Category: Technical Skills

I’ve been to MACUL in the past and while I enjoyed going, the outcome was also a bit of a bummer. The school I was teaching for at the time had very little technology, so I was given these great ideas but couldn’t implement many of them.

Now that I am teaching online, I could not only gather ideas, but I could use them! YAY!

When I walked into the conference on the first day, I had plans of finding ideas that I could use in my classroom for remediation or maybe get to know the students better. Something that popped out to me in the session “Making Thinking Digitally Visible” was the CSI activity. This is an introductory activity for students to complete where they can make a Google Slide based on their life. They pick a color, symbol, and image that represents them and write one sentence for each item to explain why they chose what they did. I think this could be fun for the students to do at the beginning of the semester. While the introduction discussion board post goes into more detail, students might enjoy creating something to match their personality, as well as possibly sharing an image from their life. I am hoping to give it a go this summer!

Something else that I noted in this session was Nearpod. Nearpod is a website that has various interactive lessons that have been created for teachers. If you are feeling ambitious, you can also create your own lessons or tweak one that is already made. I have not yet had the chance to look at the lessons in detail, but during the little bit of exploring I have done, I found some free lessons! This might be an excellent resource for supplementary materials!

A different session that I attended called “No More Red Pens” had a few interesting programs as well. However, these programs would be trickier for me to directly implement into my classroom. Peergrade.io was a website that I thought would be something to consider for our Composition courses. The students can anonymously read and comment on their peers’ work. I think peer edit is a valuable resource but is often hard to hold students accountable and make them take it seriously. This program may help with that!

Checkmark by the EdTechTeam was also discussed rather quickly. This is a tool that may come in handy for a feedback repository, however, it is meant for Google Docs.

The session “Digital Citizenship: Teaching Students to Suceed in the Digital World” was rather eye-opening. While I did gather a few resources to use directly in my classroom, this panel session was also rather inspirational. The four librarian speakers discussed the importance of digital citizenship and how they incorporated it into their local schools. They supplied some great ideas and resources that I could share with my students to help them realize the importance of their digital citizenship or to simply practice identifying “fake news”. For instance, have you ever heard of the blue tree octopus? Hannah and I discussed even doing a digital citizenship corner in our weekly announcements. Again, something I am planning for the summer!

One of the last sessions that I attended while at the conference was also the most inspirational. The speaker was Eric Sheninger. Throughout his presentation, he stressed the idea of making your school a positive, fun place for not only students but the staff. He discussed how he accomplished this at a school where he was superintendent. He trusted the teachers to make a great environment for the students. Once he gave them the reins, magical things happened. He then used social media to help spread the positive events that were occurring at the school and essentially, created a “brand” for his school. It really made me take a step back and think of what I could to do inspire my students and share their stories. In fact, I was so intrigued by Eric’s message, I bought his book BrandED. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet as I am in the middle of an excellent series, but I am hoping to read more about his process and ideas.

Leaving Eric’s session and walking into the last keynote speaker of the day, Joe Sanfelippo, was a perfect transition. Joe seemed to have worked with Eric’s presentation and build upon the ideas that he had just shared. Joe stressed the use of social media to make sure that the community knew about what was occurring in the school, to boost them up, and to give them confidence within the school district. The stories and examples he shared were not only hilarious but again, quite inspirational! It reenergized me to want to do more for my students, whether it was academically or emotionally.

That first day of the conference, I managed to gather a few ideas to incorporate into my classroom, however, that second day made me excited to grow and improve myself as a teacher. I feel like these new weapons and plans from MACUL has helped direct me on the right path to improve myself as an online teacher. Instead of leaving MACUL disappointed with the limitations to my teaching, I left with ideas that I can actually use and messages that inspired! It was a fantastic change to the MACUL Conference!

Now I just need to hope that I remember my long “to do” list for the summer semester…

Becoming a teacher means that you have to be flexible. If a lesson plan goes array, you need to be able to adjust quickly. Maybe you are suddenly sick and you take a sick day; put your lesson plans on hold and make changes to the schedule. Whoops, there is an unexpected assembly today! More changes. And that two-hour delay from last week means that your 1^st hour is now behind your 4^th hour. However, teachers don’t have to be flexible with just their schedule, but their students as well.

There will always be special needs students who have a disability requiring more attention from the teacher. Often times, special needs students have accommodations that the teacher is required to follow in hopes of helping the student be successful in the classroom without getting frustrated or overwhelmed. It doesn’t mean that the student doesn’t have to study different content, but there are extra steps to make things easier for the student. For example, maybe there is extended testing time or it is required that the students receive copies of all of the notes.

Often times, accommodations can be confused with modifications. Modifications are when the content itself is changed so that the student isn’t studying the original or required content. For instance, if students are writing a narrative where they are to focusing on imagery, dialogue, and plot, but one student’s assignment is changed because he is struggling. Instead of focusing on the three previous items, the teacher wants him to focus on just dialogue. By doing this, the teacher has changed the learning outcomes for the student, thus creating a modification. Once the student masters one element, he will not only have more confidence, but he can build off of this new knowledge to learn a new concept, such as imagery, and improve his narrative writing skills. He needs to be proficient at his current learning level before moving on.

When thinking of accommodations and modifications, I instantly think of two students that I taught face-to-face.

One student was not diagnosed with a disability, but as a freshman was reading at a fourth-grade level. Was it fair for me to ask him to read ninth grade level text on his own and comprehend it? Certainly not! If I did, I would be setting that student up for failure. He already had a habit of not doing his work out confusion and frustration. Why would I want to encourage that behavior?

I ended up working with this student after school a few days each week. During this time, I would modify his assignments. He might read a text that had the same elements as the one from class but was at his reading level. I also modified the history tests for him, so that they were not as complex as the other students’. By making modifications, I was working towards building the student’s confidence and filling in the holes of his learning. I needed to help him build up his knowledge so he could scaffold off of what he knew to understand these high school level concepts. In my eyes, this is just as important as accommodating a student’s needs.

The other student I think of was in my American History class. I had asked the students to write a paragraph using the typical structured paragraph format. This particular student struggled with writing, so the idea of writing an eleven sentence paragraph made him extremely anxious. I knew it would result in a lot of frustration for the student, so I accommodated him and asked him to write one claim, support, and explain, instead of three of each. This meant that he had to write only a five sentence paragraph.

Was he still practicing an introduction and conclusion? Yup. Did he still have to find evidence to support this claim? Yup. Did he still have to explain the evidence? You got it. The student was held to all of the same standards as the other students, just on a smaller level. I didn’t modify the assignment, rather I made accommodations to meet that student’s needs.

It seems that the accommodations that I have had to make for students in the past were usually the same and quite basic. Of the accommodations that I am familiar with, I can’t think of any that would be difficult in an online setting. I could see where if a student had a seeing impairment, it might be difficult to meet required accommodations, but other than that, I am drawing a blank. Oral directions can be given, notes and content are always available, courses are self-paced so students get extra time, teachers can create videos or audio, examples are provided, and the list goes on and on. I feel that online learning has so much to offer to students so many accommodations are already met.

I must admit, the flexibility of the online courses has made accommodations from my perspective much easier. Part of this could be because of my new freedom to be able to focus on students instead of lesson plans. I can now concentrate on being flexible with students and accommodating all of my students, not just those with disabilities- every teacher’s dream!