Mr Hammerlund

While in an SEN team meeting, I was a little confused about the data we were looking at in the system. We were looking at data from an online reading app, but the data was in ranges. All it showed us was the average from certain ranges, but we didn't know when interventions happened and what the intervention or strategy was so we could see if it worked. My idea was to collect baseline data before a strategy was implemented. Then once that was collected, we would start tracking the progress. In the example below, there are four reading skills we are tracking. At the top is a dropdown that will show the skills. When a skill is chosen, the average appears. Then I thought of a scenario where you would want to see scores in a range. I don't know how to do that off the top of my head, but I knew I could do it with checkboxes. So the second way is to use checkboxes to find the average of the scores. 

This post was in my drafts folder from a few years ago now. It feels like forever, but it was just 18 months ago or so. My big contribution to the 2021 International Festival was to make a schedule that could be shared with the community.  Looking at the above, I think it turned out all right, but I can also feel the stress that was attached to it.  It was extremely challenging to make the times and the events line up. Also, there were several people working on this at the same time, so sometimes, pieces would be moved without my knowledge. If I were to do this again, and I have 18 months of space between now and then, I would create a table and fill in the table cells. Also, I would think about how much trying I'm actually spending on this thing - maybe I could have spent less time on this and more somewhere else. Work smarter, not harder.  via GIPHY

In my years of teaching, I have used several EdTech products with my classes. The elementary students I teach usually have difficulty remembering login names and passwords. Many sites I use with them has a built-in account card generator, that allows for students to keep track of their credentials. (When I was a homeroom teacher I had students keep a notebook of their information. The technology coach in me has some problems with it, but the homeroom teacher liked not having to look up their passwords each class period.) I am using a site called Code Avengers for my coding class and club that I am running. It is a great program, but I needed login cards for the 200 students I had. Most of these kids did not use a computer - ever - so they were a necessity. I ended up using Google Sheets and Autocrat which gave me a Google Doc with every student's own login card on it. The video below will show you how to do it. I did have to do some formatting so the cards were not half on one shee...

Photo by American Heritage Chocolate on Unsplash Today I was working with a student who dismissed a website because of "bad grammar". When I looked at the site, I didn't see anything that would have caused me to dismiss it.  Is it so easy? The other day I was in a classroom where the teacher was having students use the CRAAP test . The website's tagline in the screenshot above says, "Evaluating sources easily". It is not easy to evaluate sources online. The C in CRAAP stands for current. Are current sources more reliable? Are John Dewey or Marie Curie not reliable sources? A framework is a good starting point, but if we are not teaching students to look laterally, leave sites and check the author's credentials as well as reviews about the site, we are in danger of leaving them to think that if one of the criteria is not met, a site is not reliable. It needs to be made explicit that one little miss on the test does not mean that the whole site is trash.

Having students work in groups is something that happens in all classrooms. Many teachers will give students roles to help focus their work.  Recently I have seen a new kind of role enter the groupings - where teachers have students take on the role of a scientist, an economist, an environmental activist, it could be any sort of job, with the intent of having students use a different perspective when looking at a problem. For example, I am calling a group that is formed by many roles a team, when the same roles come together, I am calling that a group. I hope I can keep them straight. In the following team, the roles are artist, scientist, and journalist. This team would work together to solve the problem presented to them.  Role Name Artist Maria Anders Scientist Alfreds Futterkiste Journalist John Smith   Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash However, instead of starting with the groups, ...