The first thing I explored related to Google drawings was Eric Curts' Create Your Own Story Cubes with Google Drawings. It was a cinch to download his templates and incorporate them into one of my already existing lesson plans about the basic elements of fiction. I can easily push the templates out to my students through Google classroom and give them a choice of words, pictures, or emojis. The story cubes make it easy to differentiate learning for non-readers, non-writers, and English Language Learners. Students can either write or verbally tell a story with prompts from the cubes which have either words or pictures. Next, I looked into creating badges in Google drawings that I could award to my students through Google classroom. Michelle Luhtala and Brenda Boyer have successfully used badges to help motivate students and provide feedback, but they use a feature embedded in Moodle. To assign digital badges to students through Google Classroom involves a two-step process of creating the badges in Google drawings and awarding the badges through a Google sheets add-on called "Magical Digital Badges." Creating the awards in Google drawing is not too difficult, although I had to Google some steps to get the job done. The Google sheets add-on is very cumbersome at this point. I don't think most educators will take the time to figure it out. Hopefully, Google Classroom will have this feature embedded in the future.
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The Information Management & Technology department at the Rochester City School District is rolling out a new platform that will make it easier than ever for students, faculty and staff to access databases and other frequently used resources! Users can sign into ROConnect and automatically get into a myriad of platforms without having to enter a second set of usernames and passwords. These virtual dashboards are tailored to each school so that a subscription paid for by my school (e.g., PebbleGo) appears here but not when someone from another school signs in. I expect we will see a bump in usage for our databases because of this very handy tool. Also, the ability for students to log in to Destiny and use additional features has been made much simpler! I chose to explore this topic because I wanted to pick up some pointers for helping students understand what databases are and why students should use research databases. Also, I hoped to find some lesson plans ideas for teaching databases and discover new databases to use with my students.
What databases are, why we should use them, and how to teach them
I explored the full list of Databases for Elementary School Students on the NYPL website, but I found the Flix series to be the most useful for my purposes.
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AuthorCarol Satta Archives
May 2019
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