 I'm Grady Edwards with Bo Gorszewski. Welcome to DISCAST, a podcast from the Ori County School's digital integration team. We believe that educational technology can be used to transform teaching and learning in the classroom. We strive to spotlight the good work our teachers are doing across our county and hope our discussions will inspire possibilities for your classroom. Your journey into the world of ed tech starts right now. Welcome to the DISCAST. We're excited you decided to join us for the second episode this season. If you missed it, be sure to check out episode one where we sit down with George Kuros. Right, you are Bo. And speaking of innovation, let's take a look at our Ori County School's innovator of the month for October. For elementary schools, let's congratulate Penny Green of Daisy Elementary School. For middle schools, a big cheer for Amy Lackey of Blackwater Middle. And last but certainly not least for our high school's Chloe Jones of Green Sea Floyd's High School. Great job. Thanks Grady. Congrats HCS innovators in the month. Coaches, remember be sure to nominate any of the teachers using innovative classroom practices or teachers showcasing their work in connection to our monthly theme. The theme for October is digital content. And the theme for November is targeted instruction. Very nice, Bo. Some great changes going on within our district. Anything else we need to share? Well aside for showcasing the whole core five of personalized learning, we want to provide some updates to our innovators in the month and HCS badges in our gamified PD. But don't worry teachers, there is no longer a need to submit an application or use a Google Form. All you have to do is make a post on any social media platform with the hashtag HCS Badges. Your posts should also include the description connected to a learning goal, an artifact, and maybe your school hashtag. Tell your instructional coach or your diss about it and you'll earn your badge. But for today's episode, we wanted to spotlight an innovative teacher, Miss Stevie Martin of Conway Middle School. She recently joined us for EdTech Task Force over the summer. And she does some great things for digital notebooking and concept mapping in her sixth grade social studies classroom. Now, Bo, I need to preface our audience with the sound quality of your interview. Well, luckily I have a growth mindset and I approached that little bit of failure with open arms and ideas on how to get better. As you may recall, this was recorded back in May. But think about just how much we've failed forward to since then with all of our subsequent audio editing and garage band skills. You mean my garage band skills. All right, you are greedy. Let's listen in. My name is Bo Berseski and I have with me Miss Stevie Martin of Conway Middle School who's been doing some really amazing things with digital notebooking and student choice and with this concept of hyper slides. And maybe we can have Stevie Martin tell you a little bit about it. Would you mind introducing yourself? How long have you been teaching? Where are you from? What's your experience? Tell us a little bit about yourself, Miss Martin. Sure, my name is Stevie. I'm a fresh out of college. This is my first year teaching at Conway Middle School. I teach sixth grade world history originally from this area. So it's really great to give back to my hometown. Nice, thanks, Stevie. All right, so you, I think the first time I ever met you, you talked about app smashing. And I think you were one of the few teachers that started the conversation with me about app smashing, though instead of me telling them about it. What can you tell our audience about app smashing and how you do it in your classroom? App smashing guarantees that learning is going to be engaging and fun. It's combining so many resources into one resource and just giving your students options to show their learning. So letting them have fun and letting them do different things rather than just the typical expected way of learning. Nice, all right. And I think also in that same conversation I had with you, you were talking about hyper slides. And I've heard of hyper docs, which are basically just Google Docs with a bunch of links in them. But you really introduced me to this concept of hyper slides. How do you use hyper slides in your classroom? So I started creating digital notebooks. And within the digital notebook, I use the resources from the district. But then I also do additional research. And I incorporate videos. I incorporate additional reading. Any kind of links that I see that are kid-friendly and look engaging and fun. I think it's a great opportunity to get students excited about learning. And it goes way beyond than just what is expected. But all right, awesome. And you use these hyper slides. Do you just create weekly assignments? Or what's your big end game with the hyper slides? I create hyper slides for each unit topic. So they're about one to one and a half weeks per hyper slides. And for example, we are starting Mesoamerica next week. So I've created a hyper slides. It's about 16 slides. And it has all kinds of different links that are linked to different information about the Mayans, the Incans, and the Aztecs. There's different videos. There's opportunities for students to create. So they can create picks and they might even have the opportunity to include a flip grid or just the opportunities are endless when it comes to smashing inside of a digital notebook. Oh, a digital notebook. So that's how you use the hyper slides. That's great. I keep hearing a lot of people using interactive notebooks. But now you're taking a step further with digital notebooks. So how have your students enjoyed that or how has it helped you as a teacher? As a first year teacher, I created all of my classroom management skills to have in a strong digital notebook. I feel that because the digital notebook is fun and engaging, I'm able to have more control of my classroom because my kids are engaged. They are having fun while they're learning and I'm not having to fight the battle of making them do their work on a typical day. Very interesting because some teachers they have concerns about the kids going on too much technology and they have a hard time getting the students to stay focused. How do your kids stay focused or how is it? So you're telling me that using digital notebooking is helping with your classroom management skills. I really believe so. I think different students learn different ways and for some students a video may be all it takes to get them interested into the topic. And then for some students reading a little excerpt about what they do that's weird in their culture, it gets them interested and it's just a hook. So giving them that option to learn these unique interesting things kind of makes history come alive and it's very enjoyable. Great. Now do the students do the digital notebook and then take a test or is the digital notebook where the proof is in the pudding? I grade the digital notebook on a weekly week and a half basis. I think that by looking at their digital notebook you can see if the student has really dived and do the links in the videos because their responses are gonna be very thorough and you're gonna tell that they've done some research. Great. Well, this has been a lot of amazing information today. Thank you so much for sharing. Are you on social media? Where can people follow you? Can they find all the great things that you're going in in your classroom? Is there anything that you can wanna plug or anything you wanna showcase? Yes, I have my own Google sites. Ms. Martin at Google Sites and I occasionally post things to my Instagram and that's Jesus is cool. Cool. Well, I'll be sure to include links to those in our description. Well, thank you, Ms. Martin, for your time today. Do you have anything else you wanna share with our listeners? Thank you so much for having me. Awesome. Great job. Well, Bo, that was some really insightful stuff on using Google Slides as a digital notebooking tool. Yes, and this is a creative example of how Google Slides just doesn't need to be a slideshow tool. Speaking of creativity, have you seen some of the great posts about hashtag STEM HCS? We have STEM teachers all over the county showing off innovative and collaborative products. Well, that's exciting. Perhaps our listeners out there can help us to continue to share out what they are seeing. What if our next episode, we focus on some STEM teachers? Great idea, Bo. If you'd like to reach out about being interviewed for our podcast, we'd love to have more teachers on. So please email Bo or myself or reach out to us on our various social media accounts and we'd be happy to see if you'd be perfect for an interview on the discast. All right, I can't wait. We'll see you then. Thanks for listening. Be sure to like, comment, or reply to one of the other episodes or share it on social media. Subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss out on the next episode. Don't forget to check out our resources within the links and see what else is going on in Orie County Schools. Be sure to follow at dear disses on social media and contact us via email or our blog. Thanks for tuning in. To continue to follow our story, please subscribe to the discast. Thank you for joining us today and always remember, in the words of George Kuros, technology will never replace great teachers, but technology in the hands of great teachers can be transformational. See you next time.