SBTS EdTech

Neighborhood H in Western Fairfax is holding a SMARTboard Users Conference for 200 participants. Registration is limited to the staff at Brookfield, Bull Run, Centre Ridge, Colin Powell, Cub Run, Deer Park, Greenbrier East, Greenbrier West, London Towne, Poplar Tree, and Virginia Run. The conference will be held at Greenbrier East January 11 from 2:00-5:00. Three 45 minute training sessions will be offered covering 14 topics from basic to advance use of SMART technologies.  Door prizes including a SMARTboard with an integrated projector, document camera, and Airliner will be given away. Support for this event is provided by AVI, FEA and a grant from North Tier. Special thanks to Stacy Kirkpatrick, SBTS at Deer Park for leading this event!  

After an introduction to Mapmaker’s Toolkit, 2^ndand 3^rd grade students at Bull Run Elementary have created their own map projects.  Students were taught how to add text boxes and stamps to their documents.  The students labeled the continents and oceans and then added stamps to their maps.

Fifth graders at Mount Eagle are using Audacity as an editing tool. After learning about editing symbols and where to use them, students read their writing and record themselves. They then listen to their readings and edit their papers as they listen. They are able to capture the “oral editing” that students tend to do when reading their writing aloud and add in punctuation and emphasis where they hear it.

4th, 5th, and 6th graders at Oakton Elementary are using wikis in Blackboard to discuss big ideas about modern artwork and important historical pieces. (”How does this painting reflect the concept of change?”) They are also going to be posting pictures of their own artwork and blogging their comments about each other’s work.

After careful writing and editing, 4th grade students at Cunningham Park Elementary School imported their book reviews into Wordle to create colorful “word cloud” visual representations to hang around their classrooms.

SBTS in Neighborhood C have been busy getting our teachers up and running with all the technology that is available in our schools.

 All Kindergarten teachers have been trained in the KMRA and are ready to begin assessing students and collecting online data in order to have a consistent and ongoing view of student progress and areas of need in mathematics.

SBTS are already working on training teachers on how to create their own common assessments using ASPIRE in eCART, with some, creating and entering their own questions. 

We have been working with classroom teachers and specialists to set up class blackboard sites that are ready for students to access.  Blackboard is being used in a variety of ways including; posting announcements and websites for students to access for extra practice or to gain the needed background knowledge for an upcoming lesson.  United Streaming videos have been posted in BB for students to view at home or on their own during centers time. Students are creating their own wiki’s as a place to recommend books for others to read, plus they get to read and comment on other book recommendations and make connections!  Students have also been blogging with classmates as a way to brainstorm for projects or discuss books they are reading.

SBTS are working with teachers to create SMART Notebook lessons that allow curriculum content to be taught in an interactive way that captures student attention and works to engage each learner in the process.

As many teachers review geography skills in the beginning of each social studies curriculum, mapmaker’s toolkit was utilized at many of our elementary schools. In 4^th grade students’ created maps of Virginia where they demonstrated knowledge of the geographic regions in VA. Fifth grade students worked on perfecting their map reading skills by locating states and countries using latitude and longitude coordinates and pinning these areas on their maps.  They also created maps that demonstrated their knowledge of direction and the hemispheres’.  Sixth grade students created maps of the 8 geographic regions as these regions are the basis for how and where settlement began in the United States and will be key in helping students understand settlement in the US.

Building Community through Technology

As part of a Language Arts lesson, first grade students at Cunningham Park Elementary used Pixie to write sentences introducing themselves to their classmates. They said, for example, “My name is Johnny, and I like to ride my skateboard.” Next, they drew pictures of themselves doing the activity they selected and then they imported a photograph of themselves into their Pixie drawing. The final step was for students to record themselves reading their sentences (with great care taken to be sure there was one-to-one correspondence between the spoken and the written words.) The final project was assembled and posted to Blackboard. The audio from the project was recorded to CD, and one set was printed and bound. These books and CDs circulate among the first grade classrooms, and now all first graders know a little bit about each other. This was a perfect way to begin teaching writing to first graders while building community and making personal connections!

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!

Lynbrook Elementary’s Fourth Grade is working very hard, but still having lots of fun, with blogging!  The fourth grade students are working on book discussions and various critical thinking topics within the Blackboard forum.  Students have become so excited about the ability to blog that many are continuing the discussion from home! 

In addition, fourth grades, as well as fifth grade are in the beginning stages of using the Senteo Interactive Responsive system.  Teachers and students are excited to use this technology tool in time for SOL reviews!