Freeform Classroom

So the idea is rooted in google rooms.

https://www.google.com/search?q=google+room&biw=1163&bih=558&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj8prGh-oXQAhUJ3YMKHSzmDwEQ_AUIBigB

Basically the idea is that you have a free flowing workspace area, plenty of open space, lots of color if possible, furniture, and lots and lots of ownership in ones own space choice. Google started doing this with their employees and saw employee satisfaction on the job, happiness, and productivity sky rocket. They have since convereted all their office spaces to this sort of setup often times having creative play areas included that people can work in and passion project time. We'll get to the latter another day. Today we'll focus on the physical setup of the room.

 In a traditional classroom this is somewhat possible if you just let your students move seats on a daily basis. I've done this before to varying degrees of success. Most of the time kids settle into one desk and end up setting down roots (leaving various things etc). This somewhat defeats the purpose of the idea of a flexible classroom that allows for flexible grouping, seating and student choice. In an effort to transition to this idea I have given students the choice to opt into bringing in a pillow from home for their seat. They can move around anywhere in the room with it (other than blocking the door). In addition we have shoved the tables against the walls and used them to setup various academic stations; a writing station, an osmo ipad station, a math manipulatives and work area station, and our laptop station. In addition to this there is a table for the students who have opted to remain in more traditional seating for now (with the option to change at any time). There is also 1 additional community work table and a coffee table that borders our rug area both of which are available for kids to work at here and there but they can not leave anything there when they are done.

Today we worked on estabilishing routines for gathering our stuff in one neat pile quickly if we need to do a momentary catch and release, talked about what to do in an emergency with our stuff, and talked about putting away everything every other time we switch subjects or come to the rug. After a day of this I can say it's working very nicely so far. Our room stays much more tidy throughout the day because they pickup and move to new spots practically every subject period. We are also finding the kids are much more on task as they are more comfortable and can move whenever they want. The final benefit that I immediately saw is the ability to move somewhere else if someone is bothering you without it becoming a fight. Overall the classroom culture improved immensely and our productivity today was fantastic! Hopefully it keeps up. We'll be reevaluating how it feels at the end of November and will make a joint decision with the students on if we wish to keep it this way or not for the foreseeable future. My next step is to figure out how to get more color diversity in the room.

Here's the room now:

http://imgur.com/a/yZswX

Exciting upcoming events

Hi all! Rough week last week for me with a sinus infection that just wont seem to quit combined with a fever. Hopefully this week is a bit smoother! We're looking forward to getting a mouse for every student to make computer time a bit easier to work with. I found some budget mice (8 dollars per not too bad) on classroom direct and decided just to spring for it myself rather than wait for a donation system or class budget to be approved. So that should be arriving any day now which is super exciting! We will also, hopefully, finally be getting our i-pads (1 to 1) in this week for our students. I'll get them labeled over the weekend and be ready to use on Monday.

Academically we have a number of new things starting in the next week or so. This week we will be introducing a simple phonics and grammar word study into our morning routine as well as differentiated word study (focusing on learning spelling patterns) during daily 5 work time. Next week we will be starting our intervention and enrichment. We are targeting this 6 week cycle for students who have missed phonetic concepts from first grade and kindergarten in spelling. The big focus will be for students who are struggling with short vowel patterns as well as digraphs. Diagraphs are, "a combination of two letters representing one sound, as in ph and ey". The two most common examples we see at the first and kindergarten level are "ch" and "th". Any students who are not struggling with this have been divided into enrichment groups. These groups will be self directed but guided by a teacher and focus on the concepts of genius hour. If you're unfamilar with genius hour think a structured self defined research project that produces a product and presentation at the end. The student has to think of a problem they want to solve in the world or something they really want an answer to, research it, and then create a tangible product and presentation. 

Dojo Registrations!

AWESOME! We got almost every single parent regeistered on dojo! This is going to be so important for communication and I'm so excited. Our next step is to get parents into SeeSaw so they can see their students graded work! Remember again our goal is to be as digital as possible. At the moment students are still using pencil and paper for math and writing but we are slowly transitioning over to digital and as such we need a way to be able to reliably send home digital work too. I'm hoping that this will fill that need.

Unfortuantely there was a slight kurfluffle with our computer situation and all the computers in our buildings are being shuffled around. Our ipads are also being reassigned. So we will be 1 to 1 on ipads in a week or two. There are enough computers for each kid though, but since they will be losing the computers that we have in the room we haven't assigned any yet.

Hopefully this afternoon after early release that will all be taken care of. Next steps after that are for me to go through each computer and manually set their home page, setup their accounts, and save passwords for them. For some reason the school district choose things like RH-C114343 as a username and RH-156420 as a password that they expect students to use to log in (those aren't real by the way). I'm not quite sure I understand what the thought process was but regardless saved passwords should be a fix. After that we should be able to start using our digital notebooks finally! Once we get the ipads we'll also be able to more reliably upload to seesaw, do kahoots, manage classkick lessons, and create a blended learning environment. My next blog post will be explaining what a blended learning environment is and exactly what it will look like our in classroom.

Starting a New Year 

Welcome to a new year! We're off and running. It's Thursday afternoon as I write this and my students are awesome! We've done a lot so far and have so much more to do. I'm so excited to experience this year with this group. Check back here to see updates on what's going on throughout the year.

Leveraging Technology

  So far we have been able to collaborate and get every kid to have feedback, discsusions, and comprehensive checks with the rules for the lunchroom, playground and classroom by using Nearpod and Kahoots. The classroom rules we actually had every student collaborate and send responses using a survey with Nearpod and developed them based entirely on student response.  Going digital is a lot of work but it has a lot of potential!