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. 

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