AACPS OIT Byte

By Kerri Lambert, Instructional Technology Teacher Specialist Computational thinking. It’s one of those current, hot educational phrases that leaves most teachers scratching their heads and thinking, “Does this really apply to me?” Especially when most articles and books stress its relationship and importance to computer science.  However, the more I read, the more I’m convinced that computational thinking extends to all content at all grade levels. After all, at its most basic, computational thinking is all about the process of problem solving. And let’s face it, that’s something we all do, all day long!  So what exactly IS computational thinking? By definition, computational thinking is the process of breaking down complex problems down into parts, recognizing patterns, and devising a solution. It has four pillars or processes: Broken down into the processes, computational thinking seems a lot less intimidating. I mean, even cleaning the house can be broken down into comp...

by Tracey Brown Instructional Technology Teacher Specialist Last weekend you attended a teacher technology conference and you learned about an amazing new website promising to transform learning in your classroom. What’s the first thing you should do? Surprisingly, this blog post is not about completing an MOI (materials of instruction approval). It is actually about what you need to do before you even know if you are ready to complete an MOI. Step 1 Explore the site - the WHOLE site This might sound dumb, like, “ of course I was going to visit the website!” But how many times have we seen just a snapshot of something and found ourselves recommending it to a friend. This happens in education too. We let a presenter show us the parts of their site they want us to see, we get excited by their high energy presentation, and we forget that we only explored about half of the resource, and didn’t explore freely on our own. Evaluating the quality of a resource is time-consuming and there is n...

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 Samantha Wilkinson, Instructional Technology Teacher Specialist While spring break may have just ended, the season has really just begun! It's time for new growth, gentle rain, flowers, baby animals, and that warm weather we have all been dreaming of.  Along with the new season comes some new ideas on our OIT Digital Take-Out  site. The site accessible from Classlink, in the orange Instructional Tech Resources folder. Under the Seasonal Activities tab, you will find dozens of curated digital activities for all seasons. Here I will highlight a few of my favorites: Spring Cinquain Poem: This Wixie project template has students write a 5 line poem about spring using adjectives, nouns, and verbs. Don't forget the image library, and video elements of Wixie to have student decorate their creations and record themselves reciting the poem. National Scrabble Day: April 13th is National Scrabble Day. Have some fun with students by using this digital Scrabble board in Google D...

By Samantha Wilkinson, Instructional Technology Teacher Specialist   Tomorrow  is the final Unity Day of the 22-23 school year. One of the tenets of the professional development we all receive on these 2-hour early dismissal days is to create a more inclusive environment for students. Technology is one way to help provide a more inclusive environment for all students but especially our English Language Learners (ELL), who are simultaneously learning academic concepts, while also acquiring language skills. This is a big demand! Our many instructional tech applications can assist ELL students in completing these processes. Here’s how…   1.    Technology Allows for Visual and Audio Assistance: The Read & Write  extension as well as Microsoft's Immersive Reader   encompass the ultimate accessibility features. Between the two, every application and web page can be read aloud, allows for word prediction, speech to text, word dictionary and pict...

 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 ...