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!

Showcase: Integrating Technology into the Bridges Elementary Math Curriculum

The new Bridges math curriculum offers opportunities for student engagement and technology integration through the use of the Digital Display Materials and creative use of student responses. Google Cast for Education is a powerful and easy to use tool that allows teachers and students to "cast" their screens from any Chrome browser to the projector. The only requirement is a computer attached to the projector and laptops in the classroom. This allows the teacher and students to show their work without being tied to the desktop at the front of the room allowing for more interactive work, the ability to move throughout the room, and even giving students a way to virtually raise their hand when they have something to share.

 

At Fouse Elementary, Heather Griffith has been using technology in amazing ways to meet student needs and increase engagement. She has graciously allowed us to record her lesson and has also provided the lesson plan materials that she used in her planning. In this lesson you will see students working in several ways: First students work in small group or on their own while others work with the teacher in a group for intervention. When new content is presented, the students provide input and discussion by sharing their work with the class and working together to identify and learn from mistakes.
 There are two videos attached to this post showing important aspects of the lesson and how it was planned. If you are interested in using this lesson, materials are attached to this post, As always, if you would like to learn more about any of the strategies or tools used in this Showcase, contact your Ed-Tech Coach for more information.

Video 1: See the Entire Class Period 
This video shows the process the entire class period followed from intervention/ group work through the main lesson. Text boxes can be used to navigate to different sections of the lesson. (Length 27:40)

Video 2: Tech Integration Highlights
This video shows how technology can be integrated into the Bridges curriculum from the teacher side as well as from the student side. Again, text boxes are included to ease navigation to different areas of interest. (Length: 8:54)

Lesson Plan Materials: 

Click the Link Above for PDF/Larger font sizes

 

Showcase: A Westerville Teacher Discusses Blended Learning

Blended Learning and Personalized Learning are two of the more recent ways of visualizing instructional practices that meet the needs of all learners. While the theory behind these concepts - that all students should have content and activities that meet their needs available to them - is an easy one to grasp, the practice of setting up a classroom to differentiate for all students can be more than a little daunting. Heather Griffith, a 4th grade teacher at Fouse Elementary has been using Blended and Personalized learning techniques along with flexible seating to better meet the needs of her students. In this Showcase Video you will hear about:

- A typical day in the classroom

- How 2:1 Technology makes a difference

- Why set a class up this way? 

- How flexible seating helps these strategies

- Struggles and successes

- Recommended starting points for teachers looking to shift their teaching style

It is worth your time to watch the whole video, but if you are pressed for time you can skip to the points that most interest you by looking for the orange question bubbles in the video. 

Additionally, example materials are included below that were used to help organize the classroom and guide students in their activities. 

Daily plan for students to schedule their independent work time

Schedule from teacher perspective

Schoology and Google Classroom continue to move closer together with what they are capable of. Schoology has added Classroom-like functionality this year. For more on anything you saw, contact your ed-tech coach!

"Jump Right In" to Coding in the Classroom

You may have heard of coding in the classroom and wonder what all the fuss is about. I’d like to show you two resources for engaging coding activities you could use in your K-12 classroom

But first, let’s take a quick look at why teachers are choosing coding as an activity to add to an already very full schedule! From Edutopia, “Coding in the classroom is linked to improved problem solving and analytical reasoning, and students who develop a mastery of coding have a natural ability and drive to construct, hypothesize, explore, experiment, evaluate, and draw conclusions." Coding is a natural fit for our older students in CS and math classrooms and it hits on many mathematical practices addressed in our Bridges math curriculum for the younger learners ( 1. Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them. 2. Reason abstractly and quantitatively. 3. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others. 4. Model with mathematics. 5. Use appropriate tools strategically. 6. Attend to precision. 7. Look for and make use of structure. 8. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning).

Beyond the direct connections to curriculum, educators who are already using coding activities have seen additional benefits. They have seen coding used as a tool to improve equity, offer inclusion opportunities, create STEM proficiency with implications for career readiness, develop perseverance, and quite simply, its fun! From educators who are using coding in the class, “Best advice is to jump right in!”

Code.org

Westerville 4th graders using Code.org

Code.org makes “jumping right in” very easy to do.  Code.org is completely free and it is easy for your students to sign in to. If you use Clever it is included in the “More Apps” section, at the bottom of the page. The activities range from “block coding” meaning students manipulate blocks of pre-written code that they can alter and arrange to solve a puzzle or complete a task, to eventually writing lines of code using CSS and HTML. Students' progress is recorded and as the teacher, you can easily see what the students have worked on and completed.

Lessons are named after letters (A-F) which correspond with a grade level. Course A would be appropriate for most Kindergarten classes (designed for pre-readers) while Course F would be appropriate for grade 5. Middle and high school appropriate materials are found under the CS Discoveries and CS Principles Courses.  There are “ramp up” lessons to support students where needed and accelerated lessons for students that need more of a challenge. Many of the courses include “Unplugged Lessons” which are small group, hands-on activities that do not use a computer but expose students to concepts important to coding, problem solving, teamwork, and staying safe online using activities from Common Sense.

Hour of Code offers a one hour tutorial using some of the highest interest lessons for teachers looking for coding activities but do not have the time for a full course. There are also labs such as “App Lab” and “Creative Labs” which offer more of a project experience.

Vidcode

Westerville 4th graders using code.org

Vidcode offers many free activities suitable for grade levels 2-12. If you use BrainPop, vidcode recently integrated with some BrainPop activities which makes use of the best qualities of both products, including using code to create stop action animation, memes, and newscasts as a fun way to show students’ mastery.

I hope you may take a few minutes to look at these incredible resources and find a little something you might want to try with your classes!

As always, if you’d like additional support with coding in the classroom, please contact your Ed Tech Coach!

Additional Resources:

https://www.edutopia.org/blog/coding-classroom-long-overdue-inclusion-merle-huerta

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/education_futures/2017/06/9_tips_for_teaching_coding_in_the_classroom.html

http://www.pbs.org/education/blog/bring-coding-to-your-classroom-tomorrow

5 Ways to Make Your Course More Clickable

You have probably run into at least one social media article that includes a ridiculous question like the one below:

Incidentally, Stop Clickbait is doing an important service…

These headlines and articles are written in ways that draw our attention because they (sometimes) pose an unbelievable or compelling question that we need an answer for. One of the hallmarks of media and advertising, particularly online is to capture attention through clear, attractive design, and giving viewers a compelling reason to engage with the content. For example, consider which of the advertisements below catches your eye:

Option 1:

Buy

Coke.

Option 2:

The second option is much more likely to catch your eye with varied fonts, pictures, color, and other features that set it apart from the rest of the writing on this page. The fact that the bottles are collectible adds to the cultural appeal. So what does this have to do with the content that you put online?

Websites, apps, and other media are built along the same principles. As teachers begin to move their course content to online systems like Schoology, it is important to remember that design is an important aspect of the online experience. Strong design can help students in their learning, while poor design can increase the barriers that they may have to work through to learn. Here are some best practices that you can use to make sure that your courses are providing students with a good user experience.

1. Establish the goal of your course- is it just to serve as a place to hold assignments for students to access? A fully differentiated and built out course? Depended on the focus, your goals and organization will be different
2. How can you help your students accomplish the goal? What will make it worth their time to interact with your content?
• Pictures?
• Video?
• Color and varied font?
• How the content is split up (folder and assignment design)
3. What can explain to students where they are, what the goal is, and why they should care?
• About this course section?
• Introduction page?
• Course Overview page?
• Breakdown of standards?
4. What is the compelling reason for them to click on folders, links, and other content? Do the clicks further the goal of the course or an assignment? How can you reduce the number of clicks while still presenting content in a manageable way?
• Make each page, link, and folder intentional in its design and contents. Can content be presented within an assignment or does it need to be a separate page?
• Do links need to be included separately or can they be embedded within the text?
5. Use common layouts. Schoology is somewhat limited in the layout options that you have and Google classroom is even more limited, but even so, there are options that you can take advantage of to make sure that navigation is easy for students.
• Pick a method of organizing content, assessments, and assignments and stick to it throughout the year.
• Break text into sections so that eyes have a break between reading (look at different websites to see how this happens without you even noticing!
• Video, photos, and other media can be a great way to do this.

If you are looking to spice up your Schoology Course, and want some more ideas, contact your Ed-Tech Coach for help!