Tech tips from teachers for teachers

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Are you a pre-service teacher about to do your practicum? Or are you a graduate teacher about to enter the profession? Wondering how to effectively use technology as a teacher and with your students, in a way that enhances your wellbeing?

I recently presented at a pre-service teachers conference at University of Technology, Sydney on using technology effectively in the classroom. Here are the highlights of the session. These tips are targeted at pre-service teachers about to go on their practicums and graduate teachers about to enter the classroom.

Google or Microsoft? (or Canvas or everything?)

Many schools will use mainly Google or Microsoft. For Google, this may mean all classes use Google Classroom and the apps that come with Google Workspace for Education such as Google Docs and Google Slides. For Microsoft, this may mean all classes use Microsoft Teams and OneNote Class Notebook. Other schools will use Canvas. Some schools will use a mixture of everything. Before you start teaching at your new school, ask which platforms the students you will be teaching will mostly use so you can become familiar with them. Ask to be added to other teachers’ Google Classrooms and Microsoft Teams (same year level if possible and same subject) so you can see what they’re doing with their classes. My school uses Google Classroom with students and I always add beginning teachers to my Google Classrooms when they ask. That way, they can reuse my posts on their Google Classrooms as a way to support them to develop their craft. For more details on how I use Google Classroom, see this post.

Get WiFi access BEFORE your practicum

This tip is mainly for pre-service teachers doing practicums in a NSW public school. When you first contact your supervising teacher or in your pre-practicum, ask them how to get a NSW Department of Education account for pre-service teachers so you can log into the WiFi. You are not suppose to ask others to log on for you and you don’t want to be using your mobile phone hotspot for your whole practicum. GET THIS ORGANISED BEFORE YOU START YOUR PRAC!

Digital wellbeing

Many teachers (including me) have work apps like Outlook, Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams and Sentral on our personal phones and tablets where everything is synced across. This can be very convenient (For example, I usually have my laptop connected to the interactive panel to display the lesson starter activity and I mark the roll on my phone.).However, this also means your work can slowly creep into your personal life and you find yourself responding to every ‘ping’ from your work apps on your personal devices. Everyone has a different way of working and you have to find out what works for you while respecting your colleagues’ personal time and the school systems policies. Here are some considerations:

  • Learn how to schedule send emails (and Teams chat messages) so if you want to write a message in the evening after work hours because it is fresh in your mind, you can have the message land in your colleagues’ emails or Teams chat during work hours. This means you can work the way you want and respect others’ personal time. If you are a pre-service teacher, ask your supervising teacher how they work outside of school hours so everyone has a shared understanding of contact outside school hours.
  • Set expectations for your students. This is particularly relevant for high school. Teenagers often do school work in the evenings, at night (sometimes in the early hours of the morning) and on weekends. I tell my students they can post on Google Classroom at any time, but I will look at their posts and respond on Monday to Friday between 8am and 5pm. I have separate expectations in the school holiday period, depending on the circumstances. If you are a pre-service teacher, ask your supervising teacher what their expectations are for the classes you are taking.
  • If you choose to have work apps on your personal phone, know the privacy implications for the relevant school system. Move these work apps to the last screen of your phone so they’re not immediately visible and available for you to tap when you unlock your phone. Explore features like Focus mode, Personal mode and Do Not Disturb mode to see if and how they work for you.

Tips from teachers for teachers

And finally here are the tips from teachers, deputy principals and principals (who I highly respect and are known for their educational technology expertise and innovations) specifically for pre-service teachers and beginning teachers. 🙂 A big thank you to every one of them for sharing their advice.

Goal setting for students: how to use OneNote Class Notebook to set students up for success

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Every student I’ve worked with wants to do well at school. But what does this look like for each student and how do they get there? This is where goal setting can be very powerful.

Goal setting is a well-known strategy to improve student motivation, resilience and academic achievement. Doing a Google Search will bring up many articles supporting this. Some of my favourite ones are from Edutopia and What Works Best from the NSW Department of Education.

But what does goal setting look like in a classroom and how can it be implemented sustainably and consistently? In this post, I will share what has worked (and what hasn’t worked) for me in leading the implementation of goal setting for over 200 students and involving 20 teachers. I have packaged the latest collection of promising practices into a OneNote notebook, which teachers and download and customise.

So, these are the strategies, practices and resources that have worked for me (all are in the OneNote notebook).

Supporting students to help students set SMART goals

S = specific
M = measurable
A = achievable
R = realistic
T = time-bound

SMART provided a framework for students to set personalised goals that are personal, aspirational and realistic. SMART also reduces the number of well-intentioned goals where progress and success are difficult to measure, such as “try harder in maths”, “get better grades” and “concentrate more in class”. Some videos I’ve found useful in explaining SMART goals to students are Setting Goals from BrainPOP and  How to write a SMART goal from Khan Academy and

But it isn’t enough to know what SMART goals are. I found students needed a comprehensive scaffold, particularly in:

Breaking down goals into smaller mini goals

I included this in the ‘specific’ section of SMART. When students have identified a goal, they are guided to identify three smaller steps to achieve the goal. This was important for students to track and assess their progress. The smaller goals not only help students to work towards their goals but also allow them to see success and stay motivated when they have achieved a smaller goal.

Identifying barriers and ways to overcome them

This part was optional for my students but for those who did it, it allowed them to see if their original goal was realistic for them and/or identify ways to remove known obstacles that may stop them from achieving their goal.

Sharing progress and accomplishments with family

My prior attempts with goal setting have largely involved it being a very personal experience for the student. Students completed a goal setting resource and at the end of the semester, they reflected on whether they had achieved their goal.

There was nothing wrong with the above approach, but to make the goal setting process more meaningful, I now have students write a personal reflection comment that goes onto their end-of-semester academic report. Students know the intended audience of the comment is themselves and their parents/carers. The personal reflection comment acts as a culminating product that nicely wraps up a yearly goal setting process.

And now to tie all the promising practices into one delivery mechanism – OneNote Class Notebook.

Why OneNote is the best tech tool for goal setting

I have used hardcopy booklets, Google Doc, Google Slides and Google Forms to deliver goal setting programs. It is OneNote Class Notebook that has been the most effective in delivering a responsive goal setting program, particularly for a large group of students that is being delivered by a large number of teachers. How does OneNote Class Notebook do this?

  • Supporting consistent implementation by offering a baseline resource package that can be used as is but has the flexibility to be customisable. This means teachers who are very new to goal setting have a resource they can take straight to their class and the teachers who are more experienced with goal setting can modify the resource to suit their needs and their students’ needs.
  • Providing ease of monitoring – OneNote Class Notebook allows the teachers who are leading the program to see the progress of every student in every class. This means we didn’t have to wait for scheduled meetings and self-reporting processes to identify which students/classes/teachers may need additional support. We can see how everyone is going anytime and be proactive in providing support.
  • Allowing ongoing, responsive adjustments – This is where OneNote Class Notebook has outshined the other tools. With hardcopy resources and Google Workspace apps, once the resource has been printed/distributed, it is overly complex to adjust it. With OneNote Class Notebook, resources can be distributed one page at a time so future resources can be prepared, adjusted based on feedback if needed and distributed when a student or class is ready. OneNote Class Notebook is like a digital binder so every page that is distributed still feels like and appears to be a cohesive package. It’s not a bunch of separate Google Doc files, a bunch of different Google Classroom assignment posts or a bundle of hardcopy papers.

The teachers leading the goal setting program created instructional videos on the technical aspects of OneNote Class Notebook such as how students get to their OneNote notebook and the structure of their OneNote notebook. This meant teachers who are not confident with OneNote could use the instructional video to guide their students. We also provided in-class team teaching for teachers who requested it.

The goal setting OneNote package

Download the Goal Setting OneNote notebook for your students. See here for more information on how to use OneNote Class Notebook to further customise the notebook and distribute it to your students. If you do use the resource, I would love to hear your feedback.

Acknowledgements

Using chat cards to establish learning routines and behaviour expectations

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Establishing clear learning routines and behaviour expectations is fundamental for maintaining an effective classroom environment. In a previous article, I discussed my approach to setting routines and expectations for my year 7 class. At the beginning of each term, I find it valuable to review these with the students to ensure a shared understanding of how our class operates, ultimately optimizing learning time. In the past, I utilised slides, videos, and fill-in-the-blank sheets for this purpose. However, to inject more engagement and interactivity into the process, I have started to use chat cards.

How chat cards can enhance engagement

Each chat card presents a typical scenario and prompts students to identify the appropriate actions. By encouraging student conversations, you can assess their understanding of the established routines. Rather than straightforwardly informing students of the routines, the chat cards prompt them to actively recall and discuss possible responses, enabling you to address any misunderstandings effectively.

For instance, a card might ask about the three steps students should follow upon entering the classroom.

A screenshot of a chat card. The card reads, "When you walk into the classroom at the start of a lesson, what are the 3 things you need to do?"

My class’s routine is as follows: 1. Go to your assigned seat. 2. Take out the necessary equipment. 3. Begin the lesson starter activity. This is a critical part of the lesson routine. It’s important it is consolidated at the start of each term.

Another card asks how a student can determine the required equipment for the lesson. In my lessons, students are expected to look at the whiteboard for this information.

A screenshot of a chat card, which reads, "You are in the classroom. How do you find out what equipment to take out for the lesson?"

In addition to reinforcing routines, some cards highlight complex situations where students may need support to know how to respond in a respectful manner.

A screenshot of a chat card that reads, "Another student is speaking to the whole class. You have realised they made a mistake. What should you do to politely let them know?"

How to use chat cards in the classroom

I find it effective to utilize these cards by organizing students into groups of 3 to 4, designating a reader and scribe within each group. The cards can also be integrated into gallery walks, where students write their responses on post-it notes and place them under the respective chat cards. Alternatively, you can assign different chat cards to different groups and have each group role-play the scenarios in the chat cards. Although I typically introduce chat cards midway through the school year, they can be employed at the start to collectively establish routines and expectations with the class. The possibilities are endless; the key lies in customising the cards to align with critical aspects of your classroom routines and expectations.

Download the editable chat cards

Access the editable chat cards here to tailor them to your needs and the needs of your students.

Three zero-prep, tried and tested STEM activities for almost any class

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After teaching for almost 15 years, here are three STEM activities I have done many times that need zero (almost) preparation and use materials readily available in nearly every classroom. These activities can work from middle primary to middle secondary but can be adapted to suit younger and older learners. These activities work really well without worksheets so no photocopying is required. They also work indoors or outdoors. You can literally walk into a class with just yourself and run these activities. And best of all, students love them!

All of them can be used to explore concepts in science mathematics and technology such as:

  • Science – fair testing, investigation design, data processing and representation
  • Mathematics – data and representation of data
  • Technology – design process and coding

You can incorporate literacy activities such as writing procedures and recounts.

So whether you need a quick activity for your own class or you are covering someone else’s class in short notice and need something hands-on and engaging, check out these activities and add them to your toolkit of anywhere anytime lesson activities.

Note these activities need timers. I usually ask students to use the stopwatch/timer app on their mobile phones. However, if you are teaching younger students who wouldn’t have mobile phones or you are working in a school where students are not allowed to have phones in class, you can ask students to use the stopwatch/timer app on their laptops or go online and use Google Timer. You can also display Google Timer on the interactive classroom screen for the class to use.

Paper helicopters

Materials and equipment needed – paper, scissors, paper clips, timer

Paper helicopters are also known as rotocopters. An internet search for paper helicopters or rotocopters will generate lots of results. I particularly like this page, which has instructions, explanations and templates. If you can’t print the templates, you can ask students to draw their own templates. The video below also shows how to draw the templates.

Paper helicopters are great for teaching fair testing, average calculations and presenting data in tables and graphs. For some classes, I also like to link them to adaptations in seeds, particularly sycamore seeds like the video below.

Paper planes

Materials and equipment needed – paper, timer

Almost every student knows how to fold a paper plane, but instead of folding a plane that flies the furthest, have a competition to see who can fold a paper plane that has the longest flight time. This is a good option as it doesn’t need metre rulers or tape measures; just a phone timer (see the above note if your students do not have phones). I like to have students explore the Fold ‘N’ Fly website, which has a large range of paper plane designs with written and video instructions.

You can also show the class a short clip from the movie, Paper Planes, to introduce the activity.

Exercise and heart rate

Materials and equipment – timer

This is one of my favourite activities. It gets students moving and can be linked to many concepts, particularly in science. The idea is simple. Have students measure their resting heart rate, and do some kind of exercise from 5 to 10 minutes (I usually let the students choose star jumps, jogging on the spot, running around the oval, sit-ups, push-ups or another exercise they are comfortable with) and then measure their heart rate again. Data can be collated from the whole class. Discussions can be linked to so many concepts from respiration to athletic performance. See this website for more detailed instructions and videos.

If you have a bit more time and access to digital materials, you can have students create their own heart rate monitor and evaluate its effectiveness.

Using OneNote to be more organised as a teacher

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Being organised is essential in teaching. Every teacher has a teacher planner where you do your lesson plans, track student progress, monitor the progress of your goals, record professional learning notes, record meeting notes and much more.

I have never found a commercial teacher planner to suit my needs and over the last 5 years, I have created and refined my own teacher planner in OneNote. Here’s the structure of my OneNote digital planner.

Sections structure

I have a very straight forward section structure. For me this is the right amount of sections to stay organised and not be overwhelmed by too many sections. I have a section for:

  • Yearly organisation
  • Term 1
  • Term 2
  • Term 3
  • Notes for School 1
  • Notes for School 2
  • Meetings
  • Misc
Screenshot of OneNote digital planner section structure showing the sections listed above.

Yearly organisation section

This section has two pages – a cover page and a yearly calendar from NSW Education.

Image of teacher planner cover page
Image of yearly calendar

Term 1, 2, 3 and 4 sections

These sections have the same pages. Each section has a page for each school week. Each page has a table format for lesson plans for each day and period, a column for a daily to-do list and a column for tracking the progress long-term projects. For the daily to-do list, I use the To-Do tags in OneNote to check off a task when I finish it. Whatever I don’t get done, I cut and paste it to the next day or week.

I like having my lesson plans, to-do list and long-term projects presented on one page so I am not flicking back and forth between different pages, which I found I did not like with hardcopy planners.

School notes section

These sections hold notes for the two different schools I work at this year. For my main school, I have pages to track homework and classwork completion. I have created a custom tag to check off student work.

Meetings section

This section has been set up so the same meetings notes template is created each time a new page is added.

Why I prefer OneNote for my teacher planner

I have tried various hardcopy planners and digital apps for lesson planning, but have found OneNote to be the best. My main reasons are being able to:

  • Sync my planner across my Surface Pro, iPhone and iPad. This means I always have access to my planner in most situations.
  • Use digital ink with the Surface Pen and Apple Pencil, which is extremely useful for annotations.
  • Email pages in my OneNote to colleagues or students if I need to. This is particularly useful for meeting notes.

What kind of teacher planner do you use? I’d love to learn from teachers how they use a planner to stay organised.

Less school, more learning – Why we should have a 4-day school week

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Despite being well into the 21st century, schooling is still stuck in the 1900s, demanding consistency and conformity. Learning is driven by bells and timetables. School systems want learners to do the same thing, at the same time, in the same way.

If we’re to shift these issues in a child’s school career by 2040, we must transform the schooling system to adapt to the needs of learners and teachers.

  • Do Australian children have to spend so many hours at school?
  • Do teachers have to spend so many hours face-to-face teaching?
  • Does school have to be five days a week?
  • Can students have an opt-in day, so they only have to attend school for four days a week?

Check out my case for change for a four-day school week as part of Education 2040: the near future of schools series.

Teach writing by imploding a watermelon 🍉

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I have been imploding watermelons with rubber bands with my Year 7 science classes for over two years. The kids absolutely love the experiment. We work as a class to patiently place rubber bands onto a large watermelon one at a time and revel in being suddenly splashed by pieces of watermelon. Here is a video of our experiment. See The Big Watermelon Experiment for details on how to do the experiment.

@missaliceleung

Explode a watermelon with rubber bands #scienceteacher #teachersoftiktok #watermelon #scienceexperiment #middleschool #australia

♬ Cooking Time – Lux-Inspira

Imploding a watermelon with rubber bands is also a great way to teach how to write explanations in science. I like to use a cause-and-effect graphic organiser to teach students how to use forces to explain what happens in the watermelon implosion experiment. It’s a great opportunity to teach how to use scientific concepts to explain observations. After the graphic organiser, I like to use an explanation scaffold to support students to write an extended text that sequentially explains how rubber bands can implode a watermelon. In this activity, they use casual connectives, time connectives and rhetorical questions. It’s also a great way to embed any paragraph structures your school prefers like TEEL or PEEL.

Use the link below to download and adapt the writing scaffolds for your students.

watermelon-implosion-writing-scaffoldsDownload

If you have done the watermelon implosion and/or used the experiment as an opportunity to develop your students’ writing skills, please comment below to share your experience.

Get in, learn, get out – How to create classroom routines in 3 easy steps

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Effective classroom management is one of the key challenges in teaching. It can make or break a lesson. It can even determine whether a teacher chooses to stay in the profession. There are lots of books and resources on classroom management. All of them emphasise the importance of routines. However, many early career teachers I speak to often say it is difficult to know how to create routines that work for you as a teacher and your students. Where do you start? How many routines do you need? How detailed should they be? For this, I found the book, ‘Effective Classroom Management: A Teacher’s Guide’. The first chapter outlines the “four rules of classroom management”, which are:

  • Get them in
  • Get them out
  • Get on with it
  • Get on with them

Essentially, a teacher needs to have routines in place to get students into the classroom, get students out of the classroom, have students learn during the lesson and establish and maintain positive relationships. I’ve condensed these further to:

  • Get in
  • Learn
  • Get out

I frame my routines around these three core events. They happen in every lesson, every subject and every learning space. Hence, they act as a great framework to establish classroom routines. Below are examples of my year 7 quick guides to classroom expectations, which then inform my more detailed routines. The quick guides are more appropriate to display in the classroom as posters as they act as a summary to the routines.

I then break up the dot points in the quick guide into more detailed routines, which are explicitly taught through our school’s positive behaviour for learning processes. I like to go through the expectations and routines at the start of each term, even if I’ve had no classroom management issues with the class. My current Year 7 class is beautiful but I still like to re-establish our shared understanding of how our class works before issues arise.

See here for the Canva template I used to create the quick guide. You can make a copy and modify the text, title and Bitmoji to suit you and your students’ needs.

See here for a more detailed blog post on routines, expectations and classroom management, based on the book ‘Running the room‘.

3 ways to stay organised with Google Classroom

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This year I teach Year 7 maths, year 7 science and Year 12 chemistry in a large high school. Working in a large high school means that no one has their own classrooms. Homerooms are non-existent. My school has a fortnightly timetable cycle with each 50-minute lessons. I am in at least 10 different classrooms in a fortnight. This means every 50 minutes, I am setting up and packing up in a different classroom, utilising different audiovisual equipment and working with a different seating layout. Learning time can be easily wasted if I don’t have a system and a consistent routine for me and my students as we move from room to room. So here are three ways I use Google Classroom to make it easier for me and my students to stay organised and maximise learning time.

Every lesson and every detail are on Google Classroom
I post every lesson with every worksheet, slide deck, website, video and anything else I use for a lesson is on Google Classroom. This includes the lesson’s learning intention and success criteria for my Year 7 classes, and the syllabus content points for my Year 12 chemistry class. This means I can walk into any classroom, connect my laptop to the display screen and my entire lesson and everything I need is ready to go. I don’t need to waste time looking for files in File Explorer or my Google Drive. Everything is already in the lesson post on Google Classroom. This maximises learning time as it allows a more seamless lesson flow. It also minimises classroom management issues and cuts down on transition points.

At my school, every student has their own device, so I encourage my students to have the same resources opened on their device as I am going through them on the classroom display screen. This is very helpful for students who may have difficulty seeing the screen clearly for a variety of reasons. Students can also work at their own pace if we are making notes from slides that I’m using so the students who work faster can move on and the students who need more time can take more time.

Having every lesson posted on Google Classroom, lesson by lesson, also makes registrations so much easier.

A lesson post on Google Classroom for my Year 7 class
A lesson post on Google Classroom for my Year 12 class

Lesson starter activity is on Google Classroom

I start every lesson with Quick Quiz, which is a bell ringer activity that the class completes in silence as soon as they enter the classroom. The Quick Quiz is a series of questions based on previous content the class has learnt. I use the Quick Quiz for retrieval practice and as a classroom management strategy. The students know as soon as they walk into the classroom, they do the Quick Quiz. This gives me time to mark the roll, check uniform and set up for the lesson. Each lesson’s Quick Quiz is on Google Slides which is placed on the top of their Google Classroom Classwork. I use to handwrite the Quick Quiz on the whiteboard, but found having the Quick Quiz prepared before the lesson results in a smoother start to the lesson.

Quick Quiz Google Slides is in a post that is sorted to be on top of Google Classroom in the Classwork tab, which makes it really easy for me and my students to access at the start of each lesson.
An example Quick Quiz question for my Year 12 chemistry class
An example Quick Quiz question for my Year 12 chemistry class

Lessons are posted on Google Classroom the day before

I post every lesson on Google Classroom in the afternoon the day before the lesson. This allows students to have a preview of the lesson before they walk into the lesson. I encourage my students to log onto Google Classroom in the evening or in the morning before school, so they know the type of learning to expect for the day ahead.  I find that when students know what to expect ahead of time, they are more settled and there are fewer classroom management issues. Some of my Year 12 students like to read the slides the night before if they have time so they can better understand the content when I explain it in class.

These three strategies are not unique to Google Classroom and can be adapted to other digital tools like Microsoft Teams. The key is using technology to facilitate routines that allow you to maximise learning time and feel less frantic when you set up a lesson.

Revamping learning logs (with downloadable and adaptable template)

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Last year I trialled digital learning logs with my Year 7 maths and science class, which you can read about here. Overall, I found it beneficial as my students were given regularly dedicated time to reflect on their learning, with a focus on what work they are proud of, the challenges they faced, how they overcame these challenges and what they can do differently next time. While students appreciated the time to stop and think about their learning, time was also a barrier to this initiative. Sometimes it felt like there was no time to do this and if we used lesson time to reflect, then we will fall behind. This challenge became very obvious in the last term of the year when students had a large number of assessments and end-of-year activities that we missed some of our dedicated time for learning logs.

So I’ve created the third iteration of the learning log, which only has six weekly reflection activities and a goal setting/tracking page that is equivalent to two weekly reflection activities. So there is a total of eight weekly activities, which provides a buffer for other things that come up during the term like assessments, excursions, incursions and other disruptions. I’ve changed some of the reflection activities to embed more extended writing which may be more suitable for older students. I’ve also incorporated an ACE score in some of the activities, which is a student self-assessment on their attitude, commitment and effort. This was inspired by Trangie Central School.

You can download your own copy of the learning log template to adapt and use with your students.