Torina Blackmond, a third grade teacher at John Muir Elementary, chose Google Classroom as the one new tech tool to focus on this year, and without a doubt, she’s fully embraced it. She’s posting her writing assignments in Classroom along with additional resources for students to refer back to in order to review key skills.

Torina approached me about helping students focus on formatting when they revise their work. I suggested leading an activity created by Anna Speiglman (fifth grade teacher at Malcolm X) to explicitly teach formatting tools and then have students practice by writing an acrostic poem using their name. Early that morning before my visit, Torina created a model, found a YouTube video as a resource, and posted an assignment in Classroom. Torina’s tinkering and deep dive into figuring out this technology impressed me. And now she’s adding comments and returning work to her students to revise — all electronically and paperless!

Students enjoyed playing with the font styles and text colors. As a result, their acrostic poems were filled with personality.

Around the same time across town at Thousand Oaks Elementary, Lorna Cross, another third grade teacher, invited me into her class to see students using Chromebooks for their animal reports. She posted the links students needed to conduct their research in Google Classroom. Students created Google Docs to type up each chapter and insert related images. They also included a table of contents, headings, and a glossary.

During my first visit when students were wrapping up their writing, Lorna asked if I could introduce her class to Google Slides. After a quick mini-lesson, her third graders leaped right in. When many students were asking how to put pieces of their animal reports into Slides, Lorna jumped onto the projector to show students step-by-step through her own trial and error until she got it right. It was cool to see how she models learning and exploring the technology in front of her third graders. Her students were eager to explore and make use of technology to showcase what they’ve learned about animals. Indeed, Lorna was able to use Google Apps as a way to establish an encouraging and active cooperative learning environment in her classroom.

– Mia Gittlen, K-8 Instructional Technology TSA

Expert Book Cover Pages
A Collaboration with Nick Williams (3rd Grade Teacher at Cragmont)

On their way out to recess one day mid-morning in early March, several students asked me if I’d be able to print out their expert book cover pages. That was exactly why I was heading into their classroom at Cragmont Elementary. Just days earlier students had created their cover pages in Google Docs and ever since then they couldn’t wait to get their hands on their creations. Nick Williams, their third grade teacher, had had emailed me, “My students are dying to have their printed covers.” It was adorable to see their genuine excitement firsthand as I entered the room simply to help print.

During my quick visit, Nick and I added the extension PDF Mergy in Google Drive so we could merge all the students’ Docs from Nick’s Google Drive Classroom folder into one PDF document and efficiently print all of their finished products in one fell swoop. Voilà. All of his students’ finished work printed out in seconds.

But the story doesn’t end there and actually began a few weeks earlier. Nick invited me to lead a series of technology lessons. We started with digital citizenship, introduced Google Classroom, and then Nick reached out to me with this project in mind–creating cover pages for their expert books. What a striking way to integrate technology into the TCRWP curriculum while explicitly teaching tech skills in a fun and engaging way.

In less than an hour long lesson, students accessed the assignment in Nick’s Google Classroom and created a blank Google Doc. Then students searched for an image related to their topic using Kiddle, a safe search engine for students. We showed students how to use both hands to drag and drop image from browser into Google Doc on their Chromebooks. Under our guidance along with the help of a parent volunteer in the room, students typed in their title and names and played with the formatting tools to resize and format their image and text.

Fast forward to the culmination of this project two days later. Students glowed with pride as they presented their books during a lovely publishing party attended by many of their parents and other invited guests.

It was an opportunity to celebrate their incredible books–each containing a detailed table of contents, multiple chapters, and additional creative touches including an about the author section and of course their cover page. In a short amount of time, this tech activity added a little pizzazz to a major writing project and introduced a few new tech skills.

– Mia Gittlen, K-8 Instructional Technology TSA

Earlier this week, at Malcolm X, I had the pleasure of teaching Brittany Pudlowski’s 3rd graders to self-asses their typing skills. For the past several weeks her students have been using our district-software, Typing Club, to systematically learn typing. I visited her class to help them know what the typing goals are for the end of 3rd grade and give them a way to gauge their progress. You may be wondering, “What is pleasurable about taking a Typing Test?” My hope was to give them a goal to work for while instilling a growth mindset around their current skills. While typing speed is certainly not the main emphasis of of any grade-level’s technology integration, having strong typing skills allows students to more efficiently use and create work on computers with far less frustration.

With students gathered on the rug, I briefly discussed the importance of setting goals for yourself and pushing yourself to try new things. I explained that the end of year goal for 3rd graders in typing is 10 wpm with 90% accuracy and we briefly talked about what words per minute means. However, the true ‘lesson’ of my lesson was showcased after showing this video of Klay Thompson shooting free throws in the 2016 All Star 3-point Competition. A student explained how one scores 3-pointers in basketball for others who weren’t familiar with the game, and then I posed a question for them to consider as they watched: What does Klay do when he misses a shot? A few had predictions which I let them share, but mostly, they were eager to watch thevideo.

After we watched, I explained that he won that year, making him the best 3-point shooter in the world at that time. Students had a lot to say. Their comments were mostly similar, “When he missed he just kept going,” and “He only missed a few, but he never stopped.” However one boy’s comments really stuck with me, “When he missed, he didn’t think about how he had missed. If he had, he would have lost. He won because he never thought about losing.”

He brilliantly summed up exactly why I showed this video before having students take a typing test. Having a growth mindset of achieving words per minute isn’t a whole lot different from baskets per minute. Before sending them back to their seats to login, I reminded them that it’s only March, so they have until June to try to meet the 3rd grade goal. Thanks to Barb Wenger, 1st grade teacher at Jefferson, we have a custom-made typing test for 3rd-5th graders which includes a paragraph about Berkeley.

A hush fell across the room as students began the test, with the clip clip clip of fingers on keys ringing in the air.

As I walked around the room, students occasionally got frustrated at their errors showing up in red. To each, I whispered in their ears, “What would Klay do?” which helped refocus them. I encouraged each student to try the test again in a month, after they had more time to practice. Many had already reached the 3rd grade typing goals and others left confident that they’d get there in the coming months.

– Allison Krasnow, Instructional Technology Coordinator

If we want to do better things for students, we have to become the guinea pigs and immerse ourselves in new learning opportunities to understand how to create the necessary changes. We rarely create something different until we experience something different.”
― George Couros, The Innovator’s Mindset: Empower Learning, Unleash Talent, and Lead a Culture of Creativity

For the past four years I have been both a Teacher on Special Assignment (TSA) for Instructional Technology and now the Instructional Technology Coordinator. Much of my work involves collaborating with teachers and I feel incredibly fortunate that I have been welcomed into so many classrooms. The richness and depth of the quality of student work that teachers are creating constantly amazes me. Having taught for 14 years both in Oakland and Berkeley, I know how rarely we get the opportunity to share the creative work we are doing.

The purpose of this blog is for all BUSD staff, administrators, and families to get a glimpse into the varied ways teachers, librarians and library media techs are integrating technology into their classrooms in order to improve engagement and achievement and to ensure that every child in our schools has equitable access to these new tools. DigiTech, the instructional technology department is comprised of several TSAs (Teacher on Special Assignment) for Instructional Technology in addition to myself and Becca Todd, the District Library Coordinator. We are so lucky to be able to watch these lessons as they unfold and want to share out all the incredible work with instructional technology that we see.

Our one desire is this: PLEASE STEAL these ideas. Read them, reflect on them, let them marinate, contact the teacher if you’d like more information, and then take what you like and make it your own.

Additionally, integrating technology is hard work. There is plenty which can and sometimes does not function properly. As we are all working to help students adopt a growth mindset, using technology in the classroom constantly requires that we have a growth mindset. We’re learning on the fly in most cases and trying to teach with tools that never existed when we were in school. As we embark on this journey to showcase teachers doing fabulous things with technology, we want to stay constantly aware of how much perseverance is involved with putting these lessons together. This video is one of my favorites as a reminder of the role that failure has before ultimately succeeding.

We hope this blog becomes a place you regularly visit, whether you’re BUSD staff, administrator, parent or community member to learn more about how instructional technology is being integrated into our curriculum and reflect on its nuances to make it as powerful a tool as possible for student learning.

– Allison Krasnow, Instructional Technology Coordinator