Thing 31: Final Reflections

Time to reflect.

As I often tell my students in class, the only people who don't reflect are vampires.

I would like to point out that I searched for images of Rodin's statue "The Thinker" which were okayed for reuse without attribution, so I am being extra special sure that I am not violating anyone's copyright.  One of the things I became aware of with "Photo Fun" is the need to make sure in advance that I am using images that are approved for re-use, that are in the public domain.  It may take me a while to go back and clean up all the materials I have created in my many years of teaching and to get rid of all my bootleg images, but I can make it a goal to clean up materials as I am navigating through them this current year.  And only to import images that are safe.

I do like to use images with my student's handouts and with my class website.  "Photo Fun" just made me aware that I need to proceed more cautiously, as I ransack the internet for pictures.  I think now that I am using an iCloud account, I might be including more images in my materials, because I can easily search for things from my phone and save them to my iCloud folder, no matter where I am or what I am doing.  As a teacher, I am always thinking about school, so this means I can be using my phone to hunt for stuff wherever I happen to be. 

The other tool I think I will be using more and more is the Bitmoji.  I am already bombarding friends' with Bitmojis in all the text messages I have been sending out since discovering this cool, new toy.  Will it get old?  Possibly.  But all my jokes are old to begin with, and I can see getting a lot of use out of this one.  There are almost endless possibilities of ways to use them to communicate with students whole-class and individually, and the production of new Bitmoji icons is on-going, according to the articles I read.  I can be the one to make the obscure reference to the newest movie or TV show.



The third tool I studied in this course was digital portfolios.  I liked what I read, but I feel that a lot of the success in this area will be dependent on the effort I can get my students to produce.  I want to help them develop meaningful portfolios, so I will be poking and pushing them all I can, but the reflection piece is going to land in their court.  Maybe I should share with them some good examples of portfolio entries that model "reflection."  In any event, this is going to be the hard lift for me.  Images and Bitmojis are simply more fun.

The overall experience of taking this course has been a positive one.  I really do like on-line learning, and I like it that the course has assembled a variety of tools I may explore, and a lot of different articles and approaches to each tool.  Not everything is applicable to my personal situation, but I have the opportunity to play around with what DOES work for me.  And since I am teaching at the middle school level, some things from elementary classrooms still work -- and some things from high school classes can be meaningful as well.

And finally, a word from my cat.

Thing 14: Bitmoji Fun

I have been aware of bitmojis for a few years, because a friend of mine discovered this function and was constantly posting cute little cartoons about her daily travails on Facebook, but I never had considered creating my own bitmoji, nor had I ever thought of it as a possible tool to use in the classroom.

But since I am a big fan of my iPhone, I decided that I would try putting the app on my cellphone, and see if it would be something I could play around with there.  After I had downloaded it and entered the app, it had me take a picture of myself, and then presented several images that supposedly looked like me, and wanted me to choose one before going further.  To me, this was like one of those eye-exam tests, where they have you switch back and forth between two lenses, and ask you which was better, A or B?

To me, none of the images really looked that much like me (whereas my friend, who'd used the app before, had an image that was COMPLETELY like her).  So I asked a friend for help, and he helped me through the whole process of setting up my Bitmoji.  I still don't think it looks that much like me (I only wish I looked that young), but maybe to other people.  I think Robert Burns said something like "Oh what a gift it were to gi'e us, To see ourselves as others see us."  I think for add ons I still need dark circles under the eyes, but this is me for now: 

I found it pretty amazing that one of the first choices that popped up for me had me standing looking out a door at snow -- and we just had 18 inches.  The front porch in the bitmoji even looks like my own front porch, so I worry a little that Bitmoji might be psychic.  If that's so, I better look for an image of me winning the lottery.

I then added the extension to my Chrome browser, and practiced inserting a bitmoji into an email.  It was easy.  All I did was click on the little bitmoji of my head next to the send bar, and I looked for and found the same image of my surveying my snow-covered porch.

I notice the icon is up in the corner of my Chrome browser now, so I will see if I can easily bring an image into the blog entry I am composing now.  Let me just test this . . .

It looks like that worked!

Now the challenge is going to be using these images when I am teaching.

The articles "Bitmoji in the Classroom," "Back to School with Bitmoji," and "Why and How I Bitmoji in the Classroom," all make strong cases for using Bitmoji to jazz up comments and communications and make them fun.  I especially like the idea of making my own stickers.  I am a big stamp and sticker guy (I even have a personalized rubber stamp that tells a student he or she is a star, since shooting for the stars is a theme in my classroom).  If I can print stickers that have me actually sharing that message (or use them digitally when students submit work on Google Classroom), how much neater will that be for my kids.

A couple of the articles shared templates I could use to print onto stickers, and that's a great resource, since I know how tedious it can be printing and re-sizing, as you're trying to use the school's only color printer (and everybody's glaring at you).  But I think rather than using some of the bitmojis that they are working with, I would rather choose my own.  Here are four that seem to match my personality.  I am NOT the unicorn farting a rainbow that one teacher shared, but I am corny in my own unique way.

And here's the real me, shoveling.  

Thing 16: Digital Portfolios for Students

This tool attracted me, because last year, for the first time, we had our eighth graders create digital portfolios of their work.  They made presentations at the end of the year, to parents, administrators, and a few selected peers, and we all congratulated ourselves on getting them through the process.  

But I was disappointed in the final result, because something was missing.  It seemed that the students were standing in front of an audience, projecting images of art they had created, essays they had written, math equations they had solved, but without showing anything of their understanding of the work.  It was simply: "I did this."  Not: "In this project, I came to understand . . . "  I didn't see any metacognition.

The article, "The Art of Reflection," by Beth Holland, addressed this concern.  She suggests the need to have the students build reflection into their work, but not just during the time that they are working on developing their digital portfolio.  She points out that by having students focus on just a few essential questions from the beginning of the year (such as "What are the characteristics of good problem solvers?") and having them address these as they work, they can begin to incorporate their reflection into their portfolios, and this is learning that they can include in their presentations.

Since my school has spent a long time developing our mission and vision, and the students seem aware of the basic tenets of both, I think driving students to express how they have demonstrated tenacity, purposeful thinking, and self-advocacy in the work they choose to include, can make their portfolios more meaningful as we work on them this year.  We will begin this sometime during the second semester, but I am glad that I read this article in advance, because I am hopeful that this year presentations can be made more meaningful.

Matt Miller and Kasey Bell discuss the use of digital portfolios in their podcast "ePortfolios and Google Sites," (note -- they don't begin talking about portfolios until the 8:00 minute mark) and they talk about how student portfolios can be what are called "Showcase Portfolios" or they can be reflective of ongoing work.  I think that last year, our students' portfolios were definitely "showcase portfolios," because our scholars were only presenting one work for each content area, and they were usually showing only what they felt was their best work.  How much more interesting would the portfolios be, if they instead showed student growth?  

Miller and Kasey talk about how some schools have students develop portfolios in middle school and then continue them through high school.  This would definitely give them the opportunity to show growth.  So what I am having them start now may be continued.  But why I can't I get them to include both the first and final draft of an essay?  They can explain some of the revisions that they made, and why, and this would be another way of having them address the problem that I had mentioned earlier, with the lack of reflection.

Since my students will be using Google Sites, and there are so many things that they can do as a result, I would like to have them create a video that they embed into one of their pages, that includes their reflection.  In "Portfolio-O-Yeah," one physics teacher had his students develop digital portfolios that highlighted their work in his class, but also presented more information about the scholars.  I noticed that in one example, a student had included a video in which he was explaining something.  

I think it would be awesome to have a student include a video explaining some project that he or she had worked on.  I feel like my students would actually be more engaged if they were developing a video, too, and -- unlike a live presentation -- they would be able to come back and revise this video until it met their own standards of excellence.  They could see themselves as others see them, critique themselves, and make it into something that met their own standards for excellence.  And to be honest, my students are much more video savvy than I am.  Just watching them pose for selfies has taught me that!  

In any event, I fully intend to make our digital portfolios into something that carries more resonance for our students than our fledgling effort last year, and I am eager to get started on them next month.

Thing 3: Photo Fun

Okay, so I feel like my head is in a cloud sometimes, but now it is in an iCloud.

I love my iPhone, and really marvel sometimes at the tricks it can allow me to do, but the whole concept of the iCloud is totally amazing to me.  I am able to take pictures from my phone, edit them right then and there, and then -- without bothering to email them to myself -- simply access them from my laptop be going to my iCloud account.

If I become a little more savvy with this, I can see how I can quickly take a picture in class and then incorporate it into the context of a lesson just like that.

I am including below some pictures of some of my students wearing hats my mother and her friends made.  My mother is 88 years old.  She and her friends (they live in Virginia Beach) decided that my students in Rochester must be perpetually cold, because we are so far north.  She asked me if they could make us some hats, and I told her sure.  Little did I know I would be receiving 200 hats.  Practically every student at my school has one now, and whenever I see one of the brightly colored hand-made hats, I get a pleasant feeling.  They provide warmth in more than one sense of the word.

I took these pictures on my iPhone, saved them to the iCloud account I created, and then downloaded them directly onto my laptop.

It took a while to download each picture, and I discovered that if I tried to do more than one at once, that I invariably lost connection with my server.  This might be more of a personal WiFi issue than anything else, but I think that from now on, I will proceed in little chunks.  And save often.

My other valuable takeaway from this Cool Tool lesson was the flowchart Infographic in Samantha Lile's article "Can I Use that Picture?  How to Legally Use Copyrighted Images [Infographic].  Since we are doing curriculum writing at my school, I have had to realize that all the minor thefts that I have committed in the past, as I've cut and pasted images into documents I have been creating for my classes, are about to be broadcast to the world.  Yikes.  That means I need to go back and re-do my materials and replace anything I have used with permission with materials that are permissible.  It's a little bit scary, but I think the flowchart Ms. Lile provided helps to clarify what I can and cannot use.  It's a daunting task, but I have to get it done before everything goes public.  Wish me luck.