Digital Organization

I am always baffled by how a student’s desk can become disorganized so quickly and their folders a complete mess. Then we became a 1:1 classroom and began using Google Drive more frequently which lessened the mess in their desks, but increased the mess in their Drive. So towards the beginning the pilot we had our students create folders within their Drives to help sort all of the Docs, Presentations and other stuff that they were saving. We even had them create folders within their folders to further organize their work. For example a student would have a folder labeled “writing” and in this folder there was a folder for writing projects, word work, and reflections. In their math folder I had my students create a folder for each unit. In science I had them create folders for the different topics we studied like plants and space.

We then showed them how to move Docs that were shared with them into their folders and delete them from their shared with me folders. We had a really good system of making sure that their Drive was organized and all files were in a folder.

Then we got Hapara. Oh boy. This really messed with our system. We had to have our students put all of their folders that we created into a Hapara folder. (For more information about Hapara Dashboard visit this site). This was done so that we would have access to all of our student’s work without them having to share anything with us. We could also organize and keep tabs on their files. Now that everything was in a folder within a folder within a folder, the students became very confused. Our students continue to move things into folders and stay organized, but to find documents they now use the search bar. With the search bar the students no longer have to click on folder after folder to locate their work. They type in part of the title in the search bar and they can find everything with ease.

Another thing that we had our students do to become digitally organized was create bookmark tabs in their bookmark bar. We went through all of the websites that we use often and had the students add these site to their bookmark bar. Seems like a simple idea and I use the bookmark bar myself, but I never would have thought of having my students use this until Christi mentioned it. It is such a time saver!
Anyways, all this to say there are lots of little things that you can have your students do to personalize and organize their chromebooks and drives to make things faster, easier, and less messy.

Guided Math

This year I have been hearing more and more about the concept of guided math.  Basically, it is similar to guided reading in that students are broken into smaller math groups and given direct instruction in those small groups. They then work on independent activities that reinforce the lesson taught, or review material taught previously.  After hearing teachers from a school in the district present how they are doing guided math, I knew this was something that would greatly improve the math lessons in my classroom.  

The Chromebooks have been an integral part of implementing this program.  We have used them for students to create digital logs of their learning by taking pictures of the fractions they created, for students to watch and respond to videos on topics we have taught, with IXL to review skills, and to create documents that extend their learning by applying it to real-life scenarios.  When starting the 1:1 pilot, math was an area I thought would be a stretch for using the Chromebooks in my classroom.  Boy, was I wrong!  The resources available on the Chromebook give us the ability to greatly differentiate the activities students are doing in the classroom.  What I have loved is seeing all of the different activities going on in the classroom during math, and the high level of engagement students have for the activities they are participating in, whether digital, hands-on, or something in between!

Olympic Projects

The Olympics are one of my favorite events, both summer and winter.  Beyond that, it is an event that unites us around the world, and provides a unique learning opportunity that only comes around every 4 years for us educators (unless the summer Olympics are late!).  To celebrate this event, our classes worked with a partner to complete an Olympic Presentation on one country competing in the Winter Olympics.

In the project, students created a presentation containing facts about their country, a graph of the athletes participating in different events, a medal count graph, and mini-biographies on an Olympian.

The BEST part of this project was the enthusiasm my students had for it.  Every day, the students were bursting to share what they had seen in the Olympic broadcasts from the night before.  Some couldn't even wait until school! The weekend after the Opening Ceremonies I started receiving Edmodo messages telling me all they had seen already! On top of our school subjects, they learned so much about sportsmanship along the way - we had such candid discussions of how different athletes reacted to their wins and loses, and how those athletes handled things well or could have handled things better.  Without thinking about the academics of it, our students were writing reports, creating and comparing picture graphs, and studying countries around the world!

To end our project, students presented to the class.  We discussed this presentation skill - that we really shouldn't read right from our pages, and came up with the facts that would be most important to share.  We made a list to display and each group shared just key facts, elaborating when classmates had questions.  We were sad when the Olympics ended!