Time off and CODE

Apparently I decided to take the holidays off because I realize I posted NOTHING since November. Busy perhaps? End of the semester is always crazy but I was so very happy not to be planning musical programs as I had been for the last....(too many) years. December was a blur. A tornado hit close to home. Took out an elementary school of a friend music teacher. So very sad to see. And of course the devastating loss of life that this storm caused.

Well December was peaceful in my classroom. We finished our Digital Citizenship focus for the year and embarked on the Hour of Code. Only I elected to do more than an hour. My 6-7-8 grade students worked on the accelerated code course and my 3-4-5 students are completing course one on the code.org site. They are loving it and have made my days very easy! There are many sites out there that offer your students a taste of coding but code.org certainly has made it particularly easy for teachers to manage classes. I thank them for giving teachers the tools to introduce their students to coding in a very simple manner. The only drawback came in December when they decided to shut down the "save and progress" area. It was frustrating for the students to not see their progress saved and also frustrating for me as a teacher to not have that documentation of what they had completed. The postings that I read from other teachers were comparably frustrated.

Well I explained to my students that anything web based will have it's issues and this is just one and we move on. That has to be one of my main goals in working with people/students with technology in that there will be frustrations, there will be glitches, there will be problems, but we try to fix, amend, or do what we can and move on. Sometimes there is nothing you can do but getting annoyed and irritated with the internet or program doesn't matter. There are bigger things in life to use that energy on.

Digital Citizenship

One of the goals this year in our diocese is for our schools to become a "Certified Digital Citizenship School" through Common Sense Media. I started the program two weeks ago with my students. I ended up purchasing the Nearpod curriculum for grades 3-5 and 6-8. For the most part I am pleased with the Nearpod lessons. Some are a little less engaging than others but I appreciate not having to create the lessons. It has saved a tremendous amount of time. The cost was more than I had hoped for but again, a HUGE time saver. They are currently $49.99 for a bundle of 15 lessons and end of unit assessments. A chunk of change but I doubt that I would have had the time to do all the work that went into creating these lessons.
To change up the classes I am also using Digital Passport (free) for grades 3 and 4. This has some fun and engaging activities that cover five topics:

• Communication
• Privacy
• Cyber bullying
• Searching
• Creative Credit

I did not have time to do a full lesson with some 8th graders so they explored Digital Compass (free). This takes students through scenarios and based on their choices the game story can go different directions. It also covers a variety of Digital Citizenship topics. My students were engaged and thought the characters were silly but fun.

All of these items, the Nearpod lessons, Digital Passport and Digital Compass, are available through Common Sense Media. I think we have met our requirements for our certification. I'll need to go through my check list, fill out the forms and do some finally things before we can submit our application. Even though we may be done with the minimum requirements, I plan on using more of the curriculum because of the importance of the information.

The digital world is a great place but our students need the tools to navigate it safely.

MATCH 2015

Music and Technology Conference Houston 2015

Wow- what a great tech day long conference! This past weekend I attended this very first Music and Technology mini conference. The organizers did a fabulous job arranging this mini conference for the area music teachers. I had the honor of presenting two sessions; Music Centers with Limited Technology and Take Me to the Computer Lab! The two sessions were kind of related to one another since I felt the tools, etc., could be used alone by one person or with a group. I used Tackk to house my agenda and links for both sessions. Below are links to each presentation.

Music Centers with Limited Technology

Take Me to the Computer Lab!

Highlights of the day were the two keynote speakers: Amy Burns and Cherie Herring. Always a pleasure listening to what these two have to say.

Collaboration

One of the things I have been getting my middle school students to do is collaboration on documents for their work. And it has worked out surprisingly well! Some of the tools we ave used for collaboration are: Google Docs, Google slides, Padlet, and just collaborating inside of Edmodo.
The Google products are very easy to use because of the larger work area. Although the doc was tricky since I limited them to keeping all the work on one page. Padlet is a nice area to share information. Depending on the layout of the posts (I used stream) this can have an effect on the organization. One of my favorite collaboration projects was to work in their small group in Edmodo doing research about the history of Big Tex. Their group had to divide the jobs up and only one person could input the information on the timeline. (We use the timeline from ReadWriteThink. Excellent resource.) The info that they found had to be posted in their small group for the Timeline person. They also had to find links to images to use. The project worked well and everyone's timelines turned out nicely. I believe that teaching students to work in collaborative groups is an important skill and helps them become an asset to their future employers.