The crazy blogging lady is back, again.

This blog post is our starter resource for our GHS Late Start Professional Learning on Tuesday 12 June 2018.  I've set up the same brief as for the last session (different colleagues this time though), but I didn't want to just do exactly the same thing.  For info on that earlier session, see this post.

Key points from that session:

1. If we think of 'blogging with students' rather than 'blogging with classes', it takes the pressure off both teachers and students.
2. Making opportunities for blog posts reminds us to be creative in how we get students to show what they can do.
3. Blogging is a fantastic way to get students to reinforce their learning by showcasing what they can do in a new format.

Today, let's have a play with some tools which can enable us to show our learning in ways that are not just writing...

Screencastify
If you haven't used Screencastify before, then today is a great day to have a play.  It's an easy tool to use in the classroom, and all students have it added to their chromebooks.  Students don't have to show their faces - instead they can create a how to guide for solving quadratic equations, or assessing whether meat is cooked or how to use apostrophes correctly.  Here is a guide to starting with Screencastify:

Reviewing a new presentation tool
Sometimes I want my class to branch out in how they are presenting their work, and I have to acknowledge that new tools don't always work out. So we review the new tool, and students practise their evaluation skills (SOLO), show their learning in a new way, and share their experience so others can learn from it.  This is Jameila's review of using Prezi for her character development presentation.  Prezi worked pretty well for Jameila and she chose to use it for her summative assessment presentation yesterday.  Nina doesn't think she would choose to use it again, but she did make some valuable observations on strengths and weaknesses.

Trust
Trust is a huge tool for blogging success.  Students don't want to look stupid.  They will put what they are ready to put up, when they are ready, with our encouragement.  You don't need to check what students have done before it goes up any more than you had to check a student's exercise book before they took it home in the pre-digital days.  I set this inquiry blog up as a way of making me get over thinking I looked stupid, or that all my writing needed to be perfect before it hit the (potentially) wider world.  When we trust that students are going to be awesome, they usually are. 

Photographs
Photos are fast and easy and can say so much.  I often take pictures on my phone of things happening in my class, and email them to the relevant students.  My MSA students love this, and I have lots of posed photos.  It's not so hard from there to be taking pictures of students discussing a maths problem together, plus a close up of the actual problem, or getting someone to photograph a sequence of how to clean up the kitchen in hospitality, or truss a chicken, or make meringues, and then share the folder of pictures for students to use in a blog post.  It is also possible to take photos using the chromebook itself, and using screenshots or Snipping Tool.