Empowering Students Is Opening Doors

I was welcomed into a few classrooms this morning at Baldwin Elementary and saw some great learning at the hands of students.

Campus Innovation Coach Raven Reaves was in a health lesson with her students. She had one student teach me about what they were doing. Ms Reaves uses Google Classroom to provide instructions, online resources as well as a PDF file that contained some comprehension questions. My new student-teacher friend showed me (as if it was no big deal) how the students open up the pdf from the Classroom assignment, open it with DocHub in the Cloud, and edit the PDF with their answers. Students either attach the link to the completed pdf work or download it to their Google Drive and attach that to their assignment.  A couple of these 4th grade students confirmed that it was so easy, even an adult could do it.

Sarah Stanfield, a Technology Cohort1 teacher, invited me into her class the first day she was using Google Classroom with her 3rd-grade students. Trying new technology with our younger students can have the ability to raise stress levels for any teacher, but Ms Stanfield's students took to Classroom with little hesitation. They got into her first assignment and was quickly typing their final copy of an essay they had been working on.  Quick finishers were editing independently and some even were adding photos to their final version before the end of class, without any direction.

On the way out, I was able to listen to some of the 5th grade programmers who were working on making their Dot and Dash robots perform certain tasks. Student teams have a series of tasks to accomplish through programming actions on the bots. The students work throughout the week and will eventually be submitting their work to a national contest in November. William Crowley's math class provides connections between classroom math, algorithmic thinking and collaborative problem-solving for these engaged 5th grade solution designers.

It is awesome watching these teachers use the technology, but it's more awesome seeing that the technology wasn't the lesson.  Students in these classes were creating personal narratives, learning about health issues, practicing collaborative working skills, using sequential algorithmic thinking and much more.  They were engaged by the tech, but it was just the open door that led to deeper concepts or more engaging curriculum activities.  

Loved my time with these students and love knowing that there are many other things happening in other rooms here at Baldwin!