Weekly App Practical- Student Tutorial Designers

Is It Possible For All Students To Make Screencasts?
Beverly High School is a 1 to 1 school for technology. Students are required to have a laptop. If
students purchase their MacBook Air through the school, the students have the benefit of having access to all of the applications and programs that BHS has licenses to, such as QuickTime. Almost all students chose this route.

How I Would Use Screencasts...
What I think would work with my classroom and teaching style would be for students to use this for reviews for mid terms and finals.
I would make a master list of all the major topics we have covered for the exam. I would let students chose their topic they feel comfortable teaching. There can only be one student per topic. If two students wanted the same topic we would use the only fair way to decide--Best out of 3 for rocks, paper, scissors. (Although I do wonder if in some sense it would be better if I assigned a topic to students, particularly one I know they struggled with, to force them to learn it. But I also want them to feel comfortable teaching...*deep thoughts by Lauren*) Students will create a tutorial on their assigned topic, reteaching all of their peers.

What applications are required?
Students could then use QuickTime which is already loaded onto their computers to make a screencast. The one draw back I could find with QuickTime is that there is no white board app with it. I think QuickTime is more for guiding through how to use a website, etc. (Our tech department often sends out screen casts to show how to post quarter grades, for example.)

Students could download a paint app (What happened to the days when this was standard on every computer?) or, they could access a free white board website. I found one, https://awwapp.com/, that I like because it also has dots in the background which is ideal for math to make graphs. There is a paid version, but the free version will suffice.

Other ideas to make this assignments successful would be to remind students they have graphing calculators on their laptops or to also access the website desmos. Both are great for graphing.

How do you use QuickTime and awwapp.com?
QuickTime was unbelievably simple to use and figure out. Once in QuickTime you have 3 options...

Click the File menu and option one is New Movie Recording. This is usual for doing a Vlog, like a beauty tutorial or an online journal.
New Audio Recording is just that. A recording of your voice, no video.
New Screen Recording will be a recording of what you are doing on your screen. (This is what we will use.) Within screen recording, you have the option to add sound. If you want sound, click the down arrow next to recording, and select internal microphone. Notice you also have the option to emphasize mouse clicks if needed.

When ready, click the red dot to record. QuickTime will start recording. When you are ready to finish the recording, press the black dot that appeared in the top bar of your computer.

That's it! Easy peasy!

awwapp.com is also pretty simple to use. There is the free, basic version and the premium version. The only difference is with the premium, you can save the boards into your account. With the free version you cannot save your boards, but you can export them as a PDF which will have a watermark on it. Since we are just using it for a screencast, we don't need to save or export our board. Here is an example of what the board will look like.

 Putting it all together...

Students would have the website open and ready to go. They would then open QuickTime and start recording. Students would go back to awwapp.com (or whatever whiteboard app they are choosing to use) and create their lesson. When they are done, they stop recording. And that's it!

Give kids technology...what could go wrong?

Some students may find it frustrating recording this, because if they mess up, it is on record and they may feel embarrassed, or re-do it a million times until they achieve perfection. When I mess up in class, I over-emphasize my mistake, to hopefully show that it is ok to make mistakes. If they are tech savvy, they may then use iMovie to edit and create a bloopers at the end!

The other issue I for see is if students are working on this during class time. With 20 students in a class, all trying to record their voices, they will most likely end up recording their peers, or be distracted by other students. You need to make sure they are given enough space, such as being able to go into the hall.

And, lastly, there is always that unmotivated student. Even though we read about student tutorials in "Who Owns the Learning", I would liked to have read about how to interact with that student who does not want to do this. There is always one student who isn't even motivated by peer pressure. I am not sure how I would handle that if it did happen (with a missing unit for a review for the final).

Weekly App Practical- Tech for Admin

Background on my history of organization:

I am a fairly organized person. I try to be as efficient as possible in all aspects of my life. As a child, student planners that were given in school were my life line. I would write when assignments were due, I could easily cross things off, and I could add non school things in there as well—afterschool plans, doctors appointments, etc.

Throughout college I still used a student planner. After college, I switched to a pocket calendar, one that showed a month at a glance so I could plan things easier. I did not have homework assignments in there, but I could still write my work schedule, appointments, lunch dates, and reminders in there.

Over time, my needs have changed. I have developed daily and weekly routines that keep me organized so I do not need reminders anymore—every Saturday I wash all the bed sheets in my house. Every July 1 I call to renegotiate my cable contract. Every Thursday I pay off my credit card. I need a system that allows me to keep track of things that are not part of my daily or weekly routine.

Where I am today:

Up until about a year ago, I swore by notes and lists. The draw back to this is, you eventually run out of room, and then you need to get more paper, and if you didn’t finish your list you then had to rewrite and carry over things that have not been completed. If the paper is lost, well, there goes my life. I have switched to my electronic list. I use the stickies app on the mac. I enjoy the simplicity of it. I can delete things as I complete them. When life gets busy, I can create different stickies for different aspects of my life (and color coordinate them, too!). The part I like most about stickies is that it is always open and in my face and it is just there reminding me to call to make an appointment for my daughter or to modify my quizzes for students on IEP’s.

What I am “playing” with:

I have found the app/website todoist (todoist.com). Here is what I think:

Pros of todoist:

• You can create different lists for all aspects of your life—personal, work, errands, movies to watch, etc.
• You can rank things with varying levels of priority.
• You can link accounts with other members of your family and have things show up on their list as well, or just keep it on your list.
• You can assign things to a particular day.
• Filters—you can look at items based on their priority.
• You can type in recurring reminders.
• Collaboration—you can have up to 200 projects going with up to 25 people collaborating on each one.
• You can add tasks from email

Cons of todoist:

• App. or website is big and can get lost (I prefer that constant nagging, reminder)
• I downloaded the free version. There are features that show up, but you click on them, and then, womp, womp, you must pay for that. Example: custom filters.
• Must assign a day for each assignment--can't have a general to do list
• When I added things, todoist kept moving things to the day before...possibly as reminders?

Pictures:

Stickies app (what I currently use)

          todoist icon hangs out up top for easy access

                                   Looking at a glance at my list

Looking at my filtered content by priority

womp. womp. Tried to create my own filter and this comes up.

On the second day, I did wake up to an email reminding me what I should have done and what I need to do, which is cool!

Overall Impression:
todoist has a lot of cool features, no doubt about it. This would be great for work if you need to collaborate on projects. The daily and weekly reminders are great. I really like the feature if you have family members synced, I can conveniently add things to my husbands todo list if needed, HOWEVER, I do not need this level of organization in my life. I just a quick list for my short term things that need to get done. After playing around, and seeing the features, I will still stick with the simplicity of the stickies app.

Model Classroom

Original Question:
You will create a model classroom that you will refer to for the rest of the course.  
Include any information that will be relevant to the teaching of those students. If you think the economic status of the student matters for your classroom, enter that information.  If you think race, cultural background, gender identity, religion, etc. matter- include it. Base it as much on reality as possible.
If you want to work in Boston, try and find out the class size and make up of a class you are likely to teach. Make a seating chart that is typical of a classroom that you have or will encounter:

How many students? What age group? What subject? What abilities do they have? ELL students?
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Model CP Algebra 1 Classroom:


This classroom is based off of one of my current classes I teach at Beverly High School. There are 16 students in my CP Algebra 1 Classroom. There are 4 girls and 12 boys. 15 are freshmen and 1 (boy) is a repeat sophomore. The age range is between 14-16. This is a higher performing than usual CP Algebra 1. Most students generally do their homework, with a few that do minimal work, but still OK academically in the class. There are no ELL students in this particular class.