Final Presentation

Growth Chart

Click here to access my growth plan.

Classroom Management

Classroom Management

Classroom management can be looked at in different categories such as space, time, routines, attention, momentum and discipline. There are several different applications out there that are helpful with classroom management such as:

Class Dojo                                            Bloomz                                   ClassKick


                                                     



ClassMax                                             Nearpod                               StickPick


                                                  




I walked around my school and asked some teachers what applications they use for their classroom. One teacher said she uses Dojo. When I asked if she used it for discipline she responded, “no”. Every teacher I spoke to said they don’t use any kind of technology or application for discipline. I also asked if any teachers used applications for noise control such as Bouncy Balls. The responses that I received was, “we tried some of those applications but we felt they were more of a distraction.”


I decided to try Bouncy Balls in my Kindergarten classroom. You don’t know if something works unless you try it yourself. Bouncy Ball is a free application that is used to control the noise level in the classroom. The Bouncy Balls react to sounds from the microphone. Below is an example:

Unfortunately, this did not work for my class since they would purposely make noises to see the balls bounce faster.


I decided to look into something else for my Kindergarten students. In the morning we have our morning circle and do our morning meeting which takes approximately twenty minutes. After sitting for so long my students are tired and sluggish. I decided to do some Brain Breaks after my morning meeting. Brain Breaks are short 2-3 minute videos that get students to move around and get their blood to flow and also send oxygen to their brain. It also helps students to retain information better. My students enjoy doing Brain Breaks after sitting for a long period of time. It’s basically a simple technique were students are given a short mental break. We do our Brain Breaks by watching videos on YouTube. Students are able to sing, dance and move around. Below are some videos from my classroom. 

  

Above is a GoNoodle video and it's called Milkshake-Koo-Koo/GoNoodle



GoNoodle

YouTube Video: Tooty Ta: A Dance for All ages - Tooty Ta

Brain Breaks: (SEA)

• Stimulates the brain
• Energizes the brain
• Activated the brain

Brain Breaks is known to:

• Reduce stress
• Reduce frustration
• Increase attention
• Increase productivity

Something else that we have available for our students is a TLC room which stands for Therapeutic Learning Center.  This room is used for students that need a break from the classroom for different reasons.  It helps students with space, time, attention, momentum and discipline which all falls under classroom management.

The picture above is called the Chill Out Zone for students that need a break due to behavior issues.

Reflection:

There are many different resources for using technology in the classroom for classroom management.  Each classroom is different and every teacher is different.  You need to use what works best for you and your students.  What works for me, may not work for you.  You don't know unless you try.  I'm fortunate to be in a school district that has many different resources for students.  Sometimes it could be a minor change in your classroom that can make a difference for many students.  For example, create a quiet area for students to sit in when they are having a difficult day.

Assistive Technology

Assistive Technology/Boardmaker

Assistive technology is a modification used for students that need assistance. Several different types of tools are available for students that have a disability and need additional assistance. Through technology many of the impossibles have become possible. Examples, students who are deaf, blind, mobility issues, reading issues etc. The major goal in education is to provide support to all students regardless of their disability. We want all our students to be successful.


Listed below are some different types of Assistive Technology:

• Hearing aids
• Cognitive aids
• Voice recognition device
• Screen readers
• Screen enlargements
• Physical modifications
• Visuals
• Video tapes of social skills

In my everyday classroom we use Boardmaker. Boardmaker is a special education platform that helps children with learning disabilities, such as communication, social/emotional needs and behavioral disorders. The purpose of boardmaker is to help students be successful. Boardmaker comes in many different shapes and sizes. You can print visuals from your computer and you can also get a 30 day trial from boardmaker online.


Within the past couple of years, I have seen boardmaker become more popular in the classroom. It's very helpful to children in the early ages of education and extremely helpful to students on the spectrum. Boardmaker is a collection of pictures and symbols used for communication. It’s a great visual tool to help students prepare in advance what will take place during the school day. The visuals can also be organized in the order that activities will take place.


Visual pictures allow students to make sense of the world around them. Children with disabilities don’t see things the same as a child that do not have a disability. Students who are not able to verbalize themselves us the boardmaker visual tool to help them understand and verbalize themselves.

Some examples are listed below of boardmakers. You can customize them to each individual student.

What I find to be helpful is to cut out each visual and place velcro on the back of each picture so that I can create a customized chart of the daily schedule for students and change it each day.

For students who can only process one or two step direction, I have created something a little more simpler so that they don’t feel overwhelmed which is posted below.

                                                                  Two step directions

                                                                        Three step directions




Reflection:
Boardmaker is a great tool for students with disabilities. The visuals available is a way for teachers to communicate to students and students to communicate with teachers. It’s important for teachers to do whatever they can in order to provide all students with the opportunity to be successful. I have realized that if I customize the boardmaker with actual pictures of the student, they respond better. They are able to process the information better by seeing themselves in the picture and are ready for the next step.

I believe that Boardmaker is a great tool for students with disabilities, but I also feel that boardmaker is a great tool for all students, especially students in the early grades that can not read. If they are able to see the visual picture with the words beneath the picture they will be able to learn to read and at the same time they will know their next direction or schedule by looking at the picture. This should be a world wide tool throughout the school system and not just for kids with disabilities. This is my thought!

Assessments/Communication with Parents

Assessments are important in order for teachers to help students learn. Useful assessments allows teachers to teach correct instruction. Assessments allows teacher to review students knowledge and performance base. This helps us to provide feedback to students in order for them to be successful in their future learning. It also provides motivation for students to want to do better.

Communication between teachers and parents take part in different ways. Communication can take place face to face, phone or through technology. I remember always receiving communication from my teacher over the summer by mail. Today, with technology we can send a simply welcome email to parents and students. There are so many different technology applications available for teachers and parents to communicate.

If we use technology to communicate to parents should we still have parent- teacher conferences? Eliminating parent-teacher conferences could be a controversial question. As a Kindergarten teacher we continue to have face to face parent teacher conferences at least once a year. Back and forth communication helps improve academic performance. Using technology to communication is a great way to enhance the communication that students and teachers have with parents. Technology should not replace human contact in education. It’s so important to remember that relationships are built on communication.

Communication technology with parents is helpful if we are able to include assessments in the communication for parents to see the progress of their child. Below are some communication applications used among parents and teachers that includes assessments

• Dojo Messenger
• Bloomz
• Parent Square
• Seesaw
• Bulb
• Weebly
• Sesame
• Freshgrade

I choose to use the Seesaw application in my classroom.

Seesaw is a free digital platform application for teachers, families and students. It’s a platform that allows students to independently document their learning and forward it to their parents to view. Students are able to take pictures, draw, write, record videos and capture learning. Seesaw is also a great way for teachers and parents to see the progress of students work. Teachers are able to refer to past activities and see how each child has progressed through the year.

What is nice about this application as you can see above is that you can add family members to the account in order for them to see your child's work and progress in school.  Seesaw also does a very good job on explaining to teachers and parents on how to use the application.  For students it's easier if the teacher demonstrates on how the application works. 

I also like how Seesaw sends out weekly emails which shows how often the application is being used.  It breaks it down for the week and also from the beginning of the year.  This allows me to see how often students and parents are actual using the application.  

Students need to be taught how to use this Seesaw application and what options it provides. Students start off by learning the Seesaw symbol so that they can easily locate it on the iPad.

Once they locate the Seesaw symbol they tap on it and it brings them to another screen that provides them with many different options.

Once students become familiar with the application they become very excited to be able to use technology in order to communicate with their parents while in school. They begin to take photos of their work and send it to their parents.

Literacy Photo 

                                                                   Drawing Photo


Parents are able to view their child's work or any post their child is tagged. Prior to parents seeing what their child is sending them it needs to get approved by the teacher. The reason for this is to make sure the child sent the request to the correct person. Parents are also able to view comments made from other parents on the post. To protect children, parents are not able to access any other students content unless they are tagged with their child.

Teachers are able to add announcements and document students work toward a goal.

Teachers are also able to create activities on Seesaw. Below is a YouTube video demonstrating to teachers on how to create a new activity. 

 
Reflection:

This application is very easy to use for teachers, parents and students. Below is a video on how quickly a student is able to take a photo of a lego piece he created and send it to his parents. Students really enjoy using this application on our classroom iPads. 

As you can see in the video the student taps on the Seesaw application.  He then clicks on the plus sign which brings him to the screen with different options.  The student decides to click on the camera which will allow him to take a photo of his lego piece.  He takes his picture and then clicks on done.  It then brings him to a screen with all the students names in the classroom. He clicks on his name which allows him to forward the picture to his parents.  As a teacher, I will see on my side of the application that he took this picture and would like to send it to his parents.  I approve the request and shortly after it's delivered to his parents.  

Parents get excited when their child sends them photos, videos or pictures while they are in school. They are able to see what they are doing and learning in school and also they are able to monitor their childs progress throughout the year.  It's also a great way for parents to see how quickly they become familiar with an iPad to use technology for communication.  

 

Students as Researchers

Students as Researchers

It’s important for teachers to provide the appropriate tools for students to be successful. Research for young Kindergarten students should be fun and engaging. What better way for students to be engaged than for them to research a topic that interests them.

I need to first explain to my students what I mean to research a topic. When you have a topic that you are interested in learning more about you research that topic by collecting information. You investigate the topic through research in order to gather materials and true facts about the topic.

I also discuss with my students plagiarism and what it means. Plagiarism is someone else’s work presenting it as your own. As students you need to write things in your own words and not copy someone else’s words, that is what you called plagiarism.


Steps that I discuss with my students:

• Clarify: what is it that you would like to learn more about?
• Search: we will search for information through books, video, social networks, read alouds and google search engines from your iPad
• Evaluate: is the information you have received what you're looking for and is it a true fact? (I went over a poster that explains how to evaluate a website and posted it in the classroom for students to use as a reference)
• Questions: ask yourself good questions, is the information going to answer your questions is it the only source?
• Cite: where does the information come from? How can you write your search information in your own words? (paraphrase or summarize)
• Help: don’t be afraid to ask for help with your topic. Ask a teacher, librarian or social networks, these are all wonderful resources.

When researching with the iPads helpful things students should understand:

• Use quotation marks if you want keywords in an exact order
• If you are not able to write the word correctly that you want to research it’s ok. Google search engine will often understand what your trying to say
• Lastly, students need to understand that each students result may be different if they are searching the same topic. It all depends on what search engine they are using. 

This research assignments take several weeks. I begin with the understanding of research listed above. Once all my students have a good understanding of how research is done we can begin with a question.

What is it that you would like to learn more about?

Together we came up with a list of ideas that I wrote on my white board. See below:

As you can see from our list, students have a very wide range of ideas that they were interested in researching more about.

I then asked my students to return to their seats and complete the KWL chart about the topic that they are interested in learning more about. (picture below)

Above is an example of a KWL that a student wanted to know more about cheetahs. All students need to complete a KWL chart for their research project. This allows me to see what students already know, what students wonder and what they want to learn more about. What they learned comes at the end when they have completed all their research. KWL chart is a great way to start a research project with young children.


Students begin their research by using our classroom library to find books on their topics. If they didn’t find what they were researching they take a walk to our school library. If was interesting to see how many students went directly to the book area and how many went to the iPad.

                              Google Search                                Book with true facts research


Students who used the iPad did an easy Google search on their topic.

                                Youtube search                                      Google search

Once students have gathered all their research and information they can put all their writing down on paper to create a book. They can also go back to their KWL chart and fill out what they have learned about their topic. To make things fun for students I told them they could choose how they wanted to present their research to their parents and peers. They could create a poster or a Fun Fact book.

The poster above was created by a student who wanted to learn more about technology. All her research was done with the iPad.

The Fun Facts book listed above was created by a student who wanted to learn more about lions. As you can see he was able to come up with several different true facts about lions from his research.

He wrote:

• Male lions carry their cubs with there mouth.
• The lion goes to eat first. Lions eat grass trees. Lions chase their prey. Lions work together to hunt their prey.
• They have manes. The lion's skin blend in to the grass. They have good smell they can smell three miles away.
• Lions are the biggest cats ever. They have red eyes.
• Lions have sharp teeth to bite their prey. They roar to scare animals away.
• Lions hide in tall grass to hunt prey.
• Lions have floppy tails.
• Lions keep baby lions in there home.
• Lions tail other lions.
• Lions get about 6 feet tall.
• Baby lions stay with their father. 
• Female lions hunt the prey.
• Lions hide in the grass.
• Manes protect lions when they fight.
• Lion's whiskers get about 5 inches long. 

Reflection:

During this entire research project I was able to observe students researching and engaged in their topic. They enjoyed doing the work, taking ownership of their work and it was fun. They learned a lot about their topic and how to research their topic.

Below are some other great website search engine applications that are helpful for young children.

Global Citizens

Global Citizens

Global citizen begins in the classroom with connections and collaboration with peers and expands outside of the classroom and around the world. Global citizen allows students with the opportunity to grow global empathy. Empathy in the classroom provides students with a positive experience. It builds positive culture and helps students to work with others in order to bring the community together.

Students with empathy are able to learn to understand each other and build thrusting friendships. In the classroom we have students of all different cultures. We have students from China and Serbia. These students are ELA students. Their social economic background is different from ours which helps us to build stronger empathy skills. As a teacher we play an important role for students. We help students develop and display empathy. It’s important for us to us to be able to equip our young students to be future leaders of our communities and way beyond.

Global citizen takes place through academics, social curricula, local, national, global initiative and collaboration with partnerships with other schools.

Read aloud is a way for students to see the world around us. Students are able to listen to stories and see how other students live in other countries. This also allows students to understand events taking place around the world and reflect on how they feel about what other students are facing.

I want my students to have the opportunity to collaborate and interact with other children around the world. I am fortunate enough to have a little cousin in Italy the same age as my students. It makes sense for me to teach my students a culture that I’m very familiar with and speaks the language fluently. I speak Italian fluently and I also can write in Italian. I have traveled to Italy many times and also studied Italian in school for eight years. I am able to teach my students about my culture and extend their learning by collaborating with other children in Italy.

I start off by reading a book to my students about Italy and the Italian culture. This is a great way to demonstrate the connections between the Italian culture and the culture in America.

After we read the book we put a list together of things we learned about Italy from the book.

Italian Traditions

• Anytime you walk into an establishment you always greet with a hello.
• Families eat together at large tables
• Opera is popular in Italy (opera tells stories using music and song to create an emotional reaction from the audience)
• Soccer is a popular sport in Italy
• Italy is shaped like a boot.
• Italians kiss on both cheeks
• Italians are known for pasta, pizza, cheese and good food.
• Roma is the capital of Italy
• Color of the Italian flag (red, white, green)

I made sure that my students had access to many different books about Italy.

The next day during morning meeting I had my students greet each other in Italian by shaking their friends hand and saying “Buon Giorno” which means good morning. Buon Giorno is a formal way of saying hello. An informal way would be “ciao”. You would say ciao to a friend or family member. Ciao can be used as both hello or goodbye.

I also show my students an application called Google Earth in which we can find a specific location in Italy. I’m going to focus their attention to a little town called Avellino in Italy. Avellino is where my family comes from and it’s located in Southern Italy is surrounded by mountains. There are approximately 55,000 thousand people that live in Avellino.

Comparisons:

6.9 million people in Massachusetts

685,094 people in Boston, Massachusetts in which Boston is the MA capital and largest city

New York, has 8.623 million people

Chicago has 2.716 million people

Another way for students to learn more about the Italian culture is through a Youtube video. A fun video that is age appropriate is called, “Italy Facts for Kids-Cool, Fun Italy Facts!’

During writers workshop students wrote about what they learned about Italy and drew pictures. I

played Italian music in the background for students from an application called Radio Garden.

Every culture has their own type of music. In America we have rap, jazz, country, rock, classical and hip hop. In Italy they also have similar music such as pop, classical, rock, hip hop and opera. Music unifies all races and has been used throughout the world for enjoyment, pleasure and different occasions.

Playing music in the background with students are working really helps students with stress, performance, making them feel happier, helps with learning and memory skills and it is relaxing. Someone once said, “music can change the world because it can change people”.

Lastly, global citizen really takes off when you are able to communicate with other students from a different countries. I explained to my students that we are going to build a relationship with a little six year old boy that lives in Avellino, Italy. I have already showed them on Google Earth whereabouts he lives. We are going to communicate with him through an application called WhatsApp.

WhatsApp is a free application that you can download onto your iPhone or computer. You can send text messages, voice messages, video, photo, voice call or video calls. It’s a great application that allows me to stay connected with my family and friends in Italy.

Students and I communicate with Angelo from Italy several times throughout the year. He is a six year old boy who attends Kindergarten. We teach each other different things. My Kindergarteners taught him how to count 1-10 in English. Angelo taught my students how to count 1-10 in Italy.

Uno, due, tre, quattro, cinque, sei, sette, otto, nove, dieci

Reflection:

I really enjoyed teaching my students about a different country and language.  Technology makes this all possible for us.  Students learned so much in just a few weeks.  They enjoyed being able to watch YouTube videos and communicating with children in Italy.  I feel that we need to bring the fun back into learning.  When students are enjoying what they are learning, it has more meaning for them.