The Power of the #Hashtag

Hashtags are integral to the way we communicate online, and it's important to know how to use them.  Plus, they can be tons of fun!

The pound sign (#), or hashtag, turns any word or phrase that directly follow it into a searchable link. This allows you to organize content and track discussion topics based on those key words.  So, if you wanted to post about HPU's Easy Ed Tech Twitter chat, you would include #HPUEasyTech in your tweet to join the conversation.  Click on a hashtag to see all the posts that mention the subject in real time.

Educators can use hashtags to find innovative ways to engage students or integrate technology into the classroom.  Educators can learn about the latest ways that other educators are creating dynamic lessons and challenging students by following teaching-trend associated hashtags.  Some of the most popular hashtags for educators are:

#Blended Learning    #EdChat     #EdTech

Even celebrities like Jimmy Fallon, Jonah Hill, and Justin Timberlake use hashtags as inspiration for skits on the late night television show, The Tonight Show on NBC.

Hashtag with Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake

Hashtag 2 with Jimmy Fallon and Jonah Hill

Most social media platforms support the use of hashtags.  Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr all have a hashtag feature allowing you to organize and view similar posts with the same hashtag. You can use multiple hashtags in one tweet, but do not go overboard!  One to three hashtags per post is considered acceptable.

Like Fallon, Hill, and Timberlake, hashtags can help your craft your voice.  Hashtags can provide colorful commentary as a sort of "muttered into a handkerchief" aside, to give context and to convey humor or sarcasm.  Using hashtags allows you to make an impression on a wide social media audience.  Unlike these celebrities, educators must make sure they are sharing quality content to make the right impression.

Twitter is to Tweetdeck as the Information Highway is to the HOV Lane

Twitter as Your PLN

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that allows you to send out short messages called tweets. Tweets contain up to 140 characters and may also contain media like photos or videos.  Twitter is about broadcasting short burst messages to the world with the hope that the messages are useful and interesting to someone.  Twitter is also about discovering interesting people online and following their tweets for as long as they are interesting.  

Twitter's big appeal is how rapid and scan-friendly it is.  You can track hundreds of interesting tweeters and read their content at a glance.  Twitter is also about discovering people around the world and building a following who is interested in you and your work and then providing those followers with some kind of knowledge they value everyday.

For educators, Twitter provides access to thousands of other educators around the world with rich backgrounds and experiences that can contribute to your professional growth.  It's about connecting with like-minded educators for personalized and ongoing professional development.

Use Tweetdeck to Organize and Optimize Your Twitter Chat

Twitter chats are one of the best ways for educators to connect with other educators, exchange and debate ideas, ask for help and provide assistance, and find new resources and take action.  The challenge is that Twitter chats can be overwhelming and confusing for educators new to Twitter because they can be fast-paced.

Twitter chats are where educators meet at a set virtual meeting time to engage in conversations by sending out tweets on a topic using a designated hashtag during a specific time on a certain day. Most Twitter chats last for an hour.

During the Twitter chat you'll see educators tweet their responses in real time.  The best way to participate in a Twitter chat is to set up a Twitter search for he hashtag using TweetDeck.

TweetDeck is one of the most popular social media management tools on the web people can use to manage their social web presence.  It is a web tool that helps you manage and post to your social networking profiles or pages.  

TweetDeck gives you a dashboard that organizes and displays separate columns of activity from your Twitter or Facebook accounts.  By adding columns for tweets, you can easily watch tweets from people you follow in real time and easily interact with followers.

Join the HPU Twitter Chat for Education Majors @ #HPUEasyTech

On Thursday, March 30, 2017, High Point University doctoral students from Cohorts III and V joined Dr. Jane Bowser for a Twitter chat to share easy instructional technology resources to integrate in any classroom.  Dr. Heidi Summey met with new teachers in Room 120 in the School of Education while simultaneously holding a virtual class via WebEx.  Doctoral students participated in both the WebEx and the Twitter chat.

Doctoral students used TweetDeck to organize the tweets for the event (see photo right). Dr. Bowser first tweeted "What's your favorite technology tool?"  It appeared in the #HPUEasy Tech column as did all other tweets denoting that hashtag.  Then the deluge began, Twitter chat participants' response tweets began to pour in.  I tweeted that easel.ly and Blendspace are my current favorite tech tools in the elementary classroom setting.  My Union County School colleagues quickly responded that Google Classroom is key for teachers and K-12 students in their district. Justin Marckel tweeted that Google Forms are paramount in his Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School.  Dr. Bowser quickly changed topics when tweeting "Have any of you heard of superteachertools.us?"  And, I for one, opened a tab, searched the address, and explored the possibilities.

Get the Most Out of Twitter Chats

In order to get the most of Twitter chats, it's important to dedicate yourself fully to the conversation.  Instead of multi-tasking during the virtual dialogue, leave your phone on silent, shut off app notifications for the length of the chat, and simply immerse yourself in the Twitter chat community.  Use your time to craft epic answers, and more importantly, have conversations with people with whom you really want to connect.

Use Emaze to Engage Your Audience

emaze

Emaze is a presentation tool that appeals to a basic user base.  A user can easily build sophisticated presentations with little effort. Emaze frees  up users from having to spend time studying and preparing the presentation tool so that they can spend their time concentrating on the actual content of the presentation letting the system take care of the design and effects.  The appearance is impressive.  The program is interactive and engaging.  

Easy Integration

Emaze is intuitive enough to not require a tutorial for people with average experience in web native applications.  It's simple to learn, to use, and to share with friends, family, coworkers, clients, and more.

Quick Create

You can quickly put together a presentation with the basics:  images, video, and text to share with others.  And, there are templates designed specifically for educators and students that will allow them to create a presentation in minutes, and they can enhance their presentations easily with relevant images, live data, audio, and video!  

Blendspace: The Perfect Tool to Create and Curate Differentiated Professional Development

Blendspace is a free web tool for teachers to collect resources in one place to form a bundled, interactive lesson for students or colleagues.  Educational consultants can use this same tool to create and curate differentiated professional development for their clients.  Any resource you can imagine or that you would pull together to share can be embedded into a Blendspace lesson or module.  To get the most out of Blendspace you'll want to create a class, or group, and add the names of the students or clients. This allows the Blendspace owner to create assessments to gauge understanding or to provide opportunities for descriptive feedback throughout the lesson or module.

Some of the best features of Blendspace - assessing and tracking progress - requires users to have an account.  This allows them to make comments or ask questions throughout the lesson or module.  As a presenter, you'll have data on who accessed your lessons, how participants have performed on assessments or surveys, and who needs assistance or additional information, and how participants feel about your presentations.

As an educational consultant, you can use Blendspace to host handouts, websites, and resources at your next workshop, inservice faculty meeting, or teacher professional development session. Blendspace's organizational structure allows you to place resources in the order in which they will be presented.  The tool also allows you to write a description of how each tile in the Blendspace is utilized.  One of my favorite Blendspaces in the Gallery is the Problem Based Learning lesson. Check it out!

Use Symbaloo to Revitalize and Reimagine Teaching and Learning in Your Classroom

Symbaloo

Symbaloo helps teachers curate content and share their favorite web-based resources with their students and with one another.   By organizing and sharing resources in this way, teachers are able to work smarter not harder. 

Symbaloo is easy to use. You can add any link you find on the internet to a customized tile and organize your tiles in different categories - called webmixes. Use the Symbaloo User's Guide to begin curating your "Go-To" teaching and learning resources today. Or, you can learn to build your first webmix by simply viewing a Symbaloo Tutorial.

Use Symbaloo in Your Classroom

Our school district is in Year 1 of its Digital Learning Plan implementation.  Our intermediate school is rapidly becoming a 2:1 digital learning environment.  This means that very soon we'll have one Chromebook for every two students.  The Digital Learning Plan specifies that each teacher will use vetted instructional technology resources to personalize learning for every single student.  Check out the Digital Tools webmix we use to curate a few of our teachers' favorite web-based resources!

Easelly, a Quick-Create Presentation Tool for the Grades 3-12 Classroom: See What Your Students Know in Just Minutes!

Students can showcase their work by creating an infographic.

           easelly

Easelly is an engaging, effective tool for learning.  Students interact with content in new ways by creating infographics and gaining experience using quick-create presentation technology.  The site's variety of resources and examples entice users and encourage creativity. Creating an infographic is empowering to students by allowing them to have greater control over their own learning.  Students can have meaningful experiences with the content they produce.  

         easelly and The 5 Standards of Authentic Instruction

In one of the two inquiry-based learning classes that I teach each day, I intentionally and purposefully planned that students would use easel.ly to transform mathematics content to produce a visual that clearly displayed their thinking.  Each collaborative team was assigned an authentic performance task.  Upon finding the solution, the team created a model that represented their method(s) to solve. The photos below document students' first foray into digital creation and presentation in our class.

Standard 1:   Critical Thinking 

Danielle and Alissa are eager  to capture a Google image to use in their infographic.  They grapple with the process before discovering the bank of images readily accessible in easelly's suite of tools.  The choice of images was dependent upon their ability to synthesize, transfer, and apply their knowledge of fractional algorithms to that of models.

Standard 2:  Depth of Knowledge

Carlie and Emmory explore easelly's shape tool to create rectangles that can be used to represent fractional models.

   

 Standard 3:  Real-World Connectedness 

Hailey, Rayshawn, and Dawson quickly demonstrate proficiency in the mathematics content standard as well as in the use of the easelly infographic maker!

Standard 4:  Substantive Conversation

Aysha, Walker, and Luke choose to use a blank template, or vheme, to transform their mathematics solution(s) into models.

Standard 5:  Social Support for Student Achievement  

Hailey and Rayshawn (foreground) provided descriptive feedback after Danielle shared her team's infographic.  Danielle is justifying the mathematics model that she and Alissa created using the infographic maker, easelly.  Dawson and Alissa (background) are engaged in rigorous discourse about the algorithms used to solve.

Collaborative learning teams rotated, Gallery Walk style, from Chromebook station to Chromebook station, to analyze and evaluate the easelly infographic created by each team using the self-assessment/peer-assessment rubric provided.  Then, teams were asked to return to their own station to use the completed rubrics to tweak their models before submitting them for summative assessment.  This is a photo of two collaborative teams debriefing the metacognitive process - solution, creation, self and peer review, descriptive feedback for improvement, and assessment.

An Enthusiastic Thumbs-Up:  Student Reviews

Aysha exclaimed, "Easelly is awesome!  I love that I have the option to choose an existing template, or I can create my own. In math, for me, it is much easier to visualize and create the fraction models without the distraction a busy template may cause.

Dawson queried, "Will we use easelly in your class everyday, Mrs. Hunter? Designing the models to represent our thinking was much more difficult that I expected it to be, but now that we've had the opportunity to see what the easelly creation tool can do, I can hardly wait to try it again!"

Bailey, my student who rarely speaks aloud in class, tugged on my sleeve before leaving class on this day and whispered, "Will we have the chance to use easelly to share our thinking again?" "Why do you ask?" I responded.  I had worried that this create and present process might be too much for him; however, I was surprised and delighted when Bailey quipped, "I am a man of few words, Mrs. Hunter.  For me, it is so much better to create a visual to communicate what I'm thinking."

EdTech: Formative Assessment Tools

Google Forms may be the
simplest way to capture,
store, and analyze data.

                  Google Forms

Google Forms is one of Google's online apps suite of tools that allows you to easily gather information for free.  It's easy to use and one of the simplest ways to save data directly to a spreadsheet.  Google Forms has special features, hidden tools, and add-ons to help you make the forms you need in minutes.  Use this Google Forms Infographic to get a quick summary of everything you need to get the most out of Google Forms. Watch the video below to discover how Google Forms can work for you!

Kahoot is as Easy as 1-2-3

Kahoot is, perhaps, the most
engaging formative assessment tool!

Step 1 - Create
Kahoot is a fun learning game that you create in just minutes. The games, or kahoots, are made from a series of multiple choice questions.  Add videos, images, and diagrams to your questions to amplify engagement.  Use this Kahoot Infographic to get a quick summary of everything you need to get the most out of Kahoot!

Step 2 - Play
Kahoots are best played in a group setting, like a classroom. Players answer on their own devices, while games are displayed on a shared screen to unite the lesson - creating a 'campfire moment' - encouraging players to look up.

Step 3 - Share
Social learning promotes discussion and pedagogical impact...whether players are in the same room or on the other side of the globe!  After a game, encourage players to create and share their own kahoots to deepen understanding, mastery, and purpose.

                                          

 Socrative

Socrative PRO now has a silent hands-raised feature.

Socrative is an easy-to-use tool for building assessments and seeing results in real-time. According to its manufacturers, it's everything you need to improve instruction and help student learning.  Click to access the User's Guide to watch the tutorial below to discover the power of Socrative in your classroom today!

Formative

Formative is an assessment tool where students can type, draw, or submit images to demonstrate their understanding.  This tool is different because you can upload existing pdfs, Word documents, or Google Docs and add interactive pieces to them.  Formative allows the teacher to watch from the teacher side of the site affording them the opportunity to provide written comments as real-time feedback. With Formative, much of your best lesson plans an resources can be given new life in a digital format.  Watch the video below to see what makes Formative a pretty cool tool!

Plickers

Plickers is a powerfully simple tool that lets teachers collect real-time formative assessment data without the need for student devices. You can use Plickers for quick checks for understanding to know whether your students are understanding big concepts and mastering key skills.  Plickers gives all students the opportunity to participate and engage in learning.  To discover how Plickers can transform assessment in your classroom, watch the video below!

Plickers is a unique online formative assessment
tool, since it requires no student devices.

To explore these and other great online formative assessment tools, read the article, "12 Great Formative Assessment Tools for Teachers."