My name is Christie. I teach 3rd grade. I am getting my Masters of Education in Instructional Technology from Regis University. This blog is a way for me to keep track of all my assignments for my program.
There are a lot of things to consider when starting blogging in
your classroom. At my school, all students and their parents sign a technology
waiver, holding them liable for their behavior with technology and whatnot. I
will definitely also have a classroom contract. It will very specifically lay
out my rules in regards to the Internet and our blogs. Some of these include,
no food or drink around devices, always know where your device is, only access
websites or apps as instructed by the teacher, and NEVER put any personal information
on the Internet at all.
This is a topic I would teach in a gradual release model (I do,
we do, you do) so that I may model and show appropriate netiquette. I will make
sure that there are web filters and parent blocks on any device I had to a
student. Students can be sneaky about what websites they are looking at with a
device in their hands, so teachers need to be circulating continuously when
technology is out.
This is a video introducing using iPads in a school setting. Lots
of great things to think about!
This
is a great video about the progression that technology has made in just the
past fifteen years. It also asks great wonder questions about the future of
technology.
Blogging
is a fantastic tool to incorporate in the classroom. The skill of blogging
itself is a life skill, but it can be incorporated into any content area from
language arts to science to gym. We need to learn to communicate effectively
with each other and the Internet is a great way to do this. It also allows us
as teachers to educate our students on safe and proper Internet etiquette, or
netiquette.
Blogging
also adds an engaging level of technology to any activity. Even the most reluctant
writer will be excited to type their assignment and post it on a class blog. We
can also incorporate other learning styles when we blog. Students can create
art to post, take pictures, or find songs. It is not just about writing.
Students
can use blogs to connect with other students from all over the country or
world. We can also connect with famous authors or actors to hear what their
thoughts on school or reading might be. That could be the last little nudge of
motivation to get that one student reading.
Below
is a link to The American Association of School Librarians Standards for the 21st
Century Learner. These are skills our
students need to know in order to be successful.
Technology
is no longer an optional teaching tool. Any educator refusing to incorporate
technology in their classroom is doing a severe disservice to their students.
These students will emerge from their class without the knowledge of how to be a
successful student in a 21st century classroom, and in life.
This
is a website that explains the importance of incorporating 21st
Century Skills in classrooms.
Below is a teacher’s blogmeant for other teachers to read and share ideas. This particular blog post is about starting
blogs in your classroom. There are so many of these sites to help any teacher,
no matter their technology background, get started.
1)
Reading Rainbow style book reviews: Students can either record video, or write
reviews of books they have read including pictures from the story and a bit
about the plot. These can be posted for other students in the school to access,
but also open for anyone else on the Internet to see. All posts will of course
end in “Don’t take my word for it.”
2)
Edmoto: Students can use a blog site like Edmoto that is secure to chat with
their classmates about what is going on at school or specific assignments. They
can also take quizzes and submit assignments on the site.
3)
Video blogging: We want to help students be able to communicate effectively and
what better way than talking about real life issues and school issues in a
video blog. Learning to use this technology is also a valuable learning experience.
Students can see other studends around the country and world and have debates
with them. They can also use video blogs to connect to famous authors and other
people around the world. Here is a video blog by best selling author John Green
that I show my kids at the beginning of the school year.
4)
Book Clubs: From what I have seen in my 3 years of teaching, it takes students
a very long time to learn how to discuss books and to feel comfortable enough
in their ideas to put them out for the world to see. I think that putting this discussion online is
a wonderful idea. Students would have time to read as well as time to process
and spellcheck their ideas before posting them. It takes a certain amount of
risk out of the discussion.
5)
Technology Team Blog: At school I am part of the teacher’s technology team. We
meet monthly and discuss what technology needs we have at our school. We could
use a blog to discuss technology needs before the meetings so that the meetings
could be more about solutions and not just problems. We could also post meeting
minutes and action items for people to complete before the next meeting.
6)
Songs: Throughout the year I use a lot of music in my general education
classroom. (I can just hear all the budget cut music teachers cheering.) On
this blog I can post all the songs I reference throughout the year for the
students and other teachers to reference. Music is a fantastic learning tool
that helps students memorize facts without even realizing they are working.
When I was in 4th grade I learned the song “50 nifty” and to this
day I can still sing all 50 united States in alphabetical order.
7)
Class Photographer Job: I found this idea on Pinterest: As part of the class
job rotation, every day there is one student who is the class photographer.
Their job is to take pictures throughout the day and write a small paragraph
about what we learned that day. It is a great way to chart our growth through
the year.
8)
Parent Teacher Communication: Parents are always asking us to communicate with
them more. Keeping assignments, calendars, forms, and school information all in
one place on a blog is a great way to do this. Here is my class website. (This website is the
format my school requires me to use, but the information could easily be placed
in a blog.)
9)
Classroom Ideas for other teachers: I always say there is no such thing as
stealing in the teaching profession, just borrowing. All us teachers have so
many great ideas, we should share them with each other. Just posting day to day
activities could help another teacher out in cyberspace. Here is an awesome
middle school blog.
10)
Summer: Parents are begging us at the end of the year for things to work on
with their kids over the summer. We could easily blog a list of fun and
educational activities for students to work on over the summer.
In third grade we study the Thirteen
Colonies. This is a very introductory unit and the students will go into
greater depth of the history in future grades. What we do focus on is the
geography of the Thirteen Colonies and the history of them up until right before
the Boston Tea Party. As we progress through out unit, my students will be
creating a tour of the 13 colonies.
In past years I have discovered it is
very difficult for students to remember information specific to each colony,
such as important crops and geography. I think that incorporating an
interactive Google Earth tour will help solidify these concepts in my students’
minds.
This will be an activity
that the students will complete throughout the unit. They will work in groups
of 5 students. They will select which layers on Google Earth they want visible
in their tour. They will drop pins in each colony and distinguish which region
each colony was in. They will also select different pins for each region,
making them easy to identify. As we study each region, they will add to their
tour, and save it at the end for a summative assessment and for future
reference.
I like this project
because it provides opportunities to compare and contrast the original Thirteen
Colonies and the East Coast as it is today. It is also a very visual project
and allows the students to associate the geography with each region’s climate
and how it helps certain crops thrive.
I
used Microsoft Word to create a visual representation of 100 third grade
students’ beginning of the year math pre-test scores versus their beginning of
the year writing pre-test scores. I did not know that you could create graphs
in Word, but it is a very easy program to use and makes many different kinds of
charts and graphs.
On my graphs, the X-axis represents a student’s
score on the beginning of the year math test. The highest possible score is a
100.
The
Y-axis represents a student’s score on the beginning of the year writing
sample. The highest possible score is a 24.
Every
diamond is a student in third grade at my school.
Sometimes we unintentionally place kids in boxes.
(These are high kids across the board: these are low kids across the board.)
We
expect our students’ test scores to look like this:
This is what my third grade students’ test scores actually look like:
I wanted to see if students who are high in math
might not necessarily be high in writing and visa versa. The range is much
wider than we believe it to be. There are students who scored at an 85% on the
math, but only got a 12 on the writing. There are also students who scored 19
on the writing, but only 24% on the math.
I think that the scatterplot below does a great
job of showing that the coloration between math test scores and writing test
scores is not as close as we sometimes believe it to be. It is also easy to see
the outliers in the data: students who scored very high or very low on one of
the tests.
