1st Graders Discover The Best Digital Tool Ever - Their iPad Camera!

This week our art teacher, Mrs. Cooper, approached me for help with a 1st grade photography lesson, not that she needed much of my help. So, I came to offer moral support and any troubleshooting that might help smooth out an otherwise perfect lesson! 

I was so impressed with Mrs. Cooper's lesson and how much lesson content her students demonstrated. Before I arrived to help with the iPads, Mrs. Cooper had already taught her students about many concepts important in art and photography. Students had chosen a beanie baby and then created an appropriate background for it. They were immersed in the vocabulary and concepts for a rich discussion about background, foreground, portrait, landscape, close-ups, and focal point.  

Mrs. Cooper prepared her students for the photography and the device, using this set of step by step instructions for air dropping their photographs to her laptop.  

Her students did a great job of demonstrating their learning!

While I was helping Mrs. Cooper, I began to think about how much the iPad camera has been such a boon to classrooms.  Yes, the apps, with their subsequent creative and collaborative uses have enriched learning for our students, but it is the camera that has given students alternative ways of interacting with content and given rise to new ways of demonstrating their knowledge. Not only do they get to take photos, now they can easily share them with Mrs. Cooper and their classmates using Air Drop.  These 1st graders digital natives are well on their way to becoming photographers!

So Thankful For A Feast Of New Library Books For OHE Students!

SAMR Smackdown! Inservice Presentation & Padlet

Today was a teacher inservice day for our district's elementary teachers and I was given an opportunity to teach our staff about SAMR! After we came together on the common language of quality digital integration with the SAMR model, I was able to share ideas to help spark their imagination!  Thanks so much to my colleague Hilary Moorlach, Digital Learning Specialist at EVE, for jump starting our collaborative Padlet, and Brianna Buck, Lakeville's Digital Coordinator, for sharing her ideas!

Hello World! Amping Up Student Learning With The LittleBits Coding Kit!

For the last several years 5th grade teacher, Susie Wilson, and I have been working together to bring students a choice unit with LittleBits.  You can see these collaborations in some of my past blog posts.  Our LittleBits have given our students hours of fun, inventing and learning about circuits.  Recently, we bought a LittleBits Code Kit. This new kit really amped up the learning for our students.  Susie took the LittleBits home and figured it all out, thank you Susie!!, so she took the lead in our lessons.  She was able to guide our students through the process of connecting their code bit to their Chromebooks using the Littlebits coding web app. Their very first learning experience was to code the traditional first timer's coding message "Hello World!" so it would show on their LED Matrix bit. Since then, we have challenged students to create an arcade game called the Ultimate Shootout. Stay tuned for more on this as students learn to use their coding for real world products!

Sharing OHE Fun Through Video!

All School Walk-A-Thon





and
Book Fair Grandparent Event

3rd Graders Create Community Helper Trading Cards With Help From Google Templates

3rd Grade Teacher, Sandra McCollough, came to me one morning searching for a digital idea that would work for their unit of study about Community Helpers.  Sandra's class was just ending their unit and she wanted her students to be able to demonstrate their learning in a digital format. Last year Sandra and I collaborated on a lesson to help students create trading cards for Black History Month, and she remembered those and suggested we try that again for this topic. I found the perfect template to edit for our needs among the Google templates curated by tech teacher Darren Maltais at   https://sites.google.com/a/gshare.blackgold.ca/engagingstudents/home.  I've written about this site before on my blogs and newsletters.  It is a collection of the best Google templates I've ever found! Thanks Darren!

I edited a trading card template so students would be required to share the information they had learned about community helpers. Students chose their favorite community helper. As all students love animals, there was a moment when I was sure they would all choose veterinarian! Surprisingly, we had some variety! I shared the link with students for the template using a google shortened link.  I also made sure to change the end of the link from /edit to /copy so it would force a new copy for each student. This kept students from all trying to edit the same document.  https://goo.gl/jyU79c  Students added their information to the template with a few helpful hints from me. Adding images is particularly easy for students from within the open Google window using the "Replace image" option. Once students finished, they shared their trading card with their teacher via Google's share option.

In the end, Sandra decided the trading cards would look great on display in her classroom, so she printed little copies of each. They looked great on the wall. It would also work for students to partner trade their cards digitally if they wanted to actually trade them!

  

Getting Students Ready To Put Their Best Digital Foot Forward! (and Library Foot too!)

Here we are! It's Saturday, November 3rd, and I have that guilty feeling. You know, that naggly feeling you get when you haven't been doing something that you value, but haven't been able to carve out time for. This time it's been my blog that has been producing that feeling for me. We have been in school for two months! Two months that I haven't been sharing all of the good digital work our students have been doing at OHE! So here I sit at a Caribou Coffee with my coffee at the ready, ear buds in, and laptop charged so I can get in the zone and begin sharing with all of you!

This year, at the beginning of the year, I offered to go to each classroom to give students some overview and get them started on a few things that would help them throughout the year - Keyboarding, Using the Library! & The Dos and Don'ts of Chromebook Use! To my surprise, every teacher took me up on my offer!  Cherished classroom time is hard for teachers to give up, but they found time for me to come in.

One by one, I ran from room to room (50+ lessons), sharing this information.  About a week into my marathoning, I realized that I wasn't exactly being consistent with each class. I would forget a bit here or there. (Something prep providing teachers will be able to relate to, as they are often called upon to repeat the same lesson to many classes.) So I decided to create Google Slideshows to help keep me on track. I don't typically consider slideshows to be the most engaging teaching technique, but in this case, I needed the slides more than the students did!  These slideshows certainly didn't represent the best in digital integration, but they were very practical! I was able to send the link for each slideshow to the classroom teacher before arriving in their classroom.

For the kick off keyboarding lesson, we quickly went through the slides and then each student logged in and tried their first keyboarding lesson.  Throughout the year, our teachers try to insert a little keyboarding practice using typing.com into their class time each week.

The Chromebook lesson gave students much needed practice logging into their Chromebooks and going through the features of the device.

Our OHE teachers go with their students to their book checkout time each week, and are often the only adult with them during their time in the library. Even though I am not there, I really want this time to be productive for our students as it is their best time to get a book that they want to read for pleasure. Our teachers do a great job, but they find it helpful when I can teach students how to find the books they want to read.  (And I think our teachers find the information helpful too!)