EEND Artifact 2- Flipped Learning

The second artifact that I chose was the screencast that I created for our flipped learning discussion. I created the video using the Google extension Screencastify. I have used this extension before and have found it very easy to use. I wanted to create a video that could be used as a resource for my students. In my classroom, my students use a hundreds chart on a daily basis. Therefore, I created a video as a reminder of how to find a number on the chart. They then could play the video whenever they need it, even if they are working on an assignment at home. I chose this artifact because it shows how technology can help meet student needs even outside of the classroom. I plan to make similar videos like this in the future so that my students parents can be aware of what and how their child is learning and so that students can independently review topics when needed. One limitation is that students are not able to ask questions in real time. They would be able to email me a question but I may not to be able to answer in time for them to complete the assignment. Therefore, I need to give my students multiple videos and supports to ensure that they are successful when completing assignments both inside and outside of the classroom.

References Origo (2017). Retrieved from https://www.origoslate.com. Screencastify (2017). Retrieved from https://www.screencastify.com/.

EEND 678 Artifact 1- PBL Unit

Click here to view my Project Based Learning Outline!

My first artifact for this course is my PBL unit based on how to create an environment where chicks can survive. Before this course, I have never used project based learning in my classroom and I did not know how to make it work. I than began to think about real problems that arise in my classroom. One of the first things that came to mind was how to take care of our class chicks. In the spring, my students will be responsible for caring for eggs and then baby chicks. Instead of me telling them how to care for the chicks, I decided that I could create a project based learning unit where the students learned and discovered what the chicks will need to survive. This is a unit that I would be able to use every year and I also will be able to share it with my teammates. One obstacle with this unit is that I need to make sure that my students find a way to meet all of the chicks’ needs as they are living creatures. Therefore, I decided that my students could be given a checklist before they present their final project and make sure that it meets all of the criteria. This project allowed me to teach a fun science unit in a way where my students are actively engaged in their learning.

EEND 678 Course Reflection

Throughout this course, I have learned many tips and ideas that I can apply in my classroom. The biggest thing that I took away was how to design a PBL unit. I have never used a PBL unit in my classroom before and to be honest I was unsure of how it would work in the primary grades. However, as I read more articles and did more research, I realized how engaging and beneficial it actually was. I became excited to find a way to try it out in my own classroom and enjoyed filling out the outline and coming up with multiple ideas that would work for my second graders. I am excited to try these units throughout the course of the school year.

Another takeaway was the idea of creating a class agreement for technology devices. I always work with my students to create a class promise at the beginning of the school year and I always take the time to go over expected behaviors when using technology devices but I have never made a specific technology agreement. I plan on making one with my students in the upcoming weeks and keeping displayed in our classroom next to our original classroom promise. I could then easily refer back to it if I ever see an unwanted behavior while students are using tech devices.

My last takeaway is that I want to spend more time looking into grants that I could use to better my classroom. While researching grants, I realized how many different types that they were and how frequently new grants were available. I always feel as if I am noticing something that my students need to grow as learners and applying for more grants may help me solve that problem.

EEND 678 Introduction

Hello! My name is Katie Trafton. I am a second grade teacher at Troy Heritage Trail in Joliet. I have been teaching at Troy for six years. In my classroom I have ten devices for my eighteen students. We have seven Chromebooks and three iPads. Each grade level in my district is assigned a different amount of devices. The number of devices increases in the higher grade levels. Each school in my district also has an iLab which contains Chromeboxes, Chromebooks, iPads, and a green screen. Each teacher is assigned an hour in the iLab each week and have the opportunity to sign up for additional time. We are a Google school and I have found one tool that I use daily is Google Classroom. By using Google Classroom, I can create assignments and easily send a copy to each student. I can then view the assignment as they work and leave comments and give them assistance. Another feature of Google Classroom that I like is that it organizes all of the assignments in folders in my Google Drive. Therefore, I can easily look over the assignments and access them whenever I need to. I also like that I can create multiple classes. Therefore, I have made a “class” for each of my reading groups. This allows me to stay organized and easily send different assignments to different students. I am very excited to learn more ways to integrate technology throughout this course. I am very comfortable using technology but I want to work on using it in all parts of my day in meaningful ways.

EEND679 Artifact 2- Tech-based Assessment

Click here to take the Socrative assessment.

The next artifact that I chose was my tech-based assessment using Socrative. I have heard of Socrative before but have never used it. I decided to take a math quiz that I give to my students during our first unit on place value and modify it so I could be given using Socrative. I was able to take the images and place them in the questions very easily. I also loved the fact that I could provide an explanation of why each answer was correct. Even though this feature was optional, I felt that it would really help my students learn the content so they could understand why their mistakes were incorrect.

I felt that I learned the most from finding an assistive technology tool that would help my students. I quickly discover the application Speakit! and I was amazed by how easy it was to use. It is a free Google Extension where students are able to highlight any text that is on their screen and then click the icon and have the text read aloud to them. This extension would help so many students and it would prevent their reading ability from affecting them showing their understanding of the content. The only difficulty that students may encounter is being able to highlight the text. Therefore this skill would have to be taught and practiced before students could use the extension.

I plan on using both Socrative and Speakit! in my classroom this year and I feel that other teachers from my school would enjoy using these tools as well so I am excited to share this with them!

References
Socrative (2017). Retrieved from https://www.socrative.com/
Origo Slate (2017). Retrieved from https://www2.origoslate.com/ 

EEND679 Artifact 1- PARCC Blog Post

Click here to view the Google Doc.

One of the artifacts that I chose to reflect on was my blog post about computer skills for PARCC. This assignment stood out to me because I teach second grade and my students do not have to take PARCC however, they are required to take it the following year in third grade so I feel that it is my job to help prepare them for the test. I began to research to find out technology issues students encounter while testing so that I could know how to best prepare my students and what I needed to share out to other primary teachers. While I found the practice tests to be extremely beneficial to students in third grade and higher, I realized there were many things I could do in my classroom. My students will be better prepared for PARCC if I can give them frequent computer based assignments where they are expected to drag and drop, highlight text, and select multiple answers.

I created this post on a Google Doc and found images using Creative Commons. By using Creative Commons images, I knew I wasn’t infringing on any copyright laws but it was time consuming. I found that this process took longer to search through the images than using Google Images but I would suggest that other teachers use Creative Commons as well in order to set a good example for our students. Therefore, this year when I have my students create Google Docs, I plan on teaching them how to insert images by finding them through the Creative Commons.

References

(2016, Nov 20). Writing_boy_e-citizen [digital image]. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AAz-Writing_boy_e-citizen.jpg
(2017, Oct 07). Keyboard Typing [digital image]. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AKeyboard_typing.png
Murray, J. (2016, May 06). How to Prepare Students for PARCC/SBACC Tests. Retrieved July 05, 2017, from http://askatechteacher.com/2015/09/03/how-to-prepare-students-for-sbac-parcc-tests/
PARCC. (2017). Retrieved July 05, 2017, from https://parcc.pearson.com/
PARCC Tips: Five Ways To Supercharge Student Performance. (2017). Retrieved July 05, 2017, from http://teachargument.com/parcctips/

My Course Reflection of Multimedia Tools in Education

Throughout this course, I feel that I was able to learn lots of practical tools and tips to help me grow as an educator. One of my biggest takeaways was to be more conscious of how I present material to both students and parents. I want to make sure that I continue to regularly communicate but I feel as if I need to make some improvements with how I do so. For example, I want to work sending home notes in lists and bullet points and instead of overwhelming families with multiple paragraphs of information. I also want to make my communication more interesting. Instead of just using text in my newsletter, I want to work including graphics and photographs to grab the reader’s attention. This is also true when creating graphic organizers for my students. I learned how it is important to pay attention to choices and to include all important information at the top of the page. This point was brought to my attention in the article about the F-Pattern Reading by Lesley Hanes.

One tool that I really liked using during this course was Adobe Spark. This tool allows users to create videos and trailers. It was very user friendly and I could easily see my students using it. I chose to this tool for both my book trailer and for my parent communication tool. It made my videos very fun and engaging and I am excited to continue using it within my classroom. Another tool that I am very excited about is Screencastify. I have seen screencasts being used in other classrooms but I was unaware of how simple that they were to create. Now that I have found this tool, I plan on creating screencasts to help enrich my lessons whenever possible. The best part of using screencasts is that my students will be able to refer back to them whenever they need to.

I have always been comfortable with using technology in my classroom but I feel that this course has shown me many new ways to incorporate technology that I may not have thought of on my own. I am excited to take what I have learned and apply to my classroom when I return in the fall.

Artifact 2- Visualizing Graphic

The next artifact I chose to reflect on was my graphic design project. For this project, I created a graphic using Google Drawings. I have used Google Drawings before to have my students submit assignments through Google Classroom, but I have not created a graphic myself. I chose to create a graphic to remind my students that readers should visualize while they read. This graphic is something that I can hang up in my classroom and my students can consistently refer back to it. I plan on using lots of graphics in the future because I teach primary grades. The visuals will help reinforce topics to my students and will be able to quickly capture their attention. I plan on creating more graphics to illustrate how readers use other strategies. For example, I can use the same layout and illustrate a reader asking questions, and stopping to check for understanding. I could then refer back to them during small group instruction to reinforce these behaviors among my students. One of the difficulties with creating this graphic was that it did take a considerable amount of time. I did not use any images that already existed and therefore had to figure out how to create pictures using standard shapes. This helped me follow all copyright guidelines but was at times challenging. I think this would be especially hard for my students. Therefore, it would be important for me to model creating a graphic design multiple times so that they can see that mistakes will be made and that they may have to try multiple things before they are happy with their finished product.

References
Google Drawing (2017). Retrieved from docs.google.com/drawings

Artifact 1- Book Trailer

The first artifact I chose to show my learning from my EEND 677 course was a book trailer for Julius Baby of the World by Kevin Henkes. I chose to create a trailer for this book because it is a book that I want my students to be excited about reading. The story has clear plot elements and shows how a character changes so I have refer to this story when teaching my fiction unit. I created this book trailer using Adobe Spark. I found that Adobe Spark was very user friendly. It had tutorials and templates to create videos with. One challenge with creating the trailer was making sure that I changed the image in the video frequent enough to keep my students engaged while watching it. I wanted to be sure that the trailer excited them and could hold their attention. I would love to have my students create book trailers to replace traditional book reports. I think they would love creating them and it would show me how well they comprehended the book that they read. The only challenge would be that the students would need to record themselves talking so they would have to take turns to ensure that the rest of the room was quiet so that the listeners could clearly understand what was being said in the book trailer. My students could also create trailers to share their nonfiction research. After researching a topic, I could have them find images and record themselves sharing facts about their topic. This would be an engaging way for them to share with their classmates.

References
Adobe Spark (2017). Retrieved from https://spark.adobe.com/
Henkes, K. (2007). Julius, the Baby of the World. New York: Greenwillow Books.

Graphic Design

Using graphic designs in the classroom can be very beneficial. Students are overwhelmed by seeing many texts each day and therefore may not know what information they should focus on. A graphic design would jump out from the rest of the text and catch their eye. In the article, Why Teachers Should Care About Typography by Mercer Hall and Patricia Russac, the authors state that certain learning styles may cause students to have trouble reading to texts that are very word heavy. Theu go on to say that this may be true for students with IEPs. I have students in my classroom who have IEPs and I believe that this is true for them. Therefore, when giving a reading assignment teachers, like myself, can use a graphic design to help reinforce the main points.

Graphic designs could also be created by students. Students could be more creative while using a graphic design than they could when writing a traditional report or slide show.  If a student created a graphic design using Google Drawing they would be able to easily share it with their teacher, parents, and classmates. Google Drawings could also allow multiple students to collaborate on the same graphic in order to complete a group project. In the article, 8 Examples of Incorporating Infographics in Middle School Classrooms by Jonna Mae Magno, she suggests that not only could graphics replace reports but they could also be used as games, visual aids, or presentation tools. Therefore, graphic design could be used in any classroom!

At the start of the school year, I always teach a unit on character traits. I feel that I could easily incorporate graphic design into this unit. I could create a graphic for the characters that are in my read alouds. After I have modeled this a couple of times, I could have my students create a graphic about a character in a book that they read. As the unit progressed they could add text to their graphics to describe the character’s traits.  

Introduction

My name is Katie Trafton and I am from Joliet, Illinois. I received my Bachelor’s in Elementary Education from Illinois State University and I now teach second grade in the Troy 30C School District. This is my fifth year teaching second grade at Troy. I am very comfortable with using technology in my classroom. In my classroom, I have seven Chromebooks and three iPads. I also have access to our school’s iLab which contains a class set of Chromebooks, Chromeboxes, iPads, and a green screen. I am able to sign up to take my class to the iLab during any openings throughout the day but I also have an hour built into my weekly schedule. At this time, students are able to complete literacy centers using technology. One of my favorite ways to use technology in my classroom is through Google Classroom. I love that I am able to assign items and check in with my students as they work. I also love that they have plenty of student choice while using Google Apps for Education. Another application that I use frequently is Seesaw. Seesaw is a digital student portfolio. Students can take picture of their work and annotate and add audio recordings. Their parents, peers, and teachers are then able to view it and leave comments. It’s a great tool to help my students reflect on their work and collaborate with one another. Through this course, I  hope that I am able to find new ways to integrate technology into my lessons. Technology can very engaging but can sometimes be overwhelming for students to use in a primary classroom. Therefore, I am excited to learn new ideas from this course to try in my own classroom.