The Augmented Reality Sandbox in Action

If you read our earlier blog post on our district’s Augmented Reality Sandbox, you likely have an idea of how the tool can enhance student learning through hands-on and experiential activities. As the sandbox has made its way to different buildings in the district this year, our creative teachers have added their own spin to how they use the sandbox to engage their students.

Amber Korn at Huber Ridge is one such teacher. Amber took full advantage of the sandbox’s time at Huber Ridge to deepen her 4th graders’ understanding of weathering and erosion. Working in stations, students built landforms, reproduced natural events, and observed the impact of weather on topography. While they greatly enjoyed building mountains, digging out lakes, and causing earthquakes, the most exciting part for many of the students was making it “rain” in the sandbox with virtual water. By making it rain, they were able to see the movement of the water and predict the impact water has on landforms. But Amber didn’t stop there! She brought the learning experience home through the use of higher-level thinking activities. Once everyone in the class was able to experience the sandbox, the students got together and connected what they had observed in the sandbox with what they had already learned about landforms, developing a more thorough understanding of the meaning and impacts of weathering and erosion. The class created a collaborative document detailing their understanding of these concepts and each student made their own artistic representation of the impact weathering and erosion have on Earth’s landforms. Through manipulating the content in multiple ways, Amber used the power of experiential learning to engage her students and bring her science unit alive in a new and exciting way that her students won’t soon forget.

Watch this video by UCLA to see how the AR Sandbox works.

The AR Sandbox has great potential for any grade level and subject, such as illustrating point of view, making inferences, solving multi-step problems, demonstrating cause and effect, creating sculptures that reflect contour lines, and even helping students process emotion, to name a few. Want to experience the AR Sandbox for yourself? Good news! The sandbox will be a part of Westerville Partners for Education’s Starry Night event on April 8th at Westerville North High School. Come and check it out!

If you would like to explore how to use the sandbox with your students, contact your Ed Tech Coach!

Capture the Flag

Hacking

Hacking is a scary word that most people hope they never have to hear used in a conversation about them or their personal information. As we move to a more digital world we are constantly faced with cyber security issues to keep our digital information private. As the world increases the amount of information available digitally, the world also needs more people to keep that information secure.

This is why the Ohio National Guard has created the Ohio Cyber Collaboration Committee (OC3). This group has been tasked with increasing the number of people qualified to work in the field of cyber security. They are starting by creating a place for high school students to learn how. Inside the OC3 Cyber Range, students have a chance to play "Capture the Flag" in a virtual world. The goal is for kids to learn how to hack into a virtual system so that they can eventually become people who will defend against similar types of attacks in the real world. The hope is that cyber security clubs will be created in schools across the state in the near future.

Westerville North High School hosted a Capture the Flag event this week. The event brought cyber security experts from the military and private sector in to help students from around central Ohio hone their skills. The event took place in "The Shop" where a leader board tracked how effective the kids were "hacking" into different systems.

In addition to cyber security experts, the event was also attended by members of the Westerville City Schools District Office and members of the Ohio Department of Education (including the State Superintendent). This event created quite the media frenzy!

Defense Visual Individual Distribution Service | Ohio National Guard News | 

WOSU | The Columbus Dispatch

(By the way, a Westerville kid ended up winning. #JustSayin')

Spotlight on Blended Learning: The “Switzerland” Project

Switzerland is known for its mountains, chocolate, and neutrality. Recently, at Pointview Elementary, Mrs. Lester’s fourth grade ELA students were reminded of Switzerland’s notoriety in neutrality during an engaging lesson that focused on close reading for pros and cons and practicing civil discourse.  

The students began by reading an article assigned to them through Schoology from the Newsela website. The article focused on the pros and cons of self driving cars. (Newsela works well for finding resources like this as the articles can be narrowed by Lexile level and the topics are high interest and timely. You could also assign different articles depending on level to differentiate for all students.) First, the students read for understanding. Some used the “read-to feature from Google Read and Write. Teacher/Coach created annotations were written in the article ahead of time so that all students could read them and respond as they read. The students read a second time searching for pros and cons. They were asked to use the highlighting tools to save the pros and cons which they then transferred to their graphic organizer.

After a quick group discussion in which students compiled and expanded on the pros and cons they realized the importance of gathering solid evidence as it would be used to have a civil debate. The students would have the chance to role play three roles, “pro”, “con”, and “Switzerland”. Mrs. Lester, Mrs. Lacy, and Mrs. Mantinieks would model this type of civil discourse in a “fishbowl” scenario. As the teachers respectfully supported their assigned role, students took notes about what they were watching. They addressed the prompts of “What words did the speakers use to debate in a kind way?” and “What body language did the speakers use to debate in a kind way?” Students noted that “they used words like “please” and “thank you”, “they used calm voices and mentioned that they liked hearing new ideas”, and “they nodded their heads, smiled, and kept their hands to themselves”.

After the “fishbowl” the group debriefed what they saw and prepared to practice civil discourse themselves as they play each role. The students look forward to continuing this next week.

This lesson could be adapted in many ways and with many topics, with many grade levels. It provides opportunities to develop multiple skills such as close reading, writing a balanced opinion, and practicing friendly debate and conversation.

Educator Reflections: 

What would you repeat from the lesson?“They were SO engaged while reading-that was beautiful!”

What would you change for next time?

Next time “I would like to find a way to have the kiddos mark their citations so they know where they found the info.” 

The group also agreed it would be neat to add more choice for the students next time by having several topics with pros and cons from which they could choose.

How did the collaboration between the classroom teacher, curriculum specialist, and blended learning coach improve this lesson?

”Taking a little time to collaborate was an energizing experience. Together we made sure that the lesson was relevant for the kids and tied in to their prior knowledge. We took a leap together to try a new approach to engage a very social class. Having the technology integration specialist there put us at ease that we could work through any tech issues that might pop up. Having the three perspectives also leads to great post conference debrief conversations”. 

Coach Reflections: 

“I think it would be great to model a “mistake” in the fishbowl and show the “civil” way to handle when you or someone else makes a mistake”.

What a great lesson Mrs. Lester!

For more information on teaching civil discourse concepts check out the book, Engaging Children, which will be available April 9, 2018. https://www.heinemann.com/products/e09949.aspx#fulldesc

For help implementing any of these ideas in your classroom please contact your Ed Tech Team.

#WCSWhereUBelong, #WestervilleWay