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.
Wednesday, September 28, 2016
Wednesday, September 14, 2016
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.
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.
Thursday, September 1, 2016
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!
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