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Speaker: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Matt Rhoads: Today, we're going to be talking about six instructional strategies to integrate with EdTech for any classroom setting. And I'm here with Janelle McLaughlin and Shannon Moore, and I'm Dr. Matt Rhoads. We're going to introduce ourselves and then really jump into this. So here we go.

And I'm a tech trainer and EdTech integrationist for the Consortium of Education to Career Network of North San Diego County. We have six adult schools within our consortium. Additionally, I work at San Diego State University and Concordia University Irvine, working with new teacher candidates as well as doctoral students. And I hope that you can follow me on my social media at MattRhodes1990 and check out my website.

Janelle McLaughlin: Good morning, everybody. I'm Janelle. I'm actually coming to you from Indiana, so it's good afternoon from my state. I'm an education consultant and previous teacher, although I say I'm still teaching, I'm just teaching adults. So I work with educators across our country, and am also a speaker and author. So happy to be here. There's my website and my Twitter, and I always love connecting with new people.

Shannon Moore: Hey, everybody. Shannon Moore. I am in central California. I'm a teacher on special assignment in our HRD department in Visalia Unified School District. So I work primarily with new teachers and their mentors as they're moving through the induction process.

We're kind of a "support all teachers" kind of department. And so love what we do. Excited to see you guys here today. And really, our next activity really is dependent upon you all and your cameras. So if you wouldn't mind turning your cameras on for a minute. If not, we'll go ahead and give you an alternate kind of way to participate.

So what we'd like to do is, really, it's all about who is in our room, right? Because we can't really continue with this content unless we understand a little bit about who is in our room. And so what we're asking you guys to do, if you're comfortable, is to change your virtual background to a scene that means something to you or captures your mood.

If you are like, you know what, my computer is not allowing me to do that, that is fine too. Do us a favor and go to Google and search an image or a GIF and just add it to the chat for us. What is a virtual background-- or an image, rather-- that supports something you're about, you're interested in, or captures your mood?

So the way that you do that is, if you go ahead and hover over the stop video icon at the bottom of your Zoom screen, you'll see a little carrot top pointing up. You'll click that carrot top. It'll go ahead and direct you to Choose Virtual Background. And from there, you can choose one that's already preloaded, or you can go find an image on your desktop or your computer that represents. So we have Will in space. Love it, Will. Jayme, your background is so fun-- so much fun. Janet, we have you at the Golden Gate Bridge. That's awesome. Janelle's living in the beach, which is always fantastic.

Blanca, I love the virtual filter you've added-- or the video filter with all the happy faces. Matt looks like he's in the mountains. It's OK, Patricia. Totally fine. Laura, we got you in a library, I'm guessing. And so if anybody's comfortable at this point, if you'd like to go ahead and wouldn't mind unmuting and just kind of share a little bit about what your virtual background or video filter means to you, we would love to hear it.

Laura Buhl: I can share that--

Shannon Moore: Thank you, Laura.

Laura Buhl: The library is-- this is actually the Stockholm city library. It's a very famous rotunda they have. And I had the privilege of living there, in Stockholm, briefly. So it's really meaningful to me. I love libraries and reading.

Shannon Moore: Yeah, I feel you. Libraries are the absolute best. It's just something about the smell, right? That smell takes you to a place that just warms your heart. Thank you for sharing, Laura. That's awesome. Anybody else want to share what their video background or image or filter-- Jamie, thank you.

Jayme Adelson-goldstein: Sure. I put as many things that I love in the background. So I've got hummingbird, and a raccoon, and plants, and then I'm lighthearted learning, so that's why it's "laugh and learn" on the pillow.

Shannon Moore: That's wonderful. Thank you so much. Raccoons, huh? You like raccoons? What is it about raccoons that make your heart happy?

Jayme Adelson-goldstein: Well, they used to-- my mom and dad lived in Oregon, and they would come and feed it the dog kibble. And they were just-- I love their little hands. I know people consider them to be pests, but I just think they're adorable.

Shannon Moore: I think they're cute too. Thanks for sharing. Anybody else?

Blanca Soto: I'll go.

Shannon Moore: OK, thank you, Blanca, and then we'll shoot over to Lois.

Blanca Soto: OK, well, I probably should have put a rainy day background. I live in central California, and it's been so dry even though it's not even spring yet. But it's raining today, so that is fantastic. So it makes me happy.

Shannon Moore: Yeah, absolutely. What part of central California?

Blanca Soto: Wasco.

Shannon Moore: Oh, cool, so not far. Not far from me. Right on. Thank you. Lois, what about you?

Lois Rhodes: Oh, very simply, I just love gardening. But most of the time, it seems to be a state of weeds. Notice the background there. It's all over the place. But it delights me. And being here for all of this training is just like that. You've got to pick the bouquet-- in this case, this crazy little thing that's on my head. You pick what enriches, enhances, and delights your life.

And then some of those things in the background, what seems like weeds right now becomes-- I can navigate later, and I'll be able to understand how to use that. So I want to thank you for doing these presentations. And I just like to hide behind not having the video on, so I'll see you--

Shannon Moore: That's fine. That's fine. Thank you guys so much for those of you guys that took the time to turn your video on and play along with us. We really appreciate it. You know how it is. Like, it's a lot. It's nice to see people's faces. So we'll leave that up to you. We're all adults. If you'd like to leave your video on, by all means. If not, that's fine too. Thank you so much. So I'm going to go ahead and pass it over to my friend Matt. Again, I'll pop the slide deck-- today's slide deck in the chat. So if you want to grab that, you can kind of follow along and click on the clickable links that exist. Thank you.

Matt Rhoads: That was all fantastic. Seeing everyone's backdrop just shows kind of how everyone's mood is or what they're proud of. It's a good social/emotional learning icebreaker to start your lessons, if they're synchronous, online, or you can even do it in person with Google Slides. I'm going to talk a little bit about a strategy that you can do that later on in our presentation today.

But, really we got together-- Shannon, Janelle, and I-- just under this idea and philosophy that really, as a result of the last couple of years, the Pandora's box has been opened, and instruction has no boundaries. And that's our philosophy. And our goal is to create a number of strategies that can be utilized in any sort of educational setting, whether you're in-person, online, in a blended-type instructional model. Our goal is to develop strategies that can go align with a lot of various tools to amplify student learning.

And we are also in the works of creating a toolkit in the form of a book where we share all of these various strategies that can be used in any sort of educational setting. And our goal is to have research-driven and teacher-driven strategies that can be utilized in any of these instructional settings, because we feel like that's the future.

And specifically, for higher education and adult education, we want to provide choices for our students. And I think this all rests under the equity argument, that you want to provide these choices for our students to meet our students where they're at, especially as adult learners.

And we feel that these strategies can help teachers in our consortium, whether it's an adult education or within K-12 or higher ed, because we want to provide our choices to students for these equitable learning environments. So I'm going to have it move over to our first strategy, concept mapping. And Shannon, take us away.

Shannon Moore: Thanks so much, Matt. And one last thing before we move into all of these. So the way that we've structured today's kind of presentation, we've taken elements from each of the chapters. Matt mentioned we were writing a book, putting these tools into a book. And today is not a pitch for us to, like-- buy our book. That's not our point. Our point today, though, is to support everybody with some concrete tools that would be effective in various instructional areas across the classroom. So each of these concepts or these ideas are presented in each individual chapter. So we'll kind of go through it in that way.

Thank you, Jill. Thank you for that. We'll go ahead and take that note. So first and foremost, we're talking about engagement. Now, engagement is one of those things that, you Google that and there's 1,000 things that come up. How do I engage my students? And why are students not engaged is probably what you're going to see lately with the pandemic education.

But what we've striven to do is, we really have tried to incorporate a bunch of different engagement structures that would work in both in-person, virtual, blended. But one in particular that has really proven to be effective is the idea of concept mapping. And concept maps, essentially, in a nutshell, they are visual representations of information.

If you wouldn't mind, since we can't really see our faces, if you'd go ahead and open the chat and maybe just give us some insight. Do you use concept mapping in working with the students that you work with or the educators that you work with? Have concept maps been a thing that you are familiar with? Just pop it in the chat like yes, no, maybe I have, I need to know more information. And we'll kind of go through and show you some examples.

But really, the goal of a concept map-- thank you, Kathleen. The goal of a concept map is, most often, they're used for study strategies, or a way to take higher-level concepts and break them into smaller, manageable pieces so that the individual who's using the concept map can consume that information. And it looks a bunch of different ways. There's no one right way to do it. We're going to show you a couple.

But the goal, really, is to take those big concepts, break them down into smaller concepts so they're manageable, but that also we can make meaningful connections to the concepts. In other words, knowing the big picture makes details more significant and easier to remember. So we're going to go ahead and dive in.

It looks like we have some-- those of us who have used concept maps, Jayme gave a really great example of pre-writing tasks to educators. KWL charts for sure. Comparison circles, pros and con columns. Thank you. So let's jump in and see what else we can do with these.

So like I mentioned, you have some options here. The goal here is to break large concepts into smaller ones. Sometimes, we use concept maps to identify how concepts relate. Oftentimes, I've worked with educators who've used concept maps for vocabulary development. And then there's that element of visual notetaking.

All of us, as educators, can agree that no student is the same, right? Everybody brings different skill sets, different abilities, different learning styles to the table. And what that means is us, as individuals, have to learn how-- as educators, we have to learn how to adapt to the individual learning style.

Now, for me, growing up, concept maps usually took the form of a brainstorm, where you wrote a topic in the middle and then you kind of branched out. And it helped kind of develop my writing, or it helped me understand concepts in science, whatever it may be. But it goes beyond just the typical web, the brainstorming web.

Oftentimes, I mentioned that vocabulary development. Frayer models are fantastic for vocabulary development. And some people think, oh, it's just so simple. But when we're talking with those who maybe have some language acquisition barriers, Frayer models are excellent, because it asks them to dive in and really think about the individual vocabulary word in a way that is meaningful to them-- to them, right? Thank you, Kathleen. Absolutely sparks a little bit.

The one that I am really playing with a lot with my educators that I'm supporting these days is this idea of visual notetaking-- or sketch noting, some people like to call it. And what it does is, it allows those students-- and I always give options, traditional notetaking or sketch noting. But I do explicitly teach both.

But it allows those students who can't quite wrap their mind around a concept using just words to fill in those blanks and make those connections using images. So it lends to a different part of the brain. It helps encourage or-- and it also empowers, because it gives those who are more visual learners the opportunity to exemplify their learning in a way that's a little bit different. So I'm a big fan of always providing a variety of techniques.

Some ways to use this-- or rather, some EdTech strategies that you can incorporate. I don't know if you've heard of wiser.me. wiser.me is a little different. It's not necessarily a concept mapping platform, but what it does include is a variety of already interactive digital worksheets. So if you're interested in concept mapping, you can go here, amongst other things, and you can identify already pre-made worksheets that have concept maps built into them so the students can then engage digitally rather than do it by hand.

I'm also a huge fan of using Pear Deck. Maybe you use Nearpod. It's an interactive slide deck kind of add-on. And you can integrate concept maps, like, say, I saw earlier a comparison/contrast, a Venn diagram. You can implement that in the back and the students can, in real time, add their notes to it. And you, as an educator, can see kind of the back side of it.

Control Alt Achieve. It's a wonderful blog. I'll go ahead and pop this in the chat so you guys can peruse. But Control Alt Achieve has 21 interactive Pear Deck templates that allows you to-- first and foremost, it shows you how to use Pear Deck. But then it allows you to kind of go through and see, here is, draw two things you already know about today's topic. So they have lead-ins. They have in the middle of the lesson. They have post-lesson kind of reflection pieces.

And you really could use these as an opportunity to frame some of the information that you're presenting to your students, or when you're working with educators. So I'm going to pop this blog in the chat for you guys to peruse. Pear Deck's a wonderful thing, and there's a lot of free templates.

The next one that I wanted to kind of show you is, some of us are Microsoft and not Google districts. And so Microsoft OneNote has wonderful options for not just taking notes via text or typing, but you can actually draw in OneNote. So if you're a Microsoft district, what I've done here, if you clicked on the OneNote logo, is you can see kind of the template of how to create drawings in OneNote, as well as a sample. Like, here, if you guys were going to go ahead and draw the water cycle, how they could go about doing that. So there's another example.

And the last piece I wanted to show you was Miro. And Miro is not one that's often heard of, but it's one that I've come across a few times. And the cool thing about Miro is, once you start an account-- it's a single sign-on with Google or Microsoft. Once you start your account, you have the opportunity then, instead of creating concept maps from just blank template or platform, you can go ahead and see all of the different types of brainstorming and ideation pieces that they offer. And it's a matter of just clicking and finding.

So here's a concept map. Here's another way, a mind map. You can see it, like, big topic to small. Just another resource for you guys to maybe think about when you're talking about concepts that are big.

The five whys is one that I always like to use. It allows you to really take a concept and really dig deeper. The five whys, if you're not familiar with it, the concept is, ask why five times. It helps them develop from like a general statement to a more specific idea. Thank you guys so much for the insight on that. So those are the couple pieces. I encourage you, again, please click our slide deck. There's a bunch of clickable links there, and you can access that for yourself.

Oh, one last thing. Miro allows you to make teams. So if you have a team of teachers that you're working together with, you guys could collectively create concept maps that you then could put in your team folder and everybody can access. So I'm going to go ahead and pass it on over to Matt.

Matt Rhoads: Yeah, so let's talk about another really great strategy that can be utilized in any sort of classroom today (Inaudible) This one is Jigsaw. Jigsaw can be used for so many different things, and it's a great way, also, to differentiate the instruction for your students. And what I've liked to do it a lot in the past is with reading comprehension, with multilingual learners. And I really enjoy doing it on Google Slides, but you can also do it on Jamboard, and you can do it also on Pear Deck and Nearpod in asynchronous mode.

And really, the instructional use is, you can focus on annotation, paraphrasing. You can have students read a passage together or read part of a passage together. You can front-load using Jigsaw, where you essentially provide two to four groups with different types of text or problems and then have them come together and have a discussion based on the themes that they found relating to the problems they were solving. Or maybe they're reading each part of a story or of a passage, and they can come together and develop those themes.

And it can also be opportunities for a mentor text dissection. So you can have various groups look at different parts of an essay or text, and then you can have them analyze it and then bring them together for further discussion. And really, one of the best ways that I like to do it, like I mentioned, is with-- yeah. Jigsaw I used often in ELA. So whenever I'm teaching English, so reading comprehension, paired reading, yeah, perfect. Yeah.

So what I would do is, I have, for example on my slide right here is the biggest pumpkin. And this is a news ELA. So I generally take a news ELA article and I make it different Lexile levels based on where my students are at. So this one is at 390L. And this is essentially for one of my lower group of readers.

And then group number-- if we go to the next group, it is slide number-- the Jigsaw 2, they're at 560 levels. So that's my medium group. And it's the same article that the other students are reading. And then so on for the third group. It's at the higher level. But they're reading the same article, and they're analyzing it as well.

Generally like to give them a paraphrase or an annotation guideline that they use. So as you can see, each group has a different Lexile. They're reading it. And this can be done in breakout rooms, whether you're online or if you're in person. You have them in groups in the class. Two to three students generally is what I like, or you could have them up to four.

And you can make as many of these groups as you want. And what I generally like to do is-- if, Shannon, you can click on that link right there-- oops. Yeah. So at the very end, I like to have, for reading comprehension, it's for each student to fill out a document like this. And they do a collaborative summary and then they look at various types of key details that they're able to get from the various groups and then come together and discuss it.

So it's a really, I think, easy strategy, the number of protocols that are required. So you can go to next slide. So I provide all of the steps here for you. And this is for online and in person. I talk about breakout rooms and groups that you can have and I provide each of these seven steps, as well as the video. It is a strategy that you can use, really, any sort of content.

So what I like to do is, I have, for example, when I get an assignment on, say, Google Classroom or Canvas, I have the assignment-- you can assign, on Canvas or Google Classroom, to various groups of students. So I create multiple assignments and I deliver them to the various groups of students. That way, it's easier.

Or, for example, you can create one slide deck and you can divide it up for each of the levels, like I did here. But you could have all of the levels there, but you don't say what the level is to the student. So you could say slide number 2 and 3 is going to be group number 1, and then slide number 4 and 5 is going to be group number 2, and so on. You can do that as well and just give them that link directly through-- if you're online, through Zoom, or whether you're delivering it on Canvas or Google Classroom, or sending it via, like, an email or whatnot.

So that's generally what I like to do for Jigsaw. And it's a really just fun, engaging-- and you can do it quite often. You can do it a lot for independent practice. And it can be used for assessments as well, by the way, if you want to do it in a team-based assessment. So there's a lot of different things that you can do here.

Shannon Moore: Jayme, did that answer your question, or did you want to maybe clarify and dive in deep?

Jayme Adelson-goldstein: I was thinking that maybe I should read through the instructions. I think I do it a little bit differently, but I was just curious about, with the summary, whether you-- because you want them to actually type on the Google Doc and not necessarily collaborate, because that moves the things around. That's what I was just--

Matt Rhoads: Generally, yeah. So if it's-- for each of those slides, slide decks, they're given one document, and that team is focused on that one document. And then everyone else has their own document. So each group has their own document that they're working on.

Jayme Adelson-goldstein: Got it.

Shannon Moore: And I've also done it where we've put the Google Doc document we've shown, we put it on a Google slide. So turn the slide 8 and 1/2 by 11 by going to File, Page Setup so it's like a normal paper. And each group then is hanging out in the same slide deck, but they get their own individual one.

Jayme Adelson-goldstein: And then they can have a gallery view of what-- a gallery walk of whatever is been going on, which is--

Shannon Moore: Oh, that's a great idea. Great idea. Thank you so much. All right. Oops. Next up, you get to hear from me again, and then we'll pass it over to Janelle. But this next one we're kind of looking at, we're moving into when we-- as we're talking about 21st-century skills-- and I heard that-- I saw that those were mentioned in the chat. One of those aspects is this idea of inquiry or critical thinking.

And so there are so many different ways we could approach inquiry and critical thinking in our classroom. And oftentimes, if I'm being honest, I think that is one of the areas that my students may struggle a little bit on because oftentimes, it does require them to get minimal instruction before they dive in and start to figure concepts out and ideas out, come to their own conclusions on their own, which for my students and the teachers that I work with, sometimes, that's a little scary, because we're so conditioned to get the right answer.

And so one way that we feel is a little less intimidating is this idea of a webquest or a digital scavenger hunt. You hear that-- and immediately, when I hear webquest, or even digital scavenger hunt, I'm brought back to when I was a kid and we would go on scavenger hunts, or we would do a scavenger hunts in the classroom. And that in and of itself gets me excited, because we get to be the detectives for the day. And so that's kind of what I have seen my students and the educators I work with kind of-- they've kind of jumped on that idea.

One of-- let me just preface this by saying one of the reasons why I think some individuals kind of shy away from using webquests or digital scavenger hunts in their classrooms is because it's a lot of work. But hopefully, by the end of this, you'll have a few more tools in your tool belt to be able to implement these without having to recreate the wheel.

So let's talk about these digital scavenger hunts. In a nutshell, you can see there that the point is, it requires students to follow a set of directions and procedures to ultimately gather evidence to solve a problem and then ultimately create a student work product that highlights their findings. So it's beyond just the read this, respond this way. This allows them to really investigate and dive in and use those research-based skills to take concepts, synthesize them, and then ultimately, come up with an understanding of the findings and the material. And hopefully, then, the next step would be for them to share out somehow.

Both strategies do involve the students kind of following-- it's a process. So the teacher has to choose the topic, and then they have to include elements to videos, photos, websites, podcasts that allow the students the resources and the materials so that they can dive deeply in and then ultimately kind of come to their own conclusions.

Here, this little graphic, you can see that there are a variety of ways to use webquests in class. In fact, if you googled webquests or digital scavenger hunt, educators across the world have been so kind to share so much information or different webquests they've created.

One of the reasons I love webquests so much, beyond the fact that it's entertaining and engaging, is it allows me to really-- when I really want to flip my classroom, so have students kind of investigate and dive in, they can either do it in class or before they come to class, depending on what your focus is or the objective is of the activity.

And then, say they do it outside of class and come to class with their findings, it allows then for the class to collaboratively engage with the product that the students have created and dive a little bit deeper from a variety of perspectives. If you do it in class and then send them home to create the web quest finding or the product.

It allows you as an educator to kind of guide them through that inquiry cycle. So when I start with webquests or digital scavenger hunts, I always start with doing the webquest and the scavenger hunt in class together, and then I send them out, and at home they create some sort of product, because I want to guide them through those steps first.

As we continue the class a little bit and we get further into the semester, I oftentimes will flip that and allow them to do the webquest at home and come to class with something or create the product in class the next day. There's so much power here, because it gives ownership to the students.

It allows the students to kind of use those higher-level order thinking skills to come up with an understanding, and then you as a teacher can support them. If your educators are using this, that is what I would encourage you to tell them, really, that that level of empowerment is high. High engagement, high level of empowerment.

So if you're going to create your own, if you want to get crazy and create your own-- also, let me know in the chat if you have created your own webquest. We love to see where we're at on different levels. There's this wonderful webquest structure that was created by this individual, last name Dodge. And he kind of goes through, these are the different parts of a webquest that you can use to guide you as you're creating your own.

For me, to be honest, it's a lot of time to create your own webquest, and I don't have a lot of time. I don't know if I'm alone in that, but a lot of time is not-- time is not a luxury for me. And so what I've done is, I've linked a couple different websites here. We have some science webquests.

Webquests in science are wonderful, because it kind of follows that similar like lab structure and asks them to dive in. And then this other piece, this website I found is a variety of web quests that have been created by college students for elementary-aged children.

So if you're teaching adults, potentially, who are going to go on and be an educator, or they're going to work in a field where they're going to have to support others, this is a great kind of resource for them to see what it could look like. These are the reasons we use webquests. Kind of talks about that.

I love them for preloading information as well. When you're jumping into a unit, if you want them to dive in to-- say I'm doing a unit on Shakespeare. I'm an English teacher by trade. I'm doing a unit on one of Shakespeare's plays and I want-- I don't want to spend a ton of class time just lecturing about the age of-- the Elizabethan era or whatever. I can have him do a webquest to figure that stuff out, and we could even turn it into a Jigsaw, like Matt talked about, where they then can turn that around and teach the class based on their integration.

This website here, questgarden.com, I'm going to show you just a little bit of what it is. It's kind of cool. So QuestGarden is a database where individuals have added webquests. So they collect webquests and they throw it up. So if you are saying, I'm going to do a webquest on angles, you can put in the free text search here "angles," press Enter, and you'll see all of these different webquests that exist for angles. And you can hit Back. And that could be angles in math. It looks like we have some for English, like media bias.

Additionally, the other cool thing about this is, you could really kind of search based on curriculum and grade level. And that gives you a matrix of webquests. So say you want to focus on professional skills, and specifically for adult learners. You would push search, and it would go ahead and give you this matrix that you could then use by clicking through and maybe even build units throughout the course of your experience-- or the student experience or the educator experience. So of course, it's going to take a while to load.

But my encouragement to you is, I know sometimes these can be scary, but I encourage you, we really are finding, in the age of pandemic education, as we are bridging both in-person and virtual learning, that giving over some ownership to learning really does reinforce student learning in and of itself. So don't be afraid to give students something and hope for the best, and then you can redirect along the way. But it also will tell us a lot about who the students are and what they can do.

So as you can see, you have your grade/content areas. All of these different webquests, 1 to 49, give you some ideas of how you could use them. So that is webquests. And if you're going to create your own, Google Sites is a great resource for that, because you can just create a simple Google site to house all of the different-- the task and all of those kind of resources that they would use to complete the webquest.

So if you have questions at all, obviously, please, don't hesitate to pop those in the chat as we're speaking. With that being said, thank you for your comment, Jayme. Absolutely. I'm going to pass it over again, I guess, to Matt, and then we'll go to Janelle. I lied. I'm sorry.

Matt Rhoads: So now we're going to talk about photo essaying. What I really like about this strategy is that we kind of already did a little bit of a preview of that, the beginning for that intro for that SEL activity. So essentially, what you can do, photo essay, is it allows students to utilize and illustrate using text, graphics, GIFs, even videos to create a snapshot of what they're learning. You could even utilize photo essay as a TikTok. And there's a lot of different tools that you can do it on.

So I like to do it for instructional uses, reformative, and some of the assessment. You can do this for Jigsaw. You can do it to activate prior knowledge at the beginning of a lesson. You can do it for metacognition and reflection, and then also social/emotional learning. And I generally like to do it-- the easiest way for me, I think, to deploy it is on Google Slides. You create a slideshow with everyone on it-- I'm going to pop it in that link right there if you want to check it out.

And I made this slide editable for everyone to access if they'd like. Unfortunately, the prompt-- this is about a story that we would read in class, "This One Summer." and I would just say create a photo essay talking about a character or event or a theme of the story. And I chose, on my slide, specifically, the mentor text. And I would use that as the first example there.

So yes, I love the squirrel. And if you read the story, it's a story about having fun and leisure, but a lot of family drama takes place on that vacation in the summer. So I try to illustrate that in that photo there. But generally, I like to create just a simple slide deck on Google Slides, and then sharing it to the class, everyone gets a slide.

So if you notice if you scroll down, Shannon, on slide number 4, everyone has a slide name. I tell the students, hey, go click on your slide after I give you the link, whether I'm sending it on Zoom, or it's on Google Classroom, or on Canvas. And the student goes to it and then they complete the task there. And what I like to do with it after, once the photo essays are done-- and they could be done in pairs too-- is for there to be a digital gallery walk. And then that can go into further discussion and move into the next part of our lesson.

So it's a really fun strategy to utilize. And then Janet, move on to the next slide and describe the steps that I like to do with the photo essay. And it's just something that really is fun and engaging for students, and it's a great way for students to summarize what they're learning about or summarize how they're feeling.

And in the world that we live in, having that snapshot of visuals, text, and video, that's a great way for students to illustrate whether they are understanding something or not. And it's a great way for you to assess students. Yep. I love that, yeah. Creativity and conciseness. All righty. Well, let's move on to the next piece, and we'll move on to Janelle.

Janelle McLaughlin: You'll probably see a trend. And a lot of what we're talking about today is focusing on those-- what most people would call 21st-century skills. And thank you, Jayme. Choice boards are of my very favorite things too, which is why I chose to get to talk about them. I think in choice boards, though, we can foster even more than just creativity and innovation, which is what we were focusing on today.

And just as Shannon and Matt were talking, I jotted down how choice was obvious or present in the strategies they talked about before. Like in webquests, choice was brought in by what product they chose to create to demonstrate their learning. Shannon mentioned that.

There's lots of choice in concept maps if you are allowing your learners to choose what kind of concept map fits their learning style best. Mine totally would be the brainstorming webs, just like, that's how I think. I'm not good at sketch noting. I would never choose that. I do it every once in a while because I think it's good to challenge and stretch, but I definitely think that offering choice is good, because it's tapping into different types of learning.

And then in Jigsaw, you can even offer the resources that students are reading on a choice board as well if you weren't going by reading level. So obviously, if we're categorizing by reading level, we want our learners to read at the level that is best for them. But if it's not, and it's on topic or on sections, then you could also offer choice there.

So anyway, choice boards are also called learning menus. Sometimes, people call them think-tac-toes. So you maybe have heard them referred to different ways-- or different titles. But they're really great for differentiating learning. Plus, it gives students choice, which increases their ownership.

So another thing that is common in all of the strategies and resources that we've shared today is that we really focus on the learner, and we want everything to be as student-driven as possible. And I remember somebody writing in the chat about scaffolding the learning. And that's so important when we're trying to empower our students to be more student-driven, because they really haven't had that opportunity, often, in their learning careers. So sometimes, we have to scaffold more than others to have them be comfortable with taking over.

So on the choice boards, it encourages our students to engage in that activity. It will require them to explore, synthesize, or apply important content, depending on how we design those. I already said this, but any time we increase choice, we're going to increase engagement and ownership. So I like to use choice boards when we're introducing new content to preload that knowledge. At the end of something to review the content, choice boards are great for that.

One of the teachers I've worked with, one of my favorite ones to see was the plainest, most boring-looking choice board I've ever seen, but I also thought it was one of the most applicable. And she just took a Google Doc, she turned at landscape position, and it was just full of grids-- I think maybe 15 to 20 squares on there.

And what she did was color-code the background of each square to be either blue, yellow, or white. And it was at the end of a math unit. And if it was yellow, it was optional, like, reteaching. The students could access the resources or the problems in that box. If they weren't quite sure on it-- on the topic concept-- and they wanted a little extra practice.

The blues were practice problems that everyone had to do. And the white was, I think, access just to notes. I can't remember exactly what the white, but there was only one color that they had to do. And that's what she used as a check to make sure everybody was ready for the assessment, was just the blue ones that they were doing.

So anyway, lots of different uses for them. I'm going to show you a couple examples too. But my favorite part about them is to differentiate. Even if you're not differentiating by level, you're differentiating by content and learning styles. So to empower and motivate our students, we can provide them with those choices as they complete activities and tasks within the classroom.

So these are two of my favorites. The one is-- you can see why some people might call it a think-tac-toe. The directions are actually cut off at the top, but this particular teacher had 20 points assigned to every box, and her students had to accumulate 100 points in a week's time. This was completely virtual, but she gave them options on if they wanted to do things virtually or paper/pencil. And she even gave them options on how they were turning those in if they didn't want everything to be digital.

So in other instances, when people use these tic-tac-toe choice boards, teachers might say you've got to get just three in a row. So then how you-- yeah, the color can be an issue. I like the symbols idea. That's great, Jayme. So this one, I'm not sure why she color-coded it, if it had any kind of reasoning in the one that's on the example here.

And then the other one is completely split between the four C's So in this one, the students had to choose one from the communication column, one from collaboration, one critical thinking, and one creativity. So both of these are actually from shakeuplearning.com. That's a fantastic resource.

If you've never gone to that website, I will forewarn you that it's a bit overwhelming. It's super text- and graphic-heavy. So what I like to use is the search bar at the top. So if you go to shakeuplearning.com and search in the search bar just "choice boards" or "learning menus," you'll find a lot of templates there available.

Because just similar to the webquests, I don't like the design part of it because I don't have the time. So if I can find one that somebody has already designed and delete out content and put in my own, then I'm happy. Thanks, Shannon.

And then Pinterest also. Similar in the search. If you just go to Pinterest and search "choice boards" or "learning menus," you'll find a lot that are already created, and you'll also find templates. Again, you can make your own, just like my math teacher friend that I coached. She just made her own with a plain Google Doc. And that wouldn't have taken a lot of time to create other than filling in all of those boxes. But if you want it to look pretty, find one that's already done, unless that's just a way that you like to spend your free time. Go for it.

The best tools, I think, are the easiest-- Google Docs, Google Slides, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint. Those would all be super simple if you were creating your own. If you are doing searches, those are probably the platforms you're going to find them already created in, which makes it easy to create and easy to share with your students.

So our last one that we're going to talk about kind of summarizes everything else. And actually, in our book, this is the chapter we start with, but we wanted to finish with it today. A lot of us, when we had to transition during COVID, transitioned from an in-person situation to a virtual or digital classroom situation.

And we did it on such a fly that we didn't think through that digital classroom routines are just as important as in-person classroom routines, and that we actually have to explicitly teach them. And it doesn't matter if we're teaching kindergartners or if we're teaching 45-year-olds. We still have to go through what those classroom routines are.

So making sure that we establish norms and what it looks like regardless of the environment is really important. And part of digital classroom routines is talking about digital citizenship. So we want to make sure that our learners are good citizens, whether it's in a digital environment or in an in-person environment. And there's so much that has been produced and developed and reiterated on over the last, gosh, 20 years for digital citizenship that the resources out there are really good and really powerful. So you don't have to feel like you have to recreate those.

But I do want to highlight what all digital citizenship includes. And if you go to digcit.us, or ISTE also has their digital citizenship standards, you'll find this huge umbrella. And not to be overwhelmed by that, but to think about how that each one of those naturally integrates into what you're teaching and when you're teaching it.

So some things that digital citizenship includes is using technology to make your community better, engaging respectfully online with people who have different beliefs than you-- sometimes I think adults need more of that teaching than children when you go on social media and look at some of those. Using technology to make your voice heard by public leaders and shape public policy, and then determining the validity of online sources of information.