One of my favorite read alouds I read to my students is The Little Red Fort. I use this book as a lesson on the importance of teamwork, being a good helper, and conflict resolution. At a later day students are invited to bring blankets to school and they are separated into groups. As a team they try to figure out how to build forts with blankets. Students are able to work together to figure out how to use the tables and chairs to hold the blankets up. I also allow them to use selection of materials. Often times students run into the problem on how to keep the blankets from falling down. They will have to use the materials provided to figure out what will be the best to help hold down the blankets. This activity aligns very much with the ISTE Student Standard #4 Innovative Designer, especially 4c and 4d. Students have to learn how to create and test different prototypes and
persevere challenges. During the COVID shutdown my favorite online lesson was the one I did for Earth Day. Over Seesaw I created an Earth Day Scavenger Hunt where students could look around their house and neighborhood for different things found outside. They also showed how they could help take care of the earth in two different ways using either the photo tool or the video tool. This activity mostly aligned with the ISTE Student Standard #1 Empowered Learner as students got to choose how they presented their findings and their learning. My basic educational philosophy hasn't changed much since after COVID-19 has happened. How I believe students learn best and the best way for me to teach them has not changed. What has changed is the process and the way that educational technology is implemented. Before COVID I viewed technology as a way to enrich students and supplement learning tasks. Now I realize it is important to make technology a center-piece of learning. I need to be using technology to transform how I apply my education philosophy in and out of the classroom.
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Battle Creek Public Schools has made it a district mandate that all K-2 classes will utilize Seesaw as the LMS for online portions of learning. I have created a basic shell inside the platform using the features that Seesaw has to offer. In addition to the shell I have edited the Online Teaching Personal Standards and added a separate column. In that column I posted how each standard applied to my classroom shell. The following is a walk through of important parts of my class shell. ![]() Inside Seesaw there is an ability to house work inside different folders within the class journal. I have created folders for all the weekly themes based on our International Baccalaureate Units of Inquiry. Each week is aligned to Journey’s text and science and social studies units. Anytime activities are created and turned in, they will be placed inside one of these folders to help with tracking of student progress. The classroom is easy to understand with three major sections that students can access; journals, activities, and inbox. The journal section will be where all students submit their work. Students are able to see all submissions unless I choose to keep a submission hidden. The reason for this is that I will be providing students many opportunities to comment and respond to each other’s work in both audio and typed (when their literacy skills are more developed) formats. I have created a tutorial video that will be posted once school begins quickly outlining this feature. ![]() The second section of Seesaw is the activities tab. The activities tab is where all assignments I sent to my class are housed. Whenever I post assignments students and parents will be notified through the Seesaw application or when they login on a browser. Assignments will be posted daily and be chunked by specific subject or part in the schedule. The week prior I will have all assignments created in my activity library and ready to post and when assigned they will be placed in the correct weekly folder. There will be both asynchronous and synchronous learning opportunities. Since our district is providing two adaptive learning suites for students to engage in, I have created activity templates that show students how to login and provide a link to each program. This will be posted daily as students will need to access both of these programs daily. I will also provide other asynchronous activities that support the skills students are practicing within those suites. For the first day of school I have two sample activities already created. One is a quick tutorial for students and parents on how to use the basic features of Seesaw. The other activity is a “getting to know you” activity. More activities will be created as we get closer to school. Within the activity library I am able to create collections where I can sort the activities I create by subject or section in my schedule. The third tab of Seesaw is the inbox tab. It is through this tab that I can send announcements to the whole class. Here is where I will send invites to my students for Synchronous learning meetings. Meetings will be done through Google Meet. I can send announcements to families as well, that way parents can know when these meetings are and assist the students in accessing the video conference. I can also send messages to individual families where I can provide feedback on the students' work in the form of videos, drawings, and audio that parents can also view. I can also provide feedback to students directly on work that they’ve turned in by using the comment feature mentioned above. Overall I feel that my shell is a good foundation for my online classroom. I have sample activities ready to go and everything is neat and organized. I have a few tutorials on how to use the system and more tutorials will come out as more activities are posted and more features of Seesaw are utilized. I have created a co-teacher account for my EDU 643 professor so she should be able to explore everything I have created within the shell.
Ashley, Lena, and myself developed online teaching personal standards for our building and aligned them to our district's Continuity of Learning Plan. The document can be found here.I have posted my philosophy for teaching online as a new section in my website. Follow the link here.As I prepare to create my own online teaching philosophy it is important I am keeping up with the latest research and information to help inform my thinking. The following link is a form that helps guide my reading as I am preparing to share my thoughts through the EDU 643 couse.
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Welcome to my Ed BlogThis blog will be used for me to post my thoughts on various hot topics throughout the education community. This blog will also be utilized as a way for me to track my journey through the Learning, Design, and Technology masters program. ArchivesCategories |