Danielle Terry's Blog

This week I was able to reserve enough iPads to allow my students to participate in research for Black History Month.  Admittedly, in the past, I have not been the best at teaching my students how to actually search for information because I have assumed that my students already know how to do this.  With the research we have recently completed in this class about digital literacy and how we still need to teach digital natives how to use technology for research and to communicate, I decided to do a mini-lesson on research. Going into this lesson I was very anxious as I was afraid my students would be bored and already know what I was going to teach them.  My students actually ended up being very engaged.  We talked a lot about using key words to search to find exactly what information they are looking for.  I was able to assign them each an important person for Black History Month and they each received a biography sheet that caused them to search for date of ...

This week Jennifer focused on teachers becoming activists in a time when our nation is leaving teachers feeling "hopeless or frustrated."  Jennifer stated that many teachers are feeling very frustrated with all of the demands placed on them, while also feeling frustrated with various policies that are being passed by lawmakers, but often in conversations teachers state they don't know how to fix it or where to start.  In order for teachers to begin to make changes, they must become an activist.  Becoming an activist doesn't mean we need a political background, but instead we can get started by using technology to follow education activist bloggers and to inform ourselves.  Anthony Cody is an education activist and also blogs about education and independent issues.  He is a co-founder of Network for Public Education .  Anthony met with Jennifer for this blog post and offered suggestions for teachers wanting to become involved in changing education policy....

Restorative Justice was the topic of Jennifer's blog post this week.  Jennifer defined restorative justice as, "it focuses on building relationships and repairing harm, rather than simply punishing students for misbehavior."  Victor Small, Jr. is an administrator in California, who has been using restorative practice for a long time and Jennifer suggests following him on Twitter, using the hashtag #RJLeagueChat.  In his Twitter conversations, he focuses on supporting teachers, who are implementing restorative justice.  He aided in this week's blog post. Restorative justice does more than just punish students for the behavior that they display.  It focuses on repairing the underlying cause of the behavior.  This reduces suspension, but does place more work on schools as there are no "steps to follow" for specific behavior incidences.  Instead, school officials have to analyze each incident and work with the student so that the student can figure out h...

This week, I didn't try anything fancy in my classroom with technology, but instead had a spur of the moment opportunity to utilize technology to further my students' understanding.  We are working on converting units of measure.  It is my first year teaching fourth grade math, and when asking a coworker (who taught math previously in fourth grade) what background knowledge students usually come with as far as measurement goes, she said in the past they had a basic idea of what each unit of measure was.  This year, of course, was not the case at all.  My students picked up on feet and inches, but kilograms, grams, meters, millimeters, etc. were all very foreign words to them.  I quickly realized that there was no discussion that was going to help them understand, so I turned to technology for help. We went through each unit of measure individually and because it was spur of the moment, I only thought to Google each unit of measure and show real-life examples of...

One of Scott McLeod's recent blogs was very short, but also very powerful.  He began with a quote by Marc Prensky.  Marc's quote was focused around the idea that if we allowed students to have cell phones in classrooms they would "vote with their attention."  Essentially, if students had cell phones and they became bored in a class, they would simply choose to use their cell phone instead of engage in class.  Marc's idea was that we do not allow cell phones in class because we don't want students to have the opportunity to "vote with their attention." He compared the way that students "vote with their attention" to the way that "adults vote with their feet."  When adults are not compelled by a meeting or presentation, they have the choice to leave.  This really rang true to me, as I have been at PD's where we were given a choice of sessions to attend and I often chose to leave certain sessions and attend a different one if I d...

This week in my math classes, we were finishing working on multiplicative comparisons and word problems.  My students enjoy working with partners on task cards.  When looking for task cards for word problems and multiplicative comparisons, I came across a set that had a QR code on each task card.  I wasn't really sure how this would impact my instruction or if it would become a huge distraction for my students, but I was willing to give it a try.  I was able to gain access to enough iPads for each pair to have one, and showed my students how to use the QR code readers.  The students were so excited and their motivation was high.  The task cards allowed them to solve a problem with their partner and then to scan the QR code to see if their answer was correct.  My students loved being able to check their own work, instead of having to raise their hand to see if they are on the right track.  It also freed up my own time, so that I could work intentio...

Jennifer's post this week is extremely helpful to those of us using technology to communicate ideas, especially if we are blogging.  This week Jennifer discusses the difference between being a Curator and being a Dumper.  There is so much information that we have access to, that we can share with other educators, but we must be careful that we are not simply "dumping" information on them.   "Dumping" information on others is actually bad for your brain as "cognitive load theory suggests that the brain can only take in so much at once."  If you simply dump information on someone, their brain can actually begin to shut down and they cannot process anything you have shared with them at all.  Instead of dumping, Jennifer suggests that we should be curators as educators.  To be a curator, we must organize information and only choose a few key points to share and arrange those points in a presentable order.  This allows our brains to sort and take in...

I often use Smart Notebook in my classroom, but I will be the first to admit it is often used to post an agenda or as an extra whiteboard in the classroom to call students up to work out problems.  My students have always loved getting to write on the Smart Board.  This week, I needed to teach elapsed time and to be honest, I was really struggling with introducing it.  I wanted an interactive lesson, which kept seeming to be impossible as our school only had a total of 10 mini clocks for the students to work with in a hands-on manner at their desks.  I remembered Smart Notebook and was able to create a lesson using it that I was really proud of and my students loved! I searched for a clock and found one under "interactive and multimedia."  This clock allowed us to move the minute and hour hand to review how to use a clock to tell time.  I was then able to put two clocks side by side and call on students to set each clock to a different time, so that we cou...