An Ancient Tradition To Connect Us

When I think about some of the best memories of my life they involve storytelling. Where the stories came from and who was telling them varied, of course. But what never changed, for me, was the feeling of being part of someone else’s life and experience for a short time. Whether it was a read-aloud novel, a campfire tale or a grandparent’s remembrances of the first car in town I was always mesmerised. Pulled in by the speaker’s tone and cadence, pulled forward by the path of the story, I can’t help but be enthralled by one of the oldest traditions on earth – storytelling. I’ll come back to that.

Today, all of the educators in our district participated in a professional development day. I often find these days frustrating. There’s loads of eduspeak, talk of shoulds and why nots and in the end I am not sure what I learned and how I will apply it. Today was different. We listened to a presentation by Jo Chrona, that I found both interesting and thought-provoking. 

I went away wondering (more so than ever before) how I could take indigenous ways of knowing and incorporate them into my technology-driven work world. The indigenous peoples of British Columbia have lived here for thousands upon thousands of years, most of them with no written language. And yet they have an incredibly rich culture that is intricately connected to the natural world and the importance of family and place.

In thinking about this rich culture and how they passed learning from generation to generation it hit me. The way to connect technology to indigenous ways of knowing is through storytelling. After all, it is through stories that we are able to place ourselves in someone else’s shoes, to imagine their life and experiences. And in doing so, we find commonalities. Through these we can begin to understand each other and truly learn from each other.

Everyone has at least one story they can share, even our youngest students. And they can all use technology to amplify and enhance their voices. Whether it is something as simple as recording a story about a holiday using an app like Clips or as complex as creating a documentary about being an immigrant. 

So, if you are looking for an authentic way to bring indigenous ways of knowing into your classroom, look no further than digital storytelling. The stories your students tell do not need to be about the indigenous peoples of Canada. The stories your students tell should be theirs, about them and their lives and interests. As they tell their stories they build connections between each other and promote understanding.

Want to give it a try? My three favourite digital storytelling tools are Apple’s Clips, iMovie and Book Creator. I’ve blogged about digital storytelling here, here and here, about Clips here and about Book Creator here and here. Maybe you can start by telling your students a bit of your story!

Bits and Pieces of This and That!

So, depending on where in the world you live you might just be heading back to school, you might be teaching remotely, you might be teaching in a hybrid setting or you might be back at school but ready to go remote. 

Here in BC we’re back at school in person but we’ve been told to be prepared to go online in the case of a “functional closure”. In my district that has meant getting your Google Classroom ready and prepping lessons for a possible absence of two weeks.

In light of that, I thought this week’s blog could just be a collection of hopefully-helpful Google stuff! So, here goes!

Classroom Notifications

Let’s imagine you are a high school Math teacher who has 3 blocks of Grade 8 Math this term. Do you really want to be notified every time a student hands in work or makes a comment in Classroom? What if you teach a K class with 18 students? Don’t you want to know when a parent or student leaves you a private comment? After all, you don’t want to have to check your Google Classroom every day to see what’s going on, especially if you’re not in functional closure…amiright?

In both cases, it helps to know how to manage your Google notifications. Here’s the latest episode of Bits & Bytes, showing you how to manage Google Classroom notifications!

Unique You!

Do you want to make your Google Classroom look unique, so that students don’t mix it up with others? Are you a visual person who likes to change things up sometimes? Either way, here’s a blog post that shows you how to change up the banner at the top of your Google Classroom.

Inviting Your Students to Your Classroom

There are actually 3 ways to get kids (and parents if you teach littles) into your Google Classroom.

With older kids, have them go to classroom.google.com while logged into their Google account. Make sure they choose “Student” if they are given an option and then they should click the PLUS button, choose Join A Class and then put in your “class code”. Not sure where to find your class code? The quickest way to get to it is to look on your main page:

Note, you could also do this with younger students – you would just need to let parents know the class code and probably their child’s Google credentials as well. If you do this, make sure you send out individual emails and not a class list with everyone’s Google usernames and passwords on it!

Another way to get your students into your classroom is by inviting them via their school email. Now obviously this is not the best way if you have a ton of students but I have occasionally used this with students who were having some trouble getting in or who needed a reminder that they weren’t in yet. You can do this by going to the People tab and clicking the little “person plus” icon and then enter their school email.

Finally, you can send out a link to your classroom. When you click the aforementioned “person plus” icon you also have access to a link to your classroom. You can copy this link and give it to class members or parents of younger students. As always, they will need to log in with their students’ Google username and password!

Organization is Key!

Being thoughtful and specific about how you organize your Google Classroom and the assignments and materials you share with students will help both you and them in navigating digital learning. Use Topics as a way to organize the assignments and materials you put in Classroom – here’s some help to get you started.

And while we’re at it…here are two blog posts (here and here) about keeping your Google Drive organized.

Have Some Fun

Finally, because everyone likes to have fun, here is a Google Slides game you could use with your intermediate and secondary students. It’s based on the game “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” and it could be played in person or online. To do this, you need to make you own copy of this slide deck and then watch this video tutorial.

If you like this one and want to try playing another Google Slides TV game, here is a link to the instructions for playing Jeopardy!

Pear Deck Pro-D

As often as I can on this blog, I like to highlight awesome digital tools, like Book Creator. Today, I would like to highlight Pear Deck for Google Slides! This is a tool that was recently approved for use in our district and it makes slide presentations interactive and engaging. Here’s a quick promo video:

So, let’s start with the basics. Pear Deck is an Add-on to Google Slides. It is not actually owned by Google but it works with Google. You can find it by opening a Google Slide deck and clicking Add-ons. You can use Pear Deck with Google Slide presentations you have already built as well as with new ones. When you launch a Pear Deck enhanced presentation, students can enter a unique “secret code” on joinpd.com and they will be able to see your presentation on their own devices – whether they are learning in the classroom or at home! And…they can interact with the presentation!

Sounds cool, right? So, to make the magic work, you go through two easy steps. They are a) preparing the slide deck and b) launching it. 

In preparing the slide deck, you choose how many slides you will make interactive (I wouldn’t advise that you make every slide interactive…maybe every third or fourth slide) and what type of interactivity you want. The 4 we have access to are “text, choice, number and www”. The draw and drag functions come with Pear Deck premium (which we don’t have in our district).

The text options works like this: you add a question to your slide and when viewing that slide students will see a place where they can type their answer! (Depending on the age and skill of your students you might want to have them answer in point form or the typing part can take quite a while!)

The choice option sounds just like it is. You can give them a binary choice (yes, no) or a multiple choice situation.

The number option is similar to the typing option but students put in a number answer.

The “www” option allows you to embed a website into the slide and then kids can interact with it. This sounds pretty cool, although I haven’t actually done it myself (yet). Here are some great ideas of websites to embed and here are the instructions for how to do it.

Once you have prepared your slide deck (either by adding Pear Deck features into an existing slide deck or by creating a new one), you are ready to launch or present your slide deck to your students (either in person or remotely via Google Meet or a similar platform).

If you are in my school district, there is one major step you need to take before you present, in order to protect student privacy. Start by clicking the three lines (the hotdog) to the right of the green “Start Lesson” button. Make sure the “Require Student Logins” toggle is untoggled – it should appear grey, not green. Now, this means that students will be accessing your Pear Deck without logging in. You will not be able to identify individual student responses. (By the way, there is a safe way around this – just have students begin their written response with their first name or nickname – then you know who wrote what!)

Okay, so once you have dealt with privacy, you are ready to present! Click the “Start Lesson” button and you will be walked through the next few steps. You want to get to the part where the students are told to go to joinpd.com and use the code (6 characters) to join the class presentation. Once you know that all students have joined (you will see there is a little prompt on your screen telling you how many students have joined) you will launch the presentation!

During the presentation, you can choose whether to show student responses to everyone or just keep them to yourself, to look at afterwards. If you do project responses, be prepared that not all students will respond appropriately, any more than they might in class. Also, some students might not want their response projected up for all to see if their name is attached to it!

There is a lot more to Pear Deck than just what I’ve shown you. They have a great Youtube Channel, with loads of tutorials, their website has lots of great teaching ideas and how-tos. They even have a section on remote learning, for those of us who are facing functional closures (not a phrase I ever thought I would say!). They often publish slide decks you can use and the slide decks they have that go with Google’s Be Internet Awesome lessons are great!

So…do yourself and your students a favour – give Pear Deck a look!