AACPS OIT Byte

You may have heard of The Hour of Code, a global movement by Computer Science Education Week and Code.org. The idea was to give students an introduction to coding through fun activities and videos. We hope you will participate this year for National Computer Science week, December 4-10 . Below you will find a resources and applications that we have in AACPS to facilitate an amazing coding experience. Hour of Code Activities for PreK through high school. No coding experience necessary.  Filter topics 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 Resources for teachers and students on doing an hour of code with Microsoft’s new computer science tutorial specifically built for 2023. Microsoft recommends their tutorial for anyone age 7 and up.  New Minecraft Hour of Code at aka.ms/hourofcode R...

By Kerri Lambert, Teacher Specialist, AACPS Office of Instructional Technology As we head into Thanksgiving and the winter holiday season, teachers are looking for ways to keep students engaged in learning. Many of the activities they may implement involve research into other cultures, holiday traditions, and other seasonal project based learning activities. With this in mind, it seems the perfect time to take a closer look at our third Maryland Digital Learning Standard which focuses on students being knowledge constructors. Here is the standard: Students curate (select and evaluate) a variety of digital resources to construct knowledge, produce creative artifacts to make meaningful learning experiences for themselves and others. Students: a) plan and employ effective research strategies to locate information and other resources; b) evaluate the accuracy, perspective, bias, credibility and relevance of information, media, data or other resources; c) curate (select and evaluate) info...

  On Oct 26, the Office of Instructional Technology hosted our Fall eCoach Day. Along with eCoaches, this year we also invited curriculum specialists, media specialists, Brightspace champions, and central office staff. This resulted in 163 participants learning new information about effective instructional technology integration and projects. This virtual tech conference, with a game show theme, offered a mind-blowing 36 unique sessions . Topics ranged from SEL to accessibility features to arts integration to engaging ELLs and dozens of content connections. We offered courses from 9 of our vendors including Adobe Express, Wixie, WeVideo, Typing Club, Lumio, Nearpod, and more. Lucky for us, we had curriculum specialists from various offices team up with us to present as well. The most special offerings were hosted by our AACPS teachers, with several mini-sessions being offered on special projects they do in their classrooms, along with tips and tricks. The day kicked off in Google M...

 By: Samantha Wilkinson We have some spectacular seasonal technology activities to use with students this October. They bring in some fun as well as build valuable tech skills that align with the Maryland Digital Learning Standards . As Lumio says, "It's not a trick- dive into our basket of treats!" They are referring to the Lumio library . Dozens of October, Halloween and monster inspired activities including a Halloween Integer Crossword, poetry collection, brain breaks, autumn mindfulness, writing prompts and more. One that I love is the Halloween diamante poem lesson. This walks students through the parts of speech, has them do a sorting activity, complete a collaborative poem, and then write their own. Perfect for teachers to practice using the various interactive presentation types in Lumio. One of my favorite resources is the Halloween channel in Discovery Education. Have you seen it? With just a quick search you can find the channel. And the best thing is that yo...

By Kerri Lambert, Instructional Technology Specialist This is the second in a series of posts about the Maryland Digital Learning Standards. Read the first post about standard 1: The Empowered Learner here .  Every year the third week of October is recognized as Digital Citizenship Week, so it’s only appropriate that our next post in our series on the Maryland Digital Learning Standards should focus on Standard 2: Digital Citizen. Here is the standard: 2. Digital Citizen Students recognize the rights, responsibilities and opportunities of living, learning and working in an interconnected digital world safe, legal and ethical. Students: a) manage their digital identity being aware of the permanence of their actions in the digital world; b) engage in positive, safe, legal and ethical behavior when using technology and online social interactions; c) demonstrate an understanding of and respect for the rights and obligations of using and sharing intellectual property; and d) manage thei...

We asked Morgan Thompson some questions about her role in the Office of Instructional Technology, as the Learning Management System (LMS) Teacher Specialist. Here's what she had to say: Q:  What new and exciting things are going on with Brightspace?  A: For anyone who hasn’t seen them yet, the Creator+ Elements and Practices within HTML documents are really exciting. In a nutshell, Creator+ capitalizes on instructional practices that I would use everyday in my classroom, from organizing/chunking information to dynamic questioning types like sorting or sequencing. These instructional practices were then built into a guided creation process that is so easy to use, resulting in extremely interactive displays and activities built into your everyday Brightspace content.  And although it’s not new, something I have spent a lot of time working with lately is Game Based Learning within Brightspace. It incorporates assignments and quizzes that you may already be using with your st...

  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...