Showing posts with label Tech Experts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tech Experts. Show all posts

Sunday, May 10, 2015

Open House Success for Parents and Students

Last Thursday our school celebrated our annual Multicultural Open House. We opened our school doors and welcomed all students and their families to visit our classrooms, watch student performances, eat a huge and generous potluck and participate in a technology event.

Before heading to the gym, students in our classroom led student conferences in our room. We worked hard on Persuasive Open House Letters to convince our parents to come to open house. It was a success as most of the students in our room made their way into our classroom to show their parents all of the great learning that takes place in Grade 3. To prepare for the evening, we talked about what we would most likely want our parents to see or learn about. We created centers and students put what they wanted to showcase at each of the centers. The centers were: Math Center, Literacy Center, Reading Center, EQAO, Padlet & QR Codes, KidBlog Writing  and of course..Tech Experts!

It was so great to see the students welcome their parents into our classroom while leading them around the room to share their learning. They loved showing off their technology expertise on a variety of apps. It was the favourite center for sure. They showed their parents all of the tools we are fortunate to have. They helped them log into Chromebooks and use the iPads to log into Raz Kids. They showcased their amazing KidBlog accounts and how much our writing has improved since the start of the year. It was so nice to see parents and future generation kids excited and engaged in the learning in our Grade 3 class. Well done friends!

The technology event in our school's gym was a first for our school. Together with the leadership of some grade 5 and grade 3 students, families were treated to an engaging Padlet selfie wall. Students set up a Padlet selfie station filled with many fun props, a camera, and a projection screen to track all of the fun images that were captured. Students guided parents to navigate on the Padlet and taught them how to use the tool by getting them to post a comment about our school. Families and students were also introduced to our school Twitter account (@Assumption_ocsb). Students answered questions about how we use Twitter in our classrooms and everyone was invited to post a hard or real tweet on Assumption's Twitter account.

With all of the wonderful access to technology that our school is fortunate to have, parents got to see some of the amazing ways we can use tech tools to engage, communicate, connect and share. Our grade 3 and 5 students are comfortable navigating the tools and families were treated to a fun and engaging activity that we called our Selfie Wall. Families lined up to take selfies with their children and were excited to see their images posted on one large Padlet. We heard so much positive feedback from families who were delighted their their children had access to so many tools AND that they were using the tech tools in fun and engaging ways. It was great to have families participate and to see some of the great messages they left on our Twitter and Padlet wall. One of my favourite quotes came from a student who said "I like that we can learn at school and then go home and teach our parents too."

Below is a link to the completed Padlet selfies and some Twitter comments posted by our family community. We hope that your picture made it onto the Padlet wall. We also hope that you enjoyed participating in the event as much as we loved planning it! A huge thank you to Mme. Paradis, Mrs. McEvoy and Mme. Oliver who supported us and helped to make this event possible. Mr. MacKenzie and I were very proud of the grade 3 and 5 students who hosted a wonderful first parent technology event at Assumption. Well done everyone...until next time :-)







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Sunday, November 09, 2014

GRA Week 5: Going Places


This week's read aloud for the Peter H. Reynolds Author Study was the book Going Places. We read the book as part of Week 5 of the project.
Going Places Talking Circle

This week students interacted with the story in many fun ways. After reading the story, students had many personal connections to share. As we chatted, we wondered what the author's message was. We decided to hold a Talking Circle to discuss what Peter Reynolds wanted us to learn or what he wanted to teach us through his book Going Places. Luckily, I was able to capture some of our student's thinking by recording part of our Talking Circle on the AudioBoom app. Have a listen to what some student's believe the author's message was!

listen to ‘going places talking circle’ on audioBoom
Peer-to-Peer Feedback
Students wrote about what they believed Peter Reynolds wanted us to learn from the story. They also added some text-to-text and text-to-self connections as well. We continue to be inspired by the messages in his stories. He continues to inspire us to use our imagination, be creative and show grit even when we feel that something is too challenging or too difficult. Going Places also taught us about the importance of working together, cooperation and to think outside of the box!

Students shared their ideas and had the opportunity to read with partners. This allowed them to share their thinking and receive peer-to-peer feedback. Peer feedback is one of our goals this year. We will be using oral and written peer feedback to help improve our writing and expand our ideas!

 Students received Twitter messages from classes who are also participating in the Global Read Aloud.






One other way that student's interacted with the book this week was through a shared-Padlet with a Grade Three class we have collaborated with before. Students used the AudioBoom app to record themselves reading their connections to the story Going Places. Last year, many students became experts since they used the AudioBoom app all year long. This week, our Tech Experts helped friends who are not familiar with the app. They demonstrated their expertise and helped a friend to record, take a picture and save the AudioBoom recording. We have a number of Tech Experts in our room so we are fortunate that students can leverage their expertise to assist others to become experts on this app too. After recording their AudioBoom, we added our readings to a shared-Padlet with Mrs. King's Grade Three Class. Students in both of our classes shared their connections, predictions and thinking on various iPad apps. Mrs. King's class used Pic Collage and Tellagami on the Padlet. On Friday, we took time to read and listen to the thinking posted on the Padlet. This shared-Padlet allowed our classes to collaborate in a truly interactive way. There are so many great ways to use Padlet. Collaborating with another class provides students with so much rich dialogue and a variety of opinions about what Going Places can mean to different people. 


I am very thankful that my students have had the opportunity to participate in this amazing Global Project this far. We only have one more week to go. This project has truly inspired my students and I am happy to see how much they've grown in their learning already!





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Sunday, May 11, 2014

Open House Persuasive Success!

Our class experts waiting for their parents to arrive at our Open House!
A huge thank you to all of the families and students who were able to join us during our school's multicultural open house on Thursday May 8th! Particularly, to the families who came to our grade 2 classroom to visit our room. Students were so excited to show you all of the fun learning happening in our room. They were even more excited to learn that their open house persuasive writing letters worked!! Our letters were written to persuade you to join us and so many of our classmates arrived at school during the Open House elated that they were able to persuade you. The students came up with the persuasive reasons to get you to our classroom during our Open House. A huge thank you for your support and your presence on Thursday!


Throughout the classroom visit, our mandate was to have the student voice in our room be the guide. Students led parents around our classroom to show some of the great projects and assignments we have worked on over the past few months. Students used their persuasive reasons to show their families all of the exciting learning in our room.

It was lovely to see the pride by the students and the parent engagement as well. Our class is blooming with tech experts who showed their parents how to scan QR Codes, how to Tweet, how to record on the AudioBoo app, how to log into the Chromebooks and so much more! Students are leading much of the learning that takes place during our Literacy Centers, and our Open House evening highlighted some of the student-led inquiries within our room. For instance, the Teacher Center expert got to show her mom what we can do at the Teacher Center. The QR Code expert showed his mom how to scan a QR Code and how to add her thinking to our Padlet using the QR Code link. We also had some class tweeters and guest tweeters add to the fun too.

A future tech expert and tweeter taking videos in our classroom!
Thanks to our persuasive letters, we learned that our class won the challenge against Mrs. Swan's Class. Our class was the more persuasive class!! As a result,  Mrs. Swan's Class bought us a brand new book from the Book Fair. We have added the book to our class library. A HUGE thank you to Mrs. Swan and the grade 3's for the challenge, but most of all for the awesome new book for our classroom library.


Class and Guest Tweeters of the Open House:

We created a PADLET to have parents and students write what they liked about visiting our classroom. Have a look at what some families posted about us. And if you'd like to add another idea...please feel free!
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