Showing posts with label apps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label apps. Show all posts

Thursday, 3 March 2016

FutureSchools Recap Day 1

My first FutureSchools was definitely not a disappointment. Even better, is that there was a dedicated Young Learners Conference aimed at promoting technology in the early years. I have been to past conferences that have been geared to secondary (without disclosing this until you turn up, even though they promote K-12) or upper primary. I feel that early years education tends to be locked up, ignored, and placed into the 'too hard' basket. 


That said, I was geared up and ready for Day 1!

The first keynote for the Young Learners' Conference was Kari Stubbs, an international guest from BrainPop (Jr). She focused on filling up our virtual backpack with tools that can be used in our early years classrooms to promote meaningful learning through digital play. I love the idea of play in the early years but I have never really thought about it in terms of digital play.

Kari first introduced DIGITAL GAMES to promote play using the Game Up section of BrainPop. 

 This was followed by a whiz through CODING GAMES. Kari made reference to an Edutopia article outlining coding in Kindergarten, and it is my belief that if concepts are introduced early enough, the foundations of learning are strong and solid. I love the idea of Run Marco! an online and app coding game for kids. I can't wait to try this one in my classroom! Kari also discussed the ISTE Connect Standards Refresh. The standards now include Computational Thinking. I believe these standards should be added to the toolbox of twenty-first century skills our students need to build. 

Another tool to add to our backpack was PLAYFUL ASSESSMENT. Kari discussed a paper by Barry Fishman which looked at gaming in assessment. 

 Next, Kari focused on how DIGITAL CONTENT can lead to learning, followed by BLENDING PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL PLAY. She rolled out the usual amazing tools such as #BreakoutEDU, makerspaces and Google Expeditions. 




Now that our backpack was full, Kari briefly touched on research from the American Academy of Pediatrics about screen time. It is worthy to note that the guidelines call screen time "time". I'm not going to list their recommendations here, but the article is worth a read. 

 Following on from Kari was Paul Hamilton. He started off with this statement, which supported his keynote on turning teachers into innovators.
#AGREE!!!!! 

I found the following infographic shown by Paul very interesting as well:  

He also put up the good 'ol pencil metaphor. I can see many "erasers" in my life!!!!

 Paul also role-played the idea of a conversation with "Yes AND..." and "Yes BUT...". The power was with the person using the "Yes AND..." sentence. It is my belief that you need to look for the positive in everything. The "Yes BUT..." mentality is a very negative way of looking at possibilities. 
Paul is an amazing educator who found it important that students engage in creative tasks using technology rather consume content. He raised the question "What do you want technology to do with our students?"


I'm a big believer of creativity over content consumption. Go Paul!

 Paul also looked at encouraging students to be problem solvers when it comes to technology. 

Paul discussed ways that ScratchJr can be used to teach mathematical concepts. I love his coding rules as well. 


 Paul provided examples of using Hopscotch and Sphero in the classroom. I love his "Saving Superman" Sphero challenge.

 Finally, this graphic outlines why Creativity is so important. Personally, I see how creativity build resilience by building a risk-taking environment. 

 After morning tea, I had the pleasure of watching these guys in the RoboCup challenge. Go Bees!!!

After lunch I was involved in a TeachMeet in the PD Theatre. I presented my experiences of Google Draw in Mathematics.  
I loved Jackie Child's talk about using makerspaces with literature. I quickly shared the idea of squishy circuits with my Stage 3 colleagues studying electricity. Thanks to Brett for the flattering photo of me during my talk.
After the TeachMeet I had the wonderful coincidence of meeting Dan Day from Kinderloop. Kinderloop is an app I implemented a few months ago for my son's day care. It was great chatting to him face to face and learning about what's next on the agenda for Kinderloop. 

 For my session, I cannot stress how humbled and blessed I felt when I received so much positive feedback about Higher Order Thinking in K-2. 



I finished off the day with a keynote from the wonderful Jeannie Magiera on Courageous Edventures!
I was so engaged I didn't take notes but found some great tweets about her keynote presentation. Essentially, she is another great educator that challenges people who says that younger children cannot use technology. She says that the littles can do what the bigs can do. We need to FAIL (First Attempt In Learning) and SAIL (Second Attempt in Learning) with them. 

Yes, I am happy to share my crazy pills with anyone. I want them to catch my contagious disease of believing that little kids can learn just as well as the bigs. Can't wait for Day 2. 

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Monday, 7 September 2015

The latest fantastic feature from ClassDojo

ClassDojo recently released an exciting feature in their product - something I have been battling with for years. I am a big believer in sharing students' work and with many parents in the workforce unable to come to open classrooms, I find the digital world a fantasic window into our learning space.

I have been using ClassDojo as a behaviour management system for a couple of years now. I am a ClassDojo Mentor for my school and an Australian ClassDojo Ambassador. Back then, I just focused on the 'Positive' and 'Negative' (now called 'needs work') behaviours, resetting the points each day. I love the random child feature, which I use to keep all of the kids on their toes when answering questions. I find the visual and auditory aspect of giving points in ClassDojo a fantastic motivator for my students.

And then they released the app!

This changed everything.

All it took was for me to take my iPad to the lines at the end of lunch and silently start giving out 'lining up' points to my Year One students. No more "Hurry up and line up" screams across the noisy playground - once kids started hearing the shrill of points being given out, whispers of "she's giving out Dojos" rippled up the line right to the back where the more challenging kids were throwing their lunchboxes up into the air. It was like an army general had just walked in and made them line up to attention.

Suddenly, library time was painless with the addition of my iPad following us to lines. During school assemblies, I'd mute the iPad but the kids knew I was giving out points, and eagerly anticipated returning to the classroom to see how many points they received.

For some of the more challenging students, I'd pull them to one side and show them the visual graphs of their behaviour. I let them know that if their behaviour does not improve, I can show this to their parents - and this sends a chill down their spine. Yes, there is the feature to allow parents access to the reports and I love this, but at the time I was working with a community where there was a distinct line between the 'haves' and 'have nots' and I did not want to disadvantage any of my students.

An example of a graph showing positive and needs work behaviours

Any now *drumroll* my favourite feature - ClassStory.


One of the biggest issues we face as teachers in a digital world is the privacy of our students. Yet, with so many working parents, whom we hardly see, giving them a window into the classroom is a must. Social media platforms such as Twitter are fantastic, however parent permission is needed to place our students' images into the public forum. I have previously used Google Sites, which parents needed to access with their child's login. This worked well but the editing of pages to add students' work required time and a PC due to editing limitations on iPads.

ClassStory looks just like a Facebook feed, however the content is contained securely within the ClassDojo platform. Parents can easily view this window into your classroom and 'like' content, just like other social media platforms. Teachers can easily send out reminders and share classroom. My favourite feature is that you can easily snap and post content from your Smart Phone. This means that you can post classroom experiences to parents in real time in just seconds! No need to find the time to do it later. I know when I had my class site, I was extremely guilty of forgetting to upload content to the virtual classroom section of our site.


The potential of this feature is limitless. My first initial thought is to allow a child or two a day (or hour) in charge of an iPad. This child's job is to document a task or the school day using photos. At the end of the day or session, this child uses a scrapbooking or annotation app, such as PicCollage, Strip Designer or Skitch to create a single image with words and images to share their day or their learning. That image is saved to the camera and all you need to do as the teacher is to log into ClassDojo and upload it on ClassStory. You don't even need to worry about finding time to get a post sorted. Parents are more than likely going to log in to check your class' ClassStory page if they know their child has contributed or will be featured.

I can't wait to try out this new feature when I go back to work next year, and I can't wait to see how ClassDojo evolves their product in the future.

Don't forget that the ClassDojo Australian and New Zealand Ambassadors host a Twitter chat every Wednesday fortnight at 7pm AEST. Save the hashtag #dojochatanz to your Tweetdeck! Follow ClassDojo Australia and New Zealand on Twitter and or join the Facebook group.



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