Connecting School Learning with Local Businesses...even for elementary students.

I'm thankful for Chattanooga and how it supports education in the Tennessee Valley. I'm thankful for local businesses that support the learning happening at Chattanooga Christian School. Recently we have been blessed by support from Bridge Innovate to allow our students to participate in a design thinking challenge. This is the second year that we have had a team to participate in this wonderful opportunity. This year the theme is "Transportation of the Future."

We have 6 fifth grade students that are participating in the challenge. These 6 students are using the design thinking process to dream about the future of transportation in the Chattanooga area. They have brainstormed and were broken up in groups to look at rural, urban, and waterway transportation. They have looked at feasibility at what seems like outlandish transportation of the future. They have thought about transportation from the viewpoint of the users.

As part of the design thinking process it is always good to get feedback on your idea. That's where our partnership with Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority (CARTA) came into play. CCS dad, Brent Matthews, is the Director of Parking and Security for CARTA. He graciously volunteered to speak with our students and answer some questions they had about transportation in Chattanooga. After a bit of planning, Brent and I soon realized that taking a field trip to the CARTA Shuttle Park South location would be very beneficial for our students. Cue last Friday! We loaded up on a CCS bus and we went to visit not just Mr. Matthews but also CARTA Executive Director, Lisa Maragnano. The students were wowed by the board room, the huge Chattanooga image on the wall, and the swag that Mr. Matthews shared with them. 
Our students had created questions in a Google Doc and this had been shared with Mr. Matthews and Mrs. Maragnano before our visit. Mr. Matthews immediately called the meeting to order and answered the questions on the document for the students. He then gave the students time to ask more questions and share their concept ideas. They were using their brand new mini notebooks given to them by Mr. Matthews to take notes during the meeting. We ended with a brief trip upstairs in the parking garage to see one of the 20 electric cars that Chattanooga has available as part of the Green Commuter Car Sharing program.

I won't share the secrets and plans for moving forward but I am thankful for CARTA and their willingness to invest in the lower school students at Chattanooga Christian School. Team work makes the dream work. The open attitude of area businesses coming alongside our students to give them opportunities to see real world STEAM jobs is a huge positive investment in the future. Anyone that knows me knows that I am passionate about our students having STEAM opportunities in an authentic setting. Chattanooga's innovative community makes it easy for educators to tap into ways for this to happen. 

If you look at the ISTE Standards for Students or the Essential Points of the Tennessee STEM Designated School program you will see that this type of opportunity isn't just seen as a perk but as essential to next generation education. With the connectedness of today's world, it's easier than ever before to get students figuratively and literally outside of their school box. Looking for opportunities to make that happen becomes the job of the educator. Becoming a well connected educator opens the door for you to be proactive in this. 

I will leave you with this, these 6 students spent approximately 45 minutes off campus in a boardroom asking questions, there was nothing magical about this trip but the sense of excitement on the way over and the sense of accomplishment on the way back was amazing. I will continue to look for more ways to give my students more amazing. 

Annotating on a Chromebook? Check out what I've found!

As our fifth grade has moved away from iPads to the Acer R11 Chromebook as our device of choice this school year I have been searching for and researching annotation options as we move forward. The chromebooks we have chosen are touchscreen and android app ready. We are using Google Classroom with these fifth graders and within the Google Classroom App, students have the ability to annotate with the "pencil" option at the top of an open file.

While it's fairly easy for a student to annotate on a PDF file in Google Classroom, it's a bit more cumbersome for a teacher to annotate and share back to students. A copy has to be made of the document and reshared in order for students to see the teacher's remarks through digital inking. Google is remarkable in how quickly it updates Google Suites for Education to best meet teacher's needs. I don't think it will be long before they will have a process within Google Classroom that makes this easier for the teacher.

As we are looking at ways to annotate, we have found 2 options that I really like. The following are choices we can use at our school for annotating (digital inking) and how to get them:

• Kami https://www.kamihq.com - we are using the free version of Kami and it integrates with Google Drive to allow students or teachers to save their annotations directly to their drive account. The downside to the free version of Kami is that it does not integrate with Google Classroom. I'm currently looking into whether this is a worthwhile investment or not by asking for a quote for a school usage license. Their teacher license covers 1 teacher and 30 students for $99/year. I can see where having this license would streamline the grading process for teachers but really wouldn't change much for the students.

• XODO https://www.xodo.com/ is also a PDF reader and annotator and would work on any laptop that uses Chrome and can be accessed straight from a browser or if the Chromebook is app ready, there is also an app option for this. XODO allows students to backup their annotations straight to their Google drive (just like Kami) but I am not a big fan of the way you erase annotations on their product. You have to draw a square and delete it, as opposed to using an eraser (something that seems more natural for students).

As I look at digital inking and the way we are using it at our school, I find myself still seeing the ease of printing off things and having students do fill in the blank being easier for some teachers than all these extra steps. The bottom line is what is most important to the teacher...

          The ability to streamlining and not having paper to wag back and forth to school to grade?

          Saving trees?

          Saving time by being able to just quickly get grading done on paper?

          The ability to have a digital record of all work?

          Could it just as easily be done through Google docs and have students type their answer?

As we have moved to chromebooks I appreciate the hearts of my fifth grade teachers that are willing to try and experiment with different approaches at the things they have done. As I introduced them to Google Classroom they wanted to have a place where we can do so much in one location. In the past, we have used the Seesaw Learning Journal app and notability for annotation using iPads and we knew both very well. The Seesaw app has already been downloaded on the students chromebooks and may be the best way forward until Google Classroom makes the teacher side of grading annotations a bit less cumbersome. 

I end this by saying that I am thankful for teachers with innovative hearts that don't balk at the roll of being "trailblazers" at our school.  These teachers create a culture of acceptance for the early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards that follow in tech integration (blog post of these levels coming soon.)

The Writing Process that Utilizes Tech Integration

I've been thinking about ways to utilize the efficiencies of edtech and create consistencies for our students lately. While teachers may all expect MLA format at our school, do we also expect the same process in writing? I am not an english teacher but I do enjoy writing. Our school does a wonderful job of growing students that can whip out a paper in no time. It's definitely one of our academic strengths. I believe that is because we see writing across the curriculum, which is a wonderful thing. I also know that some rubrics are either being worked on or are in place to grade papers equally no matter what the subject matter. I love that. 

I can't help but wonder how does technology support that well-oiled process because well...that's what I do...wonder about technology. So I am using this blog post to brainstorm possible ways to suggest technology be utilized both for efficiencies of the teacher/grader as well as to create efficiencies, standardized expectations, and additional learning opportunities for the students. 

http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/paragraph_hamburger

Prewriting: That time when students are gathering together in their mind what this paper will say and look like. It's the prep stage. I'll always remember sitting in on a fourth grade teacher explaining the parts of a paragraph to his students as a hamburger. I had never heard that before and it has always stuck with me. We, as educators, work hard to help our students learn to write. For many students this planning stage might best be done through pen and paper. Why not allow students to plan using the Wave Rocketbook notebook that would back up to their Google drive? Or let them use some mind mapping tool like Popplet to organize their thought processes to decide which direction to go? Or let them organize their main parts of their paper in Google Docs and allow peer review feedback via comments? 

Drafting: We are a school that uses GSuites. The ability to create their first draft in Google Docs adds so much robustness to the writing process because of the ability to give immediate feedback as soon as a peer or teacher makes suggestions. The ability to see past correction histories in the process can help writers maneuver forward in creating a very good paper. The beauty of self-saving Google Docs is there is less pressure to work on the fine tuning and more ability to just GO while writing. Research shows us that in the process of paper writing creativity is stronger when typing due to the fact that the brain works faster than we can physically write. The act of "writing" slows us down. While I don't believe technology integration = typing papers in class, I do believe the efficiencies of faster creation and a teacher working the room either virtually in a document or reading over a student's shoulder is a huge benefit to today's classrooms. 

Revising and Editing: There are multiple ways that Google Docs aids the revising and editing stages even before anyone other than the author lays eyes on it. For instance, teaching students to turn on the editing options (to the upper right of the paper) as they type allows them to learn as they go. 

One of the more recent features of Google Docs that can help students in researching is the "EXPLORE" feature that allows a student to access a web browser within the Google Doc to quickly look up things to support their writing. This can be found under the Tools tab on the tool bar.

While talking about research, here is where others might disagree with me but I think we are at a time where it is more imperative than ever that we help students learn what plagiarism is and we allow them to make corrections before they actually "turn in the paper."  When I was in high school (a long time ago) I think it was easier to realize if you were plagiarizing or not. I went to a library to gather a limited amount of resources and I read through them. Because it was a limited amount of resources, it was easy to remember what I read verses what I inferred from what I read. Today's students can pick up their device and have access to oodles of information on any given topic. I think it is easier than ever before to plagiarize and not even realize it. Look at all the hot topic media reports of various celebrities and politicians being called out for plagiarism. I know this is a judgment on my part but I wonder if it is truly intentional plagiarism much of the time. 

By expecting students to import their papers to something like www.turnitin.com before turning it in for grading, we help our students become aware of what plagiarism is in the process. Not only that, we put the owness on our students to correct grammatical errors before they get to the teacher (this works unless you are actually grading for grammar obviously). The point I'm trying to make is this can become an effective teaching tool in itself and make for efficiencies for our teachers. I do not think running a paper through a self-checking software means it is a good paper. I do think it can be part of steps that could ensure a paper is well written though.

Rewriting: Teachers being able to give feedback during the revisions stage (after going through something like turnitin.com) via Google Docs comments allows the teachers to see if corrections to suggestions were actually made or just ignored. Instead of having multiple papers in front of them of drafts, this makes for efficiencies as well. On the student side, to be able to click "resolve" in the process of rewrites creates a neatness of process for the student. Dare I say receiving suggestions or questions from a teacher via comments instead of pen marks potentially written all over a page is also both easier to read for the student and less overwhelming when doing final writes?

Publishing: In the past, a "published" document basically meant a teacher and maybe the students in the class got to see the finished document but in today's world the ability to allow students authentic feedback from the world at large is both an amazing ability and meets the ISTE (International Society for Technology Education) standards for students in multiple areas in regards to educational technology. What if our students added their paper to a blog? Shared their paper with a prominent author on the subject of their paper? Created an opportunity for authentic feedback by emailing the paper to scientists, historians, or others they feel might connect with what they have said? 

To repeat the process I think might best meet both student and teacher needs in integrating technology into writing:

1. Students receive rubric for assignment when the assignment is explained.
2. Students create mind maps in their planning stages, either by using digital paper or online graphic organizers.
3. Students draft their paper in Google Docs and utilize both the editing options and the explore options during this process.
4. Students upload the paper to www.turnitin.com to look for both grammatical and plagiarism issues and then rewrite after receiving the results but before sharing with teacher/grader.
5. Students share document with teacher/peers for review and feedback. Comments in Google Docs are used to make the process of corrections more streamlined for students.
6. Expectations for publishing are in place for (x) number of papers a year for every student.

I know I am not an English teacher so I wonder what parts of this seem worrisome? A burden?....Thoughts?