Slaughter's Innovative Moment
Classroom Discussion
"The Four Cs"
There are 4 Cs that are considered skills essential to the innovation age.
1. Communication (sharing thoughts, questions, and ideas in an intellectual way)
2. Collaboration (working together to meet a goal)
3. Creativity (Innovation, trying new things or presenting in a new way)
4. Critical Thinking (Problem Solving)
My addition:
5. Connection ( with each other and with previous material)
I have added connection because deeper learning occurs when we connect new information to emotion, a person, or prior knowledge. Fostering the idea of making connections with others, the past, and learned information increases the likelihood of growing from past mistakes or improving on learning. It is using the growth mindset to develop a knowledgeable leader.
Verso
discussion prompts that connect to videos, websites, or even a file like Google Slides and more. The teacher assigns these activities to classes. Students can join the class by utilizing the class code. They can go online complete the task and answer open-ended questions provided by the teacher. The magic is they cannot see what other respondents have written until they have responded. Once they have responded, they can view other respondents. They can like or comment and have a discussion. Another fantastic feature is that all respondents are anonymous to the students, but the teacher can see the names of the students responding.
The teacher can track the progress of the students and can generate a report that shows how many responses, comments, and helpfuls (likes) have been made by each student.
BYOD APP!
SeeSaw
A digital portfolio that collects students’ digital and physical work in one place for curation and assessment.
- Students can use built-in tools to capture learning, reflect, and develop new skills. They can like each other's response and comment.
- Teachers have powerful capabilities to monitor and make decisions on what appears on the classroom page and how much interaction is allowed.
- Use it as parent communication tool to seamlessly share your class or student work to build a strong school-home connection.
Seesaw is an excellent way to teach digital citizenship in a real-time and immersed way that is safe and protected. Not to mention the power of allowing students to use their voice! Empower, engage, and enrich with ease!
Best Thing Ever: Seesaw integrates with many of the apps and resources we already use!
Resources:
Discussion with Google Classroom
Google Classroom: Discussion Hack!
Shake-Up Learning
Google Classroom: Using the Create a Question option
Socratic Method: Inner-outer Circle Discussion
Inner-outer circle discussion are just as they sound. The inner circle of students is discussing the topic at hand and questions. The outer circle is developing the questions based on the discussion. In the beginning there is a need for scaffolding, but overtime the students will develop more understanding of discussion, debate, and questioning.
- As a child we are full of wonder and questions, but as time goes by this spirit somehow wanes. Successful Socratic Methods spend some time bringing inquiry in full force to the classroom as a prerequisite. For more information concerning this, check out this previous Tech Moment.
- Question and Sentence starters along with some time to prepare will allow for deeper discussion. Talk about open-ended questions and how those can allow conversations to start.
- Bring a story, a hook to get the conversation going. Vocabulary and terms are important to have visual and encourage students to use those terms within the discussion.
- Share the importance of backing up thoughts with evidence.
- Stress the importance of disagreeing with the knowledge that it is not necessarily personal but that everyone has different views.
Incorporate technology with tools like Today's Meet. Outer circle could be posting questions or thoughts concerning the inner circle's discussion using that tool. Inner circle could use these questions and comments as discussion igniters as they appear. The great part is you have a record of the outer circles thought process.
Resources:
Here is a great resource for one way to implement inner-outer circle discussions.