NOW Classrooms, Grades 9-12. Meg Ormiston
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full range of their learning.
Chapter 2, “Communicating and Collaborating,” includes lessons to develop students’ ability to engage in the four Cs of communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity. Students will learn to work better together and provide each other with constructive feedback as they create group projects and share them with authentic audiences that exist beyond classroom walls.
Chapter 3, “Conducting Research and Curating Information,” helps you develop students’ ability to find information by creating research plans and using advanced search techniques as they investigate and offer solutions to real-world problems. Students will then strengthen their evaluation skills as they determine when they find reliable sources that have limited bias.
Chapter 4, “Thinking Critically to Solve Problems,” covers how to teach students learning strategies for using digital tools to stay organized when researching challenging problems, to improve work flow and manage time, and to collect and analyze data they can later publish and present to authentic audiences.
Chapter 5, “Being Responsible Digital Citizens,” helps you teach your students what it means to be digital citizens and make positive contributions to online culture by establishing and cultivating a healthy digital footprint for themselves and others. High school students especially need to know that what they put on the Internet stays on the Internet and can affect their ability to enter college and find jobs. We also offer lessons to reinforce to students the importance of respecting ownership by properly citing copyrighted sources and avoiding plagiarism.
Chapter 6, “Expanding Technology and Coding Concepts,” explains how to grow students’ online presence by having them create digital portfolios of their work, make better use of their personal technology, and develop their computational and design skills through coding.
In the appendix, we include an alphabetical list of technology terms and resources. This includes a comprehensive list of apps, websites, and technology tools referenced in the book along with a description of each resource.
Building Background: Know Before You Go
Readers should be aware of a few additional concepts regarding this content before they begin engaging with the lessons and chapters that follow. We want to briefly mention suggestions for the sequence in which readers use the lessons in the book, discuss the concept of learning management systems (LMSs) and common education suites like G Suite for Education that are a critical part of this book’s lessons, emphasize the importance of following policies regarding student privacy and Internet use, and discuss how assessment connects with this content.
Sequence of Use
Although we organized this book in an optimal way, we invite you to move among the lessons in whatever sequence you like. Lessons range in difficulty so that you may meet your students at their level. Some concepts and apps will be new to students, requiring you to offer them more basic lessons that help get them started. Other students you can advance more quickly, perhaps starting off with an operational lesson or even going straight to a topic’s wow lesson. You know your students best, so use our NOW lesson format to fit their needs.
Each of these lessons requires some form of app or technology platform to accomplish a learning goal. We offer a variety of suggestions you can deploy with each lesson, but do not limit yourself or your students to our examples. Apps change. They disappear entirely. The best app for a job when we wrote this book may not remain the best one for the job when you read this book. Because of this, we designed each lesson to have adaptability so you can use it with whatever tool best suits your classroom. We don’t teach the app; we teach the classroom process.
Learning Management Systems and Education Suites
Just because learning sometimes looks messy, it doesn’t mean it lacks structure. Imagine a whole new world without a stack of papers to grade in which the assignments students submit are all organized and recorded in digital folders. Access to technology allows teachers to eliminate the stack of papers and create digital learning experiences that are meaningful and even more powerful to both students and teachers than paper. Schools in the 21st century use many different software programs and web-based applications, or learning management systems to stay organized. Most learning management systems have some free features and premium (paid) school or district solutions. In most schools, everyone uses the same system so students and parents don’t need to learn a different LMS for every class. Most learning management systems allow the teacher to message students, assign and collect documents, report student progress, and deliver e-learning content. Throughout the book, you will notice we provide steps for how you can give digital files to students and then how students return the digital files to you through the classroom LMS. Common learning management systems include the following, but you can find hundreds of others on the market.
• Schoology (www.schoology.com)
• Showbie (www.showbie.com)
• Seesaw (https://web.seesaw.me)
• Canvas (www.canvaslms.com/k-12)
• Edmodo (www.edmodo.com)
• Otus (http://otus.com)
• PowerSchool Learning (www.powerschool.com/solutions/lms)
• Blackboard (www.blackboard.com)
• Moodle (https://moodle.org)
• D2L (www.d2l.com)
One option that needs a little more explanation is Google Classroom (https://classroom.google.com). Google Classroom, which is free to use, is a cross between a document management system and a learning management system. It does not contain all the features of an LMS, but it is a great way to get started managing a digital classroom.
In addition to an LMS, many school districts use an education productivity suite like Google’s G Suite for Education (https://edu.google.com/products/productivity-tools) or Microsoft Office 365 for Education (www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/products/office). We focus on Google’s platform because it’s the one we are experienced with, but if your school or district uses a different platform, you will find corollaries with them that allow you to adapt our content to your needs.
With G Suite for Education, every user in a district has a unique Gmail login and password to enter their own part of the G Suite, granting them access to the following services.
• Google Docs to do word processing
• Google Sheets to create spreadsheets
• Google Slides to create presentations
• Google Forms to create quizzes and surveys
• Google Drawings to create illustrations
• Google Drive to store and share files
Using these online environments, students and teachers can communicate and