Tech Lessons for the week of April 23-27

Happy Monday everyone!

I hope you all had a great weekend and the weather is only going to get warmer (from what I've seen and heard). This week in the classroom/school, we had Google Forms, the "Form Publisher" add-on for Google Forms, Google Docs, and Google Slides. A whole bunch of Gsuite was in the classroom!

*Do NOT forget if you have a lesson involving technology, please send me a short description of how you used the tech tool and a few pictures! This puts your classroom on display to share with others within the district!!!!

Besides ISTEP, the counselors at the middle school had an 8th grade careers activity last week. Some of the activity was about career(s) of choice and recognizing their own positive traits. Mr. Mersmann created a Google Form for the students to fill out and when students finished the form, a resume was generated ("Form Publisher" - add-on for Google Forms or you could also use "Autocrat" - add-on for Google Sheets in the responses sheet) as a Google Doc for students to keep and edit when they need to add items to the resume. So, to sum it up...8th graders created their resume and now their ready to get a job!😄

 

 


Here is the first submitted tech lesson outside the middle school!!!! Barb Katenkamp had her second grade RTI group on Google Slides by creating book reviews for a story of their choice out of the Junior Great Book series! That is awesome!

 





The fourth grade teachers (Mrs. Beetz, Mrs. Harper, Mrs. Moder, and Mrs. Ravenna) at North Dearborn Elementary knocked it out of the park with a tech lesson along with sharing student success! They had students make advertisements for their products in Google Slides! The teachers shared their classes advertisements with each other so ALL fourth graders could see each other's hard work. The school showed them at lunch on the televisions and the students LOVED that idea!!!


This week of technology had some new faces along with some great tools to use in the classroom.  Sharing student success is an all-time favorite of mine! If you want a student to care even more than before and to be "all in" in the classroom, brag about them (and let them see that)!

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Have a great week everyone!!!!

Tech Lessons for the week April 16-20

This week was a week filled with Screencastify, Padlet, Google Slides, Google Sites, & Typito!!!! It seems that we as teachers have grown to love to see peer to peer reflection/evaluation. I believe that is a great form of interaction with students to share ideas, provide feedback, and to really analyze what is going on with a specific situation. Below are some really good lessons with technology! Enjoy!

*Do NOT forget if you have a lesson involving technology, please send me a short description of how you used the tech tool and a few pictures! This puts your classroom on display to share with others within the district!!!!

Mrs. Lecher was wanting a way for students that struggle with vocabulary to "see" the words whether by video or a picture.  We used Google Slides to create a slideshow of pictures and videos of some vocabulary words to show her class how to complete these tasks. Dylan (DropZone HS student) and I created a video that included 5 vocabulary words that we inserted into our slide to use for the activity. Here is the video to get a good laugh... Vocabulary Video  This was created through Screencastify using the "cam" tab (camera tab).

 




Mr. JP Jackson wanted to have students get feedback from each other on some story problems in math class, so we used Google Cast for Education, Google Slides, Screencastify, & the comment feature for Google Slides. We had a student cast their device (via Google Cast for Education) to the projector to show some tips on Screencastify. Mr. Jackson had to create a class slide presentation (gave them editing access of course) and assigned students to specific slides to put a shareable link to their video on it. Once the students put their video on their assigned slide number, other students commented (using constructive criticism of course 😁) on how that student explained their story problem.

 


Mr. Black had his students create a monologue to say in his Spanish class. Another way to provide peer to peer evaluation/reflection is Padlet. We used Screencastify for the monologue and students inserted a shareable link to Mr. Black's Padlet for that class period. Padlet is a great tool to provide feedback, brainstorming, and other types of discussions! After students posted their shareable link on Padlet, students were able to click on the link, watch the video, and provide feedback to those students. It was really neat to see these kids rehearse their monologue (possibly several times) because they knew their peers were going to evaluate them. You are probably thinking (as I am doing the same)....why don't they do that for us? 😎

 

 



Mrs. Lehman had me come into her room to show the students some tips on Screencastify. We used Google Cast for Education to cast a student's device to the projector to show the class several features.

 


Mrs. Herbert's class is reading The Diary of Anne Frank, and they used Google Sites to share their knowledge about it!!! She gave them some requirements about the content, but let them create their own Google Site for this book!! I had the chance to come in and speak about the ways Google Sites could be utilized and how to build a website. Just like other tech lessons, we chose a student to cast their device to the projector through the extension, Google Cast for Education. Students were already coming up with ways on how they could create their Google Site!

 


Mrs. Radcliffe wanted an easy video editor that students can use in her Journalism classes. Typito is the tool that we used in our tech lesson for her classes. Students used their own recorded videos, upload them to that site, and started editing immediately! These students were pretty excited that they could begin editing videos and with ease!

 

The tech lessons that we had for this week had two things happen: creativity and empowerment. Students were in charge and that helped apply creativity to their assignment and made them feel a part of class. Some used previous completed work and applied that to new projects and others gave students a new way to look at class. Either way, this week was another success for technology integration in the classrooms! 

Tech Lessons for the week of April 9-13

I know that I am missing some of you (middle school teachers) because we had already completed our team teaching tech lesson together prior to the creation of this blog. I will try to get those up on here as soon as possible as well.

Last week was a blast to get into the classrooms and show the students how we can utilize technology! Some tools that we used this week were: Lucid Press, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Screencastify, Poll Everywhere, Google Hangouts (Video Call) and Google Forms! Below, I have some pictures and descriptions of what went on in the classes this week!

Mr. Wheat and I were on a Google Hangout video call to discuss how to use Google Forms.  He used Google Cast for Education to cast his screen from his Chromebook to show the students my screen from another room. I went through the basics of Google Forms, so that the students could create a survey to have for their data collection.

Mr. Durham's class was using several types of formulas within Google Sheets to create a database of information for their chosen Major League Baseball player. He also used Google Forms to have the students complete to track what student tracked which player. 

Mr. Jackson had the students choose a Chinese Invention and create an advertisement for it to sell to others.  He used Google Slides, Google Drawings, and Poll Everywhere. Poll Everywhere is an extension that will allow anyone to create a poll question within Google Slides and anyone who has the link can vote/answer to the question(s) that decide to use. The students will vote on the best advertisement from their peers and the voting will be live too! 

Ms. Corbin's class had to create a brochure on a specific occupation within the food industry. Lucidpress.com is a great tool to accomplish this and there is a FREE (YES, I SAID IT!) VERSION!  The students can use their Google accounts and get right to making brochures, flyers, and more! I had the chance to come in and show them some tips and share ideas on how they could utilize this website. 

Mrs. Bertke had the students create a bacteria/virus poster on Google Slides and peers voted using Poll Everywhere on what they thought was the best/most creative poster! 

 

Mrs. Beck had a great time integrating nutrition, Google Slides, and Screencastify. Students had to use Screencastify to record themselves and their dinner plate while explaining what they were eating for the night and insert that video into a class file of Google Slides. Each student was assigned a slide to insert their video and their peers would provide a comment or two about what they ate for that night. Then, the students voted using Poll Everywhere to find out which meal was the most nutritious!

I hope some of these lessons have given you some ideas on how you can use these tools in your classroom!!!! Nice job to all of the teachers mentioned in this blog to show how to utilize technology within the classroom!!!😁

New Technology Blog

Welcome to "The Tech Connections" blog!

I will provide the many aspects about technology integration within education. I hope that you will find this very useful for yourself and for our students.

The ability to change student's lives forever in a positive way is by far, the greatest feeling in the world as an educator. Whether it is letting them into your world, taking extra time with them to help with a concept or material, or just being someone they can talk to, is essential to impacting a student's life.  Technology can make this type of impact as well.

Technology has the ability to make life more meaningful, whether we like it or not. It can connect people, it can educate, it can make people think in more powerful ways that they could not even imagine, and those are just a few that things that technology can do for us. Are there negatives to technology? Sure there is. How do we make students aware of both sides? There are ways that are better than others, but the fact remains that we can utilize technology to make the educational experience great for our students and even ourselves.

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