Medfield Digital Learning Day: Alyssa and I had a wonderful day of learning in Medfield on Wednesday. I attended with the perspective of learning new ways to use tools we already own or are using.
If you have any questions or would like to explore these tools or other tools further, sign up for the March Tech Day, which has been rescheduled to Thursday, March 16th.
Here are a few of my take aways from the day:
1. Google Docs:
- Use audio note feature of Read&Write for Google to record directions in a google docs. Then students can listen to the directions multiple times.
- Audio notes will stay with a file so it doesn't matter how you are sharing a file with students (i.e, using Google Classroom or simply using the "share" button)
2. BrainPop and BrainPop Jr: There are a variety of new features and games for students. If you haven't been exploring BrainPop and BrainPop Jr, please do! It has so much more than just videos!
To locate these activities, you can use the search box in BrainPop or BrainPop Jr after you login. See the example below that I did for sortify. (there are 25 activities in BrainPop)
3. Osmo Management Ideas:
- When giving directions say "reflectors off" to get the kids to stop playing
- Cleanup Strategy - inside the numbers box identify how many tiles they need & how many of each; they can count to make sure they have all of the tiles
- Create a mat - ask students to keep all of their tiles on their mat so they don't get misplaced or mixed up with other groups
4. Google Classroom - Organizing your classroom stream: As the year goes on, the "stream" tab in your google classroom becomes really long with assignments, questions, announcements. It can be difficult to find assignments in your stream. In the fall, google introduced the idea of "topics". Adding topics to your posts is similar to adding tags to a blog post. When you create an assignment, assign a topic. See example below.
After you create assignments with topics, along the left side of your stream, you will see a topics box. You can click on a topic to show just those assignments related to that topic.
Tech 1-to-1 Day - The March Tech 1-to-1 Day has been rescheduled for Thursday, March 16th due to a variety of conflicts. If you are interested in working together, please sign up on the Doodle Poll. Thank you.