This summer I have accepted the challenge to blog for four weeks with friends about the book Don't Ditch That Tech by Matt Miller. This is the first of my four posts.
I always feel like there are a hundred things that I could do differently in my classroom and improvements to what I do digitally would be about seventy of them! After reading the first two segments in this book, I am committed to making these changes next year:
1. From the very first assignment, I want to give my students at least two options for EVERY project or assessment that we do. I plan to increase that throughout the year until students can pick from a wide variety of digital tools with which to demonstrate their understanding. So often I get stuck on the everyone does a slide presentation, everyone does a drawing, everyone does...... When I have given students choice about the output, I get better quality and engagement.
2. Another digital component of my classroom that I would like to get better at is allowing students to verbally engage with me and each other through the use of digital tools. I am interested in exploring and integrating Flipgrid and Google Voice as options for students to demonstrate learning or share ideas and feedback with me and each other.
3. And finally....You Tube....I have known about this awesome tool for a long time, but I am still stuck in using it as a teacher only tool. I show videos, I create a playlist for JUST me, etc. Next year I want to be very student centered in my approach to using You Tube by incorporating playlists into our content and extension activities.
To accomplish all of these goals, I will need to learn and EXPLICITLY teach a number of different tech tools to students, as well as provide them opportunities to become comfortable with them. There are many great apps and tools mentioned that will help me help my students. I have only been out of school for two weeks and I am already excited to go back and make my classroom more digitally useful and exciting for my students.
