Granite Ed. Tech. Monthly Newsletter – January 2015
Our department’s monthly newsletter was recently sent out to all teachers in Granite School District, and you can also access it here.
This month’s highlights Include:
Our department’s monthly newsletter was recently sent out to all teachers in Granite School District, and you can also access it here.
This month’s highlights Include:
Katie Ricks, a 3rd grade teacher at Howard R, Driggs Elementary School, is one of many teachers participating in the Hour of Code throughout Granite School District. Most of the 3rd graders at her school have the opportunity to program while using Chromebooks. Programs such as Code.org, Tynker, and Khan Academy are some of the sites where Ms. Ricks’ students learn how to drag and drop programming commands. She says that the students are really excited about Hour of Code, and that she sees it as having great benefit for increasing problem-solving skills as well as an overall learning of basic programming.
Spotlight Author: Kristen Johnson, Granite District Educational Technology Specialist
Mrs. Suzette Prevo is a fifth grade teacher at Fremont Elementary. I had the opportunity to visit her class and watch the innovative things she is doing in her classroom. The students had written an essay A Person I Admire and they were working on editing their writing. Mrs. Prevo had the students using Voki to help them with the editing process. The students would copy text from the essay into Voki and then listen to the avatar read the text back. The students were listening for correct pauses and word choice. After listening to their writing they would then go back to the essay and make the necessary changes. The students were highly engaged in the editing process.
Practicing math facts has taken on a new twist in Mrs. Prevo’s class. The students used Socrative to work as teams to propel their rocket ship across the screen. You could feel the excitement in the air as they worked together to accomplish their goal.
These students use technology everywhere they go. The final activity I experienced during my visit was the fifth graders working with their first grade buddies. They went to the first grade class and helped them practice reading. Each student had a leveled reading book and the fifth grade student would record their buddy reading. Once the student finished the book they would then watch the video clip of themselves and talk with their partner about how they read. What a truly collaborative experience!
Mrs. Prevo has created a classroom environment where technology is the norm, just like using paper and pencil. Her students are engaged in the learning process, they collaborate, and the classroom environment is so inviting.
Spotlight Author: Heidi Meenen, Granite District Educational Technology Specialist
Granite EdTech sponsors a monthly twitter chat on teaching with technology called #GraniteTechChat. This chat is open to any interested parties, but is especially focused on the participation of school technology specialists and library media educational technology specialists in Granite School District.
Follow the links below for archives of our most recent chats, saved and published via Storify.
Below is an embedded selection from our archive of the most recent chat, in which we reflected on recent Hour of Code activities and began to look at how to expand upon student interest in coding by integrating it into everyday classroom activity, after school clubs, etc.
Our department’s monthly newsletter was recently sent out to all teachers in Granite School District, but you can also access it here.
This month’s highlights Include:
(Video Creator: Patrick Flanagan)
Looking for information and resources? Have a question, need, or suggestion for us? Here are five easy ways that we are reaching out to you and that you can reach out to us right now.
Did you know that all students K-12 in Granite School District have access to Microsoft’s Office 365 Education for Students? This includes several valuable tools and services: [Read more…] about Video: How Students Access Email
In an effort to use Twitter as a way to collaborate amongst members in our department, today we are kicking off the “Twitter Tag a Teacher” Contest. Below are the details of this contest.
The goal is to share amazing ways in which teachers around the district are integrating technology into their everyday teaching practice and to encourage collaboration amongst Ed Tech staff through the use of Twitter.
December 2nd through December 17th, 2014
There will be two boxes of fun tech gadgets given away to two lucky Ed Tech Dept. members. The drawing for these boxes will be held on the morning of December 18th and winners will be notified via Twitter.
I look forward to seeing all of the amazing ways super star educators in our district are effectively using technology to engage students and increase student learning. Good luck to each one of you!
Patrick Flanagan
Director, Educational Technology
This December many teachers and school technology specialists in Granite School District will be leading Hour of Code activities with their students. As part of Computer Science Education Week, the Hour of Code is a worldwide initiative designed to provide a one hour introduction to coding and computer science for students around the world, increasing access and exposure to this important field. In December 2013, over 15 million students participated in Hour of Code activities, and this year the organization’s goal is to reach over 100 million students during the week of December 8-14, 2014.
If you are a teacher who would like to do an hour of code activity with your students, you can start with this How to Teach One Hour of Code guide for ideas, resources, and tutorials for your students. Code.org, the sponsor of the Hour of Code, provides a collection of coding tutorials and activities for students of all ages and experience levels – including “unplugged” coding activities for classrooms without devices. The Hour of Code is not limited to the K-12 classroom, however. Interested students can also access these tutorials and participate in Hour of Code on their own, and parents can use these resources to do an Hour of Code activity with their children. Adults interested in getting experience with coding are also invited and encouraged to participate.
We are curating more resources for teaching and learning how to code on our Hour of Code / Coding Resources Pinterest Board. Follow it or see the board below for these resources.
Follow Granite EdTech’s board Hour of Code / Coding Resources on Pinterest.
Granite School District’s Ed. Tech. department sponsors 30 FIRST LEGO League teams. In the FIRST LEGO League program children learn about coding, programming, and problem solving to prepare their robot for the robot games and to solve a real life issue or challenge. In the course of creating a solution to this real-world issue and designing a robot, they also learn and apply the social skills of teamwork, collaboration, respect, and persistence. Educational Technology is proud of our devoted coaches and our super awesome FIRST LEGO League kids. This video shows the team from Stansbury Elementary hard at work with their teacher/coach, Karen Tinsley. We would also like to invite you to drop into our Robot Games and Regional Qualifying event, January 17th, at Granger High School. Come see all the fun (and learning!)
Spotlight Author: Cherie Anderson, Granite District Educational Technology Specialist