Today's Meet - Mrs. Garcia's English Class
About the Project
Students in Mrs. Garcia's periods 4 & 7 English 9H classes partook in an enhanced Socratic Seminar while reading the novel Speak. A Socratic Seminar is a formative assessment of student reading comprehension, and is a student-driven conversation. The preparation is done the night before and students enter the classroom and take seats in an inner and outer circle to discuss selected passages. The inner circle conducts the discussion, and the outer circle observes but has been unable to comment in previous iterations. In order to encourage more active participation in the outer circle, a Backchannel was created using the web platform Today's Meet. Students in the outer circle were then able to add comments, questions and extensions to the ongoing inner circle discussion, as well as respond to comments typed in by Mrs. Garcia to continue points raised. Following the activity, Mrs. Garcia posted the transcript of the Backchannel and asked students to select a comment she had made during the discussion to follow up on; and then to also comment on one of their classmates' posts. This continued the discussion outside the classroom and allowed everyone a voice. Students quickly learned to moderate their attention between the spoken discussion and the digital one--this is one of their adaptations as a generation, it seems, and when the activity was repeated later in the novel, the level of participation improved.
This video shows a snapshot of how the class was run.
This activity was repeated once more during the next novel, Great Expectations, and we were able to take a few moments to add a Google Drive lesson on the projector in deepening the mark-up (preparation) phase, to pay attention to text at the word/phrase level.
About the Tool
Today's Meet is an excellent way for teachers to allow them to hear all of their student's voices. Students can contribute to and follow class discussions from their device. Discussions can be archived for up to a year, allowing teachers the ability to go back to the discussion at any time to assess student understanding.
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Socrative - Mr. Hughes Geometry Class
About the Project
In order to assess his students' understanding of a midsegment lesson taught in class, Mr. Hughes ran a Socrative 'quiz' for his students. Students answered questions that were both factual ('solve for x') and also that allowed them to self-assess their own understanding ( i.e. 'State one thing that you have learned from Chapter 5 so far'). After students complete their 'quiz' the results become instantly available to the teacher (see below; click on image for a clearer view):
According to Mr. Hughes ..
This is super useful as a tool to assess comprehension. The fact that these results come in to me in real time means that I can see immediately in class which questions they’re struggling with so that I can review those types of concepts right away, or start next class with a warm up involving those types of problems.
About the Tool
Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers by engaging their classrooms with a series of educational exercises and games. Socrative runs on tablets, smartphones, and laptops. Teachers login through their device and select an activity which controls the flow of questions (Multiple Choice, True/False, Short Answer) and games. Students simply login with their device and interact real time with the content.================================================
Thinglink - Mrs. Blum's Biology Class
About the Project
Mrs. Blum provided her freshman with an image of a plant cell that the students needed to identify the various parts of. She asked them to upload the image into Thinglink so that they could tag the image and identify the important components. Upon completion of this task, students submitted their Thinglink using a Google Form and copying/pasting the url into the form.See this example below of one of her student's Thinglinks; make sure to hover over the hotspots:
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