AACPS OIT Byte

This year Computer Science Education week runs from Friday, December 6th through the 12th. Hour of Code, one of their main events, kicks off Monday, the 9th. Hour of code encourages students to code for an hour to hone their skills, but it also allows teachers to discuss careers in coding and computer science how students can explore their interests and plan their path to achieve their goals. Below are several suggestions for how you can get your students involved in CS week or Hour of Code. Hour of Code Activities for PreK through high school. No coding experience necessary! Filter topics by grade level band and then by content to find something that works for your classroom. Topics include Art, Music, AI, Language Arts, Math, Science, Social Studies and more! Explore the Hour of Code library directly from Classlink. Minecraft Hour Of Code The 2024 theme is The Show Must Go On! Minecraft invites students to step into the theater to find the show’s missing star, unlock hidden gags, s...

  By: Koralina McKenna, OIT Academic Specialist Around this time of year I was always looking for something new and versatile to capture my students interest. I wanted something that I could use from simple things like one-pagers and then use later for their final projects. Which brings me to my absolute favorite tool on the OIT roster - Adobe Express! Whether you're having students create an infographic, one-pager, thinking map, video or presentation - Adobe Express has you covered. It’s simple and easy to use for any grade level, individual or in groups; it doesn’t matter if you start from a template or scratch what your students create will be polished and professional. Students will find exactly what they need from a robust image, video and audio libraries built right into the editor. Perhaps what is most conducive to building student capacity with Adobe Express is that the editor stays the same regardless of the type of project they create. Students can download their projects...

by Tracey Brown Instructional Technology Teacher Specialist      If you’ve spent any time around OIT lately, you have probably heard Tracey say it, there is no single bigger bang for your engagement buck than Minecraft Education in the classroom. Educators today can struggle to connect with students, inside and outside of the classroom. Smiles and greetings in the morning are met with a muffled grunt from inside of an oversized hoodie that presumably contains a student. If this is your reality then Minecraft can be the tool that wakes your students up and gets them actively engaging with you and each other, even if only for the duration of the lesson or project that utilizes the app. What Can My Students Do with Minecraft in the Classroom?      Minecraft Education can teach or reinforce content through worlds built by Minecraft experts and provided for educators and students from right inside of the app’s Library, but that isn’t usually where we suggest th...

By: Samantha Wilkinson, OIT Elementary Teacher Specialist Lumio by SMART is my recent app obsession. While I enjoy all of our apps, and they each have something special, Lumio has grabbed my attention recently. Why? Well, I love that I can record up to 5 minutes of audio per slide so students can hear the directions over and over without me sounding like a broken record. I love how I can change it from teacher paced to student paced at any point in the lesson. I love the ability to upload a PDF, or existing Google Slide and make it and independent activity, group activity, or even whole class whiteboard. I love that I can share ad-free YouTube videos with students. And obviously, I love the templates, graphic organizers, manipulatives, and dozens of pre-made resources. Pre-made and low prep is just working smarter. But the thing I love the MOST, my favorite thing, is Lumio's ability for teachers to edit ON THE FLY! I recently presented in Lumio at a school and I realized I wanted t...

 by Kerri Lambert, teacher specialist, AACPS Office of Instructional Technology Can you believe that Google Earth has been around for almost 20 years? Since debuting in 2005, hundreds of millions have pulled up that spinning globe, packed with all the wonders of the world…. and immediately looked up their address. (If you’ve never watched the comedian Michael McIntyre’s riff on this, do yourself a favor and Google it). As fun as it is to walk through your neighborhood in Street View, my favorite thing in Google Earth is the “I feel lucky button.” Simply click on the search box, and  below it pops up a little spinning dice beside the words “I’m feeling lucky.” Select it, and Google will automagically take you to some random place in the world. Once you’re there, you can view images of the location, zoom into Street view, and read about that location.  What’s so great about this is that it exposes students to a wide array of places and cultures that they may not have though...

When I think of my list of favorite Brightspace features, I’m immediately drawn to the possibilities for enhancing student feedback. Providing digital feedback isn't just tech-savvy; it's a game-changer for accessibility, ensuring students can easily access and benefit from personalized guidance. Brightspace rubrics shifted my feedback routine to incorporate images, audio, and videos, which increased student accessibility and engagement. Instead of just suggesting a student refer back to a particular content video or resource as feedback, I love the ability to link it directly in the rubric. This is all made possible through “Insert Stuff” and “Other Insert Options” within the criterion level descriptions and initial feedback. With these buttons, users can insert images (including Bitmojis!), insert existing audio/video content from the Media Library, or even link back to Assignments, Content, and more.                         ...

  Brightspace Spotlight Portfolio: Your New Filing Cabinet by Darren Towers, Office of Instructional Technology LMS Specialist If you have been around a while like me, you probably had a box or filing cabinet drawer to collect those key student samples throughout the year to create a portfolio. You know, the writing samples, art projects, or math and reading assignments from the beginning, middle, and end of the year. These samples were shared with parents, drove your instruction, and even influenced how you grade your students. This process was also used to show student growth - an essential part of the teaching and learning process.  As we grow as instructors we often adopt new ways of doing things...sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity. I am not here to discourage the collection of those hard copies, but to suggest a way to enhance how they are stored, shared, and used in your process. The filing cabinet still has its place, but just as we backup our music and photos...

We are often asked about our favorite digital instructional tools and while I could talk about the student engagement afforded through Minecraft Education, or the real-world connections made with Google Earth, or even the formative assessment tools built into Nearpod's Activities, my real favorite is a tool brought to us by Google Arts & Culture. Artwork Zoom Google partnered with museums and galleries to allow high definition photography of some of the most famous works of art. This means that viewing them on your screen can allow you to get closer and visualize more detail than you would be able to see if you were visiting that artwork live, in person. With zoom, students can go from this: Under the Yoke (Burning the Brushwood) Eero Järnefelt To this: The zoomed-in view allows us to examine how artists can capture emotion in their work. We could even begin with the zoomed-in view and ask the students to speculate about what the girl in the painting is thinking, or feeling, or...

by Tracey Brown, Instructional Technology Teacher Specialist Digital activities often involve multiple modes of information delivery, or mixed media, including text, images, and videos. In order to cover each in this post, we will provide one suggestion for making each more accessible for students; we’ll call it the MOST IMPORTANT consideration for each when we think about ensuring every student has equal access to our digital materials. Text The most important way to ensure that students have equal access to text is to ensure they know how to use speech-to-text tools. Many learners comprehend better by listening, or combining listening with reading. In AACPS, the web-based tool we have to read text aloud to students is the Read&Write extension . But because accessibility is such a big deal, many applications have their own dedicated speech-to-text tools, like Wixie, for example. Microsoft applications, like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Minecraft Education also include Immersive Re...

 by Tracey Brown, Instructional Technology Teacher Specialist Issuing laptops to every teacher had additional awesome results. You now have a docking station that simplifies connecting to multiple other devices including, not only your SMART board and Document Camera, but also an extra monitor. That means many teachers now have a total of 3 screens available in their classroom. Are you making the most of your screens? Extend or Duplicate your screen The first choice you have is whether you want to extend or duplicate your screen. This means you can see the same application on both screens, or different windows on each. For example, you could be projecting your lesson onto your SMART board from your laptop screen and have PowerSchool open on the second monitor to mark attendance or keep grades up-to-date. To choose between Extend and Duplicate you will use the shortcut Windows + P. Getting Different Apps on Different Screens If you choose to Extend your monitors, you need the next s...

 By: Koralina McKenna, 7th grade Science Teacher  A long time ago, I dreamed of a day when my students' quarter long project based learning assignment would be presented and collected in a video presentation. It took 5 years to make this dream a reality and I'm going to tell you how it went and what I'll do differently next time.  5 years ago, I had the project figured out but I didn't have reliable access to technology for my classes to create video projects 4 years ago, I continued to perfect the project and had technology access but lost access to Windows Movie Maker, the video editing software I planned to use 3 years ago, I had everything I needed, I taught myself WeVideo and was ready to roll out this video option to my students but then the pandemic hit just before I planned to start  2 years ago, I decided to heavily modify the project to be more suitable to hybrid instruction and did not use the video option  Present day, IT FINALLY HAPPENED  This ...

  By Tracey Brown, Instructional Technology Teacher Specialist The Project At the start of this school year, like many central office teachers, I was asked to teach a class. I taught a one semester 6th grade science elective called Mission to the Stars. Throughout the course students learn about space exploration, what we have done, what we have planned for future missions, what we have learned and what we hope to learn. The overarching question is, “why are we exploring space?” And the answer (for the purposes of this course) is to find habitable planets, Earth-like planets that we could someday travel to and possibly colonize. The course culminates with a project in which the students are supposed to design and build a colony on a habitable planet that we have yet to discover. Their project must include 9 elements from throughout our course that colonist would need to survive on another planet: A research center A medical facility A recreation center Dormitories Bathrooms/showers...