Our lower school technology integrator uses Microworlds (an oldie, but still good) with the 3rd grade.

At the beginning of the year she had them create paper turtles out of index cards. On the back of the turtles the students drew a compass to help them with their positioning. There is also a cheat sheet with some of the instructions you type in to get the turtle to move. Like ‘pe’ = pen erase.

The front of the card has a turtle illustration and movement directions to help the student remember forward ‘fd’,  backward ‘bk’, left and right.

She saves the turtles in an envelope on her desk and takes them out when it looks like the students could use them.

Nice trick!

After skimming the NYCIST forums this morning I saw a blog post by Karen Blumberg, Technology Integrator at The School at Columbia University, discussing the responsible use policy (RUP) that 6th-8th grade students must sign and return at the beginning of the year before they start using school laptops.

“I always reinforce that everything they put online is public, permanent, and traceable. Plus, I remind not to imagine they have privacy online. Rather than public versus private, I say public versus less-public.
I also implore the middle schoolers to locate at least one person, preferably a grown-up and possibly me, who they can approach if they feel unsafe or uncomfortable as a result of someone else’s behavior (be it physical or virtual).”

Read the full post here.

What would you include if you were creating your own responsible use policy for a school?

Teaching students about sourcing a document is an explicit strategy instruction (Nokes & Dole, 2004.) It helps students understand what to keep in mind when they analyze a resource, specifically historical documents.

When students are sourcing a document they ask themselves these questions:

• Who wrote this?
• What is the author’s point of view?
• What was this written?
• What time frame was it written? (How long after the event?)
• Is this source believable? Why or why not?

See sourcing in action in the video below.

Small groups of students work collaboratively on an experiment or problem and write their results using dry-erase markers on a whiteboard. (Small transportable whiteboards work best.) Students should use a variety of alternative representations, especially drawings and graphs. The white boards and results are shared with all the groups at a “board meeting”. All groups can see the other boards and the students in each group take turns explaining their work to other groups. Whiteboarding was originally developed as an integral component of Modeling Instruction but can be used in any classroom and has been shown to be very effective in getting students actively engaged.