support students who are learning English. This method has 8 strategies that are broken down into steps, and as a seasoned teacher the steps are familiar and SIOP gives them a way for me to organize them and be intentional about using them.

Around the same time we started using SIOP the school became involved with Capturing Kid's Hearts (CKH) as a way to build relationships with each other as well as students. CKH started their trainings with us but quickly realized we are not the typical in-person or asynchronous environment and they have done an amazing job tweaking their strategies to fit our model. The basis of CKH is the EXCEL model, where E is Engage, X is eXplore, C is Communicate, E is Empower, and L is Launch.

Over the summer the school coordinator for the curriculum and instruction took her ideas - plus the research of Hattie and Marzano - and melded it into the EXCEL model. She tried to show her work to assistant principals and everyone quickly realized it is a LOT of information, so they backed off and decided to focus on just the Engage part of the model for this year.

So, our goal... How do we get students engaged with our classes? ...with staff? ...with content? The coordinator has done an amazing job breaking down the Engage model into 13 or so smaller pieces of research-based strategies. Each TOSA (Teacher-on-special-assignment, basically instructional coaches at this point) has agreed to facilitate a session on 2 or 3 of these strategies throughout the school year. The coordinator has also taken on 1 or 2.

We are working closely with our new EdTech team to integrate whatever technology will be best to support each strategy as well. It feels like a lot at this point because we are just getting started, but today was my first day to facilitate the first session I chose and it went well. About 25 staff members attended my sessions and left me some good feedback for the next go 'round.

Here we are, new year, new goals, and it's off to a great start!

Effective... no, engaging learning activities for asynchronous education

 Last week when I asked Copilot to generate blog topics, it gave the suggestion of "effective asynchronous learning activities", but as I prepared to write this entry today I thought about the difference between effective and engaging - which is better? or is there a better one? are they the same? Good questions.

Effectiveness leads us to activities where learners are gaining knowledge that educators intend for them to gain; "producing a decided, decisive, or desired effect" (Merriam-Webster).

Engaging on the other hand means that learners want to do the activity and probably complete it in high numbers due to that fact; "tending to draw favorable attention or interest" (Merriam-Webster).

So, are they same? Yes and no. It depends on the activity because it can be effective and engaging at the same time. Educators can also produce effective activities that no one wants to engage with, or vice versa.

What are some effective and engaging activities for asynchronous learners?

• Discussion boards.
• Individual or group research projects.
• Video demonstrations, by the learner or the educator.
• Interactive activities.
• plus many others that maybe we'll talk about some other day...

Discussion boards

In a classroom, discussions are a great way to see what learners know and what knowledge they have gained. It's also an opportunity for others to listen and absorb more information. The National Council for Teachers of Mathematics have research to show the effectiveness of discussions and have included it as a mathematical practice, "construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others." The content can be a reflection or discussion about the current topic, or it can provide open-ended, critical discussions about hot topics or ways to problem solve.

Research Projects

Learners can work in groups or individually to research and present on a topics of their choosing (within the realm of the content). Not only does this provide choice for learners but it also gives them a chance to focus on a topic of interest.

Video Demonstrations

When I was in trigonometry in high school, the teacher assigned each student a topic to learn about and then teach the class. Since my goal was to be a teacher anyway I loved this project. In an asynchronous environment an educator can assign much the same thing, then learners can present their topic through a video demonstration. This is just one example of how this might be used, as an educator or learner you may be able to think up other ways to utilize videos (e.g. assessments or end-of-term portfolios, etc.).

A video I made showing students how to graph a system of equations.

Interactive Activities

In math and science there are websites like Desmos or PhET that offer activities students can interact with and discover a new topic. Many of the activities contain critical thinking questions and guidance to encourage the learner to explore. In many instances, these are a great way to connect the content to the real-world. For finance/social studies there is Next Gen Personal Finance and The Stock Market Game. If you have others you would like to share, please put them in the comments below!

This blog could probably go on and on about all the activities for each of these topics, as well as other was to engage learners and be an effective educator, but I'm going to stop here. There will be plenty of chances to expand this, so please let me know what I missed or what I can write more about in the comments!!

Resources: 

https://you.stonybrook.edu/celt/2021/04/13/engaging-students-in-asynchronous-online-courses/

https://www.vanderbilt.edu/cdr/module-2/interacting-asynchronously/

https://www.rochester.edu/college/teaching/teaching-online/asynchronous-learning-activities.html

An AI Generated Topic

 I am having trouble organizing my thoughts for this blog because there is so much to focus on and think about! What's most important? Or what do I want to write about the most? I don't know, but I know who does, Bing Copilot! Copilot is Microsoft's AI chat bot that can help you write a paper or come up with topics for a blog - HA! Okay, but really, it was helpful and it was able to organize and spit out my thoughts in quick fashion, don't be afraid to try it out. 

But anyway, I digress, what did Copilot tell me about? I asked it to give me topics on asynchronous education, it first spit out a definition of asynchronous learning, which I haven't even thought about doing, what a great starting point!

Here is Bing Copilot's definition: "...education activities, discussions, and assignments that allow students to learn at their own pace and on their own time." It even gave me it's source: https://www.panopto.com/blog/asynchronous-learning-explained-examples-benefits-and-more/

Copilot asks me to mention some examples of this, then suggests I move onto the benefits of asynchronous learning, as well as providing a list of effective asynchronous learning activities. How convenient!

This was just the first prompt, I went on to ask it more details like what are the challenges to asynchronous learning and how to motivate learners in an asynchronous environment. I now have an organized list of ideas to write about on this blog, and it took very little effort.

As educators start to embrace the fact that AI chat is not going anywhere, we also have the need to find out how to detect if learners are using it to complete assignments. I hear so many discussions, especially from our English teachers about what to do when we know a learner has used AI to write a discussion post or answer a question in an assignment. There are starting to be some tools available, a colleague shared these just yesterday: 

GPTZero | The Trusted AI Detector for ChatGPT, GPT-4, & More

Free AI Detector | Gemini, GPT4 and ChatGPT Detector (scribbr.com)

But it's going to be a while before there is sophisticated enough technology to be absolutely certain a learner used AI in a response.

If you are currently working with learners in an environment where they might use AI, continue to have conversations with them about it's appropriate use. We can only be open and honest with learners, get their feedback, and encourage them to take control of their own learning.

Stay tuned for more AI generated topics, written by me!

Me as created by Microsoft Designer (AI)

PD Fridays

 A few years ago, my school decided that the first Friday of every month would be Gladiator Forum Friday. From 12-4pm anyone trained as a facilitator (this is done in-house by our Learning & Development team) can present on a topic of their choice, staff can then attend any session they choose. It's a great way to share expertise among the staff, especially since we are spread out all over the state of Colorado.

Each Forum Friday finds a myriad of choices for paras, teachers, councilors, admin etc. For example, just today there were sessions on the following topics: project based learning, instructional videos (3 different sessions focused on 3 separate areas of making videos), SIOP (EL student support - 2 sessions on 2 different topics), digital body language, Microsoft apps support and learning, suicide training, and medication delegation.

Each month I end up facilitating at least 1 session if not more, and try to attend at least 1 session. The staff has such a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, and on-going learning to share!

After one of my sessions today I was looking at the feedback that 2 people had already left for my colleague and me. We presented on how to integrate numeracy into all content areas. The question was: What aspects of the learning helped you the most in learning what was taught?

This feedback got me thinking about what an amazing group of people I work with at my school. Because of all of the diverse backgrounds and experiences, the conversations I've had with my colleagues is always rich, interesting, and filled with knowledge. Today's conversation can sometimes be a tough one because so many people have a fear of math, but these staff members were engaged in the topic and willing to discuss the importance of numeracy in every subject and every day life. It created an aura of acceptance and willingness to show students that learning is for life, and math shouldn't be a scary topic.

So here is to all my colleagues, past and present, that have helped to shape my outlook on teaching and who continue to guide me in improving my skills on a monthly (and sometimes weekly and sometimes daily) basis! Cheers!

Casa Bonita and a Curriculum Audit

 I recently had the opportunity to enjoy an evening at Casa Bonita here in Denver. It was opened in the 1970s in a large pink building and the inside contains a 70 foot waterfall and cliff divers. In 2021 they shut their doors and the Colorado community was devastated, soon after the creators of South Park (the TV show), bought the building and started renovations. It has been a huge process and since June of 2022 it has been invite only. 

Casa Bonita in 2015 - the stage and waterfall in the background.

As you leave the building there is a museum about the history and restoration of Casa Bonita. It's small but contains some treasured memories for many people. There are also pictures of the restoration along with artifacts they found behind bench seats and walls. So, what does this all have to do with education and curriculum audits?!?!?

I was starting to think about the process that was followed to break down the interior of this huge building and re-vamping, fixing, and updating it. This is similar to the process of a curriculum audit, you have to break down the curriculum and look at the structure provided, then dig into what needs to be re-vamped, fixed, or updated. Sometimes you may find old, unused parts that are buried and can be removed.

This process is slow and takes a lot of patience from everyone involved. My school went through a curriculum audit in the fall and now the feedback is being slowly combed through my our administrators. Honestly I was worried they would jump right in and try to make quick and easy fixes, but I am pleasantly surprised by the fact they are taking their time and really digging into the feedback.

The school uses Schoology to build our lessons and assessments. As most of the curriculum was developed, staff used whatever resources they could get their hands on. Specifically the math person who built the curriculum pulled bits and pieces from text books that were previously used in their classroom. Some content after that was pulled from another online curriculum. Schoology has some great features for building and using curriculum within it, and now we are in the process of finding something that can actually work for us as a school and create a smooth transition between courses.

A curriculum audit is hard (just like breaking down an existing building and trying to update it), but with a little time and patience we all can come out the other end with something that benefits teachers and students!

Virtual Snow Days!

Teachers and students along the I-25 corridor in Colorado celebrated this week for snow days!! Many schools start spring break next week (March 18th), and districts declared snow days based on high levels of snow being predicted. Mid-Thursday many of those districts called a second day, thereby creating an 2-day early spring break. Much rejoicing!!

Oh wait... I work at an online school... no early time off for me and my colleagues.

I'm not one for taking pictures of the snow, but here's a shot out my office window:

This is probably the only thing I can think of that makes me sad about working for a virtual school - no snow days. I work from home 90% of the time anyway, so it doesn't feel different, but my husband has been substitute teaching. The past week and a half he's been at the same school subbing for the same teacher, therefore doing a bit of planning every day. Wednesday night when he arrived home he said that the principal let them know Thursday would probably be a snow day. He was a bit disappointed because this is his first time actually planning and getting ready to teach students (as opposed to just following the teacher's given plan), but he also was excited to be able to sleep in!!

Thursday night, watching TV he would have just continued to watch late into the night, but I said, "I still have to work tomorrow!"

There is an upside though, the Teams chats were blowing up all day. Most everyone is used to being at the site, busy with students, but being at home it's much more quiet, so they needed to get their interactions online. Staff were sharing pictures of their backyards and their own kids playing in the snow at lunch break. It was very lively and fun to see what everyone was up to!

Asynchronously Teaching Math

 There is a lot of discussion lately about math discourse in the classroom. And I agree with every bit of it, if we can get students to talk about math with each other they can come to develop their own meanings and understandings about math. We could really make strides towards making math less 'scary.'

My classroom is asynchronous though, so how can I develop that discourse? Students work throughout the day and sometimes late into the night, sometimes they are online at the same time, but most likely not.

Using resources like Which one doesn't belong? and Would you rather? I have attempted to create some type of asynchronous discourse. It's not always successful, but as I continue to use it and encourage those around me to use, students get used to it. They are starting to get better at knowing what to do, and engaging with each a bit more as time goes by.

Here is an example of a WODB discussion post. Students were given the following graphic and asked to pick which one they think does not belong and why: 

Here are some of the responses and interactions I found: 

Student 1 says: I believe B is the one that doesn't belong. The others follow a pattern of being multiplied by 10 each time. Meanwhile B doesn't follow that same pattern and gets multiplied by 100 first.

Student 2 says: I think either B or D doesn't belong im honestly not 100 percent sure which one but i strongly believe its B because it goes from a single number automatically jumping to a 3 digit number when everything else goes by tens.

Student responding to student 2: Your the only other person I saw that also thought two didn't belong ut the the two I thought didn't belong are C and B.

Students 1 says: I think D donst belong to the fact that the pattern shown appears to be all numbers in the 1s place. It may still fit the pattern due to the transition into whole numbers but it doesn't appear to fit properly into the diagram.

Student replying to student 1: I agree that the decimal sets C apart.

Student 2 says: I think the one out of place is C. All the boxes have a right triangle shape and pattern while C does not. If not, D also seems sus, dealing in decimals while the other three are all whole numbers.

I love reading these because the students are using their math vocabulary to describe what they are seeing and to explain their reasoning.

There is still work to be done. I need to continue creating a safe space for making mistakes. In the first example, student 2 is unsure about their choice and states that, as a teacher if I can create a safer space for them, this student would just state their choice and reasoning without feeling like they have to back pedal just in case they are wrong.

Also, the student responses are very short and to the point most of the time. I pulled some better examples above, but when I look at the majority of responses to posts students usually just say 'I agree' and never delve into why.

These fun discussions will continue to be used in my classes, and I will continually reflect on how to make it a better and safer experience for students!

Microsoft OneNote

 Okay, yeah, this is another post about Microsoft products... I can't help it because my school is deeply involved in Microsoft!

But really, OneNote is a tool that can be used at home and at school, so it's a dual purpose here.

It's like having a 7-subject+ spiral notebook right on your computer. You can create different sections (for any subject you can think of) and then create pages within each section to hold any info you may need. This includes links, videos, voice recordings, PDF print outs, and more.

As an instructional coach I have used OneNote to collaborate with a teacher on coaching cycles. All of our notes, links, data, etc. will go into the notebooks so we can reference them throughout the cycle and the school year. It becomes a one-stop shop for me and the teacher, plus they can use the notebook for their evaluations with the principal.

Recently I have used OneNote to help me plan out lessons I am building in Schoology. It has helped me to create a standardized format for the lessons, including colors, highlighting, and outline. It's nice to come back to the OneNote and easily start a new lesson by using the templates I have created. [You could probably use this for Google Classroom too - build your basic course and template in OneNote, then copy/paste into Classroom.]

OneNote can also be a great way to organize yourself at home too. Use it for lists, planning parties, or gathering important documents.

If you have Microsoft at your school, then you should be able to access OneNote in the apps page. If not, it's easy to create a free Outlook/Microsoft account and utilize OneNote from the browser.

A (not so) New Blog

 Way back in 2010 I started a blog called "My Life Online" and I imagined it would be this wonderful blog that I would totally pay attention to and keep up on. I still have that blog page, but it's neglected, so I'm starting fresh and in a place that is easy to access from my work computer.

Welcome to "Seeking Online Teacher Blog"!!

Yep, I am an online teacher. Once a looked-down upon sect of the teaching profession, now a little more revered post-COVID stay-at-home era. It's hard teaching online. You do not have the students right in front of you, and it's mostly asynchronous (at least where I teach), so it's a struggle to implement the latest and greatest grouping and teaching activities.

I've been teaching online since 2010, and technology has changed, for the better, to allow teachers to do a lot more. This blog (I hope) will share out some methods and best practices that I've come across. Fair warning, these do not always work in every situation.

Happy reading!!