Tech Tuesday-Creating and Connecting

Humans are social beings. We naturally want to talk, share, and connect with others. I believe this is part of the reason that social media has become such a huge part of our society. It appears that social media isn’t going to be going away anytime soon, so love it or hate it, using social media is a skill that our students will likely need in their futures. If you teach high school or middle school, your students probably have accounts on Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. so teaching them responsible ways to use these platforms doesn’t seem outlandish.

But what if you teach in an elementary school? These students cannot lawfully have a social media account since they are under the age of 13. Eventually these students will need to have the skills to successfully navigate social media, so how can we start preparing them at a young age? Fortunately in the last few years platforms have emerged to help teachers tackle this task. Tools like Seesaw, Flipgrid, and Padlet have designed safe, kid friendly platforms where students can safely share their ideas and their work while practicing their online communication skills that will be essential in their futures. (Note: just because the legal terms of a product say they cannot use it, some adolescents with or without the consent of their parents choose to create and use an account anyway.)

 

This begs the question, is it the responsibility of our schools to teach children this skill? In my opinion, YES! Just like we teach character education, I believe that teaching these skills will not only positively impact our students long after they have left our buildings, but it fits with what we know about best practices. It is a well known fact that students learning by doing. If they can explain a concept in their own words and in their own way, then we know they have truly learned it. I love this quote from Janelle Bence:

Authentic learning is not demonstrated by a worksheet that’s turned into a teacher. That may be more appropriate to indicate progress in a particular more isolated skill. Real learning, however, is manifested in learner creations that are published for consumption by a wider audience.

Bence, J. (2016, May 17). The benefits of sharing student work in online spaces. In KQED Education. Retrieved February 7, 2018, from https://ww2.kqed.org/education/2016/05/17/the-benefits-of-sharing-student-work-in-online-spaces/

So with the idea that using social media is a life skill, and true learning requires more than just worksheet completion, where do we begin? Lucky for us, some very talented and creative educators have come up with ideas on how to combine the content and skills they are already teaching with the posting, sharing and connecting that students want and need to practice.

Book Talk

A book talk proves you read the book and encourages others to read it. Think about it like a commercial for the book, you want to entice others to read it without giving away the ending or any surprises.

What tools can students use?

Flipgrid-example
Seesaw-record a selfie video

Book Review

A book review is very similar to a book talk, but your ideas are communicated in writing rather than speaking. Short and simple is the key! You want to summarize the book and get others excited to read it without spoiling the ending.

What tools can student use?

Padlet-example
Seesaw-Activity
Google Classroom-Question

Book Trailer-Tony Vincent (@tonyvincent)

A book trailer is a commercial for a book, just like a movie trailer it creates excitement around the story using images, music, and purposefully selected words and phrases. Book trailers are intended to be short and exciting for the viewer.

What tools can students use?

iMovie-share on Seesaw or Flipgrid
WeVideo-share on Seesaw or Flipgrid
Planning Sheet

Book Snaps-Tara Martin (@TaraMartinEDU)

A book snap is a picture of a page in a book that a student found interesting, insightful, or stuck out to them for any reason. Students use a digital tool to annotate and share their thinking about what they read and share it with others.

What tools can students use?

Seesaw-activity option 1, activity option 2, activity option 3, activity option 4
Pic Collage EDU-Share on Seesaw or Padlet
Google Drawings-Share on Seesaw or Padlet
Google Slides-Share on Seesaw or Padlet

How can you get your students creating, connecting, and socializing in a positive way?

Feel free to comment below or reach out with any questions or suggestions.

Tech Tuesday-Toontastic

I am often asked "What is a good app for ______." Fill in the blank with virtually any concept, and the process is usually the same.  I research a variety of apps, look on social media, check out app store rankings only to find a great app that either costs way too much or cannot be used by students under the age of 13.  So imagine my surprise when I learned about Toontastic. It is FREE, and as far as I can tell there are no in-app purchases. It is also engaging, intuitive, and the final product looks great!

What is it exactly?

Toontastic is a creation app that allows students to easily produce their own cartoons while guiding them through the parts of a story or project.  Students can choose a short story consisting of 3 scenes, a classic story with 5 scenes, or a science report.

Pros and Cons?

There are no logins to manage, and the projects are easily exported to the camera roll for easy sharing via Seesaw. I love that the app allows for a lot of student creativity, but also has some structure to help keep kids on track.  Students can draw their own backgrounds and characters or they can use the premade ones.  The app is definitely engaging, but it could easily become a distraction for some students.  I think that making sure students have a plan for their story before they start using the app is crucial, otherwise they can easily get lost in all of the customization options. 

Overall, I think this could be a very powerful tool for students to show their learning in a really creative way.

Check out the short tutorial below to see some of the features.

How can you use Toontastic in your classroom?

Digital Citizenship

Every spring teachers and students fill out the BrightBytes survey.  In the fall our Technology Department looks at the results.  We use this data for planning purposes and goal setting. For the last few years, the items about digital citizenship have been a low point in our data, so one of my personal goals has been to provide teachers with resources to explicitly teach their students what it means to be a responsible digital citizen.  While there are many great resources out there the one that sticks out to me is Common Sense Media's Digital Citizenship Curriculum.  I like that it is well organized and has a scope and sequence across grade levels.

I decided to take this curriculum and tweak it for our teachers.  Knowing that teaching a 45-60 minute lesson on something that is not a standard would be a difficult task, I tried to scale the lessons back to about 20 minutes making it easier to fit into the already busy day.  I also tried to align the lessons in each grade level to our Character Counts pillar of the month.   In some cases this worked, but not every lesson fits every month's pillar well.

The goal is to teach one lesson per month, so that by the end of the year students will have gone through at least 5 specific lessons on digital citizenship.  More importantly my hope is that the conversations about what it means to be a digital citizen will become a natural part of our school community.

The document below outlines each grade level's lesson for each month, and includes links to the lessons.



I'd love to know how you teach your classes about digital citizenship.  And if you aren't teaching this topic what barriers are the way? 

Tech Tuesday-Flip Grid

Have you heard of this?!?! Flip Grid is a highly versatile tool that all teachers will want in their arsenal of tech tools.

We all have all kinds of students in our classrooms; the quiet kids who have wonderful ideas, but never want to speak in front of their peers, the kids with great insights who struggle to write their ideas on paper, or the kids who have no problem sharing, but can get off topic.  With Flip Grid you can give the quiet students a voice, give the struggling writer a way to express himself/herself, and give kids a limited amount of time to get their ideas out (with unlimited chances to re-record).

Flip Grid allows you to set up a "grid" (think class) where you can post "topics" for your students.  Students respond to your post, which can be written, video you record, video you upload, images, or anything in your Google Drive.  You get to control the privacy settings (password protection) and choose if students can post automatically or if you need to approve their responses first.

Check out this video tutorial from Stacey Roshan (@buddyxo) on how to set up your teacher account and start your first topic.

iMovie Book Trailer

Fourth graders are great at using their chromebooks, but when the carts had to be shuffled around for testing, we decided to try out an project on the ipads.  The teacher wanted his students to showcase a book they had read, and iMovie was the perfect platform to let them do that.  We choose to have them create book trailers that would summarize the book they read, and give others in the class ideas for reading over the summer.

Thanks to Learning in Hand with Tony Vincent, the students were able to plan what their book trailer ahead of time.

Once they got on the ipad it was easy to create their iMovie project.  The projects turned out great!  The students loved creating them, some even did two projects! Being able to view the trailers their friends had created was a great way to end this fun project.

Google Forms for Assessment

There have been some updates to Google Forms to make it easier than ever to use for formative assessment. Teachers can create questions with images in the question or answer, which makes this tool idea for young learners. Using their iPad or Chromebook, students can use forms to answer questions to provide evidence of progress toward learning targets. The teacher can see student responses in real time, and use this data to drive instruction.

Demo Quiz

SMART Notebook Maestro

Using the maestro add-on and the SMART Notebook app, you can control your SMART Notebook documents from your iPad.  Here is how you can get connected.

Setting Passcode and Wallpaper

In order to add some personality to the iPads, many teachers have their students set the wallpaper and lock screen to show the student's face.  This allows the teacher to quickly identify who the iPad belongs to.  Students can also use their lunch/library code as their passcode for added security.  This videos explains how to set up these two features.

Downloading a Purchased App

This video teaches students how to install an app that our school has purchased (even if it is free) from the app store.

iPad Navigation

A quick overview of how to navigate the iPad.

iPad Expectations and Buttons

As we begin the school year it is important to teach students about the tools they will be using and the expectations for using those tools.  This short video gives students a brief overview of the tools and buttons on an iPad.