Growth Plan

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WAP 8 - Classroom Management: Online Stopwatch

At first, I thought exploring “classroom management” in a technology course meant we would be investigating apps to track and reward good behavior or apps to make and use behavior charts. This does not sit well with me, because I am not convinced of the value of overtly rewarding good behavior. I feel it undermines intrinsic motivation to do the right thing.

But as a whole, classroom management includes the domains of space, time, routines, attention, momentum and discipline. Discipline only one small piece of that puzzle, so I chose to look at apps that would help me with the other areas, thinking that better routines and use of time would increase attention and hold on to momentum, especially with this year’s class that is particularly full of energy.

They all work at different paces, so I often lose students when they finish at different times. By making them more aware of how much time is allotted for a task and how much time is left to complete that task, hopefully they can learn to adjust their pace accordingly.

We have tried using a kitchen timer for this purpose by announcing how long they have to work on a project, and telling them they have until the timer rings to finish. However, no one can see the timer once it is set, and when the alarm sounds it sets off a chorus of screaming - totally breaking up our momentum.

I’ve known for a while that a large visual timer would help, but have never taken the time to investigate them until now. In this course, I have heard much about Children’s Countdown Timer from my colleagues and it looks perfect, but it is for android or ipad/iphone devices and I want a PC or web-based solution that I can easily project on my smartboard. After trying out a few, I found Online Stopwatch which is easy to set up, very customizable, and has a wide variety of visual representations for the passage of time.

To start, though, I will use the simple clock shape because I like how the sweeping hand shows how much time has elapsed, and students can easily see what percentage of the time is left.  A five-minute timer looks like this after 4 minutes have gone by:

The other representations, though fun, are much more subtle in their illustration of time passing, so I will stick with the clock or the egg-timer for now.  The others might be too fun to watch, and I certainly don't need any more possible distractions.

An added bonus I found with this application is the random name picker capability. This is a help I didn't even know I needed, but when I saw it I immediately thought of all the times multiple children asked me to do something and I am put in the position of choosing.  This never feels fair to anyone.  I entered my list of students, bookmarked the page, and next time this happens, I will spin the virtual wheel to choose.

I think the addition of Online Stopwatch capabilities to my classroom routines will be very beneficial to our classroom management strategies.

WAP 7 - Assistive Technology: Boardmaker

In our classroom this year, we do not really have any children with special needs that would require specialized assistive technology. What we do have, though, are a number of dual language learners, and also young children for whom social skills are not intuitive. They all need to be taught. As I have discovered in the field of education, many things that were developed for children with special needs are often very helpful for all children in general. Since I have heard a lot over the years about the power of Boardmaker, I decided to use this Weekly App Practical to see if I could employ Boardmaker to address these concerns in my classroom.

I signed up for the 30 day free trial, downloaded the Boardmaker Studio software, and was immediately amazed and overwhelmed at the same time.  It was very apparent that I could not just poke around and adequately figure out all this application had to offer, so I took advantage of their comprehensive training opportunities and spent an hour with the Boardmaker Studio Basics webinar.

            

I learned that Boardmaker Studio was an installed piece of software that allows you to create print or play activities on computer or smartboard using Picture Communication Symbols. You can create offline in Boardmaker Studio, and then manage online via BoardmakerOnline.com. You can create from scratch or use one of many (over 600!) templates already available that you can customize to your purposes. In my opinion, this is one of the most powerful features of the product.

In very short order, following the clear instructions in the webinar, I was able to create from scratch a visual aid for my not-quite-English-speaking children to make their requests for help known at lunch time. 

But I also discovered that Boardmaker is not just for printing. There are robust capabilities to create all manner of interactive projects that involve sequencing, making choices, checking off completed tasks and the like.  I searched the templates for a suitable one to accomplish my second goal, and found this sample for the sequence of events involved in washing hands.

Using something like this template as a starting point, it would be quick and easy to create numbered steps for many preschool skills we teach - like joining a group, interrupting, asking for help, etc, with help from the book Skillstreaming in Early Childhood that was introduced in our Classroom Management course.  That would be a great addition to our toolbox for social/emotional training.

At $100 to $200 a year, though, (depending on whether I want a personal or professional license), Boardmaker is a commitment!  I had better complete these projects quickly before my trial runs out, or convince my higher-ups that we need Boardmaker going forward.  

Final Presentation

Check out my final presentation here.  Thanks for your feedback!

WAP 6 - Parental Communications: ClassDojo

I see communication with parents falling into three different categories. The first, I would call “official communications,” and at my school, those all have to be handled by our RenWeb system. Anything that we send to a parent about a student’s progress or behavior or concerns we might have, are required to be sent using that system so a record of the correspondence is kept at the school. If a parent reaches out to us via email about such matters, we are encouraged to respond through RenWeb rather than just reply to their email, so that at least half the conversation is documented. So I have no choice in the matter here.

The second form of parental communication I would call “classroom happenings.” Currently, we send home a newsletter every other week with updates about we have been doing, and any important dates coming up or notices we have to pass on. That letter takes the form of a Google Document with view only permission and the link is sent to parents via RenWeb.

The third form of parental communication I would call “informal day-to-day updates,” where a parent gets a glimpse into their child’s day, and this is the piece I think we are missing out on. We are fortunate that children have to be dropped off and picked up in the classroom by a parent/guardian, so we do have the opportunity to quickly make a personal connection with most parents on most days. But there are some children who take part in our before or after school programs, or are transported by grandparents, and those parents we rarely see. I welcomed the opportunity to investigate ways to include parents in our day-to-day operations.

My initial thought was that we should create a class blog, which would be great, but not really an avenue for more personal individual updates. I looked at a number of lists of top parent messaging apps and saw ClassDojo listed on most of them.  It looked very comprehensive, so I decided to check it out and compare it to SeeSaw which I had investigated for an earlier WAP. 

In ClassDojo there is space for recording individual portfolios, a class story (class blog), and instant messaging options to connect with parents, who can also be invited to view the other areas.

My Demo Class

When I signed up for an account on my laptop, ClassDojo asked for my school and I was surprised to be connected to the “Mentor for my School,” a second grade teacher whom I did not realize used the program. I thought this was a great idea!  Since I was encouraged to go to her with any questions, I did just that to see what she thought of the program. She loves it!  But why?

When I asked that question she raved about the fact that she could use it on all platforms, she could post items to her class story (which is like a classroom blog), her students could post to their portfolios, and she could use it to instant message parents individually. In fact, she had just celebrated a birthday of one of her students that day and showed me the video she sent his parents of the class singing to him.

Screenshot of parent messaging page for my Demo Class

The thing she spoke most excitedly about though, were the behavior management tools that came with ClassDojo and how they helped manage her classroom. She could award or take away points based on behavior and invite parents to view their child’s progress.  The skills were editable, also.  She felt that inviting parents into this process helped them help her with classroom management.

Feedback area - positive points that can be awarded to students

ClassDojo makes daily informal parental communication quite easy, but not perfect.  The thing I am always wary about is the consistency launching such a program would require.  And the “plus” my mentor mentioned of being able to do it all real-time on her phone seems like it could be a “minus.”  I really don’t want my preschoolers to see me on my phone, because I feel it sends the wrong message. They don’t know what I am using my phone for - it all looks like “ignoring” to them.  In all, though, ClassDojo seems like a great solution for inviting parents into our day-to-day activities.

WAP 5 - Global Citizenship: Google Earth and Touchable Earth

I really enjoyed the opportunity to plan a lesson around the theme of global citizenship. At the preschool level I feel like that is all about noticing the ways we are all the same, even though we may be different. We can lay the foundation for this understanding and begin to build in our students the empathy that Alan November reported is a highly desired skill in the workplace.  I started my lesson by reading one of my favorite books, “We Are All Alike… We Are All Different,” by the Cheltenham Elementary School Kindergarteners. 

Then we talked about ways the children in our classroom are the same and different.  I eventually steered the discussion to how we live in different towns but go to the same school.  To demonstrate, I plugged my laptop into the smartboard, and we looked up Google Earth. We used the search and flyover features of Google Earth to compare where children lived in relation to our school. The children loved flying in and out of the towns they live in and ending up at Mount Hope. 

We noticed that their towns were all next to each other.  That’s why they can all come to the same school.  But what about kids in different parts of the world?  What schools to they go to?  Are their schooldays the same or different from ours?  How are they the same and different from us?

We explored the Touchable Earth website to answer these questions. Touchable Earth is an interesting website (and a mobile app available on ipad and iphone) by kids for kids that shows how children live in different parts of the world. There are short videos of children introducing and explaining  different aspects of their lives, organized around the topics of culture, facts, family, friends, play and school. There are many faraway places represented, and we investigated the school and play information of children in South Africa - after first flying there via Google Earth to show just how far away it was from Burlington.

My students were very engaged as we met, via video, as an assortment of South African school children telling about their daily lives.  We focused on the videos about their school and the games they play, and they loved noticing what was similar and what was not.  

Afterwards, I had my preschoolers document what they learned by drawing a picture of what they noticed was the same and what they noticed was different between them and the children of South Africa.  I was so pleased with the results!  Not only were many of my students successful using the higher order thinking skill of compare and contrast, but they were also very interested in the assignment.   

(Check out more student work here.)                                  

I hope to investigate many more places in the same way and maybe even ultimately make our own videos to introduce the world to the children of the Orange Room!

WAP 4 - Students as Researchers

                                                     

 “Just because you know how to operate a hammer,
doesn’t mean you know how to build a house.”

So true...

After talking about research in terms of building web literacy, vetting information, and asking good questions, I wondered how I would design a lesson to begin exploring these topics with my preschoolers.  I knew I wanted to check out the Google Custom Search Engine, and began creating a lesson around that, when another opportunity organically presented itself.

So much more relevant...

The other day at lunch, two of my students were very excited to discover that they both had Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle sandwich keepers.   And, they remembered that the day before one of their classmates wore a T-shirt with a Ninja Turtle on it.

Which turtle is which?  I wondered out loud.  When nobody had an answer, I offered that I knew from when my nephew was a big fan, that there were four turtles and they were named Michelangelo, Rafael, Leonardo and Donatello.   But I could never remember which one wore which color.  Kids started to guess, but admitted they didn’t really know.

So how could we find out?  And then how would we know if we got the right answer?  Thus began a great opportunity to start using some of what we had talked about in tech class.

We could Google it or ask Alexa or Siri.  We could ask a grown up.  We could ask a kid.  We could watch one of the TMNT movies.  We could watch one of their tv shows.  We could read one of their books.  All good suggestions for gathering information.

But how would we know we got the right answer?  If we tried to ask another person, would it be better to ask a kid or a grown up?  What age group would have the best chance of being able to give us a correct answer?   If we googled it, would it be better to look at a web site that carries the show on its channel (like nick.com) or would it be better to look at a web site that was just regular people answering what they think (like quora.com)?

In the end, we found this great picture by googling images for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and then trying to check the veracity of the names at Nick.com.  Interestingly, the US site had only episodes to stream and games to play, while the UK site had a section to Meet the Characters, so that was much more useful.  Information there matched our picture, and we were confident we had our answer.

Hopefully this home-grown example got them thinking about how we go about finding answers to our questions, and how to determine the usefulness of what we find, and how to ask good questions to refine our results.

Addendum:
After embracing the Ninja Turtle diversion, I did go back and look at creating a custom search engine to find kid-friendly info about different animals.  My work in progress is here.