Classroom Resources

Technology is a great showpiece for any institution, but without an educational objective, it is nothing more than expensive jetsam. At the Lower School, I carefully cultivate which technology should be used to achieve our objectives.

Instead of four iPads per classroom, an amount that limited usage, our first and second grade students now have 80 Chromebooks that allow them to learn the technical skills required for 21st century learning, interact with their teacher virtually through Google Classroom, and collaborate with their peers locally and globally.

To help increase our classroom interactivity, working with our IT department, the Lower School is now installing interactive projectors in every classroom. This allows the teachers a new, digital canvas that will help them achieve amazing pedagogy in their classroom.

Increased interactivity isn’t just limited to students and teachers, this year we also implemented a new way of allowing our parents to connect. SeeSaw, not only gives our parents a window into the classroom, but creates a digital portfolio of student work that they will have throughout their time at EA. At the time of this writing, just our PreK-2nd parents have visited our SeeSaw classrooms over 11,000 times, “liked” over 9,000 items, and made over 1,100 comments on teacher and student content.

In revitalizing our STEM curriculum, I noticed that our robots were gathering dust. These great educational tools, were not being used effectively. We just didn’t supply enough robots to create a workable curriculum for a class. Working with administration, the business office, and ESF, our students now have two opportunities to interact with robotics, Dash and Dot (Prek-2nd) and Lego Robotics (3rd-5th). This gives our students a meaningful and tangible way to learn coding while introducing them to an amazing engineering curriculum.

Devices and doodads are awesome, but integration is paramount. Our Pre-K teachers wanted to redesign a portion of their classroom and asked me to consult with them on how we could make their environment more conducive towards Computer Science and Engineering. We collaborated to design a mini-maker lab where the students could explore the concepts of Computational and Design Thinking on a daily basis. This has allowed our youngest engineers to start their adventure as soon as they arrive at EA.