Bloggin' from TTL 2018!

The Tech Teach Learn conference at Kentucky Country Day School is fully underway. Teachers from all over the state are attending to learn about Google apps, flipped classrooms, STEAM activities, social media and more!

Check out some images from the presentation "STEM in the ELA Classroom" that my colleague, Dee Anna Payne, and I presented on Wednesday!

Seek and Find Symbolism Project

To wrap up our final reading unit, I gave students a big list of STEAM activities that they could complete to show comprehension of their novels. My favorite is the Seek and Find Jar. It requires students to think of 7 important symbols from their novel and explain their importance. Then, students fill a jar with their objects and either beads or rice. The fun part is trying to find the hidden symbols inside the jar!

My students love craft-based projects, so this one has also been a top choice for them. The activity lends itself well to our theme and symbolism study. I may even make it a required project in the future!

Symbolism Seek and Find Jars for The Giver, One Crazy Summer, and Coraline. 

Future Tech STEM Project

The Technology: Then, Now and Beyond unit is one of my favorites. For this project, students first used their digital literacy skills to research reliable web sources about a technology that they think has changed the world. Students examined how the technology has affected the world for the better and, sometimes, for the worse.

The project then asked students to reflect on current technology to plan their idea of a future technology considering all the positives and negatives of this creation. Students worked in groups to develop a plan for a technology that would help the world in some way. They also created 3-D mock-ups of their product and presented their amazing innovation as a commercial! It was great to see the critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity of the students!

The 3-D Food Printer will prevent hunger across the world!

Cocoa the Cleeder feeds your pet and cleans up all its dirty mess... -- This group had a catchy jingle!

Coding and Grammar? Yes!

The Hour of Code is always a huge success in my classroom, and I spend the rest of the year trying to find meaningful ways to add coding skills to the curriculum. Since the Hour of Code stresses that activities can be online or offline, I created an offline coding activity to give my students a break from their screens while also using the critical thinking skills required for coding.

The result is the Noun and Adjective Hidden Image. Students use a 10 x 10 grid to create an image or pattern. There is a key at the bottom of the page that specifies the colors needed for the studied parts of speech. They then "write the code" by writing a list of 100 words that correspond to their image.

We typically start with a pre-made list that students use to color in the hidden image before they make their own so that they can understand the process. They get very creative with their images as they are practicing identifying parts of speech while also using those 21st Century Skills.

The "coded" image. 

The word list -- the code!

4 C's of 21st Century Living

The education community, myself included, is all about the 4 C's of 21st Century Learning right now. The 4 C's are: creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration. These are believed to be the most important skills that students must develop through their education to be successful as adults. It's pretty much an alliterative list of what most teachers teach daily.

There is also a big SEL (Social-Emotional Learning) push in the education community. Social Emotional Learning helps students to understand their emotions, connect them to their actions, and understand the emotions and actions of others to be more empathetic people. I've been trying to develop the 4 C's of 21st Century Living which would cover the SEL part of education. I do love alliteration! Here's what I've got so far: compassion, courage, confidence, and curiosity. Thoughts?

Just as we encourage students to use their skills or creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration to be successful adults, we should encourage students to compassionate, courageous, confident, and curious to be happy adults.

Teaching with the 4 C's

I have made a very conscious effort to increase my thoughtful implementation of the 21st Century Skills into my curriculum. True, every teacher will offer creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication within their curriculum, often without trying, but I wanted to make sure that I am focusing on these skills in purposeful ways.

Anyway, we completed our big reading projects for our Fall Battle of the Books recently. Students must read at least 4 books from a list of 12 within about 2 months. The book list is varied in terms of interest, genre, and ability, so most students find at least one book that they absolutely love. Our final reading projects were very open-ended. The only requirements were that students presented a summary of the most important plot points and a description of the main characters. Students could choose to work individually or with 1 or 2 friends. They could also present the information in any way that they wanted. I was so excited for presentation day!

While there were still a high number of Google slideshows, there were also some extremely creative skits, songs, drawings, and even a video game using Scratch! (We had recently completed our Hour of Code with Code.org and one student definitely found his passion!)

My teacher goal of 2017: more student choice and more open-ended assignments to foster the natural growth of 21st century skills.

Netiquette

We are well into our digital citizenship curriculum this year. Students have started working on the Common Sense Media Digital Passport and just completed a cyberbullying project for Digital Citizenship Week.

My classroom emphasizes 21st Century Skills, so we collaborated, communicated, thought critically, and created throughout this unit. The unit started with lessons from Common Sense media that discussed digital responsibility. We then used our Pixton comic creator accounts to show our understanding of netiquette visually.

We ended Digital Citizenship Week with group skits about the importance of being an upstander in cyberbullying situations. October is also Bullying Prevention Month, so we were able to discuss bullying on a broader scale as well.

The skits were amazing! Students were able to choose their groups (which was a risky move but worked out great) and had class time throughout the week to write their scripts, create their props, and practice. Students who were my timid participators became stars during this skits! We even ended with an anti-bullying rap!

The year started with many students very concerned about their work being "good." There was so much concern that students were not taking any risks and only meeting the minimum requirements of assignments. During this unit, creativity was emphasized with little directions. And the results were amazing! I hope to continue this trend of students completing their work for the joy of it and not for the grade.