Fun with Chromebooks Peggy Rux, Pasteur Elementary School

As we reach the end of our two year REVITAL grant. I want to say how grateful I am to have been a part of such a wonderful experience. One of the main reasons I applied for this grant was to be able to become more competent using technology with my students and become a leader in technology integration at my school.  While I believe I have accomplished these goals, I still have a long way to go!

Students at all levels are very comfortable using the iPads. Their favorite app would be Toontastic.  Students love creating cartoons!! This year I had to teach Health classes as well as Media and my students were concerned they would not be able to use the app. No worries, I just had them create cartoons about a health topic! Another popular app with my classes is Stack the States.  Great trivia questions! The older students really like Educreations for presentations.  

While all my students can use the iPads with ease, I feel my older students really like using the Chromebooks more. They like the fact that it works more like a laptop, with its larger screen and keyboard. They like to practice their keyboarding skills using the website typing.com. The web based format of Brainpop is also more popular with my students. It offers much more then the App version.  They have been collaboration using Google Drive which is something I hope to do more with my younger students next year.

Through this grant I have gained a lot of knowledge that I have shared with my fellow teachers. Together we have planned some great lessons. Students are using their media time completing research, creating slideshows and collaborating on Drive. I hope to continue this next year and have already started planning with our Instructional Leadership Team on implementing more technology into our lessons. I want to thank Colleen and Lisa for all their support. I also want to say a big thank you to all of my fellow grant recipients for all the great links, lesson plans and collaboration along the way!

Using Google Slides, Amy Chiu, Corkery Elementary School

We are so pleased to have our third quarter under our belts and are ready to venture on into our last quarter.  This quarter we have endeavored many projects using our chromebooks and iPads.  Our 8th graders started a research project on a President in February (President’s month).  Through this project, we enjoyed implementing apps, trying new extensions and utilizing bookmarks with our chromebooks.   

For the first slide of the Google app “Slide” presentation, students created a collage from ABCya word cloud with the president’s name along with 7-10 adjectives that describe their chosen president.  I played around with having them use the Word Cloud extension  but found the results too random.  I wanted the students to be thoughtful and precise with the words in their collage.  I ended up having the students going straight to the ABCya site and customizing a page that contained their chosen president’s name along with 7-10 adjectives to describe him, then taking a screenshot of the collage and dragging it to their presentation.  

Easybib App was a resource all students had access to use as an app.  It was helpful to several of them as they did the web resource portion of their research.  We used easybib before we had the chromebooks so they were already familiar with it.  I think they liked the convenience of having it as an app.  

Students also enjoyed having our website on their cps.edu bookmark.  All they had to do was click on the cps.edu bookmarks on the bookmark bar and then choose Corkery Library on the dropdown menu.  That made it easier for them to access our Corkery Library Website that links them to our Databases and our Library Catalog, which they also used for their research.  

We are glad to have that project done and all we have learned through it and ready to venture on into new this for this Spring!!!!

Blogging in Spanish, Lindsey Mangurten, Lincoln Park High School

For this lesson I had the Spanish classes creating blogs about festivals in Spanish Speaking Countries. I used kidblog for the students to create their blogs. I really like kidblog for the ease for the class and for the teacher. Instead of the students emailing the blog link to the teacher, all of the web links are in one place and the students can browse and comment on each others pages. The students log in to their teachers pages, select their class period and find their own accounts.

Before the class came in I got the class roster from the teacher and created accounts for all of the students. I used the password, ‘password’ for everyone. This can only work if you trust your students not to go on someone elses page and do something inappropriate. In the past I did have a student erase another students work out of malice and I was not able to prove who had done it. If you don’t trust the students you can create more difficult passwords but for ease of time I used “password”. The teacher and I discussed this prior to beginning and since it was an upper level Junior/Senior class we felt that we could trust the kids to remain on their own pages exclusively.  

I spent about 15 minutes in the beginning of the period demonstrating how to log in, upload photos, and add and edit text. The platform is very user friendly and the students were quickly able to start adding in their own information.

Because it was a spanish class the students were required to write in Spanish. In order to do that, the students typed in google docs and were going to copy/paste the text into kidblog. I also showed the students how to add accents and tildes and other spanish markings using google docs. The students were able to select

-insert

-special characters

-draw what they were looking for

-select the proper letter and accent mark

We found the drawing tool to be the easiest to use since the font was so small for some of the accents to truly decipher what they were. Once the students had completed typing in Spanish they copy/pasted their final product into kidblog before publishing their work. I highly recommend kidblog for blog creation in class. It is private, free and user friendly.

2nd graders and Chromebooks By Viviane Kraus, Franklin Fine Arts Academy

The second grade teacher and I decided to collaborate on an adjective lesson.  The teacher wanted to have students create a portrait surrounded  with adjectives describing themselves.   

The students learned about adjectives in the classroom and brainstormed adjectives that described themselves and wrote their adjectives on paper. When students came to the weekly library period, the students brought their adjective lists.

Second graders were already taught  how to access their Google Drives and how to check email in technology class.  This, however,  was their first time using Google Docs.  

I made sure that I had a copy of usernames and passwords just in case some students forgot theirs.  

First, I gave the students a quick tutorial about how to open a Chromebook and access the internet using the Browse as Guest tab and then searching for the Google CPS website in the search bar.  

Once the students were all logged on, I modeled how to create a Google Doc and how to change text font, text size and text color.  I also asked the students to help each other at their tables since we are learning something brand new.  

I then went through each step one at a time again and walked around to support students when they got stuck.  This seemed to help.  Once the students were on their Google Doc they started typing and manipulating the text by changing the font, text size and color.  By this time, the 40 minute period was almost over.  I explained how Google Drive saves their documents automatically and taught them how to name their new Google Doc.  

For the next library lesson, students had to be reminded to access their document, but seemed to be able to get started pretty quickly.  I made sure to be available to troubleshoot, but most of the students were able to finish during that library class period.  I was impressed with the enthusiasm and work ethic of the second grade students.

“We learned how to change the font.” Sophie S.

“I love using the Chromebooks, it makes me feel smart.”  Mekhi K.

Sometimes It’s the Little Things By Connie Amon, Galileo Scholastic Academy

On Monday I crossed an item off my never-ending, always changing, list of things to do: how to get chatterpix to glog. (It looks like this now: how to get chatterpix to glog; and I’m so happy!) A few months ago, when I suggested to a fifth grade teacher that we add a ChatterPix video to the glogs the students were creating on an explorer they were studying, I had no idea if it would really work or not. Sometimes things don’t work. Preparing the ChatterPix video on the iPad worked fine, for the most part. The question, then, was how to get that video off the iPad and into Glogster (which, by the way, still does not function as well as I would like). The biggest obstacle? simply finding the time to figure it out. I knew I could do it on a computer, but how exactly would it work on a Chromebook?

About a month ago I attended a PD session at the ICE conference called “Chrome-ology: Getting the Most Out of Your Chromebook”, presented by Gregory Regalado and Neil Charlet of Maine West High School. Spending a few hours with my Chromebook was exactly what I needed. Did I embrace and “learn” every detail that was presented? Of course not, but every time I login on a Chromebook now, I see the 1-Click Timer and beautiful spring theme that I added during that session (not critical to learning or teaching, but a sign of my personal accomplishment). And I learned lots of “little things” that make me feel that much smarter. Did you know that the Address Bar that you can search from in the Chrome browser is called the Omnibox? Or that those bars in the upper righthand corner of a Chrome page are called “the Hamburger”? (Where have I been?!) Check out this site: Maine West’s ChromeDepot. Containing tons of information for any user, this site is a great model for other schools.

On Friday, a student using a Chromebook asked how to copy an image into his infographic (we are using Piktochart). I was in a hurry, as usual, since a number of other groups needed help. There is more than one way to copy an image on the Chromebook. Pieces of incomplete information flashed through my brain, students nearby offered suggestions. I took a deep breath and tried two fingers. Success! Maybe I have learned a few things...

So how do you move a ChatterPix video from the iPad to a glog? Here’s what we did:

• from the camera roll, students mailed their videos to me (why not to themselves? we tried that, but then realized that students can’t receive mail from outside the CPS domain, and the generic accounts on the iPads are gmail…);
• from my CPS mail, students forwarded their video to their own email (I set up a station with my email open during class; a bit of a risk, but turned out ok);
• from their mail, they downloaded the video on the Chromebook;
• in Glogster, they uploaded the video from the downloads folder (we had to refresh to get it to be use-able).

Ta-da! The kids were so excited about this “little thing”! See for yourself:

http://cdominguez21.edu.glogster.com/explorer-8578/

http://amartinez404.edu.glogster.com/explorer/

Using Chromebooks and Bitstrips, Janice Wellborn, Hernandez Middle School

Testing time is usually a very trying time for me, as well as for the students. During PARCC testing, I am required to be out of my library but fortunately I have Chromebooks to carry with me as I travel from class to class. Our testing schedule is the entire duration of the four weeks I am seeing the current students. Grateful I am that I have these devices!

This past week we have been doing research and creating comic strips using Chromebooks and Bitstrips.  With most students working in pairs, the students were told to review the Database and Bitstrips assignment found on my wiki and answer the questions on the wiki. The topic of research was Ebola.  I created accounts for all students on Bitstrips.  When the students had completed their research they began creating one comic strip per pair to show the information they had learned.  

For the most part, this project went smoothly.  I have used Bitstrips several times and knew that one advantage of this comic strip project was that students love to create their own avatars and settings and absolutely love to share their creations with each other.  I guessed, correctly, that they would enjoy working together on these creations. I did have a few students that were reluctantly paired together and those very few who were unhappy were able to work alone.

At the end of the project, after all students have shared their work with me, I then allow the entire class to see the work of all the students.  The students are told to review twelve comic strips and give the comic strip creators feedback.  They did this with great respect and sincerity, for the most part.  

One problem I ran into with only one rambunctious class had to do with online feedback and flagging.  I had allowed students to make comments online and to use the flagging option in the settings.  With one class, this turned into a mistake.  A handful of students began to flag everyone’s comics or comments.  Before I knew it, the program started hiding the flagged students’ work.  Our classroom gallery went from 15 to six in a matter of minutes!  I had them resubmit the comics to  me and I then instructed all to stop flagging.  From this point on, I will be turning off that option and the comment option in settings.  It was a little too tempting for a few people.

Coding with Kids, Stacie Bell, Pirie Elementary School

This winter has marked the second year my students have participated in the Hour of Code. This program is a great way to introduce students to computer science and demystify coding. Last year, I worked with students in grades 3 and up. This year, code.org introduced a new curriculum that allowed even my Kindergarten students to participate.

Previously, I had students working on iPads to complete lessons. I found that while it worked, there were a few glitches that prevented the entire screen from being in view and, on some pages, the navigation and log out buttons were not visible. This year proved much easier using the Chromebooks giving me the confidence to try this program with a Kindergarten and Second grade class.

After completing an “Unplugged” lesson (which are paper based and meant to teach the entire class the concepts and thought processes they will need to solve problems online), I taught students how to log on. The Kindergarteners and Second graders were given a special class site to go to which had their names listed. After finding their name, they clicked on a special secret picture as their password. This was the hardest part for the Kindergarteners because most had never typed in a web address themselves before. The precision necessary along with brand new keyboarding skills (combined with a few students that had not even mastered letter identification yet) made this login process difficult, but we persevered (and I resisted typing in the addresses myself).

Once logged on, the students were able to complete several activities which taught them basic computer skills such as clicking and dragging. All of my students were then able to move onto solving puzzles and writing simple code to navigate an angry bird through a maze to get those evil pigs. The kids loved learning coding and were enthralled by the Angry Bird theme. My second graders started off working in partners and the site we used, Code.org, had a tutorial video on how two people could work together as a team. The video helped the students understand and accept their roles, which was a big help in preventing someone being too controlling.

Coding with my students proved to be a very successful activity which I hope to continue in the future, well beyond the Hour of Code that takes place in December.