Jeffrey Gordon is introducing computer science to both 4th grade classes at John Muir Elementary in thoughtful and creative ways. I visited his classroom earlier this week and was wowed as I realized his fourth graders are already confident coders.

Jeffrey shared that he initially teaches computer science without the use of computers.  He first teaches, “a progression of basic computer science concepts using hands-on materials (popsicle sticks, index cards, playing cards, etc).” The day I visited, students had brought in at least six different objects of varying sizes. School supplies, miniature cardboard boxes, pebbles, apples, and stuffed animals were spread across student desks around the room. Pairs of students then conducted “bubble sorts” which I learned is a method of sorting by comparing adjacent items and swapping them if they are in the wrong order. This is repeated until all objects are in order — in this case, from smallest to largest. You can watch students performing bubble sorts in this video put together by Jeffrey.

Students are learning binary math which is an extension of the study of place value. They will build on this by studying basic algorithms and game design — which has many connections to the A Story of Units curriculum.

After the bubble sort, Jeffrey launched the next challenge in his very own coding and math curriculum. After a mini-lesson on how fast an object moves when it is thrown in the air and falls, students accessed the instructions for how to create a multiple jumper that moves at various speeds and got to work block programming in Scratch.

Fourth graders at John Muir will study computer science throughout the year and will eventually design their own games. You can get a sneak peak by checking out this link to “Mr. Gordon’s Math Games.”

If you’re interested in exploring ways to incorporate coding into your classroom, check out the “Students Teaching Coding” blog post about Claire Dugan’s (4th grade teacher at Cragmont) class which mentions Code.org and the Hour of Code as well as Scratch. Jeffrey Gordon also recommends two books: Mindstorms by Dr. Seymour Papert and Theory of Fun by Ralph Koster.

All of our third through fifth grade students will soon have access to Tynker accounts so they can learn computer programming through self-paced, fun lessons. Information about Tynker will be shared with teachers soon and students can access their Tynker accounts through the blue Clever button on their school’s library web site or at clever.com/in/berkeley. As always, please reach out to Allison or myself with any questions or for help getting started.

– Mia Gittlen, K-8 Instructional Technology TSA

This past Monday, October 9, was a day filled with professional development for all BUSD staff.  Along with my DigiTech colleagues, I had the opportunity to lead a workshop on one of our district-wide equity strategies: Bringing Students’ Lives into the Classroom.  Our workshop focused on explicit ways technology can be used to ensure that both students’ lived experiences and student voice are a more prominent part of every classroom.

We started the workshop by grounding ourselves in research on the importance of bringing students’ lives into the classroom. We did a jigsaw where teachers read different articles from BUSD’s equity binder and used a virtual white board, Padlet, to share reactions & big ideas, comment on them, and connect our ideas to others’ in the room.  This photo gives you a taste of how our conversation began and how fun it can be to make connections between our own ideas and those of others.

After grounding ourselves in the research we looked at student work from BUSD students using several tools:

• Google Forms to do surveys allowing for students’ self reflection and opportunities to give feedback to their teacher.
• Screencastify and Flip Grid to collect videos and audio recordings of students to increase the ways student voice and perspective are used in class
• Google My Maps and Padlet to develop classroom community by giving students opportunities to share their personal experiences and viewpoints with their teacher and classmates.

Click here to see 8th Grade Longfellow Math Teacher Marlo Warburton’s Google Form for soliciting feedback from students on her teaching.

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Here is a sample from 5th Grade Emerson Teacher Jenny Weddle’s student self-assessment survey in Google Forms.  Having a student be self-reflective to the point that they recognize that their behavior fluctuates depending on how they feel when they come to school in the morning is really powerful.

 

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Flip Grid is a tool where students record up to 90 seconds of video and the class can view everyone’s videos on a single web page and comment.  Once complete, students can decorate the screen capture of their face with virtual stickers which is a fun treat.  In elementary school, practicing fluency is an important part of our literacy program  Alex Hohenhaus, 5th grade teacher at Malcolm X has students choose a beat from Flocabulary, a program which teaches academic concepts through raps and song, and play it in the background as they read their current “book group” book to practice their fluency.

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Screencastify is a tool which captures audio along with your computer screen.  It can be used to narrate a slide show, or simply narrate a single slide as this Emerson student does when describing her African-American hero for Black History Month last winter.

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Another tool we shared was Google My Maps where students put markers down on a world map and are able to embed an image and text to explain the significance of each marker.  This mapping tool can be integrated into many subject areas, but Guillermo Nuevo, 6th Grade Humanities teacher at King, used it as a classroom community building exercise for students to share places in the world that were important in their lives.

Teachers and IAs in the workshop then had the chance to choose a tool, learn how to use it, and begin creating a project using that tool.  The creativity of the ideas shared was fabulous.  Here are a few (of the many!) ideas that were developed during our workshop.

• Some music teachers plan to use Flip Grid, a video tool, to let their students record themselves practicing their assigned song and get feedback from peers and their teacher on it.  The beauty of this idea is that it’s so easy to re-record the video if the student listens to themselves and knows they can do better.
• A Spanish teacher wanted to use audio tools such as Screencastify and Flip Grid to have students get pen pals in a Spanish speaking country where they exchange audio messages to one another.
• A Math teacher plans to use Google My Maps for students to share what they learn about the lives of famous mathematicians of color.
• And, an English teacher plans to use Screencastify to have students record book reviews and then collect them all for a class set of book reviews that any student can access.

If you are interested in learning about any of the tools from this workshop, reach out to Allison Krasnow or Mia Gittlen to set up a time to collaborate.  Bringing students lives into the classroom more regularly is such a powerful practice and there are so many ways to do this effectively with technology.

Liz Little expressed interest in having her students create digital portfolios using New Google Sites while participating in professional development (PD) on instructional technology this past summer. Now that the school year has begun, her sixth grade math and science students at King Middle School are already writing reflections about their learning and posting them on their websites.

Introduced in November of 2016, New Google Sites is an easy way for students and teachers to create polished and professional looking websites. Google Docs, Slides, Forms, Sheets, Maps, Drawings, videos, and more can be embedded and visually displayed on New Google Sites with just a few clicks. Objects can be rearranged and resized. Since it’s a living document, New Google Sites are easy to access and continually update.

Liz launched this ongoing digital portfolio project with her students after their first visit to the Edible School Yard in mid-September. She had taken photographs during the visit, airdropped them to her computer, and then uploaded them into a folder in her Drive which she shared with her class.

Liz announced to her students that they were going to start building their portfolio website and posted the first assignment in Google Classroom. Students did not need an in-depth tutorial on how to use New Google Sites. Rather, as each student accessed their own Sites file, they quickly figured out how to maneuver around the platform. Excitement filled the room as students discovered how to customize the banner with their own images, to resize and crop photos around their text, and to write their reflections over images. Students explored, shared, and learned from one another. Within a class period, students personalized their websites, wrote reflections about their first visit to the Edible School Yard, and completed one full page of their portfolio. They used their creativity and they created.

Since that first day, students have already added new entries and pages to their portfolio website. As the year progresses, students will have more work to publish that documents their thinking and learning.

Other teachers have also been experimenting with New Google Sites. In addition to teachers who have created class websites (with resources for students and their families), Claire Dugan’s 4th grade students at Cragmont Elementary published reading blogs and their digital projects using New Google Sites last year. Lisa Caswell’s 1st graders at Malcolm X recorded themselves reading picture books and the 4th graders at Emerson in Holen Robie’s and Karen Carter’s classes recorded screencasts of their book club presentations last spring. Eric Silverberg and Mary Ann Scheuer, TSAs for Elementary Library Services and members of DigiTech, published this student work using New Google Sites to share it with the larger school community. Kevin Anderson’s sixth grade humanities students created newsmagazines in New Google Sites featuring news articles, features, and photos for the King Middle School community at the end of last year.

New Google Sites can be used for digital portfolios, collaborative projects, research projects, and more. If you’re inspired and want to learn more about New Google Sites, please reach out to these teachers, your tech teacher leader, and/or Allison Krasnow and me.

– Mia Gittlen, K-8 Instructional Technology TSA

If you teach in Berkeley at middle or high school, or have a child of that age, chances are you recognize one or more of the teachers pictured here.  This amazingly powerful group of math teachers were among the 27 6th-12th grade Berkeley teachers who attended this 2-day workshop in August led by Dan Meyer and Shelley Carranza from Desmos.

Desmos is free software which allows students to model mathematics and problem solve in some pretty incredible ways.  First, there’s a graphing calculator which can be used for coordinate graphing in 5th grade to linear equations in middle school and quadratics and beyond in high school.  Having the same tool that can be used in increasingly complex ways from 5th grade through high school means that teachers of any of these grade levels can come together and collaborate on powerful professional development.

Then, there’s modeling software, which allows teachers and students to both model and visualize the mathematical ideas being explored.  Curious to see what got these teachers so excited?  Watch this brief video and predict how many pennies will fit in the large mosaic circle shown at the end of the video:

A huge exchange of ideas followed with a lot work looking something like this

But what this work sounded like, was even more provocative.  Using the software at teacher.desmos.com, teachers discussed how they could create deeper opportunities for engagement, formative assessment, and error analysis when teaching rich problem solving tasks connected to their curriculum.  Desmos’ tools are based on several design principals including:

• Ask for informal before formal analysis
• Create an intellectual need for new mathematical skills
• Give students opportunities to be wrong in different, interesting ways
• Create objects that promote mathematical conversations between teachers and students
• Create cognitive conflict
• Create activities that are easy to start and difficult to finish

These design principals allow teachers and students to engage more deeply in the mathematics while learning the content found in the curriculum of any grade level.

This group of teachers is hopefully the beginning of more regular collaborations between middle and high school math teachers to look deeply at questions of pedagogy and how we can best support students.

 

 

For the past several years, I have been honored to present at the August PD (Professional Development) day for our substitute (“sub”) teachers. I absolutely love leading a session because I believe being a sub is among the hardest and least appreciated work within any school district.

This year I was asked to focus my session on ways teachers are using technology in the classroom and how subs can improve their classroom management when lesson plans call for students to be using their Chromebooks.  I co-led the session with Mia Gittlen, TSA for Instructional Technology (and co-author of these blog posts) and we used Pear Deck as the basis for our presentation.

If you aren’t familiar with Pear Deck, it’s an interactive software which allows participants to respond to questions posed during a presentation and their collective thinking is displayed.

After some fun warm up questions about their summers, we asked about their level of confidence with technology. Teachers dragged their red dot to represent their comfort level with technology.

Among both groups, when asked how often classroom teachers provide sub plans that include the use of technology, the vast majority said “sometimes” and very few said “never”.  I was surprised to see how frequently classroom teachers leave sub plans which include students using their Chromebooks.  This means that many classroom teachers have strong enough systems in place for students to use Chromebooks even when they are out.

Here are responses showing how technology is being used in lessons given on sub days, and I love to see “research” as a response:

However ultimately, the biggest crowd pleaser was teaching tools one can use for classroom management.  The substitute teachers loved learning about the button that allows them to see all open windows on a students’ Chromebook.  Students occasionally use a keystroke to make their screen appear sideways and use it as an excuse for not being able to do work or to have to share a Chromebook with a friend. Knowing how to undo this felt really powerful for the subs, especially those who were initially fearful of using technology when subbing.  I enjoyed the feeling in the room; many who were VERY new to technology giggled with one another as they tried out new tools and tricks.

And having a district subscription to Pear Deck, available also to our long term substitute teachers, was super exciting for those who were already comfortable using technology with kids.  Pear Deck was completely new to them all and they definitely learned how they could use it in the lessons and are asking for more. Such a successful session!

 

Stefanie Wissmann’s fourth grade students at Cragmont Elementary are now Screencastify pros. I first learned of their experience screencasting when Stefanie shared an example of their fiction reading podcasts with the Cragmont conference email list back in January. Soon thereafter I watched them record their nonfiction research podcasts. Recently the class circled back to screencasting after reading historical fiction novels in book clubs and I returned to see it in action.

This time around, their task was to summarize the book, identify major themes, and provide evidence to support them. Stefanie instructed them to make their latest podcasts conversational. Students were focused on asking each other questions and reflecting on the book.

Book clubs met and prepared a brief script. Some groups sketched out an outline for their podcast including questions to ask one another. Others wrote out more prepared remarks. Students asked each other about the historical setting, the plot, major characters, favorite moments, and so on.

Each group quickly assembled one Google Slide which included the cover and the title of the book to serve as a backdrop for their recording.

Then each book club recorded their presentation twice. They listened to their first attempt, discussed what went well and what they aimed to improve, and then tried a second time. Many of the groups made use of an external microphone for an even higher audio quality (although the built-in Chromebook mics work pretty well).

Two days later, Stefanie shared all of the historical fiction podcasts in a Hyperdoc through Google Classroom and provided students with a note-taking sheet to jot down their reactions. Stephanie carefully modeled each step and allocated 20 minutes for students to listen to podcasts while taking notes. I wandered around the room in awe as I observed students skillfully toggle between the podcasts and their online notetaking sheet. Some students chose to listen and reflect simultaneously. Others paused the podcasts to focus on typing out their thoughts.

Afterward, students shared out their notes about their favorite podcast with their elbow partner. Stefanie challenged them to make note of common themes across the podcasts during that discussion.

This lesson wrapped up with the class generating a list of the common themes they had identified. Sadness. Discrimination. Racism. Troubles/problems like separation. Family/connection. Bravery. Stefanie asked which books had each of the themes. Students figured out these themes were woven into all of the historical fiction novels they read. Then a student pointed out these themes are also present in their current read aloud book, Number the Stars by Lois Lowry. After that, another student noted these themes are present in the graphic novel Smile by Raina Telgemeier and other novels as well.

The class left with a new and profound understanding of universal themes. Stefanie ended the lesson with the sage advice to keep looking for these themes as they continue reading fiction. On my way out the door, Stefanie and I marveled at the rich discussion they had. Stefanie’s creative infusion of technology and carefully crafted lesson provided students with the time and means to gain new insights about literature.

– Mia Gittlen, K-8 Instructional Technology TSA

Look carefully at this photo. While there are many features which may grab your attention, what was most striking to me was that there are two students leading the lesson. Over the past year, I have had the chance to see several groups of 4th and 5th grade students learning coding.  Some have used the Code Studio suite of lessons on Code.org, others have done the Hour of Code games (where, when I last checked, Draymond Green spoke out in support of kids learning to code), and some have learned block programming using Scratch.

Currently, there are just a few elementary classrooms where students are learning to code, but most often I have seen it as something for students to do when they finish their work early.  I love this idea! However, I was especially impressed when I observed Claire Dugan, 4th grade teacher at Cragmont, who not only has committed time to ensure that all students learn to code, but she has supported students to master the material in order to teach it to their classmates.

District-wide, 4th graders recently studied the California Gold Rush.  After a field trip to Sutter’s Fort in Sacramento, Claire’s students gathered and summarized information to write reports on pioneer John Sutter. Claire then had her students share their information through an animated slide show which they created by programming in Scratch. Below is a sample of one of their projects (at the time of my visits, their projects were incomplete, so this is just a snippet):

By teaching students programming, students had far more creative tools to use when designing their projects and it was exciting to watch all students learning these tools. What most impressed me was how she organized the class to have students taking the lead on teaching these tools. Claire was circulating to ensure that every student received the support they needed, however students took turns teaching a new aspect of the computer programming while a second student circulated and helped. Students were riveted by their guest teachers and the class was silent as they explained each new concept.

Most teachers have never learned programming. And yet, many believe that it’s an important skill to teach their students. I love how Claire took on the challenge of learning a programming language, but also opened her classroom up to allowing students to be the teachers as well. By integrating the teaching of programming with her language arts and social studies curriculum, she was able to carve out time for this exciting project.
-Allison Krasnow: Instructional Technology Coordinator

 

Some of the most powerful professional development that has happened in instructional technology over the past few years has been the three times this year that all 4th and 5th grade teachers came together to share ideas and learn from one another. At the most recent session, we organized a gallery walk where teachers chose one piece of student work that showcased a way students were using technology that had been integrated into the core curriculum this year.

Regina Chagolla, 5th grade teacher at Berkeley Arts Magnet, chose to share how she’s using editing features such as underlining and text color in Google Docs to have her students identify important components of their writing.

She first used this technique when students were writing opinion pieces.  After students had written a first draft, she asked them to underline their claim and color code each of their reasons.  The piece of work below is a first draft from an English Language Learner who arrived in the US (and Regina’s class) just a few months ago.

After learning about Regina’s use of editing tools in Google Docs for students to reflect on writing techniques, I wanted to learn more from her.  Recently, I had the opportunity to visit her classroom while she used this method as part of a formative assessment.  Independently, students read a poem, which she had shared via Google Classroom, and their task was to analyze the language used.  This corresponds with the ELA Standard on Craft and Structure:  CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative language such as metaphors and similes.

None of the work below is perfect.  Since it was from a formative assessment, Regina was able to see what misconceptions students still had and reflect both on her teaching and what next steps she’d take during her poetry unit.
Regina explains each of these work samples:

 

Although she didn’t find all of the repeated phrases and repeated words, she wrote her own poem at the end and highlighted all three poetry power tips. She did recognize similes versus when the poet simply used the word ‘like.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This student also showed each technique in her original poem:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This student also mixed up the repeated phrases with repeated words assuming every use of the word “like” is a simile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I love how Regina allowed students to use Google Docs for analyzing their writing and not simply as a tool for typing up their writing.  This assignment was such a genuine blend of writing analysis and technology.

-Allison Krasnow, Instructional Technology Coordinator