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Sarah Hohlfeld-Teacher, Owings Mills High School.
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Sarah Hohlfeld has been teaching high school English in Baltimore County for 12 years. She graduated from Duquesne University (Pittsburgh) with a degree in Secondary Education and earned her Master's as a Reading Specialist from Goucher College. She currently teaches English 9 (Standard, Honors, and Gifted & Talented) and AVID 10. She is her school's AVID Site Coordinator and co-advisor of the National Honor Society. In her free time, she enjoys spending time with her husband and two young sons and reading all sorts of books.
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December 2016
Device use is in full swing with my classes. We use them at least once every day in different capacities. We’re reading The Odyssey in our English 9 classes, and we need our kids to track Homeric style devices in the text. In the past, we’ve had to copy the organizer, and recopy the organizer multiple times as they always seemed to run away from their owners. This year, we have the kids keep the document on their devices so it’s always there and ready to open (we’ve got paper copies, too – just in case!). I also uploaded the document to their class notebook in OneNote, so they could open it through that program, too. Hopefully we’ll see an uptick in the students tracking the style devices since the organizer is easier to access.
In my GT 9 classes, we’re talking about argument. The curriculum suggests having students view some TED Talks and track the elements of an argument as seen in the talks. I had the kids choose from a list of talks and really saw some meaningful analysis. It was great to be able to give them the freedom to choose which talks they wanted to view, instead of me showing one or two talks and having them analyze just those specific ones. They were much more invested in that part of the assignment. Now, they’re working on creating their own TED Talks. They’ve researched and outlined, and are ready to record.
Researching background information for book studies has been much easier with the devices as well. Gone are the days of having to copy websites and articles and photographs and whatever else. This time around, I made a few paper copies of resources for students who didn’t bring their device, and posted the sources on BCPSOne for student access. Students could work at their own pace. We didn’t have to rotate to stations, and they were comfortable with starting where they wanted to start and move to the next resource they wanted. I’m not going to lie – keeping them on pace was sometimes hard. There are so many temptations on the devices (ahem – Cool Math Games…) that they sometimes take too long of a brain break and don’t come back to task when they need to.
There’s such a huge learning curve this year with how to manage devices, students, and students and devices together. But I can see that I’m getting better – and so are they.
Device use is in full swing with my classes. We use them at least once every day in different capacities. We’re reading The Odyssey in our English 9 classes, and we need our kids to track Homeric style devices in the text. In the past, we’ve had to copy the organizer, and recopy the organizer multiple times as they always seemed to run away from their owners. This year, we have the kids keep the document on their devices so it’s always there and ready to open (we’ve got paper copies, too – just in case!). I also uploaded the document to their class notebook in OneNote, so they could open it through that program, too. Hopefully we’ll see an uptick in the students tracking the style devices since the organizer is easier to access.
In my GT 9 classes, we’re talking about argument. The curriculum suggests having students view some TED Talks and track the elements of an argument as seen in the talks. I had the kids choose from a list of talks and really saw some meaningful analysis. It was great to be able to give them the freedom to choose which talks they wanted to view, instead of me showing one or two talks and having them analyze just those specific ones. They were much more invested in that part of the assignment. Now, they’re working on creating their own TED Talks. They’ve researched and outlined, and are ready to record.
Researching background information for book studies has been much easier with the devices as well. Gone are the days of having to copy websites and articles and photographs and whatever else. This time around, I made a few paper copies of resources for students who didn’t bring their device, and posted the sources on BCPSOne for student access. Students could work at their own pace. We didn’t have to rotate to stations, and they were comfortable with starting where they wanted to start and move to the next resource they wanted. I’m not going to lie – keeping them on pace was sometimes hard. There are so many temptations on the devices (ahem – Cool Math Games…) that they sometimes take too long of a brain break and don’t come back to task when they need to.
There’s such a huge learning curve this year with how to manage devices, students, and students and devices together. But I can see that I’m getting better – and so are they.
November 2016
Progress. We’re making progress. The new-ness of the computers has worn off. They’re no longer a novelty. They’ve become another attachment for most of my students; just like their cell phones, and binders, sports equipment, and musical instruments. I continue to have my students use them at least once a class period – usually to record warm-ups (OneNote). And then I bring them in with the curriculum as needed. My English 9 GT students just worked on revisions to a PBA. I set up some additional instruction for them based on needs I saw in their writing. The English 9 textbook offers these great tutorials on almost any skill you use/need in the English class. I was able to assign tutorials on theme, selecting appropriate textual support, and incorporating text evidence in writing to students who needed them. And assignments could be individualized – the tutorials only showed up for students to whom I assigned them. Then actual revisions could be uploaded via BCPOne Turn-Ins (paper saver!). I’m still trying to work on small group instruction, but you know what? It’s HARD. Isn’t that the case with anything that’s new or different though? My biggest struggle with that is group management. How do you keep students focused on the task at hand? I know I’m not alone. I’ve asked. I just need to keep on working through that. Practice makes perfect, right? So practice it is.
Progress. We’re making progress. The new-ness of the computers has worn off. They’re no longer a novelty. They’ve become another attachment for most of my students; just like their cell phones, and binders, sports equipment, and musical instruments. I continue to have my students use them at least once a class period – usually to record warm-ups (OneNote). And then I bring them in with the curriculum as needed. My English 9 GT students just worked on revisions to a PBA. I set up some additional instruction for them based on needs I saw in their writing. The English 9 textbook offers these great tutorials on almost any skill you use/need in the English class. I was able to assign tutorials on theme, selecting appropriate textual support, and incorporating text evidence in writing to students who needed them. And assignments could be individualized – the tutorials only showed up for students to whom I assigned them. Then actual revisions could be uploaded via BCPOne Turn-Ins (paper saver!). I’m still trying to work on small group instruction, but you know what? It’s HARD. Isn’t that the case with anything that’s new or different though? My biggest struggle with that is group management. How do you keep students focused on the task at hand? I know I’m not alone. I’ve asked. I just need to keep on working through that. Practice makes perfect, right? So practice it is.
October 2016
Our Lighthouse journey began a few months before the beginning of this school year. In fact, it really began at the end of last school year. We spent a few days at Professional Development talking about small group instruction, technology integration, and formative assessments (among other things). We left the PD feeling energized, excited – and just a tad bit overwhelmed. But we had the summer to think about the upcoming changes and how we would begin to bring these new things to our classes. And then the school year began. We had more PD and more discussions about all of the things we could do. We talked to our students about the changes they would see, and you could tell that they were excited too. Device roll-out took place (that seemed to go smoothly) and we were ready to go! We’ve had some hiccups these last few weeks. I set up class notebooks for my classes through OneNote, but we had to spend some time getting those set up on the devices and learning how to use the program. We had to figure out how to access the online version of our textbook – and learn where to save notes and annotations. BCPSOne is an even better resource now than it was before, but we needed to do a refresher on how to download and save materials and how to use Turn-Ins to submit work. We’ve done some small group instruction, though we have a bit of a way to go before it really runs smoothly. That’s how it goes when you bring on change. There will be more bumps along the way, I’m sure, but there will also be days when everything goes as planned. For now, forgive the brevity of this post and generalities I may have made. We’re learning. It’s messy, but we’re excited for the journey.
Our Lighthouse journey began a few months before the beginning of this school year. In fact, it really began at the end of last school year. We spent a few days at Professional Development talking about small group instruction, technology integration, and formative assessments (among other things). We left the PD feeling energized, excited – and just a tad bit overwhelmed. But we had the summer to think about the upcoming changes and how we would begin to bring these new things to our classes. And then the school year began. We had more PD and more discussions about all of the things we could do. We talked to our students about the changes they would see, and you could tell that they were excited too. Device roll-out took place (that seemed to go smoothly) and we were ready to go! We’ve had some hiccups these last few weeks. I set up class notebooks for my classes through OneNote, but we had to spend some time getting those set up on the devices and learning how to use the program. We had to figure out how to access the online version of our textbook – and learn where to save notes and annotations. BCPSOne is an even better resource now than it was before, but we needed to do a refresher on how to download and save materials and how to use Turn-Ins to submit work. We’ve done some small group instruction, though we have a bit of a way to go before it really runs smoothly. That’s how it goes when you bring on change. There will be more bumps along the way, I’m sure, but there will also be days when everything goes as planned. For now, forgive the brevity of this post and generalities I may have made. We’re learning. It’s messy, but we’re excited for the journey.
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