Digital Footprint Infographic

I chose to do an infographic that gives information on digital footprints to secondary students.  There is a section that describes where the details for your digital footprint are gathered from and who might be looking at that footprint that you may not have realized is interested in it.  Another section gives some instruction on where to start looking into your personal digital footprint to see what others may see about you.  Suggestions on managing your footprint are offered, and the infographic is concluded with three questions to ask yourself in order to be aware of your digital footprint and proactive on a day-to-day basis.  Two sites are listed at the bottom as having provided information that contributed to the development of this infographic.  

I used Venngage to create this infographic and selected a design to begin but created the majority of the elements and placement on my own keeping to the color scheme and style.  I used simplistic icons with mostly rounded edges and thicker details in order to keep the infographic aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate.

Basic Trigonometry Ratios Foldable - Screencasting

Interactive Notebooks Podcast

Gamification - Kahoot vs. Quizizz

Kahoot
Kahoot is an online assessment tool that engages students in a whole-class assessment sessions designed and controlled by the teacher.  By making assessments into a challenge where the students compete against one another to earn points and be first place, formative assessment becomes less of a chore and more of a game and benefits from the perks that come with a game-like atmosphere.  I have used Kahoot in my own classroom as a formative assessment tool with great success.  My classes are for struggling and resistant learners, and playing Kahoot is one of their favorite things to do regardless of the content of the quiz.  The ability to search the vast public database of already-created quizzes (8.6 million as of this post) makes designing your own incredibly easy.  One downside that you do not think of until you have used Kahoot in the classroom is that students can lose their connection and have to login again, usually losing what they have already done and starting again with zero points which will upset them.  Be prepared with a solution to this issue.

Quizizz
Quizizz is a fun alternative to Kahoot if I need a quiz to go at the speed of each player.  It offers the option to create questions with images and multiple choice responses just like Kahoot, however after a student answers a question a meme or image is shown that relates to the correct or incorrect answer.  The best part about this feature is that the memes are customizable and the teacher can create and upload their own memes into different collections to use with different quizzes.  It was far more difficult to include gifs in questions when using Quizizz than I felt it should have been.  For some reason still unknown to me, some gifs were not playable within questions and some were which made designing questions using media more difficult.  Using Quizizz in the classroom would have to be planned differently than Kahoot since some students will finish before others and the unintended consequences that arise with downtime are now in play.  Quizizz is far better suited when assigning a formative assessment as homework, part of a student center, or other on-your-own activity since it is not restricted to whole-class play and monitoring like Kahoot is.



Overall, I would use Quizizz as a homework or on-your-own type of formative assessment tool with static and not dynamic image based questions.  I prefer Kahoot as I and my students are already comfortable with it, and it has the option for media beyond a static picture within the quizzes.

Social Bookmarking Warning!

Pocket is very easy to use and allows quick bookmarking of sites and other online content.  Being able to read the bookmarked content offline is a benefit, however not all content can be read offline despite what the app says.  This app is good for quick bookmarking on the go as it offers browser extensions and mobile app versions, but falls short of real usefulness in the classroom beyond keeping a personal collection of links and offline versions to read.

Pocket does not offer the option to create different sections within an account in order to share a group of links. There is only one repository for the bookmarked items within Pocket. If I wanted to share a collection of bookmarked items with my students, I have to share each item individually. So to share my sample collection of 20 items relating to trigonometry I have set up for this project, I have to go through the sharing process 20 times. This drawback alone is enough for me to strongly recommend against using it in the classroom. The only benefit I can see is it can collect links and bookmarks on the go to be later put into a social bookmarking site that is better equipped to create shareable collections for the classroom, such as Diigo or eduClipper.

So, what is my recommendation? I choose Diigo. Being able to annotate and highlight pages to emphasize information or comment on content makes Diigo stand out as a great bookmarking tool for the classroom. Diigo is a great tool for students and teachers to use to collaborate on assignments and share annotated links, and the browser add-on in Chrome is easy to use when bookmarking and annotating resources.  The annotation links provide multiple options for marking pages, with multiple highlighting colors, sticky notes, and comment options.  Conversations can occur directly on the page in question.  This is the tool I recommend for use in the classroom.


Here are a few screenshots of my Pocket:

Reflecting on RSS Feeds in the Classroom

Being able to set up an RSS feed reader, such as Netvibes, offers new options for teachers to foster critical thinking in the classroom. Have feeds that pull information from different sources on the same topics can give students practice in analyzing the credibility of sources, identifying bias in reporting, and describing point of view. These feeds can provide students with stories relevant to topics and concepts being discussed in class. An example for the math classroom is using an RSS feed from the site FiveThirtyEight to investigate the appearance and uses of probability, statistics, extrapolating, and other math topics in the real world and their usefulness to everyday life with articles addressing topics ranging from when a basketball team’s performance began to decline, to the statistics that prove a professional boxer’s claims to being the greatest are true. I might have students use the feed from FiveThirtyEight in this way in my own classroom. 

One surprising find is a feed that will present daily warm-up problems and questions for students to work on. For teachers that use them, rather than having to spend excessive amounts of time preparing a warm-up for classes every day, an RSS feed that provides a new warm-up for each day frees up time that can be spent on other lesson preparation and tasks. In my own classroom, this is likely another way I would use it.

Intro

I am Heather Lintz, a special education math teacher at a high school in Tennessee, teaching Algebra 1 and Geometry with intervention at all levels of math.  I have been teaching for 11 years, the past 3 at my current school and the others in Ft. Lauderdale, FL where I lived until moving to Tennessee.  I hope to complete an Ed.S. in Educational Technology at UTK and use what I learn to open more doors and create more options for myself in my career, but also to find new ideas and tools to use in my own classroom.