Supporting Students
The learning that occurs within the children in our care is at the core of what we do. Preparing them for life as best we can by focusing on the development of skills and habits of mind for success is fundamental to this aim. When it comes to technology we are lucky. It is engaging and collaborative from the start. We can all learn something from everyone else. When we add the potential of a global audience to the equation the stakes get higher and we see students rising to the challenge of these authentic experiences.
I have created a sampling of units I have been a part of with teachers and students recently below. |
PYP Exhibition Support
The plan was to have students produce videos culminating their Exhibition experience for public viewing at the event itself and then online. We front loaded skills in a prior unit in which students produced Public Service Announcement videos.
To add another element of meaning to my role in this integration initiative, I devised a simplified Design Cycle for the students to use in order to help with the transition to the MYP technology programme. Full blog post here |
Documentary Creation
Students were assigned the task of researching, designing, planning and creating a documentary on a topic of their own choice. Now, this is by an older student who I have been teaching for some time now so there was a good deal of prior knowledge of digital story telling and visual literacy going in. I was still surprised by the quality of this final product, crashing through into Redefinition by miles from a book report. |
|
Flat Class Websites for Digital Citizenship
My Middle School Technology Class & I embarked on a Flat Classroom experience with students from NIST. They were using Scratch and we were set to create Weebly websites but both classes were focusing on Digital Citizenship content. I used ISTE Student Standards from the start and used Google Apps for collaborating with our flat classmates along with student blogs for feedback, grouping and peer assessment. We started out by Skyping between classes to get to know each other which ending up having unforeseen benefits in other classes. The full story of this unit is found in the video on the SAMR page and in this blog post. |
Animated Flowcharts with Grades 1&2
After our formative activities creating animated flowcharts of how we get ready for school (available on the Learner Profile DISK) we then moved on to our culminating assessment tasks using these skills to demonstrate our unit understandings while developing technology skills of digital storytelling through production of animated life cycles. Students were further able to edit for English and punctuation as they reviewed there work and listened to peer editors. |
|
How To Videos
Missed a class? Wish you could remember what the teacher said yesterday to help with your homework? No problem, just go the website and play back the video, slide show presentation or read the notes and proceed without losing any valuable time. I love making these to support students and sharing with teachers how they can do likewise to improve learning outcomes. |
|
Flipped Classroom Approach
I am a firm believer in synergy, access and sharing with my PLN. This is a Slideshare I made for the MYP Tech website at my present school. Students have access to the site with the schedule, rubrics and lesson notes available throughout the program. This particular upload has seen over 6,000 reads so far indicating it has been picked up through my tweets and blog posts. This connectivist aspect of digital creation is a common theme of my classes as well. More here on Slideshare |
Websites as Platforms II
I was asked to offer some guidance to a sister school looking to introduce a technology program. I created a series of lessons presented through a website to help a large class of grade four ESL students produce final products of good quality. On top of the language barrier, many of the students were not experienced with computer usage at all so we focused on basics like opening applications and saving files as well. By the end, however, all were pleased with their work and some brave students stood before their class presenting, explaining and hearing critiques of their self-introduction videos. Take a look at the two-part video highlighting the difference between OK and great. |
More from my Educational Technology Blog