Category Archives: Google for Education

Gr. 3 Students Weigh-in on Keyboard Skills Programs

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Touch-typing, or keyboarding,  isn’t perhaps, the most fun skill to learn, but it’s one of the most important.   At the start of Media class, Gr. 3 students have been choosing between two, free, online programs,  Dance Mat Typing or Big Brown Bear.

The focus of each 10 minute practice session is for students to use the correct fingers on the keys while improving their confidence and accuracy.

As an extension to Google for Education tools, students were asked to complete a survey that was created using Google Forms.  Which of the two programs did students’ like better?  Or did they like them both equally?

Google Forms turns the students’ responses into a spreadsheet that includes a pie chart.  The pie chart above shows Mrs. Gibson’s class responses.  Dance Mat Typing was the overall favorite of Gr. 3 students .

Students then learned how to create their own Google Sheets. They used the same data, but represented it in bar graph format.

D. Hixon, Mrs. Holt’s class

Next month, students will have a third choice, Typing Club.  All three of these programs are free and can be accessed both at school and at home.

ISTE Standard  for Students:  1c. Students use technology to seek feedback that informs and improves their practice and to demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways.

 

 

 

Infographics

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Grade 5 Google Drive

“Infographics are visually stimulating and force us to summarize well.”

from Matt Miller, Ditch That Textbook

Last year in Gr. 4 Media classes, students practiced their word processing skills using Google Docs.  In these docs, they shared their ideas about what Google Drive is and what it does. Classes then came up with a group-generated definition of Google Drive.

This year, in Gr. 5, as an introduction to the Google tool, Google Drawing, students took that definition and summarized it in an infographic.

The slideshow above is a compilation of one student-created infographic from each Gr. 5 classroom.

Students also created a slide that listed the URLs of each of the images they used in their infographics to demonstrate their understanding of attribution.

AASL Standard 2.1.6 Use the writing process, media and visual literacy, and technology skills to create products that express new understandings.

 

Survey Says . . .

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“Survey research is often used to assess thoughts, opinions, and feelings. Surveys can be specific and limited, or they can have more global, widespread goals. … A good sample selection is key as it allows one to generalize the findings from the sample to the population, which is the whole purpose of survey research.” (Wikipedia)

Grade 6 students have been creating and taking surveys with their classmates using Google Forms and Google Classroom.

Star Wars Survey by Madeleine Payne, Ms. Stewart’s class

Once the surveys were taken, and students received the results, each student analyzed the results of his/her survey using Google Sheets.

Students asked the following questions in their analysis.

“Did my survey give the results I had expected when I created the survey?”

“What would I do differently with my survey now that I have seen the results?”

“How could I “tweak” the survey to get different results?”

Students then revised their surveys for their classmates to retake and noted both the difference in the results and their explanation for the difference.

Massachusetts School Library Standards 

5.7

Use appropriate medium to produce an original product to communicate research results.

7.9 Review and evaluate the process of transforming information into knowledge.

Grade 6 Happenings

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Google Sites

By the end of Semester 2, all Gr. 6 students have worked with the following Google for Education apps in their Media classes:  Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Forms, Google Slides and Google Drawings.

As an extension of our last unit, Evaluating Web Sites, students were encouraged to explore Google Sites, once they had completed their Google Classroom assignment.

To see an example of student work evaluating their favorite websites, click on the link above.

Tri-Town School Union Technology Learning Standards for Grades K-6 Standard 3. Demonstrate the ability to use technology for research, critical thinking, problem solving, decision making, communication, collaboration, creativity, and innovation.
This standard:

  • focuses on applying a wide range of technology tools to student learning and everyday life;
  • aims to ensure that students will be able to use technology to process and analyze information;
  • is to help students develop skills for effective technology-based communication;
  • includes the use of technology to explore and create new ideas, identify trends, and forecast possibilities; and
  • aims to provide students with an awareness of how technology is used in the real world.

 

 

What does a Gr. 5 Media class look like?

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In Grade 5 Media classes,  students begin in the Media lab and choose between TTL4,  Dance Mat Typing or Big Brown Bear software programs in which to practice and increase their keyboarding skills. During this portion of class, those students who would like to check out a library book that day are able to do so in lieu of keyboard practice.  This time also allows students who may have missed a Media class to make up any missed work using their Google Classroom account assignments feature.

This winter, we have been using the topic of black holes to learn more about online resources of information.  In our information-rich age, students and adults alike often get lost in an online “black hole”, getting sucked into the vastness of a simple Google search results list, for instance.  The essential question of this unit; what is the best resource to use according to my learning needs?

Wikipedia is an often-used resource that is widely regarded, and alternately, criticized for its free, open sourced information.  Students were engaged in lively debates over the usefulness and appropriateness of Wikipedia for this school use.  After analyzing the Wikipedia black hole article, students learned about vandalism of articles in Wikipedia, and also that the information found in this particular article was not written at a reading level that they could comprehend.  We agreed that the best online resources in which to learn about black holes were the NASA for students website and an article with supporting media found in the Britannica School Edition encyclopedia.

Massachusetts School Library Media Standard

7.7

Use critical and creative thinking skills to analyze, synthesize and evaluate relevance, reliability, and authority of sources.

 

 

What does a Gr. 4 Media class look like?

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kidsbits

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A Grade 4 Media class is similar to a Gr. 3 Media class in that students begin in the Media lab and choose between TTL4 or Dance Mat Typing programs in which to practice and increase their keyboarding skills. During this portion of class, those students who would like to check out a library book that day are able to do so in lieu of keyboard practice.  This is a change from their first term Media classes, in which students were in the library as a whole class activity for 20 minutes each class to ensure time for library orientation. By Term 2, most students are reading longer chapter books and do not require a new library book each week.  Library loan policy allows students to have up to three (3) library books checked out, each with a 30 day loan period.

The additional time in the Media lab allows for more focus on Information Literacy Skills.  With the recent interface partnership between Kids InfoBits and Google Classroom, students have access to content that is reading leveled, from resources not found via a search engine such as Google Search,  (magazines, newspapers, encyclopedias, primary sources) giving students meaningful, technology-rich methods for them to evaluate and repackage the information they learn about.

MSLMA Standards

1.8 Gather background information by reading, viewing or listening to a variety of pre-selected and self-selected resources.

1.9

As a class, develop a student driven essential question.

2.10

Explain that there are different types of resources that can be used for different purposes: books, databases, periodicals, pre-selected class websites, reference materials such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, thesauruses, almanacs, etc.

2.13 Web, map, or diagram a main topic with subtopics.

 

Digital Images and Digital Citzenship

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Cameron's Snowman (1)

Fourth grade student, Cameron DiDonato, from Ms. Davis’ class, gave me permission to use his original digital artwork in this blog post.   Thank you, Cameron!

In Media classes, students are learning how to use the Google Drawing app.   Google Drawing is a great hands-on tool to help students understand how to use images responsibly in their own digital work.

We began the unit by viewing and discussing the Common Sense Media video, Copyright and Fair Use, together in class.

In the past, Google Image search has made it so easy to take images found on the pages of the internet and use them in one’s own digital work.

It can be a difficult concept for all of us, students as well as adults, to know how to use these images with respect to copyright and Fair Use, or even to understand that we have a responsibility to do so!

It is most helpful to educators now that Google has begun to provide the web page addresses  of all the images found in its Google Drawing Image search function via embedded links.  This feature makes it so much easier for students to locate the creator of the image and how he/she has given permissions for re-use, e.g. Creative Commons license.

Students in Grade 5 have been demonstrating their understanding of the concept of giving credit to the creator of the images they use in their own “Fish in a Tree” Google Drawings.  (Fish in a Tree, by Linda Mullaly Hunt, is a book that many classes here at Spofford Pond School, as well as classrooms in Topsfield and Middleton, have read together as a part of the Global Read Aloud project.  To read more about this, click here.  Our Media projects are an extension to the this ELA project.)

Fish in a Tree

This is the example I created in Google Drawing.  I look forward to sharing some students’ Google “Fish in a Tree” Drawings in my next blog post!

Happy Holidays!

Ms. Boulay

MSLM Standard 4c. Ethical Behavior in Information Use

Survey Says! Creating meaningful data with Gr. 6 students

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Google for Education provides its users with many useful digital educational tools for students and teachers.

Students in Gr. 6 Media Classes are creating their own surveys using Google Forms, and then deciding how to successfully share the resulting Google Form surveys with others in order to gather relevant data.

In class, we have been examining and discussing the (3) sharing tools provided to us by Google Classroom.

The email sharing feature is not available to Spofford students at this time, nor is the sharing via Social Media outlets such as Twitter or Facebook.

This left us with the option of sharing the link to our surveys with fellow students in our classes.   Although this approach worked for some student surveys responses, some student surveys did not receive sufficient responses (data) to make their surveys meaningful enough for data analysis.

Together, the students and I agreed to try the strategy of sharing all of their surveys only with me, via links, so that I can then aggregate all of their survey links in one Google Doc format, and then share the document with classmates to access and respond to all surveys.

The survey screen shot above was shared with me via a Google Forms Link by Sarah Green.

I am looking forward to reporting out student survey results.

We will all learn more about student preferences for favorite author, genre, sport, pizza toppings, pet dog and more as reported via online survey.

Up next:   Critical thinking skill . . .  how reliable are surveys?   What factors, if any, could influence survey responses?

Yours, in learning together,

Ms. Boulay

Massachusetts Technology Literacy Standard 3.5  Research: Gathering and Using Information.  Use online tools to gather and share information collaboratively with other students.

Massachusetts Technology Literacy Standard 3.6  Problem Solving:  With teacher direction, use appropriate technology tools (e.g., graphic organizer) to define problems and propose hypotheses.