EEND 681Z Artifact #2

For my second artifact, I want to highlight the presentation Kristen and I did to help show our first grade teachers how they can use technology (even ChromeBooks!) with their students. Our fear is that many teachers will only use their 1:1 for math games, typing, etc.  Our school has had SAMR Model presentations, but the examples were never for very young students. We wanted to give real life examples of how SAMR could look with first graders, so we tried out a bunch of lessons with our own students and then used those lessons as examples. Of course, no one who uses tech is at the Redefinition stage every day, but the more we can work towards that, the better!

We asked the first grade teachers at both of our schools what their biggest worries were about using 1:1 with their students.

They had many, but these were the big three. Most of their worries fell under the umbrella of one of these three items.

Before this school year, I would have completely agreed with them. After focusing specifically on them since January, though, we've found that first graders can get quite adept at logging in and using apps to help them read. Once students can easily use a QR Code, sending them to any site is simple. The example we gave uses Padlet. If the kids use a QR Code to get to the Padlet, and then bookmark it, you can add any websites you want them to go ON the padlet and the students can get there easily. I've been doing one padlet per topic or unit.

We set some goals for the first graders, and then started tackling their challenges one by one. These are things we were able to get even our Level 1 ELL students to do within about two weeks.

Since we use tech with our students on a daily basis, Kristen and I were able to test out all of our solutions with our students. We didn't want to present anything to the teachers that we couldn't do for our own 1st grade students. All of our students are ELL, too, and lower in literacy than your average first grader. So if our students can do it, any first grader can!

We think this presentation is going to prove very useful to use next year as our buildings move closer to 1:1. The latest Google Apps allow for an amazing amount of creativity, and have accessibility options that are very helpful for our students. We want more teachers to be using them so that all kids can benefit from this kind of interactive, engaged learning through technology.