Pepper Highlight: Using Google Hangouts with Pepper

One of the great features of Pepper is the access to teachers from around the country. The Pepper online learning community provides opportunities to discuss and collaborate with educators on a wide variety of professional endeavors. But did you know that you can also collaborate via Google Hangouts? You can use Hangouts to send messages, make voice and video calls, and share photos. Edutopia article, Using Google Hangouts for Teacher Development states, “Google Hangouts is a perfect tool to increase the level of communication and professional development in every school.” Teachers are busy and finding time to meet with colleagues for collaboration can be challenging. Google Hangouts can make meeting easier by creating a flexible environment for conversation and planning.

Google Hangouts enables both one-on-one chats and group chats with up to ten people at a time using a Google account or email. While somewhat similar to Skype, FaceTime and Facebook Video Chat, Google Hangouts focuses more on "face-to-face-to-face" group interaction as opposed to one-on-one video chats, and utilizes sophisticated technology to seamlessly switch the focus to the person currently chatting. The use of Google Hangouts in the education setting has a lot of potential. Sharing is powerful. By using Google Hangouts teachers can create virtual classroom visits and use what they learn to build instructional practices. In addition to video chatting, Google Hangouts users can share documents, scratchpads, and images with other users.  Turn any Hangout into a live video call with up to 9 of your peers and your conversations just flow from text-to-video/voice-and-back, in a matter of clicks. 

To access your Hangout within your Pepper Course, click on the "Live Hangout" link to bring up the "Create a New Hangout" screen.

Create a New Hangout- Press the green button to start your own personal study group and invite others via email to join you.

Your Pepper Learning Community and Pepper Courses are a great place to find other educators to share both classroom experiences and learning opportunities. Utilizing the experience and skills of teachers from around the country can provide unique opportunities for networking and sharing lesson ideas and classroom management tips.

Making Learning Accessible for All: Universal Design for Learning

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a teaching approach to help all learners be successful. According to the National Center on Universal Design for Learning, “UDL provides a blueprint for creating instructional goals, methods, materials, and assessments that work for everyone--not a single, one-size-fits-all solution but rather flexible approaches that can be customized and adjusted for individual needs.”

UDL focuses on three principles of learning:  “why”, “what”, and “how”. (http://www.cast.org/our-work/about-udl.html)

WHY - The “why” of learning is about engagement. The goal of this principle is to provide students with a purpose for learning. To do this, UDL encourages the use of a variety of methods to exposing students to why what they’re learning is relevant. Relevance and connection will help motivate students to learn.

WHAT - The “what” of learning is about representation or how we present the content to the student. The goal of this principle is to provide the content in a way that appeals to individual student learning styles. Understanding that students learn in a variety of ways enables a teacher to provide multiple ways for a student to receive important information: visual, auditory, or kinesthetically.

HOW - The “how” of learning is where the student takes over. This is their opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of what they have learned. The goal here is differentiation - providing students with a variety of options for showing what they have learned. Allowing students to have a voice and some choice in how they showcase their learning is critical.

The National Center on the Universal Design for Learning continues to state that “the purpose of UDL curricula is not simply to help students master a specific body of knowledge or a specific set of skills, but to help them master learning itself—in short, to become expert learners. Designing curricula using UDL allows teachers to remove potential barriers that could prevent learners from meeting this important goal.”

As you participate in Pepper Courses, look for ways to incorporate the why, what, and how of the Universal Design for Learning into your lessons. You can also utilize the Pepper Resource Library to find ways to engage and present content to your students. The Universal Design for Learning can help make understanding content a reality for all types of learners.

Using Digital Tools to Individualize Instruction

As part of their Extending the Digital Reach report, Education Week also published an article highlighting how ed-tech tools are changing the ways in which teachers can differentiate their literacy and reading instruction. This report, Digital Tools Aim to Personalize Literacy Instruction, focuses on how new technologies can transform learning by providing individualized instruction. Education Week talked with Graphite, a division of Common Sense Media, and a Pepper partner, to gain insight on some of these new tools.

Graphite specializes in providing teachers and schools with free research-based classroom tools. They provided some suggestions for helping teachers create personalized literacy opportunities for students. Here are some of their recommendations:

1. Customize Texts to Each Student's Reading Level - Online programs such as Raz-Kids and Newsela provide topical reading at a variety of levels.
2. Allow Teachers to Target Specific Reading Skills - Apps, such as Lexia Reading Core5, are now available that allow teachers to target reading skills that students need to develop.
3. Diagnose and Respond to Individual Students' Strengths and Weaknesses - Software, such as Read 180, will analyze a student’s reading and then provide additional texts and vocabulary based on their assessment results.
4. Encourage Teachers to Offer Customized Supports - “Digital tools and interactive e-readers can also allow teachers to customize the reading experience for students—and make themselves an integral part of each student's reading process.”
5. Have Students Show What They've Learned in Different Ways - Differentiation. Tools such as, BookBuilder, give students opportunity to write, edit, and publish their own writing and ideas.

Technology can provide support and opportunity for students to experience learning on a level that they understand. It gives teachers an opportunity not to just “teach to the middle”, but to teach each student as they need for learning and understanding.

Pepper Reading Courses are available to help you apply new literacy instruction concepts to your classroom. Also, be sure to check out Graphite in the Pepper Resource Library to find technology tools to meet the needs of individual students.