Bates CT 2019

1:  What did you learn? How did you put what you learned into action at school? Personally? I used most of the things I learned with my Freshmen ELA class, having them make comics for The Tell Tale Heart as well as custom search engines for their mental health research project.  Did you expand your Personal Learning Network? Make new professional connections? It was great having other educators in the groups and I also shared my tips and findings with my East colleagues.  What challenges did you face during the workshop? Any big “fails”? Any huge successes? What did you learn from failing and succeeding? I don't recall any big challenges I faced in the workshop as I fixed the custom search engine error. Big successes were the digital storytelling tools as the kids loved making their own storyboards and it was super easy.  Were there projects that didn’t work out well for you? Not that I can say!  2:  What’s next? Did you start some projects t

I love using digital storytelling tools with students! I've used Animoto, Powtoons, and WeVideo to make PSAs and other informational videos ( example of one my student's videos ). All are fairly simple to use although I use WeVideo as more of a replacement for Windows Movie Maker as it does not exist on Chromebooks. My students are using Storyboard That currently for their Multi Genre Research Project on "The Tell Tale Heart" or "I Felt a Funeral" and they've stated they enjoy using it due to the easy drag and drop and the selection of background/characters. I've also used Meme Generators for students because a meme is telling a story/explaining something and Pixton for comic strips which was great until RCSD lost the funding for it, although the free version is still manageable. Thinglink can also be a great tool for High School level digital storytelling because you can add in different media to different parts of the story including videos and aud

In addition tools such as Evernote, Adobe Reader, and Diigo, are great annotation tools for online reading and annotating. Myself and some teachers I worked with would find an article online and mark it up for students using Diigo to show them not only how to annotate but to help them with independent reading. I use Pinterest for many personal projects but recently I've let the students use it to make a moodboard for "The Tell Tale Heart" as a part of their Multi Genre Research Project. ( Example ). For my Seniors I am a big fan of the RCSD Libguide to ease them into the waters of College data bases for their research projects. It reminds me of when I was in Highschool and was intimidated by the college data bases at first until they were presented to me with a libguide and an easing into it.  I was pretty excited about Paper.Li as I had never heard of it before and I like that on my phone I have a newsfeed of my interests already set up but one that I myself had not crea

I chose to explore the Sweet Search engine as I had never heard of it before and I was curious to see how effective it would be as a custom search engine for students. Due to time constraint on a project we are currently working on we do not have enough time right now to teach the scholars good research skills and how to distinguish acceptable websites so having a search engine that would narrow down helpful results for students would be a life saver. We are doing a mini research paper on mental illness as it is related to Edgar Allan Poe’s Tell Tale Heart and Schizophrenia so I wanted to see what results would turn up for students. I was pleasantly surprised that it provided many good resources on schizophrenia readily available for students. I look forward to using the search engine with all of my classes and especially the history option for deeper understanding of certain topics and exploration. The Google Custom Search seems to have changed and I was unable to create one of my o