March 9, 2020
Do I have an example???
Honestly, this week’s blog post reflection has been difficult for me to start. I wracked my brain for a tech-rich learning experience that had taken place in my classroom. I found it difficult to think of one. Maybe I am being too hard on myself or maybe it is an accurate reflection.
Either way, what I keep reminding myself of is that the reason I am a COETAILer is to learn how to create more authentic tech-learning experiences for my students. It is natural to feel like I don’t have any worthy examples or if others are way ahead of me in this area since I’m at the beginning of my journey. I am here to grow and go!
As I was digging for an example, one realization that I came to is that tech-rich learning experiences don’t always have to be a “big” project at the end of a unit or some flashy Twitter-worthy activity. What is important is the purpose. By asking myself, the three questions from Kim Cofino’s post, Three Steps to Transforming Learning in Your Classroom, I can mindfully create tech-rich learning experiences with a purpose.
- Make it Relevant
- Ask Yourself: How can your students relate to this content in their daily lives or experiences?
- Real-World Task
- Ask Yourself: What would a professional in this field do?
- Authentic Audience
- Ask Yourself: Who cares about this work?
Teaching Basic Skills
After considering these three questions, I finally made a connection between what my students have been doing for the past five weeks with online learning and tech-rich learning. Online learning has been manageable for my second-grade students because of the tech-rich learning experiences that have taken place in my classroom at the beginning and throughout this year.
Some of these experiences are simply teaching my students how to log-in to their Gmail accounts, how to upload a video to Seesaw, or how to create a Google Slide and share it. There have also been times when I showed them a tool like Google Slides and had them play around a bit to explore changing the background to match the mood or changing fonts when writing a story to relay a message. Allowing them to play around with all these tools led them to learn new tools on their own.
Learning is based on curiosity more than any other human characteristic.
Are We Getting Smarter about Ed Tech? -Edutopia
Online Learning Experience
If it weren’t for teaching my second graders how to use the products in G Suite (Gmail, Docs, and Slides), they wouldn’t be able to collaborate, receive feedback, and communicate as easily during our online education. Teaching my students these skills has paid off tremendously during this Covid-19 school disruption.
When I taught my students how to give feedback in Google Docs, I wanted them to be able to do this because, in the real world, giving and receiving feedback is essential to growth. Peer to Peer revision sets students up to receive constructive feedback and to give constructive feedback with these three guidelines in mind:
- Be kind.
- Be specific.
- Be helpful.
Examples
Because my students have learned how to give feedback in class, they can still do this from home during online learning. For example, when my students were working to publish their realistic fiction stories from home, they could still share their stories through Google Docs and give/receive feedback. Without the knowledge of using Google Docs, students would not have been able to receive feedback as easily from their own peers. Giving and receiving feedback has also pushed my students to seek out feedback from me; especially during this time.
Another example from my online learning experience that has shown me that the technology experiences in my classroom this year have been authentic and purposeful has been my students’ ability to navigate their online accounts as second-graders. I am able to ask them to complete tasks such as listening to a collection of poems with audio recordings in Google Slides and comment on each poem for what they notice (rhyme, rhythm, comparisons, etc.). This activity allows them to start thinking like a poet (noticing what poets do) while learning from what their classmates find as well (reading and responding to their classmates’ comments in the thread). These experiences are possible because I taught my students these skills before online learning began.
Tech-rich learning can come from teaching basic skills to young learners with authentic learning experiences. These basic skills allow learners to begin accessing the tools we want them to use when creating and making authentic products. They need to start somewhere.
Organization
My students’ ability is in part due to my organization of these tools in a more accessible, age-friendly manner. I use Symbaloo to organize all of the websites we use in the classroom. Symbaloo makes it easy for students to navigate all of the sites we use day-to-day. Symbaloo creates simple tiles for all the websites we use in class. They do not need to spend time typing in each web address- which for 2nd graders can take a long time.
I also created a Google Doc for each student with all of the sites and username/passwords. They each have their own copy in their Google Drive and a printout. This way students can easily access the sites we use from anywhere. Being organized in this way has paid off in class and while students are trying to manage all of their accounts during online home learning. Streamlining and managing their digital lives are skills students will need and use the rest of their lives.
On My Way There
Although I know that I have room to grow when planning for more tech-rich learning, I do think I am on my way there. By keeping in mind the SAMR Model, applying the principles of McTighe and Wiggins, and thinking of the questions educators ask when planning for tech-rich integration, I know I will be helping each of my students build a tech-rich foundation.