More Technology Issues

I had been using Moodle last year for my storage of all my resources and had hoped to add Edmodo to see which the students used more or preferred. But the district switched us to Moodle 2.5 over the summer and that meant I had to take time to rebuild and upload all my lesson levels yet again this year. So I have one quarter left to go! and maybe next year I will see the benefits of having the course built and just having to tweak and add new ideas.

I am already considering making use of the lesson feature which has students read information on the Moodle site, then answer questions for credit. This could be a way of helping them progress independently that I would like to try? Also, I plan on no longer requiring students to turn in their folder for credit at quarters end, so I can expect them to upload more lessons and grade them on Moodle more so they can see their scores too.

Around Thanksgiving our district decided that Google site and all it's applications were a security issue that meant we lost google at school! except for the teacher computers with the web override so that meant I had to find a new site to store and link my videos too! Frustrations! So since then I have been uploading both to Vimeo and Google so students can choose which to use at home, but at school Vimeo is available for those who do their homework at school.

I hope nothing else changes in future to add to my workload on this!

Maura

Third Quarter Summary

Well, the third quarter has come and gone, and here I am relaxing on my Spring break ready with my reflections again.

My students this year continue to need more supervised class time to complete work that previous years could complete in one class period or less...and I am no closer to answering my question of why?
So instead I have modified and adjusted the schedule to give them that time. Not to simplify their work, or expect less of them, simply to allow them more class time with me to complete it by building in more makeup days/enrichment opportunities for those who did complete the work at the pace I expected.

This has meant more reteaching time, and retakes of test...I still see a need to offer formative assessments over smaller chunks of content, as do the other 7th grade teachers, so I plan to add to my test assessments so I have one per chapter for next year...no 2 or 3 chapter unit tests. And keep those enrichment ideas coming for my top students in science.

This is the way my whole school is moving for next year, adding reteach/enrichment class time for all students in all areas. So I am doing this for my own classes independently since I know Math and English will take precedence each week for reteaching time in this extra class we are adding to the schedule.

I am one week behind where I had planned to be for Spring break, so my final week of lessons and the Geology benchmark are set for when we return. Then it is full steam ahead with our state AIMS tests and Ecology/Water Conservation for the end of the year!

This week off I am focusing on my teacher evaluation documentation log and narratives needed. I agreed to skip the second observation since I do hope and expect to get the effective rating, so it isn't necessary. So getting the rest of my evidence and artifacts uploaded and finalized is important. This first pilot year I feel a bit trepidatious about this whole thing, but one often does with new things, next year should be smoother as long as they don't change the rules at all.

Maura

Fall Break Fall out!

The first quarter is over, and again I ran out of energy to meet my goal of an entry each week. I will endeavor to keep trying though. Part of my goal for this year, for my teacher evaluation plan includes being more reflective and showing proofs of that reflection time and I realize that using my blog entries as artifacts will work for that. So double the reason to try to make time for them.

Week One Completed!

Phew! When our district decided to switch the first week to a full 5 day week rather than beginning on a Wednesday it really makes a difference. I am exhausted, and I think the students are too. But it was a good week considering. 

• Considering I have much larger classes this year, so about an extra 15 students total to fit into my room, and help get adjusted to Middle School. 

• Considering our online assessment site is not up and running yet, so we were not able to start our battery of pre-testing on time, and are still awaiting when we will be able to fit that into our schedule.

• Considering I had to "all at the last minute" switch my lessons and class information over to a new Moodle website, that IT just installed and got up and running the last week of summer.

I have a great group of students to work with this year, I can already tell. That made my week great. I also have some wonderful parents who are already asking to help, bringing in donations and using our email and online grade system to keep their students up to date. I love involved parents! 

So this past week I spent my time showing the students the Moodle website, where I store all their assignments, to include the videos for my flipped lessons. We practiced watching a video in class, and writing up a summary of what they learned from the video, and we also practiced our vocabulary format for bellwork that I have instituted this year. And I set up my first Curiosity Corner with a complicated series of flasks and tubing bubbling away for them to identify what on earth Mrs Neill was trying to do with her crazy experiment. They seemed to love that! Classroom procedures? They are getting it, slowly but surely. 

Next week we are doing a series of lab activities to hone their use of basic equipment and accurate measurements, and they have their first video to watch at home. We shall see how many students do their homework on time this first week! 

Over and Out... Commander Neill

Year in Review

Well, the best of intentions did not pan out obviously last year, and here I am a year and more later remembering to check in with my blog site and see how to work it. So I will review my year of flipping my classroom here as best I can. 

The issues I faced fell into a couple of categories that I will talk about first, as these will need addressed and I do have some ideas on how to handle them better this coming year. 

First I dealt with several Technology issues.                                                   

1. Students not remembering their passwords...I can work on doing a bulk upload with an excel file and assign passwords to all my students at the beginning of the year, they can change their email to a valid account after signing on. This way I know their passwords and can look them up when they do forget. With Middle Schoolers that is simply bound to happen I believe. 
2. Moodle is on our school server and at the start of the year there were several issues when the server crashed and my students could not access Moodle to see their assignments or do their homework...I do have the whole year built at this point, so I would have time to upload links to videos and copies of other assignments to Edmodo as a backup internet site for students to use. Also, our district did upgrade our server at Christmas and is doing so to our Moodle website this summer, so I am hoping this will not be such an issue this year.
3. Students not being able to get videos to play or files to open at home due to needing upgrades on their home computer system... I am going to set up the Moodle so that students have more time to get their work done, having deadlines that are earlier for work, so that everyone should have the work done by the day I want them to use that knowledge in class. So the only issue will be getting students to try things at home early and if they have an issue they will have time to come in at lunch, or work during class time to get caught up with their classmates in time to meet the deadline. 
4. Students not having internet at home and needing time in school to get that work completed...I already tackled this issue this year staying after school 4 days a week almost every week for any students who needed to use school computers, spending my lunch time in the classroom, and coming in early to be available to my students. The parents overwhelmingly appreciated and loved me being available for their student to get that extra time with me when needed all year long. It was tiring but I plan to keep it up.

Second was homework issues still, even though the assignments were easier to do for the students, some just simply do not ever do homework for any class.

1. Students not doing homework and getting low grades in class... this year our school is starting an After-school Learning Lab (ALL) that is for students who are failing in any class to stay that whole week after school and get all their work caught up. It will also be a study skills time, and a time to get current homework done. So my students will have to stay for this if they do not do their classwork and homework and their grades fall
2. Students not doing homework well or completely... I plan to spend some time at the start of the year, and repeat the process if I see a need during the year showing students what good completed homework and assignments look like. They will have opportunities to 'fix' their assignment that is substandard on these days and get to turn in something that is well done. 
3. Students not doing their work well, or on time and slowing down other students...this year I plan to let students know they can work ahead on the week's work and if they do they will get to do an enrichment activity at the end of the unit that will be both fun, and give them more practice for the quiz or test at the end. Some students will get to this assignment all the time, others will have to finish the other work first and will run out of class time. They will not get a zero for this special assignment, they just will miss out on enjoying it. So in my class by the end of each week, there will likely be students working on different things around the room and I will simply be supervising them, that they do get something done that hour. I hope this peer pressure will cause more and more students to get their homework done, and be ready to participate with this enrichment activity as the year progresses.  

So those were the main issues, on to the successes. 
I did really like the Moodle website set up and options it gave me for organizing the assignments into sections, adding graphics to draw in my students and send out bulk emails to families reminding them when work was due or events were coming up. There are features on Moodle that I have not used much yet and want to work with more this coming year as I have time. 

My students who were doing their homework all the time shared that they really liked doing the videos and other readings at home rather than having to finish something difficult that they might have had trouble with. They liked that we did more labs and hands-on experiments in the class time that was freed up for those kinds of activities. They wanted to include more technology assignments, like having to build their own powerpoints or videos too. That would mean giving up more time to projects, as those types of assignments take time to put together. So the flipped classroom does give me time to do different types of assignments in class and I really like that. 

I found that doing one video a week was plenty for my middleschoolers, many are coming from elementary schools that give almost no homework and the amount of homework they are getting in 7th grade is taking time for them to adjust to. Also, I needed to have some way of knowing if they watched the video or not, and one extra assignment for me to grade each week added a lot of work for me as the teacher, never mind the time it took to create and upload that video. In science we learn a new concept and then spend some time with it, so I couldn't really see how to make more videos each week anyway, unless I broke the video down to one key point and maybe only 2 minutes in length instead of 10 minutes and covering a complete chapter. I think I will keep things the same, as it worked well. My top students were able to keep up, though they told me they did have to work at it. I need to remember I am not their only teacher assigning homework each night.  

I am one of three 7th grade science teachers at our school, and the only one trying the flipped classroom model. We do teach differently as teachers, but we were doing a lot of the same lessons and activities as we share ideas well as a department. When it came time for our benchmark testing, my students consistently scored higher as a group compared to the other two teams of students.  This is only the first year trying this so I will have to gather more data over time, but these initial results are very encouraging. I saw better class scores from my students too overall this year compared to previous years, and the main change I made was flipping my classroom, using the videos for introduction of new topics as homework. 

This summer I am working up new lessons that incorporate more of the Common Core literacy skills that I am responsible for as a science teacher, and streamlining my lessons more to better benefit my students benefit. I have researched how to better teach vocabulary and deeper reading skills to my students and plan to use that knowledge throughout the year to improve my teaching.  I also studied the value of reflection pieces both for me as a teacher, and my students and see this blog as a reflection spot for me to use better in the coming year.

So for this coming school year, which begins on August 5th for my students, I do hope to make time each week to reflect and share how my teaching goes, the nuggets of wisdom I learn, and to honestly share both my failures and successes in Year Two of Adventures in Science class! 

Maura 

Hi

The purpose of this blog is to keep a journal of my experiences flipped my 7th grade science class. I have been working all summer to build a series of lessons on Moodle and will use that platform to house my videos, powerpoints and other lessons online. My goal is to post weekly on how things go, we shall see...