What's it All For?

Our Avatars, Put into Action

This week students continued their work with Google Slides as they explored some of amazing features it offers. They will use their new skills and avatar to create and publish a digital story. For a quick preview of their avatars or to see some new editions, and there will be more, see my post on "Google Slide Features." Although the fifth and sixth graders told stories in different ways their engagement and creativity soared. This is why we teach! 

While making their avatars, students explored toolbar buttons, menu bar dropdown lists, tried a few right-clicks and utilized some shortcut keys. There are many means to the same end. Check out the graphic below to see the objects and the tools that we explored. 

Short descriptions of some of the favorites are included here:

Zoom for narrowing in on small details or to see the big picture. 

Paint Format, a hidden gem lets you copy the properties of one object (a shape or text) and apply them to another of the same kind. 

So many Shapes, the rectangle oval, trapezoid, callouts and donut shapes. Spoiler alert! You can enter text directly into any shape. You DO NOT need to place a text box over the shape. Word Art yes, text, not necessary. 

Line button. It takes some practice but the curve and polyline tools are a big hit! My goodness they are creative.

Crop (and Mask) to manipulate the image sizes using gutters to make them fit like a true comic. 

Fill Color & Borders were helpful for our avatars when making hair, tie-dyes, and other materials.

What We Learned, a Summary, and Some Examples

(Number 9 on slide 4 is my favorite... well, it's up there anyway. Gosh they are cute!)

Breaking it Down

To help my remote students keep track of their Code.org exit ticket entries, I had to roll up my sleeves and dive into a new tool that I started to explore last spring, Data Studio. Their Data Studio report link can be found in our Google Classroom. Connected directly to their school gmail account, this report shows a log of any submitted exit tickets for the Code.org asynchronous activities. This link ONLY WORKS for the students in my classes when they use their school accounts.

Remote students have just started working on their avatars. We are making great progress but have a ways to go. Stayed tuned and check back to see new additions to our avatar poster in the coming week. Next up students will work on their comics.

My hybrid students continued work in Google Slides, fine tuning their avatars before they set to work on their short stories.

In fifth grade  students used their Google Slide Avatars to create comics with a focus on our FAB Classroom Constitution. My Founding Students developed and discussed ideas instrumental in writing our 3 articles. Ask them about these 3 simple but powerful ideals.

Although the comics are still a work in progress they look fantastic and I can't wait to share them with you! #Ah-mazing #LooksProfessional! #FutureGraphicNovelist

In sixth grade students dreamed about a place that they might go if there were no restrictions, e.g. school, money, health, etc. Their job was to create a 1 page comic to share this location and why it was special. In addition to some specific requirements, they needed one image with a citation that included key details like their search word(s) and the direct link to their chosen image. This was an extension of our discussion on copyright and the need to credit someone else's work if not their own and used in a school project. 

Today we started to talk about coding and robotics. We will dive deeper into this topic next week when we explore the Root robot simulator. We are really excited! 

Google Slide Features

This week students were reminded to check Google Classroom and School Brains to review their grades. They were reminded that they can always resubmit works to improve on their learning and their grade. Lastly, we reviewed turning work into Google Classroom.

My remote students have started using Code.org for asynchronous activities. These activities are self-paced so students should not feel pressured to keep up with everyone else but are expected to work on these activities on asynchronous days when we do not Zoom together. In addition to these Code.org activities they should always complete the Google form exit ticket EVERY time they finish that days work. Since classes run for 44 minutes, they should work on this activities for about 35-40 minutes so that they have time to complete their exit ticket. The exit ticket is 

1) a chance for them to explain what they think they learned for the day

2) part of their grade and should be completed every asynchronous day.

My hybrid students completed Google Slide Avatars this week. Remote students are just getting started with their avatars and will continue working on them next week. In this exercise students explored Google Slides in a different way, learned many of the unused features that Google apps offers, explored different image file types, practiced adding work to an assignment in Google Classroom and made awesome PNG avatars. If you want to make an avatar of your own, take a peek at my instructional video below.

In fifth grade these avatars will be used to make comics about our FAB Constitution. A project that they will be working on for the next 1-2 weeks. We used Pear Deck to review the tools we will be using in Google Slides, the expectations for their comics, and to review past projects so students could provide compliments and suggestions while considered ways they will make their own comics. I'm really excited to see what they come up with.

In sixth grade students were tasked with thinking about a place that they would like to go if they could with no barriers, e.g. money, school, Covid, etc. We also talked about copyright and the Educational Fair Use Act. Next, they will use their avatars to transport themselves to these destinations after the use search tools to find the perfect picture, cite their source, and add their avatar. Some ideas they share were Japan, Disney, a beach, and more. I'm excited to see where they decide to go!

Here are the avatars that have been shared so far. This is a work in progress so please check back often to see any new additions. 

Building Classroom Community

Screencasting

Students worked with a new screen capturing tool called Screencastify while they created a video "How to" to show how to make a new folder in Google Drive. In addition to making the video, students will have a digital folder to organize their work for our class and hopefully their other classes as well. Already, they are sharing new ideas and even additional screencasts for other tech tips to help each other in school. 

Some highlights:

helping other people understand how to do stuff without needing to say the same thing to everyone over and over again

I think that I will be able to explain some thing better because you can show your screen to explain your theory. 

Show people how to Zoom for Fridays 

Stay tuned for new videos in the future. To get started, you can try B (bold), I (italics), and N (new folder.) After this assignment students were invited to create other videos to add to our ABC's of Technology slideshow. Videos may only display when students are logged in with their school account. 

A big area of focus for students this week was to dissect our Word Cloud data to learn more about each others ideas. During our discussions students learned that data can be represented in many ways, like the frequency of words, pictures, etc. Data is not just numbers and something we share whenever we post anything online. Students in each class took turns to identify the "big words" or should I say "big ideas" that resulted from their work. There was also discussion about how literal computers are as we noticed that some words appeared two or more times. This was the result of different spelling or case sensitivity. In the Word Cloud we also noticed that groups of words didn't stay together. To show them how a Word Cloud might look differently I grouped their words together using underscores between the groups of words instead of spaces. I also used all lower case letters before sharing a modified version of the same data. View this version which was added to the group Word Cloud share posted last week in "My Classroom, My Learning." 

FAB Constitution

Next up for students was to review their ideas and work before they signed our FAB Constitution. Using their ideas some work from a Responsive Classroom course, I created our FAB Constitution. Keeping it short, simple and to the point, students can easily connect what they do in class with a positive learning environment. They own it! They wrote it! They enforce it! :)

Once we reviewed our Word Cloud responses, my "Founding Students" reviewed the preamble, and considered their contributions as they related to the 3 FABulous articles I suggested. Students had a chance to speak up again if they felt their voice wasn't heard. Once we agreed, students signed their constitution using a signature script that my very talented friend and fellow digital learning coach Zak Kolar created.  

Remote Learning Rules

Another visual to show some online rules for learning. 

NEXTOUT

My Classroom, My Learning

This week we utilized a variety of tools as students worked in groups and independently to build our Classroom Constitution. Their goal was to discuss and identify what makes a positive learning environment. 

Their initial work started in groups of 3-5 students using a Google Jamboard with color coded digital stickies to share their ideas. See copies of two examples here. Grade 5 & Grade 6. These examples are not all inclusive but they do provide an overview of what some groups of students identified as being important. You may have noticed that frames 6 & 7 share their ideas to help us teachers and parents to support their learning.

After some time building these informative works of art, students completed a Google Form to self reflect on the ideas so they could share what was most important to them. 

The next step in the process was using their responses to build Word Clouds. This gave us a chance to have fun with a new tech tool while they learned a little bit about graphical representations of word frequency which they will continue to reflect on as they build their constitution. 

Each student was assigned one question. They used the responses for that question to build their word cloud. We used a website called wordcoulds.com. Below are a couple examples from each question. They really had fun exploring this tool and making it their own. 

Students wrapped up these activities with a Flipgrid post to tell me why classroom rules are important. Stay tuned for the big reveal of our Classroom Constitution next week in my post, "Building Classroom Community."

Online Presence

Zoom time. Below are two slideshows that I created, one for hosts (teachers) and the other for participants (students.) Students navigated the file using ghost hyperlinks embedded on each slide, usually on the menu bar at the bottom. The "ghost links," think the movie, "The Net" with Sandra Bullock, are hidden links that transport you to other web based locations. In this case they are hyperlinks within the same Google Slide. This exercise allowed me to introduce Zoom features and settings while students worked to complete a scavenger hunt. 

Some of their takeaways include:

Learning how to share screens, using the touch up feature, changing skin tone for reactions, testing the audio and speaker settings, keyboard shortcuts, controls and features differ on different devices, how to Zoom better, there are multiple ways to do the same thing ((un(mute)) and more.

Some questions:

Will I ever use screen share? Yes, everyone will have an opportunity to share their screen to present and show off their work. 

Why can't I use the virtual backdrop? Like all of the features in Zoom, the device you use will affect which features are available. It has to do with a lot of variables, memory, refresh rate, etc. Virtual backgrounds don't work on our Chromebooks.

Where is the reaction button on Zoom? You will find it on the tool bar at the bottom of the screen. Depending on which device you use, you will have a different number of reaction button options. 

How do you change your name on Zoom? Your name will default to the user who is logged into Zoom at that time. You can change it in settings by logging into Zoom.us and modifying your profile, or you can try the rename feature. Hover over your name in the Participants window for the rename or More pop-up "window." You should find the option there if it is set up as an option in Settings. 

What is the keyboard shortcut, also known as hot key shortcut for closing your window? It depends on the device but is likely (Control + w) on most devices and (Command + w) on a MAC. 

Students

Presenters

Your Data Says a Thousand Words. Even before remote learning became a reality, many did not think twice about sharing a picture or a video unknowingly giving away personal data and identifiers. The big shares these days are images and videos. What I want my student to know is that they need to be aware of what they share and who they share it with. The objective of this exercise is for students to recognize what they are sharing online when they share images, video, and conferencing tools.

  

Here is a snap shot of some responses for Froggy.