With a district-wide push to increase student engagement and student choice, my geometry co-teacher Jarrod and I made some changes in the delivery and assessment of our curriculum. [Expect a blog post soon highlighting some of the deeper details...]
We also have plans to integrate innovative tech tools with the goal of climbing the SAMR model in order to enhance student learning. Two of the tech tools we plan to use this year are Seesaw and Flipgrid.
To give students an introduction to these tools, we decided to use the tools to have students introduce themselves. In the past, as a way to get to know students, we would have students fill out the following paper:
Instead of that, this year we had students complete the following prompts in Seesaw and Flipgrid.
In Seesaw:
In Flipgrid:
We spent today getting students logged into Seesaw and Flipgrid and had them work on completing the two tasks shown above. Our thoughts: tech integration = high; student engagement = high; student choice = low, but students will have the choice to use these tools throughout the year and need to know how to use them in case they so choose to do so.
While some students completely loved the tasks, Jarrod and I were both quite surprised at how many students were hesitant to complete these two tasks. We had some students take their selfie of just their eyes and up while others used their descriptive words and text to cover their faces. Some students asked if they could wait to complete the tasks at home; they wanted to think more about what they were going to say and requested a quieter setting while recording.
In hindsight, we shouldn't have been so surprised at the hesitation from so many students. After all, we have a large number of freshmen in our classes. This was just their second day of high school, which can be an overwhelming place. Yes, we witness many of our students taking selfies and sending them out on Snapchat and posting to Instagram. A major difference is that when doing that, students are sending only to those who they choose to send to, versus an entire class.
Next year, we may make a minor change to the tasks. In Seesaw, we have it set so that a student submission does not get posted to the class journal unless we (as teachers) approve the submission. We can simply tell students that their submissions will not be posted for all to see, only Jarrod and myself will be able to see them. I'm not sure if there is a similar option in Flipgrid, but it is something we'll think more about next year.
