Author: Admin

[Editor’s note: This piece is the first in our new monthly series focusing on Innovative School Libraries and Librarians. Be sure to keep checking back during the month of August for new library-focused articles!]

The Barrow Peace Prize is a cross-curricular project that allows 2^nd-grade students to consider the character traits of peace and extend their voices to a global audience.

Named for our school, David C. Barrow Elementary, the project begins with each student selecting one of six nominees from civil rights history to research. They then create a persuasive video essay as well as a watercolor painting showing why their chosen nominee best displays the qualities of peace. The videos are voted on by people from all over the world, and the nominee with the most votes (and the students who researched them) is awarded the Barrow Peace Prize.

This project comes after students have studied Jimmy Carter and Martin Luther King Jr., and gives them an opportunity to explore additional historical figures beyond what is specifically listed in our standards. Each year, I begin by sharing Alfred Nobel: The Man Behind the Peace Prize by Kathy-Jo Warginalong with information on the Nobel Peace Prize. I also read Peace Is an Offering by Annette Lebox. Each classroom brainstorms a list of traits that someone would need to exhibit in order to be worthy of the prize.

Teaching Basic Technological Skills

Every year when we start this project, I’m overwhelmed by just how many technical skills are woven in.

Our students mostly use iPads in kindergarten and 1^st grade, so this is their first use of a laptop for a project. We share a Google Doc graphic organizer in Google Classroom, so students must learn how to log in to their Google account, access Google Classroom, and open their document. They also must learn to navigate multiple tabs online, since they will have Google Classroom, PebbleGo, and their Google doc all open at the same time.

I show students how to copy and paste from digital resources, cite sources, and put information into their own words. I also show them how to use Google Explore to search for public domain images to use for their art project. Students have some familiarity with Flipgrid by 2^nd grade, but sometimes they do need support to navigate typing in their code and recording their videos.

Two students are selected to design the peace prize in  3D, and I show them how to use Tinkercad and sit with them while they design to offer troubleshooting tips.

Even though it can be a challenge to use all of these new skills with young learners, they prove again and again that they can do it. If they start using these tools now, it will only strengthen the kind of work we can do together in later grades, when they have their own device.

One of the databases our students use for research is PebbleGo. Designed for students in the younger grades, it offers a quality base of facts about a variety of topics, which are broken down into manageable sections under each heading. We use many of the headings to craft our graphic organizer questions so that students are able to navigate the information related to the question.

(Next page: Embracing all students; a global audience; strengthening the community)

Embracing the Talents of Every Student

The cross-curricular nature of the Barrow Peace Prize gives students opportunities to shine in different areas.

Some students design amazing pieces of art to represent their nominee. Other students are detail-oriented, so they shine by sharing the many facts they have found. Some students have a gift for persuasive writing, so their talents come through as they write convincing reasons for people to vote. Other students are great speakers, so they show their personality through their videos.

Every single student is engaged in the project in some way.

I think students surprise themselves during this project. For example, I’ve seen students who have said, “I’m not a great artist,” and then they suddenly create a beautiful watercolor image that they had no idea was hiding inside them. Other students are more introverted and don’t like sharing in front of the whole class, but by using a tool like Flipgrid, students are able to speak to just the iPad. This allows their voice to be heard in a way that it might not be heard in the classroom. I also think students surprise themselves by the amount of work that they put into the project across several weeks. Many times, students finish an assignment within a class or a few days.

The Barrow Peace Prize pushes them to persevere through a long project.

Speaking to a Global Audience

Alan November says, “An audience of one, the teacher, is no longer sufficient in preparing students for success in a global economy.”

From day one of the project, we talk about audience. We look at past projects and show students how their work would be viewed by people all over the world. This year, I showed them pictures of classes in Weatherford, Texas; and Seattle, Washington, viewing student work from last year.

In the library, students used Flipgrid to record a video where they read their persuasive essay and displayed their watercolor image. As each student recorded, their video uploaded to a grid with all of the other 2^nd-grade students researching that same person. After recording, I made a Smore page with links to all six Flipgrids featuring student voices. I embedded a Google form so that anyone could vote on who they thought should win the Barrow Peace Prize. I shared the link on multiple forms of social media, with our families via email and newsletters, and with the students and teachers in our school. The 2^nd grade also presented the project at our schoolwide assembly and asked other students to vote.

This year’s project Smore was viewed in more than 150 locations around the world. The students accumulated more than 3,000 views of their videos, hundreds of likes, and hundreds of votes. Every student had a voice in the project, no matter if they were in general education, special education, gifted, English as a second language, or early-intervention programs.

One of the biggest benefits that I’ve seen through this project is student motivation. I think back to other traditional assignments where students repeatedly said, “I’m done,” or “How long does this have to be?” or “Do I have to do this?” With this project, those comments pretty much disappeared. Students are motivated when they know their work has a genuine audience. They see the maps of visitors to the projects, the number of views, and the number of likes that previous 2^nd-grade classes have received, and they know that their work must be their absolute best. They suddenly feel a sense of pride and fame before they’ve even started the project.

We saw students who would normally write minimal amounts during writing time suddenly writing full persuasive pieces—because they knew people would listen. Students respond to knowing that their voice matters in the world.

As the project comes to a close, we connect with the developers of PebbleGo and Flipgrid to celebrate our work. Both companies talk to students via Skype about how their voices make an impact in the work. They also stress how much they learn from students about the effectiveness of their products and how they support student voice in schools.

Strengthening the School Community

When we announce the winner of the peace prize, students know that their collective voices from across the whole 2^nd grade came together to make that person win. It wasn’t one student’s voice alone.

At the end of the project, we celebrate various students with awards for their speaking, writing, research, and art. Every time we award one of these individual prizes, the entire grade cheers. It’s at that moment that I can tangibly see how this project strengthens the student community.

Families are also connected to this project, because they get to see their child’s work and share it with extended family around the world. Parents who can’t come to the school for the awards ceremony due to work can still see the project and participate. So often, extended family members miss out on the great work happening in a child’s classroom, but this project allows them to view the work from anywhere in the world and interact with the project through voting and sharing.

The Barrow Peace Prize is one of the projects that I showcase not only when I speak around the country, but also when planning new projects with the teams in my school. It weaves together digital literacy, information literacy, public speaking, reading, writing, art, social studies, character development, student voice, global collaboration, and more. It has a balanced mix of print and digital content, and it brings an entire grade level together to work toward a common goal, rather than being in individual competition.

Because we’ve been so public with this project, other libraries and schools have already started similar projects, so our students are able to see that something they create can have an impact on people around the world. Through projects like this, we can teach our students that their voice matters.

I oversee a portfolio of nine turnaround schools, all of which had an overall rating of F when ACCEL Schools first took them over two years ago. This means that, on average, fewer than 30 percent of students were proficient. As a charter organization in Ohio, our schools receive 40 percent to 60 percent less funding than traditional schools, because charters in Ohio rarely, if ever, get local funding. This means we don’t have the budget to radically restaff our schools.

When we started with these schools, I faced a high level of skepticism among the principals. They had been bombarded with change for change’s sake, so their trust in leadership had eroded.

The mindset was, “If I keep my head low enough, everything will pass and I’ll be fine.” To show that the climate had changed, the first thing we did was a book study on Mindset to get them reflecting on their own willingness and openness to be pushed, grow, and improve. This quest to improve is expected from all of our teachers, so it was critical that our principals shared that sacred belief.

Then we started the multi-year process of showing these principals what good leadership looks like and how they can become the leaders who will turn their schools around.

Summer 1: School Redesign Project

In their first summer with us, the principals took part in a four-week Summer Institute, during which they completed a school redesign project. Our aim was for them to focus only on academics and school culture, so we took nonessential tasks off their plate. Our back office handled operational compliance and reporting work so principals could put their energy into distilling what was truly core to them and effectively planning to operationalize it.

This laser focus on the key elements of school turnaround continued throughout the school year.

We asked them to explain why and how they would work with their existing teachers to make their plans a reality for students, family, and teachers throughout the year. Each principal set the vision and mission for their own building-crafting, refining, and articulating what was core to them as it related to their school’s culture and academic framework.

(Next page: Redesigning the academic year for amazing principals)

Academic Year 1: Learning Content, Understanding Coaching

We supported each of our principals based on collaborative goals, which meant that sometimes we were doing nine different things at nine different schools. To support this personalized approach, we provided all of our principals individual coaching with consultants from Insight Education Group. Sometimes we had consultants on site, sometimes the communication was via phone or email.

We inherited our current principals from a toxic environment, and we needed the coaching relationship to be sacred and protected. We wanted someone from the outside who was not doing evaluation and who gave me no line of sight into the conversations. The focus was on building our principals’ leadership skills and increasing their familiarity with the coaching model-something they were expected to replicate with their teachers.

Very few of our teachers had been exposed to a high-performing, robust, and appropriate coaching relationship, so in our principal PD we modeled coaching for them in real time. We expected teachers to get a coaching meeting every week, and I wanted our principals to have that same sort of coaching themselves. I also checked in weekly with every principal.

During their first academic year, our principals were a leadership team of one. They had no dedicated instructional coach, instead sharing a coach with one or two other schools. The instructional coaches exposed principals to strong teacher coaching, and also spotted instructional issues that we addressed during optional evening PD sessions once or twice a month.

Like our teachers, the majority of our principals had not worked in high-performing schools, so we exposed them to the pillars of best practice through professional development and coaching. Our theory of action is rooted on the belief that principal effectiveness improves student performance, which improves enrollment, which in turn gives principals the funding they need to eventually build out their leadership team.

Academic Year 2: A Pivot to Content-Based PD

After completing a second summer institute, each principal got his or her own instructional coach, doubling the size of the building’s leadership team. Some principals responded better to structured professional development settings than coaching or mentoring, so in year 2 we used our coaching resources as part of a mapped sequence of traditional PD.

Now that our principals understood coaching and had an instructional coach at their campus, we pivoted to content-based, outcome-focused PD. I think of year 2 as a step function, with each formal PD event followed by coaching so that principals constantly build on what they learn.

Our ultimate goal is to empower each principal so that every school in the system operates on its own, financially and in terms of leadership capacity. I believe we’ve made a good start: we have delivered on the culture and curricular shifts we had promised, and we have kept nonessential tasks off our principals’ plates. Those steps have earned us their trust, and our coaching and PD is giving them the skills they need to turn their schools around.

Our principals are excited about the support and the autonomy they get—and the accountability that comes with it

Today, Google is excited to announce 10 updates to Google Classroom and Google Forms designed to make teachers’ lives easier this school year.

We’ve seen educators do incredible things with G Suite for Education tools: creatively teach classroom material, collaborate with students, and design innovative assignments to achieve meaningful outcomes. Classroom is a useful tool for teachers, and since it launched three years ago, students have submitted more than 1 billion assignments.

This year, we’re sending teachers back to school with updates designed to help them do what they do best—teach. Today, we’re announcing 10 updates to Google Classroom and Google Forms to help teachers save time and stay organized.

1. Single view of student work: To help teachers track individual student progress, we’ve created a dedicated page for each student in Classroom that shows all of their work in a class. With this new view, teachers and students can see the status of every assignment, and can use filters to see assigned work, missing work, or returned and graded work. Teachers and students can use this information to make personalized learning decisions that help students set goals and build skills that will serve them in the future.

2. Reorder classes: Teachers can now order their classes to organize them based on daily schedule, workload priorities or however will help them keep organized throughout the school year. And students can use this feature too. “For teachers and students, organization is important, and being able to reorder class cards allows us to keep our classes organized in a simple and personalized way,” notes Ross Berman, a 7th and 8th grade math teacher. “Students can move classes around so that the first thing they see is the class they know they have work for coming up.”

3. Decimal grading: As teachers know, grading is often more complicated than a simple point value. To be as accurate with feedback as possible, educators can now use decimal points when grading assignments in Google Classroom.

4. Transfer class ownership: Things can change a lot over the summer, including who’s teaching which class. Now, admins and teachers can transfer ownership of Google Classroom classes to other teachers, without the need to recreate the class. The new class owner can get up to speed quickly with a complete view of past student work and resources in Drive. 

5. Add student profile picture on mobile: Today’s students log a lot of hours on their phones. Soon, students will be able to make changes to their Classroom mobile profiles directly from their mobile devices too, including changing their profile picture from the Google Classroom mobile app. Ready the selfies!

6. Provision classes with School Directory Sync: Google School Directory Sync now supports syncing Google Classroom classes from your student or management information system using IMS OneRoster CSV Admins can save teachers and students time by handling class setup before the opening bell.

7. New Classroom integrations: Apps that integrate with Classroom offer educators a seamless experience, and allow them to easily share information between Classroom and other tools they love. Please welcome the newest A+ apps to the #withClassroom family: Quizizz, Edcite, Kami and coming soon, org.

8. Display class code: Joining Google Classroom classes is easier than ever thanks to this new update. Teachers can now display their class code in full screen so students can quickly join new classes.

9. Sneak Peak! Import Quizzes in Google Forms scores into Classroom: Using Quizzes in Google Forms allows educators to take real-time assessments of students’ understanding of a topic. Soon, teachers will be able to import grades from Quizzes directly into Google Classroom.

10. Add feedback in question-by-question grading in Quizzes: More than test grades, meaningful feedback can improve learning. At ISTE this year, we launched question-by-question grading in Quizzes in Google Forms to help teachers save time by batch grading assessments. We’re taking it one step further and now, teachers will have the option to add feedback as well.

As educators head back to school, we want our newest Classroom teachers to get the most out of their experience. In the coming weeks, we’ll be launching a new resource hub to help teachers get set up on their first day of Classroom. If you’re already a Classroom pro, help your fellow teachers by sharing your favorite Classroom tips, tricks, resources and tutorials on social media using the hashtag #FirstDayofClassroom. Stay tuned on Twitter this Back to School season for more.

From all of us here at Google, we wish you a successful start to the school year! We hope these Google Classroom and Forms updates help you save time, stay organized and most importantly, teach effectively during back to school and beyond.

As computer science education grows across the nation, many states are making it a core subject and are counting it toward math and science requirements.

But progress across states varies. Here’s a look at how two different states, California and Maine, are faring in their computer science efforts.

In California, some think the state’s progress to make computer science a graduation requirement is too slow. An editorial in the San Diego Union-Tribune says the state’s is displaying “astounding lethargy” in its efforts to increase access to computer science.

And in Maine, the Portland Press Herald notes that “not too long in the future, almost all jobs will require some fundamental skill with computing, and many of the best new jobs will require a mastery of it. Yet computer science remains a subject on the periphery – if it is covered at all – in most Maine high schools, where students should be getting their first taste of this high-opportunity field.”

(Next page: Two editorials, both focusing on computer science)

California moving too slowly on computer science graduation requirements

The San Diego Union-Tribune

In a June 1998 commencement speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, President Bill Clinton called for computer literacy to be a high school graduation requirement and declared that training should begin in middle school to ensure students had early exposure to invaluable tech job skills. Clinton made a powerful case that mandatory computer training was not only crucial to the American economy but a potent tool to address inequality by giving impoverished minority children a path to lucrative and satisfying careers and lives.

Clinton’s proposal won cheers from high-tech firms in Silicon Valley, in Boston’s Route 128 tech corridor and from the Microsoft tech hub in Seattle. It got little if any reaction from most corners of the education community.

Nineteen years later, this astounding lethargy continues. As of September, according to the Education Commission of the States, computer science could be used to fulfill mathematics, science or foreign language graduation requirements in 20 states, but only Virginia has decided to make computer science a graduation requirement. Given that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has forecast a shortage of 1 million computer science graduates by 2024 — and given that a comprehensive 2016 survey showed college graduates majoring in computer science had the highest starting salaries — this amounts to institutional malfeasance on a staggering scale.

Click here for the full story

Maine high schools should offer computer science courses

Portland Press Herald

Jobs in almost all fields will require proficiency by the time today’s youths enter the workforce.

Not too long in the future, almost all jobs will require some fundamental skill with computing, and many of the best new jobs will require a mastery of it. Yet computer science remains a subject on the periphery – if it is covered at all – in most Maine high schools, where students should be getting their first taste of this high-opportunity field.

School officials throughout the state, then, should be looking hard at a new initiative that is training teachers to integrate computer science into curricula – helping students build the skills to compete for the jobs of the 21st century. Two statewide groups – Educate Maine and the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance – are working with Code.org, a national nonprofit interested in expanding computer science education. This summer, the first class of 35 middle- and high-school teachers representing a wide range of subject areas will receive training – and ongoing support – to bring computer science programming to their schools. The plan is to educate a new class every year in order to build Maine’s capacity for computer education.

Students will need this foundational learning as they enter the workforce, as computer literacy becomes necessary for work in almost all fields, and technology becomes more and more integrated into industries like health care.

Click here for the full story

Laura Ascione is the Editorial Director at eSchool Media. She is a graduate of the University of Maryland’s prestigious Philip Merrill College of Journalism.

Latest posts by Laura Ascione (see all)

Recently, some of my colleagues went to the Imagine Cup, an annual technology and Innovation competition sponsored by Microsoft and held at their mammoth Redmond, Washington headquarters. The campus is so large that when one of my colleagues quietly called me during his initial tour, he told me that they were just now passing building #99.

This year’s competition featured 54 teams of college students from all over the world. The teams were a geographically diverse bunch, hailing from Russia, Nepal, Australia, Jordon, Romania, Sri Lanka and even a few countries that were probably geographically smaller than Microsoft’s 99+ building campus.

The Imagine Cup competition, and competitions like it, are so inspiring. This year’s competition, though large and very well done, is only a small representation of the vast amount of innovative talent out there who use technology to work together to solve many of the world’s future challenges.

While my colleagues were there, they interviewed several of the top contestants and some of the folks at Microsoft who were responsible for making the Imagine Cup happen. Dr. Rod Berger, our lead correspondent and one of the world’s top education news personalities, along with Producer/Director Jessi Scherr, brought back some amazing footage.

One of the contestants was a young woman from Nepal named Melisha Ghimire. Like two-thirds of the people living in Nepal, her family raises livestock. To put things into perspective, Melisha’s family is considered wealthy by local standards. They own about 45 animals. Ten years ago, the family suffered a devastating animal health disaster and lost over half their livestock to disease. Ten years later and the family is still getting back on its feet.

Melisha and her teammates from Nepal created a project called Echo Innovators. It’s a wearable device for livestock that monitors vital signs like a FitBit does for humans. The information is sent to the cloud, where animal health is analyzed for temperature, step count, stress levels, sleep patterns, pregnancy status and more. Machine learning results combined with an expert knowledge base provide actionable recommendations, sending that information back to farmers.

Melisha originally wanted to be a doctor, but was introduced to technology and she loved it. Fast forward a few years, and Melisha and her teammates have created a program that can potentially improve the economy of her country in a very significant way.

Talk about inspiring. It’s an example of the way our young people are using technology to work together to solve the world’s most pressing issues.

Another great example of youth innovation is the Conrad Spirit of Innovation Challenge. Each year, my friend Nancy Conrad, wife of the late astronaut Charles (Pete) Conrad, invites teams to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to present their ideas designed to benefit our world in one of four areas: Aerospace and Aviation, Cyber Technology and Security, Energy and the Environment, and Health and Nutrition. If you don’t know Nancy, she’s a force of nature. Tragically, she lost Pete 17 years ago in a motorcycle accident, but his spirit lives on through the works she does and through Nancy’s annual innovation competition.

Like the Imagine Cup, the Conrad Spirit of Innovation Challenge assembles some of the brightest young minds on the planet. High school students participate from all 50 states and 72 countries, and the competition touches over 100,000 students. This year, almost 35 percent were girls, and that number continues to climb through a concerted effort by Nancy and her team.

I am very inspired by our young people. Not only do they continue to exceed the expectations that we place on them, but they have almost an innate sense of responsibility to create enterprises that give back and make the world a better place.

It’s so easy to become discouraged, particularly when we are mired in a system of education that seemingly does not reward excellence. But every now and then, while we are dodging the bulleted challenges that come our way, it’s important to look up and see the incredibly bright and ambitious students whom we serve.

Sometimes, I think if we could just get out of their way, we’d be amazed at what they could do.

A recent chart from Bloomberg on the future of artificial intelligence and employment lends evidence to a point I have been making for years: teachers will not be replaced by machines.

The chart compares a wide array of professions based on required education levels, average annual wages, and likelihood of automation. Sure enough, elementary and secondary teachers are among the most educated yet least paid professionals; and their likelihood of automation: practically zero.

Yet the debate about machines replacing teachers rages on. Recent opinion pieces claim that teacher obsolescence is inevitable and something we should embrace. Fortunately, a recent article in the Economist gets the narrative right, pointing out that “the potential for edtech will be realized only if teachers embrace it.”

Research consistently shows that teachers are the most important school-level factor affecting student outcomes—and good teaching goes well beyond presenting information or grading assessments with discrete answers. But for teachers, the mountain of academic and non-academic tasks they must tackle each day often leaves them feeling like they can’t serve all of their students.

Fortunately, the future of learning technology is not replacing teachers, but amplifying their ability to meet the learning needs of their students. My hope—and the focus of my recent paper on this topic—is to shift the narrative of “teachers vs. machines” toward a more productive conversation. We need to start talking more about the best ways to integrate technology and teaching in order to amplify teachers’ impact.

Along those lines, here are two areas where technology can amplify teaching:

Reallocating Teachers’ Scarcest Asset: Time

Teachers have an ever-increasing list of tasks they must complete each day that often require them to stay late at school or take their work home. Fortunately, technology is increasingly able to do some of these tasks, such as take attendance, administer and grade assessments, deliver basic instruction, streamline lesson planning, and track student progress. By offloading these tasks to technologies such as MasteryConnect, Khan Academy, and Gooru, educators should be able to focus on the aspects of teaching that have the greatest impact on students: providing mentorship and guidance, offering expert feedback on student work that cannot be graded by machines, and engaging students in critical and analytical thinking.

Targeting Students’ Individual Learning Needs

Traditional teaching constrains teachers to one-size-fits-all lessons and pacing that make it hard to meet students’ individual needs. As a result, some students fall behind as the class moves forward without them, while other students finish all their work and become bored and disengaged as they wait for everyone else to catch up. Fortunately, technology offers a new alternative to the traditional model. Software can help teachers gather student learning data, analyze that data to pinpoint the daily strengths and struggles of each student, and then deploy various online, teacher-led, independent, and peer-to-peer learning experiences to target students’ idiosyncratic learning needs. When implemented correctly, teachers and software work in tandem to support student learning.

Teachers are indispensable to high-quality education. They give students expert feedback on how to reason, design, compose, and find creative solutions to problems. They create classroom cultures where academic inquiry is exciting and achievement is a shared ambition. They provide students with social and emotional support and coach them on managing both their daily tasks and their long-term dreams. These are roles that machines are unlikely to substitute for anytime soon.

Nonetheless, teachers need technology to help them meet the demands that stretch them to the limits of their human capacity.

Technology can do a great deal to support high-quality teaching. But we still have a way to go before technology significantly amplifies the impact of great teachers. The most important work in edtech over the next five to ten years will be figuring out how to design technology and redesign teaching so that technology and teaching become seamless complements in the work of serving students.

[Editor’s note: This piece was originally published on The Clayton Christensen Institute Blog.]

The 2017 Education Next annual survey of American public opinion on education shows public support for charter schools has dropped, even as opposition to school vouchers and tax credits for private-school scholarships has declined.

In a dramatic change of opinion over the past year, support for charter schools has declined by 12 percentage points, from 51 percent last year to just 39 percent this year (36 percent opposed). Support has fallen by 13 percentage points among Republicans and by 11 percentage points among Democrats, to 47 percent and 34 percent support respectively, leaving the partisan gap on the issue largely unchanged.

Opposition to private school choice declines despite partisan differences. Opposition to universal vouchers, which give all families a wider choice, has declined from 44 percent to 37 percent, while support for vouchers targeted to low-income parents has increased by six percentage points (43 percent in 2017 up from 37 percent in 2016).

(Next page: The “Trump Effect” on opinions about public education issues)

Technology is an incredible resource for learning. It connects us to people all over the world, it enables us to find answers to our questions with the click of a button, and it is versatile enough to be used by students of varying skill levels.

I have been teaching in a 1:1 classroom for four years at Washington Yu Ying Public Charter School. We started in 5^th grade when my colleague got a Khan Academy grant to purchase 12 Chromebooks to supplement the Chromebooks our school provided. We then did a Donor’s Choose project to purchase the remaining computers. We have 1:1 Chromebooks for each student in 4^th and 5^th grade, and we’re introducing 1:1 for 3^rd grade this year.

Within our 1:1 framework, we start by planning our units and lessons with the International Baccalaureate (IB) framework in mind, thinking about how our students will learn best. If it makes the most sense to use the Chromebooks to research or take notes, then that’s what we’ll do, but we also make sure that we have a variety of learning experiences each day. We are a highly collaborative school and 1:1 has helped us tremendously. Our PARCC scores have risen each year since we introduced 1:1 in 5^th grade.

These are My Tech Essentials for working in a 1:1 classroom environment:

1. Chromebook: You can’t have a 1:1 classroom without devices. We love the Google Chromebooks because they are easy for our students to use, and we can access all kinds of apps through the Google Play Store. We share resources through platforms such as Google Classroom. (Our students have a Google Classroom in both English and Chinese). We are also able to have our students type weekly essays, and we can give them feedback much more quickly than in the past.

2. Kids Discover Online: Digital curriculum like Kids Discover helps our students explore a range of topics that relate to our IB Units of Inquiry. We have units about conflict, water, human migration, industry, and chemistry. The Discover Maps make it easy for students to make connections across different areas of study, and to explore their own interests. Kids Discover also has a single-sign on feature that can be used with Google accounts.

3. Go Guardian: With a device in the hands of each student, we want to be sure they’re staying on-task and not wandering around the internet. The Go Guardian system sends us email alerts if a student is on an unapproved site. We also have students sign a technology agreement and use the IB’s learner profile to emphasize being principled online.

Students are already using so much technology at home in their free time, and they are incredibly creative with it. Through our 1:1 implementation, I have realized how important it is to use technology in a thoughtful way to enhance learning and to prepare students for the future.

The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) will leverage Digital Citizenship Week (Oct. 16-20) to raise awareness of the importance of teaching digital citizenship to students of all ages. ISTE challenges students, educators and parents to take time each day during Digital Citizenship Week to explore what it means to be good citizens in a digital world.

“The need to teach digital citizenship skills has never been greater. These skills include concepts like how to use tech to organize around good causes, how to respectfully disagree online, and how to distinguish between true and false information. As our interactions with friends, community members and government leaders become increasingly mediated by technology, we must model and teach the behaviors we hope to see in our next generation of digital leaders,” said ISTE CEO Richard Culatta.

ISTE is providing a number of resources to support schools and families in taking the Digital Citizenship Week challenge:

• Release of Digital Citizenship in Action: Empowering Students to Engage in Online Communities a book by Kristen Mattson, Ed.D., that focuses on the need for educators to think about digital citizenship as more than a conversation about online safety. Included are tips for creating digital spaces where students can experiment and grow, educator stories about successful participatory digital citizenship and classroom-ready activities.
• DigCit Coffee Break email course that gives educators a tip a day on digital citizenship, along with free resources to use in their schools, including a printable poster illustrating the three critical elements of digital citizenship.
• Free webinar for educators, “Bring Digital Citizenship to Life in Your School,” on Oct. 16 at 5 p.m. EDT will examine how to help students realize the potential of technology in engaging ways.
• Two digital citizenship Twitter chats on Oct. 19 that allow for engagement and sharing of best practices and resources. The first will be led by Marialice Curran, a leading voice in the digital citizenship conversation, at 8 p.m. EDT using the hashtag #ISTEChat. The second, hosted by ISTE’s Digital Citizenship professional learning network, will discuss the role of edtech coaches in the development of digital citizenship, at 9 p.m. EDT using the hashtag #digcit.

Digital Citizenship Week is a national effort focused on helping kids use technology to engage with and improve their communities. Follow the conversation on Twitter at #DigCitWeek.

About ISTE

The International Society for Technology in Education  is a nonprofit organization that works with the global education community to accelerate the use of technology to solve tough problems and inspire innovation. Our worldwide network believes in the potential technology holds to transform teaching and learning.

ISTE sets a bold vision for education transformation through the ISTE Standards, a framework for students, educators, administrators, coaches and computer science educators to rethink education and create innovative learning environments. ISTE hosts the annual ISTE Conference & Expo, one of the world’s most influential edtech events. The organization’s professional learning offerings include online courses, professional networks, year-round academies, peer-reviewed journals and other publications. ISTE is also the leading publisher of books focused on technology in education. For more information or to become an ISTE member, visit iste.org. Subscribe to ISTE’s YouTube channel and connect with ISTE on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Material from a press release was used in this report.