LOA Diaries: Humans of Edmodo

At +Edmodo I was excited to participate in q. my first hackathon.  My director, +Kevyn Klein had an idea that I thought would be fun and engaging, a riff on Humans of New York called Humans of Edmodo.

We sent out a request using influitive Teacher Leader Network and received some great quotes and pictures from the teachers who use Edmodo. 

Our team included Kevyn, Nick Jarvis, a graphic artist, Vivienne Pustell, Rachel Sherman & of course all of the teachers who made our project possible. We collected quotes and pictures throughout the afternoon and worked on the images late into the evening. We communicated almost exclusively through +HipChat each of us at our own location, but collaborating as a team. Most of our team used Canva, a free and easy to use design program to add teacher quotes to the images, creating sometimes thoughtful and sometimes funny, and sometimes both, posters. Kevyn even recruited her fiancee for some voice over work on our introduction video.

Friday morning, I arrived in the office early to work on the presentation with Kevyn while Vivienne waited for Target to open. When it opened, she bought almost every frame they had in the sizes we needed. Rachel was busily multitasking - supporting customers and printing all of the images. As she was printing, Vivienne and I started framing the posters. Once we had them all framed, we hung them in every conference room and in team rooms so that Edmodo staff could always have a customer with them in the room, a Human of Edmodo.

We took pictures of the hanging work, and pulled everything together into a Google presentation which we would show the judges at 2:00 to describe what we had done.  After presenting our project, The Humans of Edmodo, and all of the other hackathon projects were submitted, the judges, including yours truly, retired to the large conference room for deliberations. Although I had agreed not to take part in the judging of our category, I couldn't help myself and pointed out the beautiful photos that were now gracing the walls.

Again, I found myself planning how I could take this idea back to my students... The Humans of Bagby, or making memes with historical figures, character building quotes (The Bagby Bs), these are the things that keep my head spinning at night... So many ideas, so little time (#IMCAST)...if you have other ideas, I'd love to hear them.

I am really proud of what we accomplished in 24 hours and I love how each of us brought our own design sensibilities and strengths to the project.  And yeah, I like that we won, too!
 

Kindness Matters: Writing with StoryLines Pages & Edmodo

I partner teach 36 fifth graders with +sheila monger , our inclusive education teacher (some would call her an SDC teacher, she would not). We encompass rooms 7 & 8 so we call ourselves Team Seight. If you were to come in when we are all in the same room, you would not know who was officially assigned to each teacher.  +Edmodo has been a great tool for connecting our students in authentic ways, and preparing them for the world of social media in a safe and controlled environment. This year a theme at our school has been kindness, so using StoryLines Pages, an app in Edmodo, we created a Kindness Matters Book for each student.  

StoryLines Pages is a collaborative classroom activity where students learn the power of compliments and encouragement. Inspired by the story "All Good Things", by Sister Helen Mrosla, StoryLines Pages has each student in your class creating a page for each other student, expressing something he appreciates about his classmate.With this app, each student writes a “page” (one sentence) about every other student in our class. We read the short, true (verified by Snopes) story by Sister Helen and then the kids got to work. Some of my findings as we worked on this project:

• All students participated, and I had a quick snapshot of who was or wasn’t working on their pages, using the overall status page

• As I went through and reviewed students’ pages, I was able to see common mistakes, trends and areas of need. For example, this student consistently used capital letters incorrectly. Many of my students are still misusing the contraction of you are, spelling it Y-O-U-R.  Several of my students had difficulty writing in the first person, present tense.

• It was extremely rewarding for me to read the comments that my students made about all of their classmates. Never once was a comment checked “It is not nice” because it was mean. Some of our ED kids did have challenges differentiating between a statement (You play with me at recess. vs I like when you play with me at recess.) However, overwhelmingly, the students really had surprisingly nice things to say about each other.

• One of my students on a 504 has significant challenges starting work.  He will sit and stare into space. I was very worried about what other students would say about him, there just doesn't seem to be much 'there-there' from a 10 year old’s perspective, or so I thought.  I was delighted to see pages such as “You respect others, You are smart and funny (he is, when he speaks), You are a good listener, You are good at sitting still when others are talking. You are polite, respectful to others and very quiet in class.”  None of these things are untrue and I just loved seeing how they took a behavior that can be difficult and saw the positive in it! I learned a lesson myself from these kids (well,honestly they teach me something every day)

• The app was incredibly easy for me to use, and even easier for the kids.  Because often the same child would make the same errors repeatedly, I could cut and paste my review comment, and they got practice correcting these problem areas.

• I did have a few students think they could just cut and paste and make the same comment to multiple classmates. Because I would review all of the pages by a given student at one time, it was pretty easy to catch this and comment back to them to be original and be specific.

• Once most of the Storylines Pages ages are done, we will go ahead and publish the book. Students will receive a link that they can choose to share outside of Edmodo.

.

I am eagerly awaiting the smiles and happy sighs when the students read the kind words said about them. As a parent, I know I would cherish seeing the kindness extended toward my child through such a project.  As a teacher of students with a wide range of abilities, it was great to find an activity that all students could participate in equally. This activity also served as a great formative assessment and gave me insights into student needs. Finally, it was just sweet and this time of year, in fifth grade, we can all use a little sweet!

Visual Storytelling, Digital Storytelling, Cinematic Narrative: Literacy Across the Curriculum. By Ken Shelton - Cue13

+sheila monger and I attended this inspiring session at CUE last week  I was actually in another session and she text-ed me to 'get over to Primrose A now!' I was so glad I did! Our world is surrounded by still and moving imagery. In many cases these are used to provide directions, information, or even tell stories. The most vital element to all of these is Literacy. This session examined ways in which we can incorporate visual learning to support literacy across the curriculum.  +Ken Shelton is a wonderful, creative storyteller with amazing ideas and examples. I am still waiting for him to post his presentation which was just stunning. (Once I see it, I am sure I will have more to say about the session!)

This picture of +Diane Main   was annotated in thinglink , a tool for annotating/adding story to digital photos. You can click on places on the picture and get more information, more of the story.

Here are some other resources he shared: 
A presentation by +Michael Hernandez, Cinematic Storytelling which gratefully included some practical information and lesson plan ideas (something I found generally lacking at CUE this year)

Shelton also had a great idea to get kids to do a more thorough job with Storyboarding. Tell kids their grade depends on how well someone else does our movie based on your story board! 

Remember to include reflection part!!
 
Pixar’s rules for Storytelling  - I want to make a poster out of this for my kids!

 Shelton recommended the book : Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room by  +David Weinberger.

If you every get a chance to hear Ken Shelton speak, you'll be glad you did!