Who Said Learning Can't Be Fun??

Wow! These past two weeks of school have been incredible! All of the teachers that I work with regularly are coming to me with things that they want to do in their classroom! It's been non-stop since we came back, but I really enjoy the busyness of it all!

The first activity came from 5th grade. She was set on doing Word Sorts on the iPad. This was something she started doing last year and wanted to start the year with this year. She just started exploring padlet (Pictures / Screenshots will come soon) in which she praised it by saying, "It gives every student a voice to share how the really feel about the text without verbally saying it in front of an audience."

 

The next activity was in 1st Grade. This teacher had a big vision of her students recording their voice over images snapped in Explain Everything.  This particular teacher was really nervous to do an activity because it was their first digital learning activity in her career! I wanted to do something simple such learn the basics of Pic Collage, etc, however the only way we could do what she wanted to do was with the Explain Everything app. After quite a few planning sessions, motivational talks, etc we co-taught and pulled it off! We both thought it was a good idea to teach the student the app first before using it with her content so that is what we had focused on. In partners, students had to create a new file, take pictures of each other, type in their name, record their voice saying their name, re-editing the audio if needed, then saved / exported it out to Google Drive! Mind, you these are 1st Grade students and they did it all! The teacher was so relieved when we were done! We gave each other high 5's as a celebration of her first lesson! Such a proud moment!

Next we had a 3rd Grade Math Teacher who also had her first technology integrated lesson today! I had been wanting to work with this teacher last year however our schedules never really worked out. This year however, she is on our digital learning team and will be using technology on a regular basis!  She wanted her students to compose / decompose numbers in Pic Collage. We co-taught the lesson for 1st period and for 2nd and 3rd period she did it all on her own with me just floating around the room! She really found this activity engaging and challenging for her students! 

 

Our last activity for the day was a Google Hangout. My Science Teacher told me that she really wanted to beef up using technology in Science. We talked about doing a video chat with another school in our district. We found another 4th grade teacher that was willing to do this with us! Collaboratively, we came up with the questions students wanted to ask, however something was lacking. After talking it over with the other Digital Learning Coach, we thought it would raise the impact of the lesson if students could collaboratively work on a Padlet to identify various safe / unsafe behaviors in the Science Lab! He created about 8 Padlets in which we then placed on our website. Students would navigate over to the Padlet and we would go over the question together. Once we went over the question, students would respond. Once finished, students would chat with each other in the hangout and discuss their results! Oh yeah-- I failed to mention-- my Science teacher invited 2 other Science Teachers  + their kids into her classroom! So instead of 20 students, we had about 60! The kids behaved so well! We were all impressed! We plan on doing many more of these soon!