Of bellybutton lint & glitter...

So, you teach. (At least, I assume that most of my readers teach.  Those of you who don't teach, this is still good, I promise.) You are tech-friendly, as evidenced by the fact that you read blogs. (Or, at least, you read THIS blog, which seems like a good first step.) Maybe you LIKE some teaching-related stuff on Facebook. Maybe you blog yourself. And maybe you have heard or read a little bit about how teachers are using Twitter for professional development. And you think it sounds sort of cool, but it's also like trying to decode a whole other language. What in the name of heaven is a hashtag? What's with the @ symbol in front of everything? With 100 million users, how do I even FIND these amazing teachers?

Alternatively: you teach. You are tech-friendly (if not downright tech-crazy). You blog and you read blogs and you belong to 856 Facebook communities related to education. You are on Twitter and you LOVE it, and you sing the praises of your PLN to everyone who will listen. The problem? No one will listen, because "Twitter is just a bunch of celebrities tweeting about their bellybutton lint and what they ate for breakfast," and they "just don't have time to figure all that out."

Whoever you are, this, my friends, is for you:
(Watch it in full-screen, if you can; it's better that way.)

So you want to tweet with kindergarten...

Welcome! Please visit the updated version of this post here: http://missnightmutters.com/2011/12/so-you-want-to-tweet-with-kindergarten.html

So, based on the response I have had to my recent media exposure, it seems that another how-to post is in order. Many people have asked me how to get started tweeting with young students, and honestly, the responsibility of guiding you through this is sort of daunting. To simply tell you: "Set up an account and go!" is woefully inadequate, and possibly negligent. As I have described in previous posts, my own decision to tweet with kindergarten was slow, thoughtful, deliberate. Your decision should be, too. With that said, this is my attempt to walk you through Twittergarten (as it has been coined by a reporter I know...). This process remains equally true if you are tweeting with any grade level, by the way, so don't be turned off by the frequent kinder-references. Also: I stand by my statement that this is not a how-to blog. I don't think I tweet with kindergarten any BETTER than anyone else.  This is just how I do it, and this is the only way I can, in good conscience, advise you to do it.

**An opening sidebar: The process below is meant for teachers who are looking to tweet with multiple other classes, using connections they have made for themselves. If you are tweeting with just one other class, in the context of Kindergarten Around the World, I'm not sure that ALL of these steps are strictly necessary, and some of them have been done for you, by me. In fact, Kindergarten Around the World would be a great way to start tweeting with your class, and then move on to tweeting with multiple classes. End of sidebar.**

Step 1 - Get on Twitter yourself. I cannot emphasize this enough. If you are not active on Twitter yourself in a professional capacity, I'm not sure that it is responsible for you to start tweeting with your class. From perspectives both technical and ethical, I believe it is important in this situation for teachers to KNOW the medium. Create a personal account, start building a network. Start with me, @happycampergirl, if you don't have anyone else to start following. Other good choices are @hechternacht (my partner in #kinderchat crime, more on that in a  second), and other #kinderchat stars: @matt_gomez, @mr_fines, @mathmurd @tori1074, @havalah. Follow us, interact with us (we're nice, I promise), get a feeling for who is who and what is what. Follow links, read some blogs (and comment, too!), make some friends. Participate in a chat or two (the Newbie's Guide to KinderChat is here, and holds true for other chats, too). This is important for several reasons: a) you will learn HOW to interact on Twitter; b) you will develop some instincts for who your "people" are, and when something is just not right; c)people will get to know you and trust you, which you will need once you start tweeting with your class and are requesting to follow other teachers' classes. Let's put it this way: I do not accept follow requests for my class if I have never interacted with their teacher, and (to be completely honest) my class interacts more with the classes of teachers I know well.

(And, all of this aside: even if you do not want to  or cannot tweet with your class, get yourself on Twitter. It is truly the greatest, free PD you will ever find. If #kinderchat doesn't float your boat, find a chat that does. There are chats for most grades and subject areas. @cybraryman has a great guide, here.)

2 - Think through the logistics and reality of tweeting with your class: When will you do it? Do you have the technology? I honestly can't imagine tweeting with my class without having an Interactive White Board. If you don't have one, how will you facilitate students' interactions? (A good PLN can help you figure this out, by the way.) When in your day can you work it in? Twitter is only meaningful if your kids are building relationships with other kids, and that means tweeting regularly. Are you, yourself, completely sold on this medium as a meaningful tool for young children? (Obviously, I am, but you need to draw your own conclusions on this). Read some of the criticisms, here, and here, and think about them, please. 

3 - Figure out your curriculum connections. What are your goals for tweeting with your class? These will provide you a road map for how you will use twitter in your classroom. Are you focusing on geography and social studies? Literacy and literature? Second language development? Math and numeracy? Intercultural awareness and internationalism? It is okay if your answer is "all of the above!", just be sure you know where you are going.  Again, there are teachers around the world who are using Twitter for all of these things, and being active on Twitter yourself will help you find them.

4 - Talk to your administrators. I want to be clear that, while tweeting with kindergarten seems  to be considered cutting-edge, and, in some eyes, makes me some kind of rebel (if I figure out what exactly I am rebelling against, I will let you know), my boss (and her boss) has always been completely, 100% aware and supportive of what I am doing. Another good reason to be active on Twitter yourself is that it will help you build your case with your admins. Long before I wanted to tweet with my class, my boss knew about all the great ideas and support I was getting from teachers I knew through Twitter.

5 - With your boss's help, think through privacy and security questions. Will you tweet photos/video/audio that shows your students? Your classroom? Your school? How will you identify your students? Full names? First names? Initials? Can you/should you name your school and/or city?  Will your class account be private or protected (I highly recommend private to start, but I know of classes for whom a public account best meets their goals, and I know their teachers are handling safety and privacy very well.) Who will you follow? Who will be allowed to follow you? A good PLN can help you think through these things, and share samples of their own policies/consent forms (are you starting to notice a pattern, here?)

6 - Talk to your students' parents, preferably face to face. Even if your school already has a photo/video/online release policy that covers the use of Twitter (this is pretty unusual, by the way), talk to parents and get their written consent. My students' parents KNOW what we are doing, they signed written consent forms, and about 1/3 of them are following our class. Before I created my class account last year, I added twitter to my agenda for our November parent-teacher conferences. I explained it to parents, encouraged them to talk/think about it, and to follow-up with me with any questions or concerns.

7- When ALL of this is done, and (as my grad school advisor would say:) all of your ducks are in a row: create your class account. Share your screenname with your admins and your students' parents.  Use DMs (a DM is a direct, private message on Twitter) to share your class screen-name with teachers you know and trust through twitter, yourself. My class's screenname rarely appears in the public stream on Twitter, because I don't want to field follow requests from spammers or people I don't know. I share our screenname only via DM. With your students' help and input, write your twitter bio, choose an avatar, and send your first tweet. 

With that, you are off to the races. I trust that you are all competent teachers, and capable of creating your own activities, organizational systems, and management tricks (although I'm happy to share my own, if you ask.) If all of this sounds a little confusing, and you are wondering why I kept putting a "#" in front of kinderchat, and you're still not sure how a DM is different from a regular tweet, well.... I would suggest you are not ready to tweet with your class. There are lots of situations where I am completely in favour of learning alongside our students, but, given the attention span of 5-year-olds, and the (manageable, but still present) risks of a social media environment, my position here is that Twitter is not one of those. 

For perhaps the 347th time: If you want to get your class on Twitter, you need to get yourself on Twitter, first.

Scrapbook is not a verb: How to Use Evernote for Student Portfolios

Welcome! Please visit the updated version of this post at http://missnightmutters.com/2011/11/scrapbook-is-not-a-verb-how-to-use-evernote-for-student-portfolios.html. 

So, the thing is... this is NOT a "how-to" blog. I've never really been comfortable with the idea of using my blog to explain my tools, tips, routines, rituals, in great detail. It always somehow feels like bragging. Don't ask me how TWEETING about some new trick (something I do all. the. time.) doesn't feel like bragging, but it just doesn't. Maybe because Twitter is a conversation, so sharing something there feels more like TALKING? And writing a blog post seems more like hanging a poster saying "Look at me, I am so awesome?" Does that even make sense? Writing a "how to" here seems so much like saying "Behold the brilliance that is me!" Ick. I also tend to not like most "how-to" teacher blogs, for the very same reason. Of course, if you are reading this, and you write a "how-to" teacher blog, I don't mean YOU. YOUR BLOG, I LOVE.

Ok, great, I am not even up to the how-to part, and I have already probably offended half of you. So, let's just pull out all the stops here: BEHOLD THE BRILLIANCE THAT IS ME, while I tell you all about How I Use Evernote for Student Portfolios, and You Can, Too.

Back-story: This School has portfolio-based assessment as part of our 3-year strategic plan, and we decided that this year was The Year that every teacher at every grade level would include portfolios in our assessment strategy.

More back-story: Up until now, the kindergarten teachers at my school have always done scrapbooks for the students, containing art projects, work samples and photos. I have always been HORRENDOUSLY TERRIBLE at doing these, because I am one of those people who doesn't think that scrapbook has any business being a verb, and I just feel like, if parents want a nice souvenir scrapbook of kindergarten, they are WELCOME to make one. At home. On their time. Because making a cute scrapbook for each kid is 110% NOT FUN FOR ME. (See? Now I have also offended the scrapbookers out there, haven't I?) Oh, my glee, why do you people even put up with me?

Ok, so: we needed portfolios, I wanted a way out of scrapbooks (not a verb, not a verb, not a verb). Even before we decided this was Portfolio Year, I had begun playing around with Evernote. Evernote is an app, downloadable for free, to computers, tablets, and most Smart-type-phones. I installed it on my Macbook, and my Android phone, and, when my school gave me an iPad to play with over the summer, I put it on there, too. (Quick disclaimer: I have the paid, premium version of Evernote, and have been using for long enough that I am no  longer sure which features are in the free version, and which are only available with a paid account. Basically, if you are considering using it for student portfolios, you need the paid version because you need the extended memory and (believe me) you WANT the capacity to add video clips. If more than one teacher at your school is going to use it, the best value is to set up a sponsored, group account, for education.)

Evernote is such a broad-based app that it is hard to describe it in a general way. Basically, it allows you to create digital notebooks for any topic that interests you. Within each notebook, you can add notes that may be:

• text (typed right into the app on whatever device you choose)
• photos 
• audio clips
• web clips (there is a web-clipper tool that allows you to insert a link or an entire webpage into an Evernote notebook)

You can also add attachments to your notes, of nearly any file type: Word, Excel, PDF, Powerpoint, video. Notebooks can be shared with other users, so, for example, specialist teachers can add their own notes, photos, work samples to student files. More on that later.

So, I first started using it to document my own teaching, because I am fantastically gifted at teaching an amazing lesson by the seat of my pants, and then being unable to replicate it the following year. I created Evernote notebooks for each unit/theme, and as we did different activities, I:

• took photos of completed projects/crafts/writing activities, etc
• took photos of bulletin board displays or whiteboard setups that worked (or didn't)
• used my phone to text notes into Evernote notebooks about how to change/modify/improve/adapt an activity or lesson in the future.

The reason Evernote was so great for this was that I could walk around the classroom with my phone, open the app, go into the "Butterflies" notebook, take a picture, text a caption, and then IT AUTOMATICALLY SYNCED TO ALL MY OTHER DEVICES. There is no "take a photo, e-mail it to self, save the photo attachment, create a new note, re-attach the photo." The photo and/or text are automatically filed in the right place, and (assuming wifi is present), almost INSTANTLY available on every device to which you have installed the app. Nearly a year into using the app, this still seems like magic to me.



The leap from there to student portfolios was a short one. At the beginning of this year, I created an Evernote notebook for each student in my class. Throughout the day, I walk around with my iPad (I much prefer the iPad to the phone, but I suspect that is because the keyboard on my Android phone is downright hateful), and take notes in the kids' notebooks. For art projects, I make sure to take a photo of the process as well as the product. For journal writing, I take a photo of the journal page, and then add audio of the child reading what he/she has written (audio recordings can be added directly to notes, within the Evernote app). I take notes about activities students particularly enjoy, pics of completed lego/sandbox/playdough creations, notes on social skills or behaviour patterns. I also take "souvenir" photos of special occasions: first day of school, birthdays, lost teeth, Halloween, etc. Everything is filed in each child's notebook. Evernote also allows you to copy a note to several different notebooks, so if a group of children complete a project, that project can appear in each child's individual notebook. Student work can also be added by scanning it as a PDF, and then attaching the PDF to an Evernote note, but I find the photo technique is faster and cleaner.

About once a week, I go into Evernote on my laptop, and "clean up" each child's notebook. I make sure the notes are clear and appropriate for parents to see, add captions to photos, delete notes that are not pertinent, and correct anything that is mis-filed (this is easy to do, just drag-and-drop). I also add tags to all my notes. Tags allow me to pull up (for example) all journal work for a particular student, or for all students.  I'm still working out the finer points of my tagging system, but I try to tag by: subject area (math, literacy, language, etc), developmental domain (gross motor, fine motor, social skills, etc), and type of content (photo, journal, audio, etc).

Last week, I had my first round of parent-teacher interviews. In the interview, I showed each parent their child's notebook, and explained that over the weekend, I would e-mail them an invitation to view their child's portfolio at home (I also encouraged them to look at the portfolio WITH their child, and am really hoping they will do so). Parents can choose to download the app, or to log in to Evernote online (this is true for me as well: if ever I was away from ALL of my devices, but needed to update a notebook, all I need is a computer with internet access, and I can log in to Evernote.com to to access all my notes. See? MAGIC!). My plan is to share the notebooks with parents for about 2 weeks, and then "unshare" them, so that I can continue to add new content without worrying about parents seeing typos or mis-files, or temporary notes that only make sense to me.

The next step in all of this is to bring our specialists on board. All my students have classes with our Phys Ed and Music specialists, and some of them also work with our Early Intervention teacher. With a paid Evernote account, I can share students' notebooks with those teachers, and grant them access to add content. There is also the possibility of granting access to the Speech Therapist and Occupational Therapist who work with some of my students. If (please, God, PLEASE) we were to decide to go to all-digital portfolios next year, for all grade levels (and to do so using Evernote), I could also transfer ownership of my students' notebooks over to their first grade teachers. (At least, I'm pretty sure I could. I haven't tested that out yet, but it makes sense that it would be possible.) (To clarify, Evernote is being piloted this year by me, and 2 of the first grade teachers. Other teachers are doing hard-copy portfolios, in a variety of formats.)

Evernote is not perfect. I wish that I could add video notes as easily as photo and audio. (Hey, Evernote people, if you're reading this: how about the ability to record video notes DIRECTLY from within the app, rather than having to record with a camera, download, and then attach to a note? THAT WOULD BE AWESOME!). I wish that I could create a "batch" of notes, all with the same title and tags, and then file them into appropriate students' notebooks. Example: when the children wrote Thanksgiving journal entries, I took a photo of each journal, and then had to title and tag each note individually. It would have been great to be able to create a batch of "Thanksgiving Journal" notes, all tagged with "writing" "language" "journals" "audio." (And if you are reading this, and know a way to do this, YOU HAVE A MORAL OBLIGATION TO SHARE IT IN THE COMMENTS!) I am cautious about my students' privacy, and their Evernote portfolios identify them by first name only. Their last names, birthdates, personal information, do not ever appear, nor does the name of our school.

Altogether, I love the system I have created. I love that I can access my students' portfolios from anywhere, without having to lug around a huge stack of paper. I love that I can photograph and file a whole day's worth of activities in less than 10 minutes. I love that group projects get to be included in EVERY child's portfolio, even if the project is big, messy, or three-dimensional. As a French immersion teacher, I love that the audio note feature allows me to document my students' budding language skills, and play it back over and over to assess their pronunciation. As a kindergarten teacher, I love that it allows to me use and document assessment tasks that are play-based and age appropriate (rather than being limited to paper-and-pencil activities and/or standardised tests.) I love that going through a child's portfolio has the potential to educate parents about not only their own child, but also about what and how and why I teach.

I love that Evernote allows me to create Kindergarten Portfolios that are both a lovely souvenir AND a record of growth and progress.

And most of all, I love that it allows me to do all of this WITHOUT using scrapbook as a verb.