Connecting Comprehension and Technology PLC

 I was introduced to  Anne Goudvis several years ago when she did a professional development workshop at High Peaks Elementary.  High Peaks was using the Comprehension Toolkit and Anne was there to help us better implement the practices.  When I changed jobs last year and began teaching technology at Peak to Peak, I was looking for ways to integrate the technology standards I needed to teach with the grade level content that students were engaging with.  I discovered,  Connecting Comprehension and Technology.  Knowing how much I learned from Anne's workshop, I decided to buy the book and fell in love with the ideas.   This year the kindergarten teachers and I have been doing a year long book study.  Each month we read and discuss a section of the book and look for ways to implement the practices into our classrooms.

During our first month we read about monitoring comprehension and started using the Drawing Pad with students.  Some of the early projects included reading books about animals getting ready for winter and drawing about our thinking.  Later we read about puffins and used Drawing Pad  to show what we learned. Students loved using Drawing Pad to show their thinking.






During the second month we read about connecting and annotating our thinking and began to use Book Creator along with Drawing Pad. Students continued to use Drawing Pad to show their thinking with pictures, learned to save their drawings and then add them to Book Creator in order to add voice to their work.

We fell in love with Book Creator and Drawing Pad have used them as comprehension tools in many situations. As we looked at the chapters on Asking Questions, we introduced students to BrainPOP Jr. and PebbleGo as online resources that are safe and easy for kindergarten students to do their research. In small groups, students researched animals of the continents they were learning about in class.  Students used Book Creator to show what they learned about their animals.  We published their work in an interactive Google Drawing . Students love to read and listen to each other's work.

This month we have been talking about visualizing.  We began by looking at the book Right Outside My Window by Mary Ann Hoberman and talking about how the author has shown what is outside the window through illustrations.  After a few pages, I asked students to become the illustrators and visualize what the author was describing. They did a great job of drawing their visualizations.
"

Silver raindrops catch the light, right outside my window."

"A spider weaves her web around, right outside my window."

Next we read the poem Green Giant by Jack Prelutsky. Students really enjoyed visualizing the giant and sharing their visualizations. 

Thank you Stephanie Harvey, Anne Goudvis, Katie Muhtaris, and Kristin Ziemke for helping us to effectively engage students in the reading process with the technology in our classrooms.  I recently read  Amplify:  Digital Teaching and Learning in the K - 6 Classroom.  Looking forward to implementing new ideas and practices in our classrooms from this as well.

Drawing Pad Visualizations

Kindergarten students have been learning about Drawing Pad and visualizations. This week we read Right Outside My Window by Mary Anne Hoberman.  Students had so much fun drawing and sharing their visualizations.

Asking and answering questions EdTech Style

First graders are learning about Ancient Civilizations in their classrooms.  In Tech today, I asked students what questions they have about what they are learning in Core. They generated a wonderful list of questions.  We talked about places they could go to find answers to their questions.  BrainPOP and Pebble Go were their first suggestions as we've used both sites before.  I also introduced them to DK and Wonderopolis today.  They went to work researching to find answers to their questions.  After finding answers to some of their questions, students went to Wixie to write and draw to show their new learning.  Students then shared their Wixie projects on the SmartBoard as a closure activity.

We had so much fun asking and answering questions today.
http://www.wixie.com/p/UzUxMDkxNjA%3D/wixie.html
http://www.wixie.com/p/UzUxMDkzODY%3D/wixie.html

Games over Time

I was working with 3 students today who were researching video games on the Museum of Play website and were fascinated by how games have changed over time. We started talking about video games of the past, and I confessed that I played Zork many years ago and described to them how there were no images in the games so I had to draw a picture to keep track of my thinking. Then I told them about the work my son did in college with XBox and coding sound from a dancer. Their eyes got buggy ... I can't wait to see what they come up with as they think about what games will be like in the future. They had some pretty wild ideas.

Simple Machines and Ed Tech

My second grade students were learning about simple machines in their classrooms. For this month's tech project, students researched their favorite simple machine. They read about their simple machine on Pebble Go; watched movies about simple machines on BrainPOP; and then wrote about their simple machine in Wixie. They incorporated important nonfiction text features in their writing including table of contents, headings, pictures with captions, labeled drawings and glossaries. The students loved creating and sharing their books. Wixie made it easy for students to write, spell check, format, and share their books. Students loved adding transitions and music to their final products. Enjoy a few of their books: http://www.wixie.com/p/UzQzMjg1MzU%3D/wixie.html
http://www.wixie.com/p/UzQzMjg0Nzg%3D/wixie.html
http://www.wixie.com/p/UzQyOTYxODM%3D/wixie.html
http://www.wixie.com/p/UzQyOTU3NjI%3D/wixie.html
http://www.wixie.com/p/UzQyOTU0NTk%3D/wixie.html
http://www.wixie.com/p/UzQzODYwNTA%3D/wixie.html

Gamification

Keyboarding is one of the big units I have to teach to elementary students.  I teach pre-keyboarding skills in K and 1 and begin formal keyboarding instruction with the homerow in 2nd and full keyboarding instruction in 3rd - 5th.  In analyzing student data last year, I noticed that  many students with IEPs and Lit Plans are not making adequate progress in keyboarding and for many of these students keyboarding is listed as an accommodation on their IEP.  Keyboarding cannot be an accommodation if students have not achieved some level of proficiency in keyboarding.  

In evaluating Typing Pal as a teaching tool for students with disabilities, I believe that Typing Pal does not provide the proper types of experience in the cognitive phase.   Accuracy and word per minute benchmarks for each activity mean that students who struggle may stay “stuck” on the same exercise for weeks.  This is frustrating and diminishes student perception of their abilities. Students need to experience success, not be asked to redo lessons multiple times.  Doing more of the same does not help these students.  Students need alternative ways to learn keyboarding with reasonable and appropriate benchmarks for success.

 As school ended I realized that I needed to do some action research to determine what would best meet the needs of my students.  I started the summer reading as much as I could about teaching keyboarding (there is a very limited amount of scholarly work in this area).   I attended InnEdCo in June, where I hoped to learn more about keyboarding.  There were no workshops directly on keyboarding, however, I made some great connections.  Handwriting Without Tears had a booth at the conference and I learned about Keyboarding Without Tears.  I was lucky to be able to then attend a follow up workshop with HWT called From Pencils to Keyboards:  Written Production in the Digital Classroom.

Keyboarding, like handwriting, is a complex skill that requires many hours of practice and instruction. (HWT professional development)  According to research, keyboarding acquisition is a process that involves three phases:

1. Cognitive phase: The student relies on visual feedback. The learner looks at their fingers or at the screen immediately after hitting a key.
2. Associative phase: The student relies on kinesthetic cues.
3. Autonomous phase: The student relies primarily on kinesthetic feedback.

According to research by Type2Learn, “keyboarding is a psychomotor activity that needs to be taught through introduction, repetition, and reinforcement. Key/letter locations should be introduced two at a time in a sequential format with repetitive activities that begin to build the kinesthetic memory traces that will link each letter with the appropriate finger movement and key. These activities must be designed to guide the learner toward successful completion and reinforce accomplishment.”

Leonard West (1983) proposed that mastering digraphs (two-letter combinations) was the key to maximum typing speed and accuracy. Earlier research showing that typing efficiency improved when typing practice contained “frequent letter combinations or common words,” (Type to Learn)

During the Cognitive Phase students are introduced to proper posture and technique. Students are introduced to individual keys and practice strings of individual letters and letter combinations. During this phase students are taught the proper use of action keys including:  shift, enter, backspace, tab.  Research shows that student progress should be cumulative, adding letter combinations of previously learned individual letters.

Associative Stimulus Phase includes on-going practice through exercises and activities that provide the repetition necessary for “kinesthetic memory traces” to develop. Developing kinesthetic memory traces is part of the psychomotor learning process (Starr, 2001). This stage of learning is the longest of the phases and involves developing a sense of continuity and rhythm in keyboarding.  During this phase students begin to move their eyes away from the keyboard and trust their fingers to stroke the correct key.

Autonomous Muscle Response Phase (Automaticity):  Automaticity is a level of proficiency where the learner is able to complete a task as a whole without devoting attention to each individual component task. Keyboarding automaticity requires facility in typing to the point where the operator is keying without thinking of the individual keys.

Having a better understanding of the phases of keyboarding development, I set about revamping my curriculum.  As I worked through the objectives I want students to learn, I recalled a workshop on gamification I attended at InnEdCo, which got me thinking in a new direction.  This year keyboarding will be gamified.

Methodology

• Pre-assess students to determine where students are on continuum of keyboarding learning.
• Cognitive phase
• Associative phase
• Autonomous phase
• Use Gamification and badges for students to see their progress and maintain motivation.
• Students will enter QWERTY Land and move through different lands based on their phase in the keyboarding learning process.
• Students may stay in any land for as long as they need to complete that phase of learning.
• Each land will include quests from:
• Keyboarding without Tears
• Typing Club
• Dance Mat Typing
• Keyboarding Games (http://www.symbaloo.com/home/mix/13eOcMQP6h )
• Exercises from  Keyboarding Skills for Children with Disabilities
• offline keyboarding games (kinesthetic)
• authentic keyboarding or word processing tasks (sight words, spelling words, other writing assignments)
• Students will earn points for completing quests that work toward mastery of the objectives in their specific phase of learning.  As students earn points for participation they will gain higher levels of adventurer status. This will give students who take longer to learn the positive reinforcement of making progress.
• As students master different skills they will earn badges to show mastery of the skill.   This will give the student who learns keyboarding more quickly badges for completing skills.

I have created the game in Google Classroom. Each land is a separate Google Classroom and students will move through the different lands as they master the objectives of the land. Students can choose which quests to complete within the land and gain their points by turning in screenshots of their completed activities. Students can do the level up challenge (assessment) whenever they feel they have mastered the objectives of the level. (I will be closely monitoring progress and will encourage leveling up whenever I see a student has mastered the level, if they don't self select the level up challenge). I am hopeful that this will honor and recognize various types of learning.

Passion Projects and a Huge Thank you to Century Link

Friday was a professional development day at Peak to Peak.  I was sitting in the auditeria waiting for the morning session to begin.  I was casually chatting with colleagues and sipping my tea, waiting for the morning discussion on PARCC.  Before beginning the day's events our Executive Director introduced a guest from Century Link.  My mind started spinning... could it be?  Several months ago I had written a grant application to help fund Chromebooks and accessories to support developing an elementary school computer lab where students will engage in a wide variety of learning.  In particular, I  am interested in having students research passion topics and create multimedia products to inform others about their passions.   While I knew my ideas were important and had great potential for student growth and achievement, I wasn't sure that others would get as excited about the project as I am.  Friday morning my dreams came true.  Century Link had selected my project to receive a $5,000 grant.  I am still floating and so excited to get started.  I can't wait to share the good news with students on Monday.

Students and I will blog about our experiences in creating passion projects over the next 12 months.  I'm excited to see students develop their interests and passions and to see how students become creative producers with this great infusion of technology.

Thank you Century Link!  Your generous donation is appreciated and we are so excited to get started.