This has been a busy, but awesome, start to the year! Our 4th, 5th, and 6th grade students have been equipped with Chromebooks to enhance and deepen their learning. Our teachers have been implementing amazing tools for managing the flow of classroom work, communicating with students and families, and adding more authenticity to their work.
One of the neatest things our students are learning to do is work collaboratively with Google Apps for Education and Google Classroom. Our students have been creating projects, sharing them with friends, and their teachers in a meaningful way. Sharing is often something people associate with online tools. People share photos and experiences, stories and opinions. Our students are learning to share in a totally different way. They are sharing back and forth, making changes and editing work. It's really powerful to watch kids problem solve and collaborate in this way. I'm looking forward to the many good things coming this year! I'm excited to learn from the teachers and students as they explore our new technology.
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A colleague talked to me today of opening up her classroom to some more STEAM based learning. I have some LittleBits from a generous grant from our local Rotary and a set of MaKey MaKeys from our parent group a couple years ago. She brought up setting up these tools and some more opportunities at a table in her room that will be available all the time before integrating them directly into curriculum.
This is an excellent plan. It allows for students to explore tools, engage in learning, generate inquiry, and be prepared for activities. How often as an adult has someone said, "you just need to play with it to figure it out." A lot of time this is pretty sound advice. To grasp basic function of what something does, spending time with it is often the best way to learn. Now, going deeper with learning goes beyond just playing. It needs a mentor or coach, guidance, and scaffolding. This is why her idea is so solid. Kids will explore technology through ways meaningful to them and gain some prior knowledge. They'll make discoveries and create things that a planned lesson would have never thought of. Then when it comes to a more structured task- students will be primed to exceed expectations. I'm really looking forward to being part of implementing this inquiry based STEAM learning in her classroom. Kids are going to be learning, building, and problem solving together. What an awesome project and plan for learning. When we started implementing iPads a few years ago, the world was our oyster. Every app was new and every use of the iPad required some learning from our teachers and students. Now that all of our students have iPads in hand for two years, app learning isn't as important as it was. It's a neat spot to be in, because most of our students are familiar and comfortable with apps. They are even able to generalize settings, buttons, and functions between apps. They are becoming excellent at trouble shooting and helping each other too.
I've been focusing a lot with classes lately in extending the application of the technology. We've been smashing apps like ChatterKids, Popplet, and SeeSaw in order to create something really unique. Teachers are really experimenting using multiple apps to accomplish a task as opposed to being restricted by the functionality of one. Yesterday I worked with a first grade class who worked through many steps, which would have been tricky not too long ago, to create a talking image about earth day. To go from start to finish with the process took 30 minutes. They were only able to do it this quickly because of their base knowledge of apps; smashing them together was the new learning. Opening the doors for new opportunities for our students to show their learning is a really big deal. Also, using apps in different combinations enhances creative thinking and offers endless possibilities in project based learning. Probably my favorite part of my role as a technology coach is that I am able to visit many different classrooms. I've said in the past, "I wish all teachers had an opportunity to visit the classroom of everyone else." With all of this awesome work happening all over the place, it's important to find time to share. Even though everyone can't be everywhere, teachers have been carving some time before school to meet together at what we call "Learn and Shares." These events are times when teachers can come together and share what kind of awesome things are happening for others to learn from, and to learn from others.
We mainly focus on technology work. Teachers are doing some amazing things to integrate technology into education to truly engage and lift students. One kindergarten teacher at this morning's learn and share is beginning digital journals to capture pictures, drawings, and writing about the upcoming caterpillar to butterfly unit. A third grade teacher is finding ways to use video and screen casts to explain "workplaces" and math games to kids in order to more efficiently use time and help more students learn. I was tasked with trying to find an assessment app that has the ability for a teacher to include picture answers instead of only a picture with the question. Learning and challenging each other is what makes for more opportunities for our students. Learn and shares are a great way to have colleagues work together in a way that really leads to some great outcomes. Returning to school from MACUL means returning with so many ideas it can feel like a freshman-sized backpack full of books. Maybe that analogy doesn't work anymore with everything fitting on an 11" Chromebook or iPad, but it certainly can feel overwhelming.
Part of going to these conferences is returning to your district with some new knowledge to share. One of my colleagues I was fortunate of attending with this year gave an awesome presentation to the staff of Oakwood about some of the takeaways she had. She was so positive and picked a few that she knew would work in her classroom, and that she could start right away. Her favorite quote is "You don't have to do everything, but do try something." This is a great mantra after MACUL. There are really amazing things going on in education, and technology transforms and revolutionizes that every day. We are fortunate to have the amazing amount of resources available to us through modern technology, but integrating it in a meaningful way is where a teacher can really shine. Teachers strive all the time to provide their kids with the best learning possible, and teachers are really digging deep in to educational technology as a resource for that. Sometimes it gets tricky to stretch the few precious hours we get with our kids during the day. Something that I'm trying out is extending my efforts using Google Classroom. We wanted to start a lunchtime coding club for a few grades using Scratch. I've scheduled grade levels to meet on alternating weeks, with some Google Classroom communication in between. We had our first day, and we got set up on Google Classroom. I was able to post some information about Scratch easily. Google Classroom will serve as a central location for our clubs. Before logging into Scratch, I've just asked kids to log into Google Classroom first. I plan on posting challenges, tips, and new learning each week onto classroom and having students check it out. I really think Classroom will end up being a forum for individualizing learning, even in a club setting. Students will be able to check in easily and go at a pace that they feel good about and interests them. It's going to break down the walls to the the club, and make sure that their coding doesn't start and stop during lunch time every other week. I'm really excited about the way things are shaping up, and I can't wait to see how it unfolds. Ah, the good ol' keyboard and mouse. As testing approaches, a lot of teachers have talked to me about how their kids are coming into school with less and less keyboard and mouse knowledge. In our technology soaked lives, it might be hard to imagine kids coming in with less experience, but kids at home truly aren't interacting with a physical keyboard or mouse. Touchscreens, TV remotes, and the occasional trackpads rule the roost when it comes to consumer electronics these days. This is usually no big deal, except when it comes to the state mandated testing our kids have to do, which requires assessment using a mouse and keyboard. It's also important knowledge to have as they grow, progress, and interact with different forms of technology. Fortunately, the internet is there with resources to help give our kids some valuable practice in fun ways, so hopefully when the reach a high stakes environment, they only have to worry about the content, and not how to make a question mark. The skills section on ABCYA.com provides some great activities that require clicking and dragging, double clicking, and arranging. Kids can build cars or cakes to practice mouse skills. There are also some really simple typing practice sessions, where students focus on quickly finding the letters. There isn't a whole lot of technical typing training, but it is a great first step. This Proofreading Makes Perfect site is really simple, but provides some short bursts of grammar editing and mouse/keyboard skills. It increases in difficulty and offers a range of areas to practice in. It's pretty plain, but kids enjoy the challenge more than you might think. Please comment below with your favorite resources for helping kids master the mouse and keyboard. Lately, I've been having a lot of conversations with teachers about meeting the diverse needs in their classrooms. Technology offers some really unique ways to both accommodate learning and support all kinds of learners. From programs that allow speech to text (or text to speech) to inverted colors, activity timers, even zooming into parts of the screen for easier reading. On the iPad, the accessibility tab in settings offers a wealth of options for adjusting the way the iPad works. It's a powerful tool for the classroom and for personal use.
It's interesting to me, because some kids who aren't identified as needing any sort of vision accommodations will use some of the tools. The most common is the inverted colors. A lot of kids think it looks cool, but they often end up switching it back. Some kids flip their colors and leave it, because it helps them read the words better. This sort of personalization can be really helpful to someone that wants to maximize their learning. It breaks down barriers and allows for preferences that a student may have not even known about before. As kids learn to better customize their experience with technology, they can make accommodations for themselves and become more independent learners. App smashing has become a pretty popular phrase in the edtech crowd. It just means using multiple apps to accomplish something that wasn't possible in any of the apps individually. We've been working on a One Word project here at HSE. See this HAWK Talk from Mr. Phillips for more information. I've been walking students through some steps to app smash a picture using the camera, photos, and Educreations. We were able to have students quickly add text, crop, and apply a filter to their photo to participate in the One Word Project. It opens up a whole new set of possibilities for our tech learners to think of a project in mind, then apply more than one app to the project.
Here is a revamped post from last year before break...Break almost upon us! Long holiday breaks are great for spending time with family, eating great food, and relaxing. It is a great for our kids to step back form all the hard work they've been doing at school and feel proud, but it can be hard on a student's learning if there is a total break from from anything educational. Fortunately, being on break doesn't mean that learning stops. I always think of the advice: "Learn something new everyday." Reading is hands down the best thing your child can spend time doing to keep their learning growing. Make time for family reading at night, or read a book to your child before bed. Kids learn so much from watching and imitating, that seeing you as a parent reading can be very powerful. These can be fiction books or nonfiction, and really try to find some "just right books" for your child. Just right books are also called "Goldilocks" books because they aren't so easy that your child will get bored, but not so difficult that your child gets frustrated. You can use the Lexile information from your child's NWEA scores as a starting point to find just right books. You can even download the app Overdrive to check out free library ebooks from the comfort of your home! Some teachers or schools have RazKids available for their students as well. RazKids is a inclusive leveled books and assessment program where kids can earn stars for reading and correctly answering questions about reading. It's fun and provides some cool incentives for kids to read. There is a link to the RazKids site in the Links for Families section of this website. Math practice is also very important. iXL is available to all k-1 students at Harvey Swanson and all students at Oakwood. ! Their slogan is "Practice that feels like play!" iXL is a great way to practice math facts and concepts. It offers quick bursts of practice with tutorials for questions answered incorrectly. iXL also has a incentive component that provides kids with some fun short goals to keep them engaged. There is link to iXL under the Links for Families section of our site. Second and third grade students at HSE have access to Study Island to practice math fluency. I hope everyone has an awesome break full of learning! |
Bob LarsonInstructional Technology Coach Archives
February 2018
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