Posts

How We Collect Student Data

By Thomas Hammerlund -
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At OYIS, we use a Google Form to collect data about students with concerns. This helps admin, coordinators, learning support, and teachers to see, as a community, which students are coming up on our collective radar. It shows us frequency of submission and why the submission was made. This can inform how we talk with teachers during our collaboration meetings. On the form we have teachers fill out, we have a field asking for more details on the concern. This field includes the following, and this was recommended by our Head of Inclusion when she came to our school. This allows teachers to quickly choose one by clicking a button. If there is a need to add more context, the teacher can add a comment at the bottom. I experimented a little last year with making the categories a little more dynamic. The idea was to analyze the data every month and then put the most frequent responses in the list for the next month.  That hasn't happened yet, but as I write this, I wonder if that is the ...
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I Made an IB Testing Accommodations Timer

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I get really confused when I am dealing with time. I don't know what it is, but it gets me every time.  Many students taking the exams qualify for additional time. Because of this, we write the starting time, when there is 30 minutes remaining, 5 minutes remaining, and the ending time on the whiteboard. On top of my own deficiency with adding numbers, there is sometimes more than one student taking a test at a time, and now that there are even more tests happening, sometimes there are different tests happening with different students who might all have different accommodations.  It gets complicated.  So I thought about how technology could help me here. I knew I needed a timer, and I needed it to find the times for 30 min left and 5 minutes left and the end time based on the start time and the accommodations time. So I turned to Claude to help me. It wasn't easy, but after 8 prompts, I came up with the following app.  https://claude.site/artifacts/3db52944-61db-4d82-...
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Talking to your child about Artificial Intelligence

By Thomas Hammerlund -
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Since November 2022 when ChatGPT was released to the world, it’s seemed that AI has been everywhere in the news. Since then, AI has become a force in technology and has taken the world by storm. We have already seen examples of its uses in different fields from  history ,  archaeology , and  law enforcement . More urgently,  universities are starting to partner with AI companies , which will further their adoption.   image created with FreePik.com As AI continues to grow, it is important to have conversations with young people about their relationship with AI.  The MIT Technology Review offers some guidance for parents  with 6 points to talk about: AI is not your friend, AI is not a replacement for search engines, You might be accused of using AI even though you have not used it, Systems are designed to get you hooked and might show you bad stuff, Use AI safely and responsibly, Don’t miss out on what AI’s actually good at.   AI is not your friend ...
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Activities with Second Language Learners and Working Memory

By Thomas Hammerlund -
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I was back at tennis this past weekend. I go every weekend, so it is not surprising. Photo by Lucas Davies on Unsplash Tennis lessons always start with a warm-up. If this were a part of my own lessons, I might call it retrieval practice. We usually practice backhands and forehands for a few minutes at a fast pace.  After warming up, we usually take a drink of water and then gather as a whole group to see what we will be doing. This part of the lesson is a station rotation model where we break up into four groups and practice different skills on different parts of the court.  Then we play a match or a match-like game. But, I want to focus on direction-giving here and how it can affect students. The coach usually gathers us as a group and often numbers us off. Then we get the directions for the activities. Remember, this is up to four different stations that are explained to us. It can take a lot of effort to try to remember what is happening and how many balls we play until we...
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My Second Attempt at Presenting - an Improvement

By Thomas Hammerlund -
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Yay! Improvement is good, right?  NOT ME! - Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash BEFORE What I would change 1. Slow down Wait for the audience to catch up 2. Focus the presentation I think my presentation was too broad. I threw ideas into the slideshow as they entered my brain.  3. Practice with my co-presenter 4. Ask for less time.  One hour was too long. I was tired and could feel myself starting to  What might a revised presentation look like? Divide the ideas into three sections - what we do for students, what we do for teachers (to use), and what we aspire to do. Slow down - explain more.  Give more concrete examples.
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The Venn Diagram of an Inclusion Coach

By Thomas Hammerlund -
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I wonder what it would be like if inclusion teachers meet with the coordinators.  Hear me out - I think inclusion teachers are really coaches.  As an inclusion teacher and coach (inclusion coach?) I see things in the classroom that can help teachers. I see tweaks that teachers can make such as: shorter lectures, improved slide design, more scaffolding, etc.  But where does the inclusion support end and the curriculum support begin? What does the Venn Diagram look like for this?
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Scaffolding in Inquiry

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I was able to catch a few minutes of the Toddle webinar, "Designing authentic inquiry with Tonya Gilchrist" today and I came away with a nugget I want to share with the teachers at my school.  Teachers often overestimate how much prior knowledge or skills the students bring to a lesson. One teaching technique I am trying to emphasize is for teachers to go slowly, break down tasks, and give scaffolds to students. In the webinar, Tanya shared how this might look in an inquiry-based writing program.  The flow of her lesson (for a school she was not working at) was: Find out what is being taught. This class was learning about self-management skills. Connect the learning to a big idea. Here the class was already learning about self-managing. Give them a sentence stem and have them complete it. Give more scaffolds.
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