Rubrics For the Little Ones

Being an elementary school teacher means that you must think about the capabilities of your little ones (students) before creating grading criteria. If you teach kindergarden, your little ones have completely different capabilities than 3rd, 4th, or 5th, graders. Then again if you teach 5th grade (as I do), your students have  completely different capabilities than middle and high schoolers. Teachers of all different grade levels have certain expectations depending on their students' abilities. Therefore, we should all monitor how we grade our students, and how our rubrics appear so that our little ones are able to follow the organization set by each rubric in order to use it properly.

Because I teach 5th grade, I need to make sure that my rubrics are very simple, straight forward, and use appropriate diction so that my students understand the expectations set aside for each criteria. If I used a rubric created by textbooks that are only for teachers' eye, my students would stress out because it would be too difficult for them to understand.

By adjusting your rubrics to match your students' cognitive abilities, you will avoid frustration, and set students up to succeed. How can we expect a rubric to benefit our students if it is way over their heads?  My suggestions are to use simple diction, clear statements in each category, set aside point values in each category, and limit the number of categories for younger students.

Attributed by: MagneticNorth

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Creating Lesson Plans: College vs. Career

I attended the University of Central Florida for my undergraduate degree, and am currently right back at UCF attaining my masters degree in elementary education. While studying at UCF, one thing I have done time and time again is create lesson plans, some hypothetical, some actually useful for the classroom. Yet I have noticed a huge difference between the lesson plans your professors require you to format and turn in versus the lesson plans you actually write with a team at work. Lesson plans for college grades tend to require tremendous amounts of information, whereas lesson plans for work merely state an objective, description, and page number of the book where an activity can be found. In fact, a whole week's full of lesson plans for math, reading, language arts, science, and social studies can all be written out onto just 2 pages. So why do we create 12 page lesson plans for just one activity for one subject while we're in college?

Taken by: Jose Castillo H

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It wasn't until I was actually working in the classroom during an internship that I experienced what actual lesson planing is like. I was shocked to find that I din't need to write 12 page papers for each lesson that I taught. What I had learned from my college classes was quite different from what I practiced as a teacher. I sat and thought, "Why force us to write out step by step procedures of what I will say to my students, and exactly what my students will do every 5 minutes during the lesson if we don't actually write lessons plans this way as working teachers?" This seemed very tedious and ludicrous.

Taken by George Eastman House

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It wasn't until I had been teaching for about a year that I realized most likely why we had to write out our procedures, materials, and extensions to go along with our topic, standards, and objectives. My thoughts now are that professors were trying to train our planning methods by having us write our each step so that we could anticipate exactly what we wanted our students to do, and exactly what we needed to include in our lesson to do so. All I can say now is that I am extememely relieved that career lesson plans are far less detailed complex than college lesson plans. Would you agree?

-Lisa Costello

My Digital Storytelling Example

I teach 5th grade, so this digital storytelling project is centered around our current social studies unit. I plan to show this example after explaining what digital storytelling is. This example is so important because I feel it sets expectations so that students have an idea of what they will be producing. I think viewing an example will also inspire students to begin thinking of how they will create their storytelling projects, and what elements they will add to their digital stories to make them their own. 
I would encourage my students to include photos and recordings of their voices when narrative their Prezies. Do you feel that creating a lavish example may hinder students' creativity? I am sometimes afraid that particular students will try to copy what I have created as a sample because they want to create something, "Right" (my students always ask, "Am I doing this right?"). I want to be sure that my students feel free to create something different from my example. The whole point is to see what they have taken from a unit, and what they feel is the most important information to be shared. I want to see different points of views, not my own recopied from my example. 
-Lisa Costello

Digital Storytelling in the 5th Grade

Digital storytelling is the new, high-tech way for students to share their knowledge on a particular subject. Students are simply using technology as a means to show what they know.

My classroom is filled with critical thinkers who are intrinsically motivated to learn. They love hands on activities, and especially love when they get to use computers in the classroom. Using technology only gets them more excited about their education. If I were to use digital storytelling to enhance my curriculum I would be sure that my students would me more than trilled to take on the challenge.

One type of digital storytelling project I would like to create for my 5th graders would be on the events leading up to the American Revolution. Currently we are learning about this topic in social studies, and students have been building their portfolios of classwork on the topic. I would love to create a digital piece that could be saved onto DVDs to place in their portfolios as well.

Before telling my students that they will be creating a digital story, I would teach them what digital storytelling is, and show them examples of digital stories to engage them. This way my students will feel more comfortable with the idea of creating their own digital stories in school.

My students would have a given assignment topic, such as: Explain what caused the American Revolution. Then my students would have the freedom of choice to either share dates and events, writing samples explaining points of views from both British and colonists' view points, and any other creative works to show the growing tensions between the two sides of this revolution. I would give my students about two weeks (15 class days during social studies block) to work on completing their Digital stories.

I would give students several ideas they could use to organize their information for their digital storytelling, such as: Prezi, PowerPoint, or imovie. We would spend class time working in each of these software programs so that my students has a basic understanding of how to work within their program of choice. I would also teach them how to embed videos into their presentations if they chose to share one their made themselves, or one found online.

I would then give my students a list of resources where they could conduct research for their digital stories. Some of the resources I have in mind are the class social studies textbook, History Channel videos, and several other kid-friendly websites that give useful information on the events, people, and reasoning behind the American Revolution.

Ideally my students would create an organized presentation through a digital means to share their knowledge of the American revolution after class discussions and researching. I would expect their presentations to include appropriate, and relevant information, along with colorful images to add visual appeal to their presentations.

We would have a publishing day to share each students presentations with the class, and end with a final discussion about the commonalities between the students' digital stories to gather the most important events that led up to the American Revolution.

Digital storytelling opens up students imaginations/creativity to share their knowledge with others. Today students live in a digital world; shouldn't school help build their technology skills they will need later in life?

-Lisa Costello

Digital Storytelling

Touch Screen Devices

Touch Screen Tablets

Today touch screen devices are all the rage. Most of today's new smart phones, tablets, mp3 players, digital cameras, and computers have touch-sentsitive screens that allow the user to interact with the devices by using their fingers, a stylus, or a digital pen. Because these touch devices respond to finger motion, they are very user friendly. A child for example isn't going to have to use a mouse to select information on a screen, or use a keyboard to zoom in; all that child will need to do is tap their finger on what interests them to select, or pinch their fingers to zoom in or out on the screen.

Not only are these devices user friendly, they are also incredibly intriguing to children in this digital age.Touch enabled devices are the most up-to-date machines, and children naturally are engaged when working on them. For these reasons I think incorporating touchscreen devices into the education curriculum is a great idea that will enhance student motivation, engagement, and ultimately result in higher performance in many subject skills.

Touch screen tablets are number one in my mind when I think of incorporating touchscreen devices into the classroom. These devices do not take up much space (less than a computer, and monitor) and they can easily be help in the hands of elementary children. Today even Apple's ipad mini is available, and would be ideal to give to first through third grade students. The original ipad, larger in size would be more appropriate for grades four and up through high school. There are also other touchscreen tablets available for students such as the Dell Latitude 10 tablet, and the Samsung Galaxy Note II.

Below is a youtube video giving us feedback from a 5th grade teacher, and her students on how they feel about using ipads in the classroom. See for yourself how these touch screens can engage young minds as well as yours.

As these students were explaining in the video, there are endless ways to use touch screen tablets to enrich their curriculum. I also want to share a link to the article, 25 Ways To Use Tablets In The Classroom. I particularly like way #25 from this article: using tablets for current events. My school is doing away with Scholastic News next year, and we are trying to find a way to keep our students up-to-date with current events. We could use touch screen tablets in the classroom to allow students to work in pairs to research current events on kid friendly websites like Time for kids, or discovery kids. 

Every teacher can use tablets in their classroom in at least one way, and many teachers will probably find more than ten ways to use touch screen tablets. I know that each classroom is different, and that's why these tablets will fit nicely into those classrooms. They are versatile, and exciting for students of all ages. 

-Lisa Costello

Lets Be Smart About Smart Phones!

I currently teach 5th grade, so texting, and digital cheating on assessments isn't a common issue amongst my studnets. However, i'd like to focus this post on how teachers of higher grade levels can use their students' smart phones as aids to class lessons and activities.

Now even though my focus is on older students, I would also consider using smart phones as technological pieces with my own 5th grade class. This is because I know that many of my 5th graders do have their own phones. Lets face it, it's a digital world, and younger children are learning to get their hands on all sorts of technologies. Most of my students either have an iphone, an android phone, or a windows phone. Since the invention of the cellular phone, use of these phones have been frowned upon in schools for a few reasons. Skeptics say that students will text, play, cheat, and lose focus if they are using a smartphone in class. Well, i'd have to disagree. There are ways in which to secure the privacy of students, and monitor what students are doing while they are using their devices. Its up to teachers to continually monitor what students are doing, and execute consequences when a rule on appropriate use is broken.

iPhone photo by William Hook on Flickr

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I think teachers should be educating students on how to use their smart phones for educational purposes, such as how to use educational apps, blog with peers, set up a work schedules, record ideas, watch educational videos, research the websites, and search through maps. These are just a few of the many ways in which students can effectively use readily available technology.

Many schools lack the funds needed to give students enough computers to use in regular class time. They school where I work only has 2 computer labs, one is available for a class to use during "lab time" once a week for about 45 minutes. The other computer lab is reserved solely for taking computerized standardized assessments. We then have 1 laptop cart, which is usually reserved weeks in advance. I think it would be wise to change our negative outlooks on smartphone usage in school to create a more optimistic view on what our students can accomplish if we allow them to use this familiar form of technology. If monitored correctly by the teachers, smart phones definitely could be used appropriately in the classroom.

Want to see an example of a classroom using smart phones effectively? Check out this article from Raising Arizona Kids; read about teachers who seize opportunities to use the technology students bring to school with them each day. Think about whether you agree that educators should change the negative stance on cellphones, and begin to work on letting students use their smart phones for educational purposes in school. The digital world is still evolving around us, lets evolve with it!

Also here is an article published by NBCNews on 5 good ways to use smart phones in high school. Check it out!

-Lisa Costello