Liven Up Your Staff Meeting With These Apps

Come on, you can tell me.  We’ve all been there.  Whether you’re in education or some other profession.  We’ve all been in those staff meeting where your attention is everywhere other than on the material at hand.  Your eyes wander.  You can hear your heartbeat.  You stare at the ceiling.  You resist the temptation to one of those people that stare at their phone all meeting.  Time crawls.  Minutes turn into hours.  The clock seems to be going backward.  You don’t want to be rude or seem inattentive, but you just can’t seem to pay attention.  The presenter drolls on, pretending that everyone is hanging on every word.  Come on, admit it, you’ve been in those meetings.

Don't let this happen at your meeting.

And now it’s payback.  The chickens have come home to roost.  It’s your turn to present in front of your colleagues.  You don’t want the staff to feel the way you do at some of these meetings.  What do you do?  Well, lucky you, it’s the age of technology in the classroom!  You’ve got a Chromebook, an iPad, or perhaps just a smartphone.  You are ready to make your presentation interactive and engaging.  But how do you do that?  Let me share you with you a few apps that you can use to keep everyone’s attention by engaging your audience.

When it comes down to it, school staff are much like the kids they teach.  In the same way, the students might get a bit fidgety when sitting in front of their teacher listening to the lecture for an hour, adults do the same thing when being asked to sit and listen to someone present information for a long period of time.  Just like in your class where you want to engage your students and keep their attention throughout your teaching, you want to have the same impact with the teachers you’re talking to.  And you know what, you don’t have to look far for the tools to help you because the apps used for your classroom can also be used in much the same way for a PD or presentation to your colleagues.

Socrative : Use the space feature to check for understanding or summarize the meeting. Create a Socrative quiz, then use it to summarize the meeting with a space race.  If you’ve got more than 20 in your meeting, simply have people pair up.  Give out a prize to the winner.

Kahoot: Use Kahoot to test the staff about the contents of the meeting.  Again, like the Socrative space race, give out small prizes for first, second, and third.

Padlet: As you’re giving your presentation, ask the participants to participate by putting very brief summaries of what you’re saying on a Padlet board.  Pause every so often to allow your fellow teachers to jot down a tiny summary of what you’re talking about.

PearDeck/Nearpod: I put these together because although they have differences, they’re kinda the same idea.  You present your information, then, embed small exercises in your presentation, such as a drawing exercise, a multiple choice quiz, or a short answer question.  The beauty of Nearpod and PearDeck is that you don’t have to leave your presentation to have your audience participate, it’s in the presentation.  Another fun aspect of the two is that you can share participant answers and drawings with the rest of the audience.  

Google Slides Q & A: If you’re using Google Slides to give your presentation, then using Google Slides Q & A is a must!  Ask the audience to not only ask questions or comments, but make it interactive by posing certain sceneries that concern your topic and ask teachers to respond in the Q & A portion.  For example, if you’re talking about classroom discipline, ask your audience how they would act in a certain situation.

Use These 3 Apps for Pre-Assessment!

I was in a class recently where the teacher was beginning a new chapter. Instead of asking the students to open up their Chromebooks for a pre-assessment, she orally posed questions and asked for responses by asking kids to raise their hands. Her twenty-five student class remained mostly silent, with one student raising their hand to volunteer what they thought they knew, the rest of the class--crickets! Unfortunately, there may have been students that did know about the topic but where afraid to take a chance in front of the class.

When beginning a new unit, chapter, or topic, it's important to find out what your students already know about the said topic so as not to waste time covering material that the students already know. In the age of technology, apps can make this process easy and, depending on the digital tool, incorporate the pretest directly in the lesson.

Pre-assessment should be painless. Painless in a sense that you don't want your students to be timid in answering your assessment questions. You want them to give it their best shot, not being afraid of getting the question wrong. After all, it's not so much about the individual student, but about the data that you'll glean from your pre-assessment.
You want to know what your class already knows.

Socrative: Socrative is a great formal assessment tool. And, it can be handy for pre-assessments. Create a quiz and turn it into a racing game, where students try and answer all of the questions correctly in order to win the race. Then, at the end of the race, Socrative provides data on how your class answered each individual question.

Kahoot: Again, gamify your pre-assessment with a Kahoot. Always competitive, Kahoot engages students by presenting timed questions where students have a limited time to answer. Like Socrative, Kahoot provides a report on how well your students answered the questions so you can determine where you need to spend more time on your upcoming lesson.

Pear Deck: A fantastic interactive presentation tool that allows not only for student participation by typing in their answer but also allows them to draw their answer. Pear Deck has built-in templates asking students what they want to know about the upcoming topic while another asks them to draw what they already know about the topic.

Engaging Apps For Summer School

Summer school teachers, the days of lecturing for hours or having your students do book work for most of the day are long gone.  You have one class with the same students and the same subject for the entire day, why not make it fun and engaging?  With technology, students can now be fully engaged in a lesson while spending hours in the same class. 

You say you don't have access to Chromebooks or iPads in the classroom?  Well, there are ways around that, especially at the high school level.  Knowing that most of your students have cell phones will set you free of a day of classroom monotony. 

Here's some ideas to energize your summer school classroom, all of which have phone friendly apps:

Socrative is a great way to spend a summer class session. Split the class up into teams using just a few cell phones and boom! You've got fun learning that can last as long as you need it or want it to.  Students can participate in a race to answer questions correctly or review with a quick quiz or morning warm up.

Kahoot is another great way to keep the troops entertained while there is actual learning going on. Again, split the class into groups based on cell phone availability and review the days topic with your students. You can create a quiz beforehand or quickly use one that has already been created.

Nearpod is a good activity to use when other reviewing content or going through it for the first time. With Nearpod, the teacher can create either a teacher led presentation or a student paced presentation where the students work through the various activities at their own pace.  Nearpod exercises can include drawing activities, quizzes, short/long answer, and collaborative activities.  Nearpod is great for keeping students engaged throughout a lesson.

Edpuzzle is a fantastic way to show your class a video.  Using Edpuzzle, students answer questions throughout the video, keeping them engaged.  Students watch the video at their own pace.  So, if they don’t know they answer to a question you’ve posed, they can simply review the video again until they find the right answer.

5 Ways To Measure Engagement Without Breaking Your Lesson Flow

The book "Bold School" (Keischnick, 2017, p. 95),  states that "Trying to measure engagement and comprehension without breaking the flow or falling behind schedule is a great challenge for direct instruction."

This is where technology can come to the aid of a teacher trying to infuse checking for understanding throughout the lesson without pauses or time-consuming transitions.  Chromebooks and iPads have created numerous opportunities for teachers to measure engagement during instruction.  The trick is how to measure engagement without breaking the flow you've created in your instruction.  How can technology help in keeping the lesson flowing, without interruption or dead spots?

The other consideration is to make sure every student has a voice.  If you simply ask students if they get it, some may genuinely understand, while others, not wanting to risk embarrassment or hold up the class, shake their head in the affirmative.

These apps can help you reach each student while incorporating checking for understanding in the lesson without breaking the flow of your lesson.

1. Nearpod: Use Nearpod for all phases of your lesson, from the introduction all the way to your formative assessment.  All the while checking for understanding in between.

2. Pear Deck: Pear Deck will not only help you present your lesson and incorporate checking for understanding with an anonymous thumbs up or thumbs down option, but you can also ask a question on the fly for students to answer in the lesson, without having to exit your Pear Deck lesson.

3. Google Slides Q & A: If you're presenting a Google Slides presentation, make it a Google Slides Q & A presentation.  Students can have their phones at the ready to ask a question without interrupting the class.  Q & A is great for those students who oftentimes are too shy to ask a question.

4. Kahoot: At the beginning of class, prior to the lesson, ask students to prepare for a Kahoot by having them go to Kahoot.it.  Then, you can insert Kahoots at various points of your lesson.  Prepare a few checking for understanding questions throughout your lesson.  Then, when the time is right, throw in a Kahoot.

5. Socrative: Use the Quick Question feature in Socrative to ask a multiple choice, T/F, or short answer question.  Like Kahoot, ask your students to prepare to use Socrative.  You can either have questions prepared (in which case, you can make a rocketship race out of it) or ask them on the fly.