Digital Portfolios and Parent Communication

For the past 4 years, I have been an ELL teacher at  West Broadway Middle School in Providence. I have been lucky enough to work with some of the most supportive, inspiring, and dedicated teachers I have ever met. We have grown to become great friends both in and out of school, and have been through a lot of curriculum and administrative changes but have always stood by our belief that we need to do what is best for the children in front of us, even when our beliefs were challenged.

To me, our school has always been an innovative and forward thinking environment which has pushed me to use technology to help me solve everyday problems. For this reason, I view myself as what Scott Noon would call a techno-traditionalist. I like to take ideas that I am already using and update them with technology, but sometimes it is still hard for me to think outside the box. With this project, I am pushing myself to update another aspect of my teaching and to improve communication with both students and families.

       I believe that our students (and their families) need to be to see how much progress they have made to stay optimistic and develop their growth mindset. Although learning, especially language learning, is a never-ending process it is important for us to recognize how far we have come. I also believe that this relates to Wesch’s “Problem of Significance”. Learning to speak English is incredibly significant to my students and their ability to survive and thrive in their new home. However, it is easy to get bogged down by grammar and vocabulary lessons, and the new struggles and questions that arise as language structures get more complex. I feel that by being able to show students how far they have already come it will help them to reflect and renew their perseverance. I also believe that students grow when they take risks in the classroom. By allowing them to record their learning and share it they will be asked to take a risk but it will also lower their affective filter when it comes to speaking or reading in front of a group of peers.

  At a recent parent engagement event, my team and I hosted, one of our 8th graders spoke about her experience moving here as a Spanish speaker and learning English. One of the things we felt would support both students and families would be to have a way of recording and sharing student progress. But how do you “show” how students speaking skills have evolved? One program that I learned about in another class is SeeSaw. Using this program you can create a digital portfolio. This is different than a paper-based portfolio because, in addition to writing samples and test scores, I can have students record themselves reading and responding to questions orally to show progress in their confidence and ability to speak in a new language. I am particularly interested in trying this out because I have a lot of new arrival students and I typically have them for two or more years in a row. I think it will be very powerful to be able to look back with them and their families and see how much growth they have shown. I would also like to shift the focus in our room from mainly reading and writing skills to incorporate more thoughtful listening and speaking activities.

                

In exploring this tool online I have learned that I can use it to have students keep their own personal journal of what they are learning, in the form of a stream similar to a facebook page or a blog. This could consist of both activities that I assign them and their own thoughts and feelings about what they are learning. There is also the option of having them create a journal post that is in written, video, drawing or photograph form. This would allow me to have students record themselves reading a leveled book, discussing a diagram or picture they created or making a video with a partner to show what they have created in class and explain what they have learned. It also allows me to create unique assignments, such as oral readings of a short story we are using in class, where students can respond to listening questions or save pictures of writing samples they have created. The first activity I am planning to use is a get to know you chart where they can record their answers by writing on the screen. I believe that this product will help to solve some the problem I have encountered and help me to record my students' growth over time so that I can share that with them and their families. I anticipate this being a powerful tool in our classroom.

One of the options I was drawn to with Seesaw was that there is an option for parents to have access to their child's portfolio from home. I believe that students learn best when they are supported both at school and at home. Another aspect of my project is that I want to engage more parents in their child's education. It is around the time of middle school where parents begin to see their children as being more independent and begin to distance themselves from the school environment. For many of my students, there is also a language barrier. My team and I want to keep the parents in our community informed and involved in their children's education. Using this tool parents will be able to see their child’s work from either the website or using the SeeSaw mobile app. I am hoping this will be one way that we can help them see what their children are learning in school.

       As part of the parent engagement committee, reaching as many families as possible is a part of my goal. Over 26% of our student population currently qualify for ELL services, with many more emergent bilinguals who have been exited in lower grades, meaning for most of our students their home language is not English. It is not enough that we translate handouts and hope that they make it home. The second part of my project is to create a bilingual newsletter that is available to our students’ families on the internet. After learning the facts about how lower income and Latino families mainly rely on their smartphones to access the internet I checked to ensure that the tool I wanted to use was easily accessible on a smartphone since this is the medium that I know most of our students are using at home. Knowing that our families would have access on their phone was important and so I decided to move forward and try using the smores.com website to create an ELL Team Newsletter for our school. This has been a goal of ours for many months now and beginning a new school year seems the perfect time to introduce this to our students’ families. Part of my goal with this newsletter is to help families feel like they have a voice in their child’s education. My students do NOT represent Leslie Grinner’s dominant ideology or SCWAAMP. I am hoping that a bilingual newsletter will be one small way to help them feel empowered and informed about their child's education. By using an online format it will also give families the opportunity to translate this information into multiple languages besides English and Spanish allowing all families to participate.

Newsletter

           Our newsletter will include information about our team of ELL teachers, updates about what we are learning in our classrooms, events and afterschool activities in our school, and information about community resources. I think it is important to have all of this information in one place as we have many families with students in multiple grades and try to build relationships across grade levels to support our students. I also believe this will serve as a way to bridge home and school and help parents foster meaningful conversations about learning with their children. As we learned from Sherry Turkle it is just as important to learn how to put away our devices, power down and build conversational skills. I hope that improving communication with these tools will support all of the stakeholders in our student's education.

Script

Pecha Kucha with Screencastify

Self Evaluation Part 1    Part 2

Turkle and Wesch

In reading these two articles I felt like they were both discussing the current state of human interconnectedness. Turkle focused more on the individual and how media, and smartphones, in particular, can connect people on a large scale but also make us more disconnected and lonely in our real lives. While Wesch focused more on the educational implications of how we use technology and grouping and also how we can take what is happening in our classrooms and expand it to how it affects people on a global scale.


I felt like conversations were at the center of both of their messages. In order for people to communicate effectively, there needs to be a balance between face to face conversations for sharing ideas and using technology with a purpose. People need to learn conversational skills such as, how to introduce themselves and start a conversation, how to respectfully disagree, and how to share what we are feeling, which are all part of our social-emotional health. Additionally, these are skills used in both the real world and the classroom when we collaborate. We also need to be aware of how and why we are using technology. There is definitely a need for people to "unplug" and learn to limit the tech use as Turkle points out but there is also a need for us to learn how technology can support connectedness and drive social change. I think Wesch was using technology as a way to take people's ideas and turn them into action, as a way to give students power and make their learning more significant.

I see them as allies because they are both arguing for people to be less alone and in their own bubble and more connected to the world around them. They just take different approaches. Turkle is talking more about unplugging and connecting to family and friends, while Wesch is talking about using collaboration and technology with a purpose to teach people how to connect.

Text Overview

Text Overview

Maker Space: Gender/Power

We started our project thinking mainly about gender roles/norms, but as we were working our idea evolved into more of a power relationship. Using the green cup we are showing someone who feels hurt. The pins in them represent the challenges they've faced and the pain they feel in their society. They also have bigger eyes to show that they are observant. They also have multiple arms to show that they are a multi-tasker and overwhelmed. Their heart is "on their sleeve" to show that they do have emotion, but their mouth is taped shut because they cannot share how they really feel. We added the netting to show that people who feel hurt or powerless often wear a "mask" to hide their emotions. Finally, their "world" feels limited.

In contrast, the second character in the background is the powerful person. They have legs because they are able to stand on their own and feel like they have more freedom and are smiling because they are not "masking" their emotions.

Looking for the Girls

I was drawn to this chapter of the book "Looking for the Girls" because I work with young people who are navigating the transition from being children to becoming young men and women.  I worry when I see these young women who looked so young and innocent in the 5th grade allowing themselves to become sexualized, and changing their appearance to please other people in just a few short years. I know that the media has a huge impact on these girls sense of self-image and was interested to see what Andrea Brown-Thirston had to say about music videos influence on young people.

She begins by explaining the images she sees of black women in music videos, specifically R&B and hip-hop. She describes scantily clad women twerking and grinding in the background while men (and some women) sing degrading and sexual lyrics. She then goes on to describe the effects she sees this having on teens. On page 188 she describes a student "still looking for the girls in the DMX video" and says “I think he meant that the girls in the videos represent a lifestyle that blends money. Power, respect, material wealth, and beautiful women. This lifestyle does not just dominate music videos; much of the “curriculum” in mainstream media focuses on this lifestyle as the essence of the American dream.” (188) She continues to explain how the problem of promoting this lifestyle affects both boys and girls. She says that the dangerous part is “the basic message for African American young men was that money can buy you beautiful, sexy and seductive women.” (189) and that “Black girls may internalize these images and begin to accept the role of sex object.” (189) As we have discussed children needing to develop a critical lens for looking at media and film.

Brown-Thirston then proposes three ways to help counteract this effect on the young women of color in our communities. First to help young people develop their critical lens and ask them to question what they see in the media and if it is positive and realistic. Secondly, to recognize the power these images have and present them with other ways, and finally to recognize the impact that parents, teachers and mentors have and to intentionally guide them to show them that "our confidence comes from who we are rather than what we have." (190)

Finally, to reflect a different perspective I found an article where Cardi B pushes back against the idea that female musicians perpetuate this problem, and that instead, they are showing they are empowered by making their own decisions about their bodies and how they present themselves.

Imagine if we treated men the same way in music videos...

Easel.ly Tutorial

Tech Tool: Easel.ly - an online program to create colorful, personalized posters, infographics,
comparisons, and flowcharts!

Quick Facts: 

• Free version, with limited (10) but a good variety of choices for templates and

backgrounds

• Can upgrade to “Pro” for 1 annual payment of $48
• Under the “Getting Started” tab they have a blog with great tips! There are also

suggestions for classroom infographics and how to have students create them in class.

• Easy to use!!

Tutorial: 

1. Go to www.easel.ly 
2. Login with your Google account or email and password
3. In the “My Visuals” screen, which opens automatically, click on blank template box.
4. Across the top of the screen you will see options such as Templates, Objects, Media,

Backgrounds, etc.

5. I would begin by choosing a template to work with, but you can also create your own.

6. After you choose a template you can choose the background (if you want to change
it) and then you can begin adding your text and data.

Classroom Ideas: 

• Timelines
• Plot Map/Sequencing
• Identify areas on a world map (Biomes, Where are we from?, Natural Resources, etc)
• Compare and Contrast
• Before and After
• Flowchart for steps to solve a problem
• Student Presentations

Disney Myths

 

Being a child in the '80s and '90s I grew up watching many Disney movies and cartoons. I remember when Aladdin, The Lion King, and Pocahontas each came out and how excited we were to go see them in the theatre. My favorite princesses were Cinderella and Ariel from the Little Mermaid. Although I never felt like I was hugely influenced by this media, now as an adult I think I bought into the idea of a "happily ever after". As if there was some event, not necessarily a marriage, but some rite of passage like graduating or getting your first "real" job or buying a house where you suddenly just became an adult and things just got easier after that. I am also struck by how often I catch myself rethinking the gender roles that I grew up thinking were normal.

It wasn't until I was in high school that I was even aware that there might be underlying messages or lessons in any of these films. Although I have since learned about some of the dangerous messages that cartoons and animated films can have, Christensen's chapter helped me to think about it in a way that I had not considered. On page 176 she says, "Children's cartoons, movies, and literature are perhaps the most influential genre "read." Young people, unprotected by any intellectual armor, hear or watch these stories again and again, often from the warmth of their mothers' or fathers' laps." I don't often think of media, in the same way, I think of literature, but for little ones, especially those who do not read on their own Disney and other animations are often their primary source of entertainment, and hence observation, besides their family. This makes them much more influential than I had originally thought, especially when their family is supporting that message by making it feel safe.

In rewatching Frozen I was pleased to see that there was a more progressive take on the gender roles. Although some of the more traditional prince/princess conventions are present both male and female characters also take on non-traditional characteristics. For example, Anna being outspoken and adventurous, whereas Kristoff is more of a social outcast and humble character compared to a traditional prince. I also liked that the "true love" in this movie was not the traditional heterosexual romantic love. Although that was still a part of the movie, it was not what "saved" either Elsa or Anna. Another site I found that supports this opinion is called gender norms thaw in Disney's Frozen.