Digital Playground ~ Creation Apps

The iTeachers at Powdersville Elementary and I have decided to host a Digital Playground session with a different theme for each month. Our goal for these sessions is to provide teachers with a fun way to explore new apps for the classroom and to encourage collaboration & sharing between grade levels.

For this month, each of us selected a creation app and created a station activity for the teachers. I chose to share Tellagami and My Talking Avatar, which can both be used by students to create a talking avatar to describe an image of something they've created or learned about. Book Creator, Puppet Edu, Popplet, and Thinglink were the other app selections for this month.

Teacher feedback from this session was excellent. They liked that the session was "self-paced," allowing them to move from station to station at any time. One of the teachers commented, "I enjoyed the opportunity to talk with other teachers about these apps as we were exploring." Several others made comments about the session being "informative" and "fun."

Thank you so much to Melissa Wilcox, Brenna Wilkie, Rachel Wayne, and Melissa Tollison for working together to make this a great learning opportunity for our teachers! Thanks also to Principal Brad Moore for supporting this event and providing drinks & snacks.

Thanks, #iTeachers! Always fun @pvespride #digitalplayground #a1digitalinnovation pic.twitter.com/1n5pYhrQQO

— Jessica D. Preisig (@PreisigJessica) September 15, 2015

Ts are playing with a variety of creation apps @pvespride #digitalplayground #a1digitalinnovation #blessedinpville pic.twitter.com/4YxNGulXFX

— Jessica D. Preisig (@PreisigJessica) September 15, 2015

A1 Core Apps Symbaloo

An important aspect of my job as an Instructional Technologist is to pull together resources for my teachers to use. In the same way that creating recorded Math lessons for my students allowed them to "take me home" with them each night, curating and providing quality resources is a way that I can provide help even when I am in another building! It is important for the resources to be organized and easy to access, so last school year I created an organized Google Drive Folder full of cheat sheets, video tutorials, and student samples to share with the teachers in my area.

Though the teachers and I love the accessibility, organization, and ability to search in Google Drive, I wanted to find a more visual way to show what resources were available. Yesterday, I decided to try using Symbaloo to share file and folder links from Google Drive.

One of my favorite things about this is that I can easily update and make changes! As I add files into my shared folders, they will automatically become available here. As app icons change, it is easy to edit a tile and change the image. If we want to add or delete an app to our core, it is also simple to add or delete a tile from the Symbaloo. I hope this will be useful way for my teachers to access the resources that our A1 Digital Innovation Team is pulling together.

Get a Jump on Technology

Powdersville teachers are excited to use Google Classroom with their students next year, and the summer is an excellent time to give it a test run!

As a way to support teachers over the summer, our A1 Instructional Tech Team put together four tasks to help teachers "Get a Jump on Technology" before August arrives, and we are using Google Classroom as a platform for the course. This is a great way to experience Google Classroom from the student perspective before diving in with students in the Fall. The tasks listed below are designed to give teachers an opportunity to create things that will be useful in the year ahead.

Task #1 Make Google Forms Work for You
Teachers are asked to create a useful Google Form for next school year, (i.e. a student introduction form, reading interest survey, parent night survey). Then, create a QR code that links to the form and turn in the QR Code image. (Thanks to Alice Keeler for sharing her Quick Start Guide!)

Task #2 The 4Cs: Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, and Critical Thinking
For this task, we asked teachers to watch a Common Sense Media video on the 4C's and use a Google Docs template to transform a particular unit of study to include the 4Cs and technology tools. I have enjoyed getting to see the exciting things that teachers are planning and adding comments to the doc. Adding comments to a Google Doc is simple and effective!

Task #3 Creating Task Cards to Spruce Up Your Centers
This task has been my favorite! We asked teachers to watch a video from Learning in Hand, view some sample task cards, and create their own station/center task cards in Google Slides. Instead of turning in the presentation as an assignment, I asked my teachers to post the link as a comment and mark the assignment as done. This is a great way to have students share work for the entire class to view! I created a Padlet Wall to share their work here.

Created with Padlet

Task #4 End of Summer Presentation
For the final assignment, teachers are to create a multimedia presentation to document their summer using one of the following apps: Adobe Voice, Adobe Clip, Adobe Slate, Book Creator, Haiku Deck, Flipagram, or PicPlayPost. Again, I asked teachers to post a link in the assignment comments for all to view their final product. I'm excited to see the fun things Powdersville teachers create!