Chrome-flections Week One: Resources!
During my first week with Chromebooks in my second grade classroom, I have come across some amazing resources. I know there are so many out there but here are three that I used this last week, that are my new favorites! These are tiles that I have made sure to include in my class Symbaloo: https://sososeussey.edublogs.org/1-fish-2-fish-seussville-tech-fish/
TodaysMeet
The second day of last week, I wanted to take our failed Google Doc vocab discussion and find a better way to have our discussion, I remembered TodaysMeet. This website is for lack of a better description, an online chat room. You don’t have to create an account to set up a room but I did. This way I could pick how long I wanted my room open and I could delete comments that may need to be taken down. (Oh and then screen shot page as a reflection for appropriate digital citizenship). This went a million times better then having 25 kids edit a Google Doc at the same time. In real time students were looking at a collection of pictures that described our vocabulary word and typing what was the same, different, and seeing what others were typing. While I feel technology is amazing, I wanted to still have a face to face component. After allowing them to type their reflections in TodaysMeet, I had them discuss everyone’s comments by scrolling through the feed. It was a great way for them to point out what was good and what they needed to work on. It was in doing this I realized this would be a great way to do a number talk before math lessons. Enter number talk TodaysMeet lesson. Our number talk that day was how many ways you can make 20. It was beyond neat to see students type away and then reflect with our peers.
Honesty Alert! I LOVE TODAYSMEET! I can print transcripts and since my room is open for a year, students will be able to look back on previous discussions. I also love how quickly it opened student’s eyes to proofreading and how important typing skills are if we want to communicate a message. I also noticed some of my best spellers struggled with that when typing. This will give them the challenge they need and will hopefully strengthen their typing all at the same time. While I feel Google Docs are way cool and am currently researching how to use them more effectively, for this particular discussion TodaysMeet worked better. I did have a student who chose to not type what they were asked to do. They simply had to close their Chromebook and look off of someone else’s while writing out their comment on paper. My cooperating teacher also uses it on the iPad and it was a similar hit for her students.
Kahoot!
This is probably me new favorite teacher resource. It is a way for me to make an online interactive quiz. I create problems with either pictures or videos playing. Students log in with a number code that my quiz generates. Students have to look at the SMART board to read the question and the answer choices, then use their device to select the correct colored shape that is the answer. I created an intro to Kahoot as a way to introduce my students to how it works and highly recommend doing this. Make your questions simple and answers they either know or can look around your room and find.
After each question it shows a graph of how many students selected what choices (so you can gauge understanding) and it provides the leader board after every question which my kids LIVED for. Not only were they excited if it was them but I was very impressed with how much they were excited for each other. At the end of the quiz students can provide you feedback. Then you can save the results to your computer and it makes an Excel spreadsheet for you. Yep, I totally nerded out over this. This spread sheet records every students score, what questions they missed/got correct, and what they answered for every question. There are even multiple sheets so you can break it down by questions.
Honesty Alert! Engagement will be high but students get swept up in the game and begin to get click happy. I showed them the spreadsheet it creates and they were surprised to see that I could see how they answered. They realized that it isn’t about how fast they can be but how accurate they need to be. My partner teacher and I thought this would be a great way to review skills and asses their knowledge of that content. The amount of rigor is HIGH and we feel the data collected is way more meaningful.
CODE
This is a free program that teachers can set up for their students that I mentioned in a past post. On Fridays, I have time in my schedule for them to have coding time. Students build code by watching an instructional video, and then moving code tiles to make something move. In the first level it is moving an angry bird. The amount of critical thinking and problem solving skills is through the roof. Students are highly engaged and began naturally collaborating with others to solve the code. They even acted out which way their angry bird needed to turn which then led to discussions of how did you figure that out. It was neat to sit back and watch them be independent thinkers. These problem solving skills are also teaching them not to run to me every time there is a technology problem.
Honesty Alert! While our time is precious as teachers, I highly recommend giving students time to do this! The skills outside of computer science are important in every subject and will help them become independent thinkers which after all is one of the main goals of going 1:1.
Are their any resources that you feel are must haves in a 1:1 classroom?
