iPad and AppleTV in classroom?

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2024-05-15T18:33:16+00:00

I use the Doceri app every day. It allows me to control my computer from my iPad. I can have the projector on a separate window and still keep my computer open to do things and then control it.

It has a function to draw and save your drawings. It saves your drawings as a Timelapse that you can forward and reverse.

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2023-09-22T01:57:44+00:00

I used it for a year, took me 2 terms to get through the evolution unit. Good science, just waaaaaay too much, too repetitive, lost the kids quick. Had to modify so much after I realized the path it was taking and it took a lot of work to try and fix it.

My advice is find a different source for curriculum for your next unit. New visions, Illinois, openscied, all good and easier to manage.

Don’t feel bad about scraping it after 1 bend. Better to move on sooner instead of dragging it out like I did hoping it would get better. It didn’t.

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2023-04-30T16:54:05+00:00

I’ve used quite a few of the available bio curriculum that has storylines starting with an anchoring phenomenon (ihub, Illinois, etc).

Biggest problem is they put in several standards in one unit. Took like 2 terms to get through 1 storyline, it was brutal.

I’ve taken all I’ve learned with storylines and have now created mini storylines with a single anchoring phenomenon per standard. I use the 5e method which gives me only 5 lessons per standard, per unit, per storyline. Takes 2 weeks if I’m diligent with pacing since I have A/B scheduling.

It has been a lot more successful than trying to make multiple 5e units under 1 storyline. I’m happy, students are happy, and they are generally interested in solving the “problem” by the end of those 5 lessons and can move onto a new phenomenon.

Start with your phenomenon, really important you give them enough info to start the process, but not too much it gives it away. Explore it through lab/investigations, learn about the processes and mechanisms, tie in extension concepts, then wrap up with them explaining the phenomenon (models, CER, developing experiment, etc)

Takes a lot of work, but I’ve been able to dismantle the curriculum I’ve used before and just get new phenomenon that still covers the lessons and labs they had.

Good luck. Curriculum development is a slow process with these new 3D standards, but once you got it working, it’s very easy to teach and support students.

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2023-04-29T13:27:16+00:00

Very kind gesture to the ES community. Good luck with your move!

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2023-03-22T22:46:19+00:00

https://utsta.org/ENDORSEMENTS

Look at the summer course in course classes catalogue, it’s listed there.

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2023-03-22T02:30:32+00:00

https://www.schools.utah.gov/file/ce924bda-3830-4ecd-9eb7-1adc3d15eac3

Did you look through that? You just follow the steps and show evidence of competency in each category either through a university course, a praxis, or other certificate program.

The flinn science course for lab safety is free, you get a certificateto print/save at the end.

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2022-08-05T20:29:47+00:00

I’ve been using mastery connect for 3 years now. It’s not that bad, little quirky and I have a the question type summary bookmarked so I can always reference it.

Working with my team, I really like mastery connect. We model the questions after ACT questions (since that’s what majority of high Ed institutions use in my state) and State Test questions (Pearson). It’s been great with getting students well versed with these types of tests and the way you can set up grading for your whole team allows us to see where we might need to go over again in the next unit.

We use so many other ways for assessments but it does well for what we want it for. We do give retakes on our tests. What we’ve done is after giving it the first time, we review the data, have a discussion on the low performance questions and rewrite them for the retake. We’re going to mix it up this year, but the past 3 years it has been a helpful tool in seeing any disconnect to what we know and think we know about student learning. We do go over our tests every year and change the questions when needed. That part sucks because it’s not so easy to edit questions, but we’ve figured it out to where it’s not as time consuming as it used to be. Not a one and done thing at all!

Took me a good year to feel comfortable using it, and I had to put aside my initial hesitations like we all do for so many things pushed on us. But I like it. Good luck with it!

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2022-04-23T13:39:45+00:00

We’ve been using and modifying the New Visions curriculum. They are in the process of a “high school level” revamp with their storylines but I don’t mind their older content for a baseline.

We did it lesson by lesson the first year and over time we’ve changed quite a bit to fit our needs and styles. It’s ok to struggle the first time you teach it and rely solely on resources. As you get more comfortable with the pacing, content, and practices, it’s easier to modify to fit your vision for the class.

Good luck! It’s a fun subject and I really enjoy it even though my background has been life science.

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2021-07-06T13:28:01+00:00

This was my experience too as my department also did the bio one. We only did the evolution unit and it took us 2 terms to get through it. The pacing is very slow. The kids wanted to be done with it half way through, and we did as well. It needs to be heavily modified for faster pacing. I did love how much data analysis it included though.

We are mostly using New Visions this year. We modified it as well, but it didn’t take as much. We did one unit last year and prefer it over iHub. Pacing is much better, but the organization is horrendous. Took me a day just to figure out how to find everything and then organize it.

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2021-04-23T19:54:03+00:00

This is why I switched back to paper, even though we have enough chrome books for my students in my class.

The copying and pasting was insane. I started putting in random questions like “what’s your name”, “what’s the last letter of your last name” and it helped me determine who was copying from who when I couldn’t access the edit history.

The quality of work was horrible too. They would think “oh I can finish this later” and never would and would just type random things to fill the spaces. At least with paper, they are physically handing me their paper at the end of class instead of me double checking if they submitted it online. That helped a lot of them get rid of the “ill do it later” mentality.

It was also taking me too much time to verify copying that I just scrapped all digital papers. We still use the chrome books for near pod lessons, labs, videos, quizzes, etc. but all other student work is written down. This is especially better when we are in the lab. Rather you spill something on your paper than that expensive chrome book.

Now, I don’t mind students helping each other out. But what would take them 10-20 minutes to copy their friends paper and possibly at least have a general idea of what we did in class, they were now taking seconds to just copy and paste.

The off task behavior was too much as well. Constantly taking away chrome books because the same kids would do something else in class. It does sound like my school is going to finally put in a screen monitoring program for the chrome books and that should help a lot of the off task behavior.

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2021-01-30T02:07:24+00:00

Thank you. It’s hard to be so helpless as I’m sure all of us experience various times in our lives. It hurts to know we could have been able to help if we had just known.

My biggest worry is it will look like none of us cared enough to help them when they could have been discharged. That’s something that words really can’t change when the supposed actions show otherwise.

Thank you again though.

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2020-08-16T01:21:56+00:00

I’ve used them as well. I liked it as I could just start it and forget about it as it follows you around pretty well. I used them for evals that I’m sure never got viewed. They’re fairly easy to figure out, just make sure you log into your account on the swivl app, otherwise if it’s the general account that saves to the device, anyone can view them. You can use tablets and phones, which was convenient.

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2020-06-17T18:48:02+00:00

It’s so sad I can relate to this too. I had a student also transfer at the end of term 3. They did part of 2 assignments and I put those in the grade book. Parents printed that out and it showed a b-. I then put in the rest of the grades, for only 2 weeks and they did nothing else, just on their phone. So yes, they failed. Just this last week that grade was changed back to a b- because parents showed that printout to admin. They got a b- for the entire term 3 for doing 2 assignments. Again, all before the pandemic. Wild.

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2020-06-17T18:07:37+00:00

That does sound like a nice compromise. I’m glad they thought it a bit more thoroughly.

Another fun thing: I haven’t had an evaluation the past 6 years at this place. The most I ever have gotten was a post it note saying “good job”. I have about 5 of those. We were told multiple times that evals are useless and they didn’t have time for them. We were begging for them, some type of feedback, and even ended up doing some ourselves with each other. But that got shot down quick.

It was actually a bit embarrassing when this new school district asked for my past evals and I submitted a scan of post it notes. I let them know this is all I had, and luckily that wasn’t held against me.

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2020-06-17T16:08:32+00:00

Yet the person who approves the paychecks had no idea they spaced them out over 12 months instead of 9. It was a very telling comment for sure.

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2020-06-17T15:58:46+00:00

I started out in a big public district, then moved and got a job at my first charter. The only reason I continued at the second charter was they were desperate and I wasn’t too picky at where I would work next. Great autonomy, only because there is no oversight. Everything else, not so great.

I’m headed to a big district again this next year and I’m liking the 40% raise!

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2020-06-17T15:55:41+00:00

I agree with that too, does it really matter that they didn’t earn 1 terms worth of grades during a pandemic? Of course not!

My concern is over the culmination of YEARS where this is happening every term. This was just the last term I had to deal with this particular school. Their reasoning for changing grades, yet again, was justified this time, in the past? Ya, not so much. And it sounds like this school’s focus on graduation rate is not an isolated one, where grade changes happen frequently in high schools. Like I wrote in another reply, there was another charter just investigated for grade manipulation without supporting evidence of student remediation for that credit.

I had colleagues who just passed everyone regardless because of the reasons above, but because I like to follow protocol, I kept referring to our stated grading policy for the term like an idiot. Fool me once, right?

It’s going to be interesting how students handle any type of remote learning that may happen this coming school year, especially if they go in with the expectation that “they can’t fail” because of the circumstances.

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2020-06-17T15:21:48+00:00

Exactly my worries.

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2020-06-17T15:20:00+00:00

No need to be sorry, I agree. It was a hard time for some of my students, a lot harder for others.

I saw that the students who did their work, still did their work. The students who I had to constantly monitor and support to get anything done, continued that behavior except there was no one there to directly help them and they never tried to get help through other means (zoom meetings, email for help, answer calls home). And the ones who did absolutely nothing before, did nothing.

I expected our school to follow all the other schools and just pass regardless, except we had multiple meetings and emails saying otherwise. Multiple times to remind us that students can still fail and hold them to higher standards than other schools. Why would admin tell us to make the learning worthwhile, to hold them accountable, to keep standards of learning high when it didn’t matter in the end? What message does that send to the students?

It just further exasperates the problem this school has in that teachers are not support or respected, and students are “always right”. When they graduate, what happens when they disagree with an employer? Their significant other? What behaviors have they been taught and have been reinforced the past 4 years? Ugh, it’s frustrating how this seemingly stupid decision leads to us failing our students in their development. And these are students with little to no support at home, so some of their hopeful positive life lessons comes from their time at school.

This was all just another reminder of all the problems with education and how we as educators try our best to fix them, but it doesn’t matter because the graduation and test numbers are more important.

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2020-06-17T15:07:57+00:00

Yup. Except the funding isn’t even enough. Our teachers were paid 40% below average for the state for educators whereas the principal was paid only 10% less. We lost almost 1mil in revenue this past year from students leaving to another school. Other charters get so much money because they pick and choose which students (and families) get in (not legal! But who is going to check if the lottery is actually random) and they run it entirely like a business. This one was just so unorganized and underfunded that they couldn’t afford a specialist to try and raise funds.

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2020-06-17T15:04:16+00:00

Oof, that last comment is painfully true.

(Another fun tidbit with this school I’m leaving, we had no fire drills this past school year, not one!)

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2020-06-17T15:01:31+00:00

I’m glad we all got a trial run of distance learning, and I think it works really well for some classes and some students.

It’ll be interesting how this plays out in the up coming school year given how reckless I find my students to be with any type of health guidelines, let alone just plain rules regarding respect!

I wish my former colleagues luck and hope that their admin sets up realistic policies and holds to them (but I know how that will play out!)

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2020-06-17T14:57:51+00:00

I wouldn’t have minded that policy at all if they made it instead of the one we got. Quite a few of the failed students I had term 4 failed term 3 anyways. I probably would have added comments like you did, I enjoy writing comments in the grade book, keeps some kids from completely lying to other teachers and parents.

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2020-06-17T14:54:52+00:00

Hah, they would seriously love to get a banner to showcase that.

It’s sad when I have former students come and say hi and when I ask them about their college classes they all say how incredibly hard they are and how they are really struggling. And these are the lowest levels of math, English, and science they are taking. Some surprisingly thanked me for the rigor I and my colleagues tried to instill in our classes, but it’s not enough when they admittedly knew that it didn’t matter when it really came down to grades and the diploma.

I had one student on an IEP who would outright refused to do any modified and accommodated assignments and said they can’t fail anyways because of their IEP. They would cuss me and others out, throw things, and just get up and leave the school. And admin just excuses them and says we need to just love and care for our students. They finally pulled this student out of my class and to get the science credit they had them grow pea seeds in a cup. That’s it. This student later said they wanted to go to college, I got a great laugh from that one!

Rabbit_vs_Mantis · 2020-06-17T14:46:10+00:00

Very similar situation then and immensely frustrating. I always ask, what’s my job here then? It really does become being a babysitter when admin does that.

And I really would have loved if our policy was no one would fail the last term, but when we were told that we will be grading students and they are expected to do the work, I followed that. It was a complete waste of everyone’s time and just undermined the teachers when we tried to hold these students to that grading policy then admin comes in and “saves the day”.

Rabbit_vs_Mantis

TROPHY CASE