Tech Bytes

Do These Fun Spring Coding Activities with Your Kids!          Students can have fun learning coding skills while they are using their Chromebooks. These lessons from Google have videos are self-paced, and relate to things kids are interested in. A no-brainer for teachers who are already over-whelmed with teaching hybrid or remotely, but still want students to think critically and learn new skills! Google for Education: CS First Reach out to your friendly, neighborhood ed tech coach for more information!

 Do you have trouble engaging all of your students? Try Gamification!     Most of us struggle to engage those students who aren't excited about school work. But some of those same students love to play games and enjoy competition. Why not play to your audience and create some excitement for your students? In the meanwhile, you can exercise your own creativity.     Check out this blogpost from Matt Miller and his guest blogger Jon Spike.  Game design in the classroom: 8 steps to get started     And if anyone wonders why you are investing energy and precious time into making this happen in your classroom, give them this link to some research: A desire to be taught: Instructional consequences of intrinsic motivation.      Once you have set up a gamified classroom, you can reuse your games year after year...and you have a behavior management system embedded! Contact one of us to help you get started and support you in carrying it through. 

 Google Search Cards     Wouldn't you or your students like to g enerate random educational questions, and provide a brief answer, as well as a link to go learn more about the topic? A fun way to encourage inquiry as well as tech skills.       Or how about an Earth Day quiz or a breathing exercise?  Need a word translated or a measurement converted? Google Chrome has your back.      Check out these things you can do easily with Google Chrome's address bar or omnibox: Google Search Cards 

 Struggling with Chromebooks?           Do you find that you and your students are still wondering about Chromebook tools and apps? Are students stuck on enlarged screens or unable to use their keyboard? They may have accidentally changed some settings. Working offline or adding a new user are important skills for your kids when they are completing asynchronous assignments.        Here are some tutorials and resources that are appropriate for both students and adults. They cover a variety of topics some of which include: logging on and off taking a photo or video adding another account  keyboard shortcuts accessibility tools (visual/auditory) - turning them on or off using your Chromebook offline and Much More.......     Encourage your students to explore, learn and problem solve on their own! They will be more motivated, more efficient and perhaps even better learners! Chromebook Simulator Chromebook Accessibility Features Keyboard Shortcuts

 What Happened to Student Learning This Year?     Renaissance Learning released data they have collected about where students are right now in Math and Reading. They were surprised to find that reading wasn't impacted as much as expected. Math, however, was a different story. Students in grades 3-6 especially were behind 8 to 10 points nationally.  Learning was impacted more in rural and small town areas versus suburban and urban areas. Growth rates from last year were similar to typical rates, although still lower by a few percentage points overall. The acheivement gap is something that education struggles with ordinarily. Remote learning has accentuated this especially for those already at risk. (Every teacher knows this already.)      While we do not want to hold our kids back, we also need to be able to focus on skills that are more critical when we work with them going forward.  As we look at our instructional practices during this hybrid period, offering students learning exp

 Teaching in person and remote students simultaneously? Here is ONE idea...you may have others that work better for you. Let us know what your great idea is so that we can share it with other district teachers!

  Enduring Practices From Remote Teaching     Our nation of teachers has learned a lot during this last school year. What are some key practices that should become a regular and embedded part of our classrooms from this point forward?     Here is a short article from Edutopia and worth reading. If some of these ideas interest you, yet you haven't had a chance to make them a part of your everyday classroom yet, reach out to us.      Remember that you're not alone in this. You could figure everything out by yourself if you had 48 hours in every day, but since you don't....let us collaborate with you!      Enduring Practices From Remote Teaching

 What should students do while they're not with you? Portfolios!         Experts agree that independent, asynchronous work should include reviewing previous lessons, previewing upcoming content and practicing skills. But we can also assign more creative, reflective work as well. A project that is automatically personalized, differentiated and creative could be a portfolio!     This is always a great time of year for student reflection and review. We have great tools in our district to make this easy and a great formative assessment for you. Perhaps have students use the Google Drawing app to reflect on the year and the year's learning. They can add text, images and create links to digital work they've done. Even younger students can have fun building their portfolio and seeing the growth they've accomplished throughout the year. The drawing tool is fun and photos of their work are easily inserted.      Even better, teachers can add comments and feedback easily on a stud