Beyond Integration

Do you need a new approach to getting your students to analyze graphs, draw conclusions and even evaluate the reliability of the information? Well, I just saw this on another blog I follow, Teacher Tech with Alice Keeler , and was intrigued by the instructional activity that encourages students to participate in an online moderated conversation about the data and their observations. Graphs display information about politics, policies, pop culture, and daily life topics, bringing in a variety of content related to most classrooms. Students 13 and older can participate in the online moderated conversation, but don't let this discourage you if you teach younger students. Have a whole group discussion and use the teacher account to add the comments, allowing students to have that online learning space opportunity. The 3-day process of analyzing graphs and contributing to the online discussion with the New York Times is the same each week. 1. On  Tuesdays,  the...

Here at BeyondIntegration we’ve been spending over a year sharing ideas for technology integration in Richland Two classrooms.  We also, however, want to honor and share the significant uses of technology we see teachers implement regularly.  We will begin sharing a series called Teacher Spotlights.  You can find all posts in the Teacher Spotlight series by clicking the tag on the right side of the blog. Teacher: Alesha Love, high school math School: Ridge View High School (where she graduated from as well!) Showcase of technology integration use: On the day before an assessment in Ms. Love’s foundations in Algebra class, Ms. Love worked to engage students in reflecting on their understanding of various learning objectives to be assessed and provide support for students who had gaps in their knowledge. The app Ms. Love chose for this task was quizzizz.com.  This isn’t your average quiz site but rather a gamified version of questions to engage an...

Quick formative assessments provide educators with valuable insights that can be used to modify or improve lesson plans, adjust teaching methods, and, ultimately improve student learning. Ultimately, the goal of formative assessments is to:  provide day-to-day feedback that can be applied immediately provide useful information about what students have learned with minimal time or effort allow educators to address student lack of understanding or misconceptions quicker help to fosters the notion that teaching and learning are on-going processes.  Technology makes the process of creating assessments and collecting the information much more simple and a much faster turn around. Here are a couple of suggestions to get you started.  DyKnow: This is a cloud-based management system the district has purchased for our teachers this year.  A favorite feature of mine is the ability to push out a quick question to all my students in that class and have immediat...

Previously we shared some ideas for using Google Sheets and Orange Slice Docs rubric to make the process of giving feedback faster for teachers.  Today we are sharing some ways to provide feedback easily using two tools you may already have incorporated into your regular classroom practice. Many teachers use Google Classroom to collect assignments from students.  It certainly helps teachers reduce the amount of papers they carry around and the commenting features within the Google apps makes giving students guidance in their working document very easy.   Still, when you’re working with 30 students per class, the time it takes to open each student’s document and waiting for it to load can add up!  As a result, Google Classroom has released a grading panel that makes navigating through each kid’s document quicker for teachers and the included comment bank makes providing feedback to frequent mistakes a breeze.  Watch this tutorial for more infor...

Starting your class off in a productive way can jump-start a student’s thinking process toward a learning objective/target. “Bell Ringer” activities are usually a short question, problem or task for students to engage in that can either review the previous day’s topic or begin thinking about today’s topic. In a 1:1 digital environment, these bell ringer activities can add more creativity and Google Suite has everything you need to make it relevant and meaningful for the students. I have 4 simple strategies that you can use in any subject that will take between 5-10 minutes to complete. Create a Comic Strip using Google Drawing ELA: Comic Strips are a great way to encourage reading and writing and reinforce key story elements  Have students recreate a scene from a story the layout of comic strips is a useful tool to help students plan a beginning, middle, and end to their story or their interpretation of an event that occurred in the book. Science/Social Studies: Ask a ch...