A Creation and Collaboration Transformation

Technology tools like Seesaw and Flipgrid provide a space for students to record their own voices to share their thoughts, questions, ideas, and solutions.  But in a crowded classroom, how can you drown out the background noise?  Sheila Self, Reading Interventionist at Carthage Elementary School has just the solution.  In her classroom, Mrs. Self has created a designated recording studio area made with storage cubes and foam.  Check this out!

To make this recording studio, start with a collapsible fabric storage cube (12.8in x 12.8in x 15in)  

Insert foam acoustic panels (1in x 12in X 12in) into the bottom and 2 sides of the storage cube.

A wire book stand in the bottom of the cube holds the iPad.  

To prevent background noise while recording, Mrs. Self added a brightly colored retro handset that plugs into the headphone jack.

(Advice from Mrs. Self: It is not necessary to have both the foam acoustic panels and the handset for noise-free recording. It works either way but the handset offers less background noise.)   

In Seesaw, students take a photo of the pages they want to record for fluency then record their reading.  According to Mrs. Self, any recording done with the retro handset has a better sound quality and it gets the students excited about recording and doing their best reading.  Using the phone handset reminds the student that their reading should sound just like they were talking to someone on the phone.  The directions from Seesaw are posted at the recording station so students can refer to it for recording.

Check out these examples!

With the retro phone

Without the retro phone

In addition to using Seesaw, Mrs. Self has recently started using Flipgrid to amplify student voice.  For more information about Flipgrid and how you can use this in your classroom, check out this awesome blog post from STEM teacher extraordinaire Kim Collazo.

-Carrie 

Flipgrid is Flipping Awesome!

Sometimes a technology tool comes along that you know will drastically change the way kids collaborate, create, and communicate! I feel this way about Google Classroom (well all the Google Apps for Education, actually) and Seesaw, and now I am adding Flipgrid to that prestigious list.

“Flipgrid is a video discussion community for your classroom that supercharges your students’ voices. You add the topics, your students respond with short videos, and everyone engages!” (Flipgrid website)

Like Seesaw, Flipgrid is extremely user-friendly for both the teacher and the students. Because the video responses are limited to a minute and a half, students are able to practice being concise and articulate, while teachers don’t feel overwhelmed viewing the responses from an entire class. Flipgrid allows all students, especially those who struggle with expressing themselves via written language, the opportunity to share ideas, thoughts, and newly gained knowledge. Also, Flipgrid is able to be used on all modern browsers, desktop, Chromebook, iPhone, iPad, and Android devices.

How many times have you spent hours leaving penned comments and suggestions on students’ written work only to have them immediately shove the paper into their desks or backpacks (or better yet, the trash can)! Today’s students rely on visual and auditory messages to gain meaning in their lives. Think about Snapchat, Instagram, and the other social networking platforms that they use profusely throughout the day. As a teacher, Flipgrid can be used as a powerful formative assessment tool, allowing you to provide meaningful feedback using a modality today’s students desire.

Because students are able to view each other’s responses, Flipgrid is also a great way for our kids to practice digital citizenship, critical thinking, and gain new insight, understanding, and perspective (something sorely needed these days). In the teacher dashboard you have the ability to allow students to comment on each other’s responses or just allow viewing. Flipgrid also makes it easy to help our students become global learners through their global connection portal!

Flipgrid is an awesome tool for all grade levels and all subject areas. Math teachers are using it to have students explain their problem solving, ELA teachers are using it for global book discussions, science teachers are having students describe their lab findings, music teachers are having students share short performances, the possibilities are endless! This week at Southern Pines Elementary, several 3rd grade teachers used Nearpod lessons to teach students about the differences between saltwater and freshwater ecosystems. Then they had their students choose three things they wanted to share from their notes (Venn Diagrams) using Flipgrid.

The students used their Chromebooks and the entire class was finished recording within five or six minutes. The teachers now have rich formative information they can use to plan tomorrow’s follow up lesson, the class has a collection of interesting facts, and the students enjoyed quickly sharing what they had learned. You can visit the grid HERE.

I encourage you to give Flipgrid a try! If you are on Twitter @flipgrid is developing an enormous, energetic following. Make sure you check out the #flipgridfever hashtag to get amazing ideas on how other teachers are using this awesome tool! You can also check out a new grid HERE they’ve created where teachers (even you!) can add new ideas throughout the month of May!

Your DIF will be happy to get you started or model a lesson using Flipgrid, just ask!

Here’s to trying new things to empower our kids!

Kim

Southern Pines Primary Students React to...The Device Pilot

Friday, November 14th was a big day for the elementary schools of Moore County. This was the day that devices were delivered to Highfalls Elementary, Westmoore Elementary, and Southern Pines Primary School to be put in the hands of students so that our district could get input from students and teachers as to which device they should go with as move towards our 1:1 goal. Here at Southern Pines Primary, two second grade classes received a cart of Chromebooks to test out and two first grade classes got their hands on a cart of Samsung Galaxy tablets.

It was love at first sight. These students have truly enjoyed the opportunity to test out the Chromebooks and Samsung Galaxies. Their eyes light up when I walk into their classrooms because they know they usually work with their device when I'm in the room. It's hard to have a bad day when you have kids running up to hug you when they see you. To give you an idea of how these students feel about the pilot devices, as well as a taste of what they can create with them, here's a video I made with a Samsung Galaxy using WeVideo.

Find out more information about our Elementary School Pilot by visiting our website here.


- Clint Rogers

Promoting Student Voice with Chromebooks

One huge benefit we've found in deploying Chromebooks on a large scale is that they are so much easier to manage than any other device we've used in the past (PC's, Macs, iPads, etc.).  One of the excellent features of Google Apps Admin is the ability to easily create a district-specific App Store within the larger Chrome Web Store Environment (if you'd like to read more on how to do this, click here for a tutorial).  Our store is called "Moore@School".

The way we set up our Chromebooks for app downloads is in two tiers- staff and students:  
Staff:  Any staff member has full rights to view and download ANY app from the wider Chrome Web Store.

Students:  All students can VIEW apps on the wider Chrome Web Store and have access to download and install any apps within our "Moore@School" store.

So how do we promote more student voice within our district?  Well, we give all students an opportunity to request an app to be placed within the Moore@School store. All students have to do is go to this page and fill out this form to request an app to be loaded.  I get a notification of the request, download and test the app, then approve or deny it.  Once it is approved, I email the student back to thank them and let them know of it's approval, then push it out to our web store.  This entire process- from my email dinging with a notification to the app showing up for download in the web store takes less than 5 minutes.

We've seen great benefits from this already!  The students are doing an outstanding job of providing sound reasoning and justification for their app choices.  Here are just a few excerpts from apps that were requested and approved:

App Request:  Caret  (Requestor: Garret K)

"This app is a text editor. I am trying to write html and javascript code on my chromebook but the text app has a very hard to use interface and doesn's make a whole lot of since. After every opening tag it adds a two space indention that you have to remove to had a closing tag to keep your text aligned. I'm on the search for the best text editing app on the web store."

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App Request:  Cacoo  (Requestor:  Cheyenne)

"I think cacoo should be add to Moore County Schools because it is a app that would help us in math and science and reading. Cacoo can help us in science because we are learning about plants. In reading we do flow charts that help us draw conclusions It can help us in math because we plot coordinates on a coordinates plane. It can help us in social studies because we do timelines. Thank you for taking our suggestion."

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App Request:  Graph.tk  (Requestor:  Brittany)

"I believe students of Moore County Schools should be able to access the app Graph.tk. I believe this because it’s a very useful and educational app. The 6th-8th grade students of Highfalls Elementary School are working on learning graphing and calculating functions. In this utility you are able to use exponents which would be very useful for the upcoming years. The reviews on this app are “excellent graphing utility” and ”quite amazing”. Graph.tk can help us in many ways such as with completing tasks. Also, it allows easy work formation, and allows you to plot and design your own graphical unit. It has more functions that are still new to the app and it is easily used. By having this tool we would be able to use less paper by graphing parallelograms, trapezoids, and polygons through the app. Thank you for considering my suggestion."

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If you're interested in seeing how our app list has grown, check out this page and scroll to the embedded G Doc toward the bottom.

We've been able to be responsive to student needs, have been exposed to a lot of great new apps, and students are able to have a positive impact on the rest of the students in our county- a true win for increased student voice!

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