A place to share my experiences as a TTOC and Middle School Teacher. Resources, ideas and important issues in education.
It allows students to create their own positive digital footprint. Kidblog allows students to embed video, slideshows, artwork, etc. As the teacher, you have control of all the privacy settings for your class. It also creates an excellent digital portfolio of of each students writing.
Cargo-bot is a great iPad app to get students introduced to basic coding skills. It sponsored by code.org, which is a non-porfit foundation dedication to growing computer programming education. It is the first app ever created solely on an iPad using the app Codea.
It features 36 fiendishly clever puzzles, haunting music and stunning retina graphics. You can even record your solutions and share them on YouTube to show your friends. (http://twolivesleft.com/CargoBot/)
Source: Read more about app smashing here!
This week was also fun because the students got to use their devices, and QR codes to do a warm up using SMART XC (extreme collaboration). The kids scanned the green QR code, answered the question, then scanned the black QR code, which connected them to the SMARTboard, and they typed in their answer. Their answer then shows up on the board somewhere and after we have a bunch we can see which one is correct! And what's great is I can choose for the information to be anonymous so no kid has to worry about being made fun of if their answer is wrong. Thanks to @RafranzDavis for showing me this!
This week one student came up to me to explain that while reading Tlinglit legends (as part of a project she has chosen to take on in conjunction with our novel study 'Touching Spirit Bear') she couldn't "get" the moral of one of them... another student piped in "ya it makes no sense, there is really no lesson" (he is NOT doing this project, but somehow knew what she was talking to)
Puzzled, I ask which legend and he pulls up the legend summary the first student had wrote, which he had in a skype chat and showed me the legend.
I noticed as I was reading that 6 students in class were part of the chat and had been collaborating and discussing as they worked through their final projects (which were all different projects, very diverse as they were able to choose from list or create their own final projects)
How cool!
Twitter: Whether it is class homework updates, project deadlines, school news or dinnertime conversation starters, teachers are taking advantage of Twitter’s free tool and keeping parents up to date and involved in classroom happenings. In a day-in-age where most parents have cell phones, Fast Follow by Twitter becomes a simple and reliable alert system. To use it, all you need to do is setup a Twitter account and ask parents (and older students) to text Twitter’s shortcode of 40404 with the message “follow [your Twitter username].” From there, parents will start receiving all of your updates via text message in real-time.
Verbal explanations
I have always used formative assessment in my classroom, but our digital portfolios give me much richer information than our paper portfolios ever did. Because my young students are still beginning writers, it is often difficult for them to explain their learning through writing. They can, however, explain their learning verbally. There are lots of apps (including my current iPad favorites Educreations and Draw & Tell) that record voice over an image. These digital artifacts allow me to understand a child’s thinking in a much deeper way.
The beauty of digital portfolios is that as the children and I are constantly assessing their learning in a formative and summative way, the students are also demonstrating their growing knowledge for a wide audience and learning about digital citizenship and appropriate online behavior. What great by-products of the assessment process!
Education—there’s an app for that. In fact, there are hundreds of thousands of apps on the market designed for teaching and learning.
It will come as no surprise to anybody who has been paying attention that kids in today's classrooms with their BlackBerrys, iTouches, iPhones, thousands of apps, Google, Wikipedia, Face-book, Twitter and laptop windows on the world are making a new kind of demand on public education and its teachers.
"Digital" has always been in these kids' cultural DNA, they've likely never written in cursive, their cellphones tell them the time and are their social lifelines, they can organize a flash mob in two minutes and anything bizarre that happens in a classroom will be on YouTube later that same evening.
Teaching this group in a classroom is not getting any easier.
Today's kids are awash in a computerized technology that does not distinguish information and knowledge. So it will be up to their teachers to help them distinguish gold from dross.
