 in listen only mode. Hello, hello. Welcome to PD and your PJs. I'm so excited to be here with you tonight with Shelly to talk about classroom community. Oh goodness, I'm showing my screen but I think you might be seeing nothing here. Let me see if I can get you back to something that's a little more fun to look at. I'm here with Shelly Friar and she and I have just had a really good visit and I'm excited for you to get to hear what she has to say. This just might not be working for us tonight. These are just my intro slides and I'm just gonna tell you a couple of bits of important information before I kick it over to Shelly. You should hear me talking now even though you didn't see much on your screen. We are recording the session and you're going to receive that in an email shortly after we conclude. And of course, we will also share the slides which is the best part. Shelly, I'm gonna change it over to you because obviously I'm having some sort of problems on my end. Let me see if I can get it to you. I'll just tell you who I am real quick. Even if you can't see my slides, I'm Julie. I'm just out of the high school ELA classroom where I was a teacher for 18 years. I'm now on the community team at CISA. I work with Angela so you might know her from some other trainings or webinars. You can find me on Twitter at edtechjulijay. I share mostly CISA related things. But the main thing I wanna tell you about at this beginning part of the webinar is that if you are brand new to CISA, Shelly's webinar is really not going to be talking about that tonight. So you would need to visit ideas.cisa.me to learn more about how you could get started or how you could set up a class. This webinar is not going to really talk about all of those things. So I just wanna make sure you always know where you can find us if you need that kind of information. Also, if you're watching us later and you're not watching us in the live version of this webinar, you are going to see a link. You can see it now at the bottom left of Shelly's screen where you can open these slides in case you need them later if you're not registered and watching us live. Okay, Shelly, sorry about our technical glitch there, but I think you're good to go and we can see everything on your screen. I'm gonna mute myself so you can take it away. Well, hello everybody. Welcome to this CISA presentation of Building Classroom Community. Like it says, I'm a third grade teacher at Cassidy School in Oklahoma City. Please connect with me on Twitter. I'm at Esfriar. It says over 20 years of experience, man that is totally hard to believe because I don't know, I still feel like I'm thinking about what I wanna be when I grow up. I love to make things, I love to make and I create. So in that whole digital innovator thing and one of my new exciting things is I am gonna be doing some code.org workshop. So if you're a teacher and looking for that, that's what my new gig is now. So today we're gonna be talking about building classroom community with CISA. This are some more ways that you can connect with me on Twitter and Facebook. I'm in the third grade teacher Facebook group. If you're not in that, I highly suggest you connect with your grade level group. I do have a YouTube channel and my podcast. So all of its classroom related things that I use for my classroom. And speaking of classroom, let me introduce you to room 12, Cassidy room 12 and this is who we are. And we are a family and we are a community and that's what I really believe in. Today I was at a workshop and they said, why do you teach? And I was thinking about it and I teach to help students love learning and building relationships with my students is really a passion of mine. And so I love how CISA is allowing me to be able to do that. And so community does matter and it's a big part of who we are. I wanna always start out with a cool story. So this is a total unplanned CISA moment. I teach it at school. My daughter is in eighth grade there. My husband is a technology director and we get to school early and my eighth grader is an artist and she started posting these questions for the day early in the year. I was glad that she was entertained and she did her thing. But it really started getting my students excited to get into the classroom. And then the students started keeping this list on the wall that picture on the right is the student suggestions for the question of the day. And so Rachel will come in in the morning and she'll pick one of their questions and it's a big deal. And this has been huge with pulling my classroom together. I teach two sections of language arts in the day and both classrooms participate in these little questions of the day. And at the end of the day, students trade off posting it into our CISA class and sending it out to everybody. And it's a big favorite. It's become a huge favorite with the students and it's become a huge favorite with the parents. And we have a lot of conversation that happened around these questions for the day. So the organic never planted. It just kind of happened this year and it's been a big part of what we do. So our outline for today that we're gonna be talking about is, what is a classroom community? And why is that classroom community important? And how do we begin to build a classroom community using this app, CSAW. And our classroom is important to us and our school is important to us and how we do that together is great when we're using CSAW together. So what is a classroom community? Well, I've done a lot of thinking about this and really to me, it's building those relational bridges. It's building those bridges between the students helping them to connect with each other and get to know each other beyond just who they know at school. It's also building bridges with teachers. Having students have that relationship with their teacher that they know that teacher and they trust that teacher and that teacher makes them feel safe. And it's also building bridges with parents which has been kind of a new phenomenon. This is my first year teaching third grade at Cassidy and I've been amazed at the parent interaction and just the relationships that I've been able to build and a lot partly due to CSAW. So why is classroom community important to us? Well, the last four years I taught at a school in Oklahoma City, it was a school for homeless children. And in that classroom, it was all about family. And when I moved to Cassidy, I was just, I wondered about what was gonna happen there and why was that and how was I gonna build that community? And it's really classroom community for us is all of these things. It's about connecting with each other. It's about getting to know each other's interests. It's about knowing that we're safe in an environment. It's about remembering our year and being able to celebrate activities that we're doing. It's building confidence and trust with each other. And it's also building confidence and trust with our parents. And so it's important. These are things that make school real. And I think it's something that we all need to make sure that we're being very intentional about as we go throughout our days. When I first started using CSAW was producing a lot of digital media. We were doing iMovie trailers and green screen videos. And I really didn't have any place to put that where students can see it. So when I first started using CSAW, it was just a place that became where I put the things that I was doing in the classroom. At that point in the beginning, it really wasn't about the activities or the teaching or not using paper. It was so much more than that. And I love CSAW for that enriched assessment possibilities. But for me, CSAW and this learning journal really became our portfolio. It was the place where we shared our work and where we could see each other's work. And it became, it was just so much more and it is so much more than just the assignments that me as a teacher are assigning. Want to give you a quick little story about empowering kids to have conversation. So here's a basic spelling activity. I'm a language arts teacher. And we're building these activity libraries now. This might be something in an activity library. And I had this student doing it. And of course, me as a teacher, when she turns it in, I'm looking to see does she have all of the vowel teams in the right place? And is she reading those words? And she had to put her spelling list in there. And then she had to go back in and read it. And me as teacher, I'm looking for those things. But then I started getting these comments and I'm like, whoa, who is this? Well, her grandparents are stakeholders in her education. And her grandparents are in and they see this. And they're one of my first parents to ever really get involved in. And here is her, this is Daddy Dave. And I know Daddy Dave now just by getting to know him on seesaw that responding back to her work and encouraging her and helping her. I don't think Daddy Dave lives in this state. I think he lives in another state. But he is involved in her education. And empowering kids to have those kind of conversations with their parents and there's grandmother clapping and giving her feedback. And I can remember this day Ella responded back, oh yeah, I didn't do that. Let me go back and correct it. She had made a mistake when she was saying one of the words. But having those conversations is building that bridge to in this case grandparents. Here's another story. I've got another student in the beginning of the year we were working on character traits. It went along with one of the novels that we were reading. And so the students began creating word clouds. It's a word cloud app on the iPad by ABCF and of their character traits. And then they would record their voices. And I can't think of anything more powerful than in the middle of your day being able to hear your student's voice and talking about how she feels about herself and how she would describe herself. And then later in the day, getting this feedback from mom and dad. I agree with those traits and also your creative, intelligent and thoughtful. And dad saying, yeah, you are but you're also smart, brave and witty. And so just that being involved and I'm almost like on the outside looking into this to this interaction with parent and child and empowering students to use what they're using in the classroom but also making those connections with this activity. So being very intentional about the activity but then really noticing what's going on with the parents. This is another way. We have a classroom podcast and we have our question for the day. I use it as a teacher, language teacher and helping students to complete a thought. What are you thankful for? Well, repeating back the question and then giving a full answer and then giving detail. I'm thankful for family dinners because. So it's a part of our oral fluency that we practice but it also becomes just a window into our classroom. So I wanna play you just a little bit of this. It's five minutes. I won't play that long but this is one that I had both classes actually in class that day. And we're just having a conversation in one of our classroom meetings about what are you really thankful for? And I use an app called opinion app. It's on my phone and it's a really easy way to just collect. Oops, whoops, a quick audio. There we go. And this is Cassidy Room 12 podcast. Today is November 20th, 2017. And this is Cassidy News 12 coming to you live from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The question of the day is what are you most thankful for? Hi, my name is Graham and I am most thankful for my family because I would not know how to do anything without me. Hi, my name is Edelind. I am most thankful for my house because it covers my head when it rains. Hi, my name is Elizabeth and I am thankful for my pets because I can tell them whatever I want and they will never tell anyone. Hi, my name is Kyra. I'm thankful for all my friends and cousins because I wouldn't have anyone to play with if I didn't have them. My name is Grace and I'm thankful for my grandparents because they let me think whatever and they say I'm smart. All right, we're gonna kind of stop right there. Again, helping my students find voice and then building our community together, listening to things that are outside of our classroom is a really, I think, valuable tool and especially being able to voice who is important to us and what is important to us and that goes a lot to build our classroom culture. It helps us respect and care for each other and view each other not just as classmates but maybe actually as friends. So just using our classroom podcast, Radio Show, is one of the ways that, and again, having an app like Seesaw that can hold this and so that we can share that inside of our classroom but also outside of our classroom. Talking about making parent connections, I did teach at a school for homeless children where I had two connected parents and I thought, well, that's pretty awesome to have at least two connected parents to my Seesaw group and this was one of my connected parents and she was awesome and we had a field trip and we were learning how to fish and I had loaded up our fishing pictures on the bus on the way home and before I even got back to school, I had a reply back from this mother and she was like, oh, thank you. This is his dream to go fishing. I am so happy for my baby and that went a long way with me. It was important. She was making that school connection and in situations like that where they don't feel like they have as much representation but this really made her feel like a part of her students' learning and which I think is valuable when one of the first ways that I began using Seesaw in some ways was just posting pictures and that's a great entry-level thing but really being able to make those connections is important. Another great way of making parent connections is, again, I think the value of student voice is so important. Let's say parents really love getting these pictures but making that connection with hearing their student voice is huge. This is a student and the art teacher actually posted this and had the students talk about how they were using this in the classroom. Again, I want you to hear the student voice. I want you to hear, oops, a little bit about how she's describing her picture that they had done in art class. Hi, my name is Cara. I am describing how I made my beautiful sunflower. I created it by watercolor paints. I used something called a wet wash for the background. I used a wet and wet for the base and the lines and the black books and the sunflower. I blended some pink and blue in the background. I put yellow and orange for the sunflower leaves. We used Vincent Van Gogh's sunflower paintings to get inspiration first this time. All right, and then she goes in to describe, you know, as the art teacher, I'm sure she's listening to see kind of how much of that technique and, you know, how they connected to that Vincent Van Gogh, me as language arts teacher, I'm listening. Oh, she's doing a great job of sequential, you know, telling about first and then and next and last. And so we, as teachers, we're looking at it like that. But then when dad hears this and sees this, and I have to tell you a little story about this, both her parents are physicians and dad travels quite a bit. But he stays real connected with her and there have been times when he's out of town that, you know, she and her dad will actually have some interactions back and forth. So this has been seen by mom and dad. And then this is what you don't see when I just share straight from seesaw. You know, here is this interaction between her dad and the student. And, you know, dad is saying, oh, here's a little juicy tidbit about Vincent Van Gogh. So he was taking medications back in the time to deal with a heart condition, but he really didn't have a heart condition. And then they were giving some medication. And this medication happened to cause him to be able to see everything with a yellowish hue and a vision. So, you know, when you look at Vincent Van Gogh's stuff, you know, it all has kind of that yellow muted on top of it. And then he goes back in to say, and hey, he didn't have a heart connection and even actually had epilepsy, but they didn't know that. And so that day we happened to be talking about comments, you know, how students can leave each other comments, but when we leave a comment, we need to be specific. Well, that day, you know, this dad's comment was up there and we talked, wow, is this specific? Is he, you know, giving us new information? And it became a really impressive way to use dad's information to extend our own learning, but also just, you know, the student was just so proud to, you know, how to have that happening. It was a really great example of what a great comment should be, but it also was a learning opportunity for the rest of us in the classroom. So I just think those kind of connections and building those bridges with parents is wonderful. And it gave them, I'm hoping something to do and talk about later on during the day. Another awesome way to use CSOT to build classroom community is about celebrating. It's about celebrating what's going on at school. And this happened to be the first day of school with these two young friends. We're excited to see each other after a long summer break, but, you know, kind of keeping a scrapbook of our year so that they can go back later and say, wow, you know, look how much I've grown or oh, there's that friend or remembering back through the day. Just documenting those classroom experiences is really cool and important. Celebrating different days, you know, in September we did International Dot Day. And this happened to be when I was introducing CSOT in the beginning and we were introducing the draw feature. And so they did their dots in the draw feature on CSOT. And then they had to say, hey, how are you gonna build your mark on the world? And I think this one is real quick. I'll let you hear this student talk about it. My mark on the world is to help other people solve their problems. And you know, that's a really neat thing is to be able to collect his voice and also celebrate that activity. So special days, building that into just how we celebrate our community. This is another special day that we did at Global School Play Day, which I have celebrated and participated in. Definitely hashtag and Google that because it's a really awesome thing. International, you know, students just taking that one whole day just to play and just to connect and talk about building community into the classroom. But also about talking about the importance of unstructured play and how we need to build an unstructured time within our school day. So that was a neat experience. Also, you know, just building our community within our school building. We've, I've done an after school coding club using PBS Scratch Junior after school. And I'm also doing it, I've done an after school coding club. And you know, once we learn a skill and then we want to share a skill. So in this case, we had our first firstie friends come down and we were teaching them how to code using PBS Scratch Junior. But again, documenting classroom experiences, sharing with our friends, building that community not only within our classroom, but outside the walls of our classroom. And then it gives students a purpose for being there and building. This is when I taught at Positive Tomorrow's. And I think we do have to be sensitive about having permission to share students photos. You'll notice in all of these that I'm not using student names with student pictures. In this case at Positive Tomorrow's, we had what we called red shirts. And red shirts, we did not have permission to share their faces, but we wanted them to feel like they were a part of the community. So I used to get really creative about how I could include them. And you'll notice my red shirt in this picture is wearing a Darth Vader mask. And so he didn't wanna always have to be left out of our pictures, you know? And yet I could include him so that he could be a part of that community. And that is about keeping our kids safe and in talking about good digital citizenship and being aware of how we portray in an authentic way what's going on in our classrooms. And I think people need to know what's going on in our classrooms, but we do need to be very careful about keeping our kids both emotionally safe and physically safe. Another way that I love reaching outside the walls of our classroom, working on our world community, I have a newspaper app. It's News-O-Matic, if you haven't heard of it, look that up, that they write a newspaper, it's a digital newspaper for kids. And they write it 365 days a year and they work really hard. All of their articles are vetted just for kids and written just for kids. And this was around February, of course, Valentine's Day. We had just finished a unit in third grade over chocolate. It was a big project-based unit and we had talked about how some of the cocoa farmers use child slave labor and we were really in tuned with fair trade chocolate. And then this article came up in News-O-Matic talking about Red Hand Day. And it just made that connection not only with our chocolate unit, but it made that connection to what was going on in the world and being able to document that. And then when I posted this and the students for everybody, I was posting it really for parents to give parents an opportunity to talk about some of the things that are going on in the world. So I actually recorded this so that parents could talk about it and have some today in classroom meeting, we read the article, Red Hand Day in News-O-Matic. Please discuss this important article with your kids. You only have the first page, but the students were able to read the entire article. So I do think it's important to not only build community within the walls of our classroom, but also encouraging them to have voice and know what's going on in the world in a very kid-centered way. And so I use my classroom community, I have a folder, as an opportunity to start those conversations and get kind of in a deeper learning process when we do that. We also, this is what we did for our Red Hand Day and we made the heart. And just giving kids service at our school is very important and service to our community is very important. And this is a way that we could talk about how others are encouraged to make a difference in the world and how we can leave our mark on the world. So I end this with a call to action, an activity that you can do and I know I didn't save it in an activity library, you'll have to do that one on your own. But it goes back to that one of the first activities or examples that I shared about the student who had the character traits. Well, this is one that I always love to do at the end of the year when students know each other, when we spend a year building relationships with each other. So I have each student in the classroom comment a positive character trait on all of their fellow students. And so this character trait that you see over here, this word cloud, and again, I use word cloud by ABCM, it's an iPad app. And so the students collect those words, those positive words that their friends have described them by and they put that into a word cloud. And that way it's really meaningful because that's the way that their classmates view them. And then they read that back out. I actually printed these out with the QR code on it so that they could have those to take home, eliminated it even. It was kind of like how their classmates viewed them. It was kind of something that they could take with them to document their year in the classroom. And I love this because this is Amika. And Amika was playful and she was hardworking and she was funny and she was quiet and she was helpful. And that's the way that her classmates saw her and that was powerful for her to be able to see that in herself and acknowledge that in herself. So that's kind of my call to action. If you create an activity page, please share that with me because I would love to be able to do that. I just haven't taken the time to get all of that done. Looks like I have a couple of minutes if we have any. Oh, let me tell you this last story. Ooh, talk about building classroom community. This was huge. This was huge for me this year. I lost my father to a heart attack earlier in the year. And it was a real, it was a surprise. It was shock. I left in the middle of the day at noon and to fly to Dallas to be there with him. And while I was gone, the students at school built this outside at recess for me. It's a cross and they built it in memory of my dad and they built it for me because their hearts were hurting and we walked through that together. And it just, it meant a lot that the students could take that experience and become a part of it. That we were a classroom family and that they were able to share that with me. And I think that's really what building community is all about is becoming real to each other and building a community together. And CESAW is just awesome to be able to have a platform like this to be able to share that together. So anyway, you can connect with me here on any of these work. I mean, I'm pretty active on the third grade Facebook page but if anybody has any questions, we only have 30 seconds. So, but I'd be glad to answer any. Shelley, this was so wonderful. You are making a lot of people smile. The question box is mostly filled with thanks and compliments but I am gonna ask you a few questions that some people are posting. People have really loved this. You're getting lots of love from Peggy, Stacey, Elena, Cynthia, Sarah. Quick question too about your photos. Do you make that an activity for students to post their own photos or does everybody just post photos as they take them? You don't make any sort of like template for folders I don't think, right? No, I do not. You know, I am an old school CESAW user and I haven't really jumped on that activity bandwagon. I love it. It just, it hasn't been a part of my repertoire. So I may spend some time this summer playing around with it but most of the time my students just post to their activity journal themselves. And, you know, we have a small enough classroom and it's a part of just our digital repertoire on how we add that. So I probably need to get a little more organized with the activities but I haven't really done that yet. No, but I actually think for what you're talking about like taking photos of special class events. I don't know that the activity structure would even serve that. I think you could organize with folders. Like I would sometimes as a classroom teacher have a folder called beginning of the year pictures or something. But yeah, I don't know. That's exactly what I do. And a lot of times I'm taking pictures on my phone and adding them in and then also, you know, students are taking pictures in the classroom. So it's kind of a little boat. Sometimes I take pictures and air drop pictures to them so that they can create their collages. Right. So it happens organically in a variety of different ways. Yes, well said. Peggy is wanting confirmation. Do you pay for NewsOmatic? I can't remember what their subscription plan is. Yeah, it's a paid app. And I only have it on my classroom iPads weird. I used to be in a one-to-one situation and now I'm in a shared iPad situation. So I pay for it just for my specific apps. I get some money from the librarian. She bought some and I've bought some. So my students use it. Some of them have bought it at home as a single usage, but yes, it is a paid app. Unless you have Myon, they are connected with Myon. And if you have the news section of Myon, which I don't have, but NewsOmatic works closely with Myon as well, but it is a standalone app and I would highly recommend it. But it is a little pricey if you're looking at buying a site license. Okay, thank you, that's helpful. And remind us again what tool you're using for the podcast. We listened to part of your thankful podcast. What tool was that? On this, it's called Opinion. And on this page, you can still see my screen, right? Do you see the little, the red guy talking on the far end next to the house? I don't know. Right, okay, yeah, we can see it. That's the Opinion app. So it's Opinion and they used to host it. And now I'm hosting it on podium, which is another hosting app. And so it takes a few more clicks than I would like, but recording the app on, using the Opinion app is so easy just to do right on my phone, which is why I stick with it. So my hosting is a little different and I am able to link it and share those links with the students. It's also on my webpage, which I think has now been hacked. So you may not wanna go there. Mrs. Friar at Cassidy.org. There's a link to my podcast there. But that's the app that I use for my radio show. Okay, that's super helpful. And just to kind of throw out there, if you're thinking in general about podcasting, Shelly's giving you some great ideas for other tools, but you could essentially create a podcast right in Seesaw. I mean, you could take one photo or one image you created, like a word cloud or some other pit collage, some other digital art and just have a student narrate or audio record along with that. So if you're inspired by the idea of the podcast, but intimidated by thinking about going to another outside app, I think you really could do it maybe just in Seesaw or an app smash with Shadow Puppet 2, which we've done. I have a question, how long, I've forgotten and I probably should know this, but how long is the recording now within the app? How long can you record something? 10 minutes. It's 10 minutes. Oh, that's huge. Because I try to meet my podcast anywhere from three to five. I try not to make them much longer than five because people won't listen to them. Well, and when I had students, I would do like my audio newsletter. And I taught big kids, so I wasn't typically sending home any paper newsletter ever, but once we were all connected to Seesaw and it was so convenient to do it, I started recording like a weekly audio newsletter and that's the same way you could do a podcast, probably just taking a photo and then recording. Okay, well, Shelly, we probably are gonna wrap up tonight, but you guys can still see her screen and you have all those ways you can contact her, all those little squares at the bottom are icons and you can click those when you gather when you get her slides. And then her Twitter handle is there at the bottom. You are going to get a survey that pops up on your screen shortly after we conclude. And I would love it if you could give me some feedback about the webinar. It's how we make our sessions better and how we get ideas for future topics. And we also draw one winner each week from those responses. Somebody randomly will win a Seesaw t-shirt. So take a minute, give us some feedback and maybe you'll win the shirt. Shelly, it was so fun listening to you tonight. I always learned so much and this one was really inspirational. I loved all of your anecdotes and stories. You have built a really amazing community with your students. We're so lucky you could share with us tonight. Thanks so much. I hope to be with you all again really soon. Bye-bye. Thank you.