Episode Topic: When we meet as a team on Fridays, we have roundtable discussions resulting from teachers’ questions throughout the week. Many ideas and initiatives have evolved from these talks. We now invite you into the conversation. In an effort to support the learners we serve and help you connect better with us, we have aptly named this episode style DISconnectED. Today we will be answering questions submitted by our A5 teachers.

Introductions: Who is on the Anderson School District 5 Digital Integration Specialist Team?

• Danae Acker serves T.L. Hanna and Westside High Schools

• Ashley Pursley serves Glenview Middle

• Melissa Looney serves AIT, C.F. Reames, Special Ed, and Whitehall Elementary

• Erin Darnell serves Centerville, Midway, West Market, and the Early Learning Preschools

• Anna Baldwin is the Director of E-Learning and Integration

• Sheri Richey serves McLees and Homeland Park Elementary Schools

• Mel Hahn serves Robert Anderson Middle School

• Paige Mitchell serves Concord, Nevitt Forest, and North Pointe Elementary Schools

• Alicia Madison serves Calhoun Academy, New Prospect, and South Fant Elementary Schools

• Adam Cobb serves Varennes Elementary and Southwood Academy of the Arts

• Beth Brannon serves McCants Middle School

Teacher Questions and DIS Team Discussions:

1. With the new technology, what kinds of apps will we be able to use to enhance student engagement?

The technology is just the hardware piece. Apps and tools are web-based and can be utilized across devices. Technology is another tool for your toolbox and doesn't have to be utilized everyday or all the time; it's just a tool for you to use to engage students. Consider your content overall; what is your lesson about, and what are your student needs? THEN, you can take those needs and find tools that fit them. Look at the end goal/objective to see where you want your students to go, THEN you can find the tool that suits the needs of the objective. The DIS Team member at your school can be an essential resource to use in this process.

2. What tool can be used to record instruction?

Flipped classrooms could be a powerful instructional strategy to support learners at home. Parents would appreciate having access to the instruction as they support their students at home. Screencastify and Flipgrid are excellent tools that teachers can use to show themselves teaching the content with the ability to push it out to students so they can watch it, pause it, and be able to reflect and think about it on their own.

3. Why is Nearpod so great?

Each school and subject area has a different way they are utilizing Nearpod. It does a great job with supporting kids in your classroom that might need additional accommodations. Immersive reader supports readers with verbal accommodations, and students can record audio responses in short answer questions. You don't have to recreate the resources you've already created in Google Slides you can just add interactivity to those lessons. You can incorporate and curate the web-based tools you are already using such as Flocabulary, Flipgrid, PhET simulations, 360 tours, virtual field trips, and so much more! The student-paced feature allows students to learn at their own pace. Nearpod has a huge library of lessons that are already developed to save teachers time.

Nearpod changes your whole way of direct teaching. Student work can be posted to the board anonymously and the class can analyze and discuss together without singling anyone out. It allows for giving and getting real-time feedback and adjust instruction to meet needs. At the end of the lesson, teachers can view results/reports to use data to move forward with and review the effectiveness of instruction. Check with your DIS to support you as you start exploring this all-inclusive tool.

4. How can I give feedback to students so they can open and correct it?

Utilize the tools we have. GSuite for Education is the primary platform in Anderson District 5. If you are in Google Sheets, Docs, and Slides as a teacher looking at student work, you can highlight a sentence and comment with feedback and then add the plus sign and the student email address to assign it to a particular student. You can also audio record comments when providing feedback.

5. I would love to create my own app. What's the best way to do this and what resources are available?

There's a tool called Glide that allows you to make your own app using Google Sheets. You could use it for student projects as a way to share products with parents. Another, more kid-friendly, way to build apps is through Code.org. Click "projects" and scroll until you see "app lab". The project uses block coding to create an app, but you can also change it to html coding. This tool could be added to a choice board as a way for students to show mastery of the content they learned. Choice boards put the learning into students' hands and is a great starting point for those teachers interested in personalized learning.

6. Is there a way to take a virtual field trip?

Google My Maps will allows students to use the online mapping tool to pinpoint and describe locations to create virtual field trips through Google. The teacher can also design and create trips and share with teachers around the district. Teachers can add pictures and notes to their pins to make their trip a more visual and informative experience.

Nearpod has a virtual field trip feature built into the platform for students to see 360 views of locations.

Google Tour Builder allows you to create a VR field trip and add descriptions and images. Google Tour Builder will shut down in July of 2021, but teachers and students can create the same projects within Google Earth.

By creating your own trip, you can make a virtual field trip super relevant to the students. Take a field trip to places students are already familiar with to use their prior experiences to build on concepts they don't know about.

Teachers can also take their own photos on their own trips to create virtual tours for students.

To take the virtual field trip to the next level, consider the five senses. We can see the images with the virtual field trip, but what can you feel, hear, smell? What room transformations can you make to add to the overall experience for your students?

Each of these tools (My Maps, Google Tour Builder, Google Earth) facilitates collaboration for multiple students to work on the same product. Collaboration skills are necessary college and career readiness skills and we need to teach them what effective collaboration looks like. Collaboration puts the learning in the hands of the students to explore, be curious, and question what they're seeing.

It's important to note that students may not be able to immediately meet your high expectations for an epic virtual reality tour. Scaffold students through the creative process by giving them models and discussing what makes it great, allowing them to re-create one that's already been made, then creating one on their own to show mastery of content. The same thought process goes for teachers or anyone trying to create something new or learning a new tool. It's okay to fail-forward in the learning process. Your DIS team is here to support you to walk you through utilizing a tool in the classroom and engage in using the tool with your students to give you feedback on how to make it better. Don't give up the first time; you will get better and better at it and become an expert.

If you feel like you've reached expert status with some of these tools, we encourage you to explore using it in more innovative ways. For example, with Google Slides, students can create magazines, eBooks, stop-motion videos, and virtual museums. Your DIS team loves to see what you are doing to collaborate to gain new and better ideas. The teachers are the experts, and we love to share what our teachers are doing in the classroom with others.

7. Is there any way to create a student blog?

There are a variety of tools teachers can use to facilitate student blogs in their classrooms. Some teachers have used Google Docs and had students comment in their own designated color to keep up with the threads and comments. The teacher can publish the Docs to a Google Site to reach a wider audience. Students can create their own Google Site and have a specific page designated for their blog. When you publish student products outside of the classroom, the effort and quality improves. At the elementary level, teachers use SeeSaw to see and provide feedback on their student's products. Students can use Google Slides to post a different blog entry on each slide. Here, students not only use text, but also images and format it to make it look professional. Blogs are a great way to develop student communication outside the classroom, but forums are also excellent for developing communication inside of the classroom. Teachers can use Google Classroom to facilitate discussions by posting a question and letting students respond. This is a great way to start having those digital literacy and citizenship conversations with students.

With the variety of tools you can use for blog creations, it's important for the teacher to review the standard and determine the expected outcome to decide which tool would best meet the needs of the learning goal.

Thank you for joining us! If you have any questions for the DIS team, please submit them to the Google Form on our A5 Digital Tools Website.

Let's keep the conversation going! We invite you, our listeners to join the conversation; please contribute your thoughts and ideas on this Flipgrid page.