Edmonds Digital Learning

In the third grade, I was involved in an uncomfortable relationship with my teacher's chalkboard. Speaking without raising a hand, accidentally tearing a blue ditto worksheet, or any number of other relatively minor infractions led to her drawing a small circle on the board. The dissident student was called to the front of the class and instructed to put her/his nose in the center. If the incident was deemed especially heinous, the student would be called to the board before the circle was drawn so the teacher could sketch it just high enough that the perpetrator would be forced to stand tip-toed to serve out the sentence. To this day, I'm not a fan of the smell or the feeling of chalk. Starting my teaching career, chalkboards made way for whiteboards and such punitive procedures were, thankfully, deemed barbaric. Nonetheless, whiteboard marker tips were notorious for getting pushed in and, if erased by human hands, the boards started looking nasty alarmingly quickly. ...

Hello, all you Google Classroom users! If you've signed into Classroom in the past few weeks, you'll have noticed a slew of changes. As a matter of fact, the entire interface looks different and, for the most part, these updates improve the overall experience for both teachers and students. As Aladdin would say, Classroom has entered, "A whole new world!" So, let's fly through some of these updates and don't you dare close your eyes! First, what's all the buzz about Topics ? Organizing assignments into Topics will make life way easier for students. You no longer need to have multiple Classrooms for each subject area. Instead, use one Classroom and create a Topic for each subject. Each Topic will have its own heading that you can drop your assignments into. No longer will you have a long stream of assignments dating back to September, now assignments will be broken into sections that will be easy for students to find! Cool, but I can't find t...

If you’re looking for engaging digital books for beginning readers of all ages, check out the website Unite for Literacy . I was working with Quyen Terry, a fabulous ELL teacher, this morning and she introduced me to this amazing resource. This site has a wide variety of picture books celebrating many languages and cultures. Most books can be translated and narrated in at least two languages! There are many genres of interest to beginning readers such as, animals, plants, creating things, zoos and aquariums to name a few! Check it out and add it to your 3x3 Links page for students to access easily. If you want more info about creating your own 3x3 Links page, contact your elementary instructional tech coach !

Topic: Integrating Google Apps for Education (GAfE) with the writing process.  Videos of three teachers were featured at Thursday, March 3rd's CLP meeting discussing how they are integrating Google Classroom and Docs into the writing process. Watch the videos to hear how these teachers use GAfE to organize materials, conference with students and increase student engagement in the writing process.   Jason Aillaud, 5th grade at Cedar Valley Community School Mike Ochoa, Edmonds Elementary 6th grade Tom White, Lynnwood Elementary 4th Grade