... This blog shares a recent adventure where I was forced to overhaul a digital activity in a matter of minutes ... I am hoping this inspires teachers to believe that even when things go "wrong", we can learn and improve our craft moving forward. ...
One of the best parts of my job is working directly with students. I have regularly scheduled appointments with kindergarten classes in my district and they are the inspiration for many of the activities I share here. In December, I had one such time scheduled but had to do some quick thinking, thanks to a hiccup with logging in!
Just before I went to the class, I was trouble-shooting an issue for a middle school teacher and discovered I couldn't log in on a chromebook. I had to put this mystery to the side and go to the class. As the first students were using their QR codes to log in, I thought to myself, "I wonder if they can log in - it's different than our older students?" Nope! The issue Google was having that day prevented ALL students from logging in. And if the kindergarteners couldn't log in, they couldn't access the activity I'd posted in Google Classroom for them. Arghhhh!
I did some quick thinking and I'm excited to share that what we ended up doing was amazing!
Thankfully, desktops were not impacted by Google's hiccup with logging in, so I asked the teacher if she minded if we used her projector and desktop. Of course she didn't! She has a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, so I brought them over to the projector and carpet where students could easily see. Rather than each student doing the Gingerbread activity, we did it collaboratively!
After a quick - but specific - lesson on the teachers keyboard and what direction the arrows move (Hey! We tucked in a little left v right and up v down) Students came up one at a time and used the arrow keys to move the pieces on the activity and then choose a classmate to move the next piece. The students in the audience cheered on the one who was moving the piece.
I was very impressed with our alternate activity! The specific learning of the arrows, the thinking students did using the projector as a giant computer, taking turns, choosing a classmate to go next, left v right, all while doing a Google Slides activity I had intended for them to do on their own.
I actually learned a great deal during this - I had never given thought to teaching this way. And I found I LOVED it and found it to be much more effective than having students just jump in. And I loved it so much that I repeated the Gingerbread activity with a different class the same way - even though the login hiccup was fixed by then.
What did I learn from this?
- I learned that I still have a lot TO learn!
- Doing the activity I had designed to work on students' ability to move items with the arrow keys worked great as a collaborative activity and probably should be the FIRST step in teaching the littles how to move items around.
- I also reaffirmed that tech doesn't have to be 1:1 in order to be effective learning ... the collaboration and cheering on the students did as their classmate moved a piece around was awesome!
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