SBTS EdTech

Neighborhood D is using Delicious!  We have set up a neighborhood site on Delicious that we are sharing between ourselves.  The idea is that we give the link: http://delicious.com/tech4u to our teachers, as a resource for finding educational websites and tell them when they have a new one to send it our way.  This will keep us all updated with some great sites and an easy way to search for them.  Teachers can then pick and choose what they would like to put on their 24-7 site for students.

In the Professional Learning Community that is Cunningham Park Elementary School two of the main questions are “What will we do for students who haven’t learned,” and “What will we do for students who have already mastered material we are teaching?”  

This school year, as part of that philosophy,  changing groups of students in grades two and five who have mastered concepts being taught in their math classes as evident on pre-assessments work with Scratch programming to enrich their mathematics instruction and foster critical thinking and problem-solving skills.  They use Scratch to solve challenges presented to them and are surprised when they discover they’re using math to complete their tasks!

These groups change frequently based on their teachers’ formative assessments, so the group often combines students who know a great deal about the tools in Scratch mixed with students who are seeing Scratch for the first time. Watching these students collaborate to solve problems and seeing their satisfaction at a classmate’s success is amazing.  Students learn innovation and creativity skills, problem-solving, collaboration and critical thinking and have a great time doing it!