Welcome Back, students!!! I am excited about all the learning that will happen in the computer lab this year. Our theme this year is It’s GO TIME based on various games. You will see classroom decorated in different board game themes. I chose the game OPERATION. As always, I HAD to include my 8 precious grandchildren in the decoration. It makes me smile the minute I enter my classroom. The door poster indicates which group of students may choose a ball to sit on. I will switch the mask weekly. Here is a picture of me in my “costume” for beginning of the year pictures with Nurse Jones being silly.
I ran across a blog post this summer at https://www.byrdseed.com/talking-less-shocking-stats-on-what-students-can-hear/ that got me to thinking about the way I give instructions. I LOVE to talk about things I am passionate about. Give me a captive audience, and I can ramble on and on and on. You get the picture. I am passionate about my content, and if students are not what you consider a captive audience, I don’t know what is! Hence, the problem. I look forward to the first week of school because it gives me an excuse to ramble on and on about all the wonderful opportunities my students will have in technology. I get to “tell” them what I expect of them. Due to the blog post I read, now I have a dilemma. What to do, what to do? THEN, I read this tweet:
That gave me an idea. Could I give my students all the information they would normally hear me talk about by allowing them to go to stations and discover it for themselves? One of the things I am nervous about is getting from them their choice for our Fun Friday Clubs. We began Fun Friday Clubs a few years ago. Clubs are held on the Friday the high school has a pep rally. Teachers get to choose what activity they want to lead and students get to choose what club they want to participate in. Being a technology teacher, I will see every student the first week of school, so I create a google form to collect that information. For the past two years, I have included the form in a google classroom lesson where students access the form by logging in. That has been problematic in the past, especially for the 3rd graders who have never had a school email account and are not familiar with google classroom. This year, I will monitor a station where students fill out the form AND introduce themselves to me using FlipGrid. They will be able to record a short video of themselves telling me their name, their homeroom teacher’s name, what they would like me to call them, and one thing they would like to do in technology. I am looking forward to the chance to get to learn their names by watching their videos.
Here are the stations students will participate in:
Station 1 – Lego Challenge
Station 2 – Would You Rather Jenga
Station 3 – I’m Done/Now What I will have a set of computers opened to my google slide mix of sites students may access when they have free time. You can check it out here: http://tinyurl.com/technecksites.
Station 4 – FlipGrid introduction and Fun Friday Form – I will monitor this station
Station 5 – Arial’s Adventure AR
Station 6 – Find It Word Scramble Each team will pick up a form. They will locate the places indicated in the room and place the letter above that place on their page. When they have located each spot, a very important phrase will be revealed.
Below is a slideshow of the pictures I took of decorations and stations. I will post a reflection below when the week is completed.
Thursday and Friday classes went well. I did have to make an adjustment to stations after my first class left. Having students record themselves using FlipGrid was just too time intensive without them having prior knowledge of the application. (They seemed to enjoy it immensely, however.) I was able to get the information regarding Fun Friday Clubs from all students, but it was a time crunch with my first group of students. I eliminated the FlipGrid activity and combined exploring the I’m Done, Now What webmix with the Fun Friday form. Students rotated through five stations. When all the students had made it to every station, they were then able to go back to their favorite activity until the class period was over.