What Happened This Week! 10/26/2015

This week started with our PD department tackling Twitter. They created a department Twitter account as well as professional accounts for each instructional coach.

I also visited Rancho Village where we learned all about Socrative. This school has been focused on tools for formative assessments this fall.

On Tuesday, I started at Coolidge. We were able to get all of the 6th graders logged in to their Google Drives on desktops as well as chromebooks! Success!!! Sadly, I don't have 1 picture from the morning event:(

Tuesday afternoon I met with teachers from Fillmore and we were able to  learn 10 ways to use Google Docs. This event was awesome.

Wednesday was our regularly scheduled department meeting and then Part 4 of the Hour of Code series.

Thursday we were able to attend SMART Amp training. SMART Amp is COOL!

On Friday, I visited Wheeler to meet with a 4th grade teacher who is exploring gamification and has had wildly awesome improvements in test scores!

9.28.15 - What I'm Seeing this Week in Classrooms!

This post is about all of the random cool things I am seeing in classrooms around the district. 

On Tuesday, I started my day at Pierce. I saw GoNoodle and quite a few brain breaks. Brain breaks are a great opportunity to get students moving and are a nice way to transition from one activity to another.

Also this week, my blog post about Part 2 of 5: Hour of Code Series was posted. This week consisted of learning to code with Code.org and then setting up your class in Code.org to have students start coding.

As I visited another school, 5th & 6th grade students were practicing their Google Search skills as they researched and learned about Jamestown. 

Then I stopped by school to follow up with a few teachers and found more students using technology. My favorite room was the nonverbal special education class where students were using the SMART board and switches to take assessments. 

Anything is possible! What a great week! I love my job!!!

Educational Technology Learning Challenge

Whoa...what is an Ed Tech Learning Challenge??? This is a series of tasks, or challenges, presented to staff members. The participants learn how to use and integrate new technologies in the classroom.

This semester I am working with one elementary campus over 12 week. We started out working through the SAMR model using ipads. Next we moved to Google Drive and now we are working with SMART Notebook and SMART Boards. We just completed week 6 this week. The next 6 weeks will include flipping, coding, project based learning, social media and more ipads.

The conclusion of the challenge will be a peer showcase so we can all show what we learned and how we customized it for our classroom and students.This campus has a great staff and is a joy to work with every week!

I will post more after the peer showcase. There will be some amazing sharing at that time!

ETLC - Fall 2014

Our department just launched the Ed Tech Learning Challenge - Fall 2014. This cohort consist of teachers with 15+ years of experience and who want to learn the basics of technology to use in their classroom. Teachers volunteered to participate for the 3 month challenge. The challenge consists of 3 smaller challenges revolving around Google Drive, SMART Boards & Twitter. Each challenge is delivered via Google Classroom and consist of a challenge, discussion questions and a reflection face to face meeting.

Thus far, the reviews are good. It is definitely a new experience for many, as they are use to "sit and get" professional development. This is a self paced, any time professional development.

Ed Tech Update #3...SMART tools

I really like using my SMART board and I like my SMART response clickers even more. I have used the clickers to take vocabulary quizzes most of this year. I even convinced one of my team members to start using them! Once you model appropriate use of the clickers and the procedures to go along with them, it's a breeze. I create quizzes every week about the definitions or synonyms/antonyms of our vocab words and then we take the quiz and it grades it automatically for you. I feel like the students stay on task and are smarter about their time management when taking a quiz using the clickers.