Chrome Book Return Procedures in Graphics

Today I bring you some integration ideas I learned from Joshua Cassellius, a spanish teacher at Union Pines High School. Mr. Cassellius has been doing an exceptional job, smoothly incorporating technology into his daily instruction. He was an early adopter of Google Classroom to manage workflow and now runs a largely paper free classroom. Mr. Cassellius understands well that Chromebooks are a teacher’s tool for instruction that doesn’t fit every instructional situation. Accordingly, students move their devices back and forth from desktop to backpack efficiently several times in a class period.

Mr Cassellius has been particularly good at using Chromebooks this year to 1) increase student-teacher communication and 2) increasing the rigor of student mastery assignment through creation, collaboration, and publication.

In a recent training session we discussed Today’s Meet. Mr. Cassellius volunteered to his colleagues that he uses it with great success. He make one “room” per course, sets the time limit for 1 year, and posts the entrance code on the “About” tab of the course’s Google Classroom page. Before tests and quizzes he asks students to post any questions they have to the wall. He credits the anonymity afforded by Today’s Meet for the increased increase in student requests for help and as a result better student performance on the quizzes. Similarly he solicits student responses in spanish to verbal questions and as responses are collected peers critique the grammar and word choice without the fear of judgement by peers.

http://blogs.nvcc.edu/kriddick/files/2013/10/todays_meet2.jpg

Mr. Cassellius has also asked that students work in groups to create video presentations with cell phones and WeVideo to demonstrate their mastery of elementary spanish. This one activity allows Mr. Cassellius to reach all 4 of the central components of spanish skill instruction: speak, writing, listening, and presentation. The task is made challenging and relevant because these students have to collaborate with each other to produce mastery work while navigating the non-native language.  

Here are a few sample products by Mr. Cassellius’ students

Learn more about Mr. Cassellius’ tools featured above by clicking the icons below

Postponing December Training

Good morning and happy Friday

Item 1:
I wanted to reiterate an email I sent out the other day informing you all that I am postponing the trainings scheduled for Wednesday the 17th. Many of you are busy with senior exams or tying up lose ends before the break. I will be helping to run the Chromeboook help desk since Mitzi will be temporarily ousted from the Media Center. 

Item 2:
If your students have trouble with their chromebooks next week please send them to the future home of the help desk outside the attendance office. Mitzi will be using that nice set up Ms. Lea built to offer the help. Mitzi has sent an email to everyone asking you to tell kids to turn in their laptops with bad mice now so we don't have issues that compromise testing after break. 

Item 3: 
You will likely encounter students soon that will only have limited access to the internet. These students were flagged by the county as abusing some or several aspects of our acceptable use guidelines. Students will have access to Google Apps (Docs, Movenote, Picktochart, Lucid, etc..) and some site predetermined to be educational by IT. This is NOT a tech issue that should be sent to the help desk. This is a sentence they are serving for a period to be determined by Ms. Lea and the administrative team. If you need a certain site opened to one of these students let me know a day or two (preferred) ahead of time and I can request it be allowed for the student.

Item 4:
As you have seen, it has taken some time but the district and our school are serious about providing powerful tools to our students but also that they use them in productive and appropriate ways. We (I) need to do a better of preaching and teaching digital citizenship to our students. If there is a day that I can talk to one or more of your courses to (give you a little extra planning time?) talk to them about behavior in digital spaces please shoot me an email and we'll get it on the calendar.


Image attribution
http://www.agbusinessmail.com/Images/Holly-Banner.jpg