August 31, 2015 by plemmonsa

Fostering Digital Leadership: A Next Step

I recently rolled out our 1 to 1 devices to grades 3-5. During this orientation, I talked with students about digital leadership. Since then, our oldest grades have started taking their computers home, but our 3rd graders are still waiting. It’s their first year with their own computer and we are trying to do a better job of helping them understand what kinds of things they can do with their computer when they take it home.

Ready for some more #digitalliteracy with 3rd grade today. #tlchat #edtech pic.twitter.com/BZqjWKrrfS

— Andy Plemmons (@plemmonsa) August 24, 2015

The third grade teachers chatted with me about digital leadership and digital citizenship and we thought about what would be the most important thing to explore next. We looked at Common Sense Media and their scope and sequence. We also talked about ideas that I planted during the orientation.

Based on our discussions, I decided to focus on our digital snapshots. What are we currently doing with technology? What do we want to strive to do with technology? What is ok to share? What do we keep private?

I created a short set of slides to guide our conversation, and I’m fascinated by some of the things that came up. I started with a small piece of my own digital snapshot.

It contained my blog as well as a screenshot of my home screen on my iPhone. I asked students to look at this one piece of my digital life and see what they could learn about how I use technology. They had conversations with partners and I eavesdropped. I heard things like:

He misses a lot of calls and doesn’t answer his text messages
He likes to share things
He takes a lot of pictures
He likes to travel
He is very organized with his apps
He uses his phone to look up books in the library
He has 2 kids

The list continued to grow with each class, and each class inferred something more than the last class. I was actually amazed about how much they could learn from me just by focusing on my phone. In fact, that’s all they focused on. Not a single student talked about the picture of my blog. There focus was completely on the apps on my phone, which was also interesting to me.

I used their noticings to connect to some of the decisions I make as a user of technology. I talked about how I know when I share a picture or a blog post that it is going to be seen around the world. I once again shared our blog map to remind students where people are looking at our work.

Next, I had students talk with partners about what their digital snapshots look like. How are they using technology in their everyday lives? We started adding some of these ideas to a doc. We didn’t capture everything, but I at least wanted a list we could refer to.

All of this was leading up to us spending more time talking about using our devices in school and at home for educational purposes. I loved having this list because most students thought it was bad for them to go onto Youtube. Many were surprised when I talked about all of the great things Youtube is for. In most classes, we spent a bit of time brainstorming why we might use Youtube. This list also gave me some insight into what students are doing at home that I haven’t even heard of.

After students reflected on their own digital snapshot, I showed students what other students have already done at our school with technology. I couldn’t show everything, but I gave them a quick look at pictures to show some of the awesome ways we’ve used technology to connect, collaborate, create, and share.

Finally, I asked students to spend time brainstorming how they might use their 1:1 technology. This was only a starting place. Many students focused on videos, games, or websites they might visit, so we have some work to do in regards to thinking about our devices as creation tools and tools that connect us to opportunities. Students added their ideas for how to use technology at home and keep it connected with learning and appropriate use for an elementary student to a padlet.

3rd grade using @padlet to brainstorm ways to use computers at home. #tlchat #edtech pic.twitter.com/IdCFFSdsMO

— Andy Plemmons (@plemmonsa) August 26, 2015

Some students were also able to move on to a wonderful coloring page from the augmented reality app, Chromville. This coloring page features Zoe and a computer screen.

Students can draw or write about a digital citizenship message on the screen.

Using the Chromville app, Zoe comes to life on the screen displaying the students’ digital citizenship message and you can even click the mouse to display additional messages about staying safe online. I want to make sure all of the students get to try this out, but only a few made it this far during our hour together.

We will continue to revisit these topics in classrooms and during library projects and lessons throughout the year. If you have an innovative way to have these conversations with your students, I would love to hear them.

April 29, 2014 by plemmonsa

Kindergarten Narrative Writing Using Chromville Augmented Reality (and a little Skype too)

Kindergarten is revisiting narrative writing at the close of the year. This year, they have also worked very hard on the standard

ELACCKW6 Production and distribution of writing: With guidance and support from adults, explore a variety of digital tools to produce and publish writing, including in collaboration with peers.

With this standard as our guide, we have explored tools such as Storybird, Padlet, and Flipgrid to publish our writing. We’ve also used digital tools such as Pebble Go and the Capstone Interactive Library to gather information for our writing.

The Kindergarten teachers wanted to try one more digital tool, so I met with them to brainstorm. We tossed around a lot of ideas, but we ended up deciding to try a brand new tool called Chromville. Chromville is an augmented reality app that was just released this year. It offers 6 different coloring pages. Five of the coloring pages have a setting and a character and the sixth coloring page is a “create your own” character with no setting. First you color your page. Then, you use the Chromville app to select the matching setting and scan the page. Once the screen turns green and you wait 3 seconds, the character and setting come to life on the iPad and the character begins to move around and interact with the setting.

From my own experience with Kindergarten students, I’ve seen how visual they are, and I thought that seeing their character and setting in an interactive way might give them enough ideas to begin imagining their own stories. The teachers and I mapped out what we would do in the library and in class. It looked something like this:

In class, choose a setting and color it.
In the library, use the iPads and the Chromville app to see the setting come to life and brainstorm what to write about.
In class, begin the writing process by describing the character and setting as well as thinking about 3 events and a reaction that might happen in the story.
In the library, use the iPads to look at the Chromville character and setting again for more brainstorming and continue the writing process, including revision and publishing.
In class and in the library, share the final stories.
In the library, do a gallery walk of the all the stories by scanning the Chromville setting and reading the accompanying story

Four of the Kindergarten classes went through this process and it was very exciting to watch. I saw some of the longest stories by Kindergarten students that I have ever seen. Chromville was an exciting and motivating tool for them to use and they were full of energy when using it.

We did learn a lot about what to do differently next time. For example, we will probably opt to use crayons or color pencils next time rather than markers. We will also avoid black as a color since the lines of the coloring page are black. These black lines are the instructions for the iPad to read in order to generated the augmented reality scene. Students also need to be careful not to cross over too many of the lines or color so dark that the black lines can no longer be seen.

Along the way, we shared our success (and our failures) with Chromville, and they were eager to learn with us. We sent them images of pictures that didn’t scan for us and they started taking a look at them to better improve the app.

Today, Mrs. Boyle’s class Skyped with them all the way in Spain. It was so much fun to Skype with someone in another country, but it was even cooler to see the improvements that they are working hard to create for the next update of Chromville. We even got to see some upcoming Chromville projects as well as other augmented reality projects that the team is working on. We loved seeing how even a t-shirt could be a part of an augmented reality project. During the Skype, we also heard them talk about the improvements that they are making to the app. This was such a great connection to the writing revision that students had just gone through. It also validated all of the feedback that students have given about the app over the past few weeks. They heard from the developers that their feedback was making a difference.

We selected one student from each of the Chromville settings to share their stories with the Chromville team. Each student showed his/her coloring page first and then read the story.

Chromville currently has a narrative writing contest going on using the Greenland setting but Kindergarten is not eligible to enter. This was a way to still honor their work and let the good people at Chromville hear how fantastic a Kindergarten story can be too.

This is definitely a project we will try again. I’m thankful for Kindergarten teachers who took a risk with me to try something totally new. As usual, things didn’t work perfectly along the way, but that’s usually where some of the best learning happens. Even though there were some tears, it was a great lesson that things aren’t always perfect and we have to push through failure and learn from it in order to be innovative.