Are you ready for the #CCSDDigitalCampfire?

CCSD Digital Campfire                      

DLC Showcase & Share Event   

May 21st                       

Participating DLC teachers will come together to celebrate, showcase and share their experiences with 21st century learning and 1:1 implementation.

This day-long event will follow an “unconference” format in the morning, in which teachers will share with and learn from each other.

In the afternoon, selected teacher leaders will showcase digital learning experiences from their classrooms for our district guests.

We look forward to celebrating all of our Digital Learning Cohort teachers at this event! #CCSDDigitalCampfire

March Madness End of Year Review

  

Final exams  and End of Course, EOC, exams are upon us.  How to review a full year's content with students while making it interesting and relevant is a real challenge.  Review packets and Jeopardy reviews are still popular, but how does a student own this learning, and how does a teacher know whether all students are participating and how each is functioning?  Two great interactive review sites are StudyStack.com and Quizlet.com

Background Info
At the West Ashley Advanced Studies Magnet in Charleston County School District, Chad Rentz and his 7th grade team partners -- Cassandra Lock, Jayuntay Williams, and Jamie Schmidt -- solved this problem using iPads and StudyStack.com, an interactive quizzing system.  The full team of students, around 100, converged on the cafeteria for a March Madness-style competition.  Using the website freebracketgenerator.com, Rentz created a bracket for 4-man teams to compete against one another  using an online quizzing system, StudyStack.com.  He created a review stack for 7th grade South Carolina standards, and the students applied their knowledge of the terms and definitions using the timed matching activity.  After the science round, the social studies round by Ms. Lock ensued.

Meaningful Exercises

Keeping the survivors on task was easy; it was the eliminated players who presented the greatest challenge.  To keep everyone focused on the review, eliminated players gathered in one area and were given a chance to win consolation prizes by continuing to review using standards-based questions through StudyStack again.  This time, the exercises were not timed, and students had to type in the correct answers to questions.  See directions sheet below.

The silence and focus throughout the cafeteria was shocking.  These were students who would not have filled out a review packet had it been given to them, and yet they were all focused on standards-based questions.  On the SAMR scale for technology use, this would have come it at a base level of substitution or maybe augmentation for the ease of workflow, but there was something else going on here.  The competitive quality of the exercise hooked these eighth graders and raised their level of interest.  Because they bought into it, they were willing to interact with the content in a way that had not occurred up to this point this year.

 

Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance

Can other teachers have a successful event like this one?  Of course they can.  This event was brainstormed, planned, and completed in a week's time.  These teachers knew their kids; they knew what to expect if left to their own devices, no pun intended.  As a result, a few extra adults were called in for back up support; consolation exercises were planned which allowed students to review the information and complete the exercises as many times as they chose to master the content.  If you are looking for some creative and fun ways to use your technology to help engage students, I recommend studystack.com and quizlet.com with team competitions as well as other creative applications.  

 

Digital Learning on Edisto Island

By Emily Elliott, Ed Tech Specialist

2nd grade students at Jane Edwards School use their iPads in a variety of ways. Working together in class allows students to push each other to be more creative when working on Keynote presentations and inspire each other in ways to present their work. Students are charged with troubleshooting problems on their own and asking designated iHelpers before coming to the teacher with their issues. 

Living on Edisto Island has its perks when you can take your iPad outside. Sunny days mean soaking up vitamin D and improving our math fluency! 

Substitution on Steroids

When faced with the use of iPads or Chromebooks in a workbook-completion setting, the teacher might feel defeated or even disheartened, but this does not have to be.  With a little ingenuity and some tech savvy, teachers can utilize the workbook activity on the 1:1 device using a PDF annotator.  

Michael Marsico of West Ashley Advanced Studies Magnet is determined to accomplish this goal for multiple reasons: to solve issues he has with missing workbooks and to build his students’ tech skills.  Students who apparently losetheir workbook on purpose to avoid doing work do not have an excuse anymore.  Students who legitimately lose their workbook and don't have the money to replace it don't have to worry about the financial burden on their families.  Now, the PDF version of the workbook is posted on the classroom Edmodo site for easy download. In addition to completing the activity, the students are more comfortable using a PDF annotator, a task which will become more prevalent and important in their personal and professional lives.

The PDF annotator in use is TinyPDF, a free app for download to iPads.  While it is called “tiny,” it functions as a powerhouse.  Students have the ability to use a pencil to free write, type text, and strike through, underline, and highlight text! They can even upload their in-process or completed file to their Edmodo backpack or their Google Drive. Many other popular PDF annotators do not boast this feature.

Just as workbooks and worksheets need to be collected, these PDF files can be handed in to be checked.  One very easy way to check these on an iPad or Chromebook is to have students take a screenshot of the specific page or pages and upload them to Edmodo, Google Classroom, or Google Drive. While this is simply at the substitution level of SAMR, it is so much more than filling out a worksheet.  Try TinyPDF if you are looking for a no-cost solution to annotating.