DigiTechTeach

  • Berkeley Unified School District

Third Grade Teachers Diving into Google Apps for Education

May 8, 2017

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 Blackmond's Google Classroom

TORINA: Teacher Optimistic Room 13 Interested in learning Never going to give up At John Muir 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.

Acrostic Poems

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.

Animal Reports

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

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Jessica Lee

Jessica Lee is the Coordinator for Library Services for BUSD and DigiTech lead. Prior to this year, she was a teacher librarian on special assignment supporting elementary schools and the Teacher Librarian at Willard Middle School for 13 years.
Jennifer Nguyen

Jennifer Nguyen is the BUSD TK-8 Instructional Technology Teacher on Special Assignment. She has over 14 years of experience working in both public and private schools, as a classroom teacher and technology integration coach.
Eric Silverberg

Eric Silverberg is a BUSD Teacher Librarian on Special Assignment, supporting libraries and instructional technology and Digital Citizenship. He has over 20 years experience working in public schools, as a classroom teacher, a teacher librarian, an arts coordinator, a drama/music specialist and a digital media teacher.
Mia Gittlen

Mia Gittlen was the BUSD K-8 Instructional Technology Teacher on Special Assignment from 2017-2019. She has taught English and history/social studies for eleven years. She also actively participates in East Bay CUE and the Krause Center of Innovation--two organizations focused on inspiring innovative learning.
Allison Krasnow

Allison Krasnow was the BUSD K-8 Instructional Technology Coordinator and a Teacher on Special Assignment from 2013-2018. She has taught grades 4-8 and is now teaching math at Willard Middle School.

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