At the beginning of the year I applied for a technology grant from the school district and was lucky enough to be one of 27 teachers throughout the district to be awarded a $5,000 grant for our classroom! I am so excited to announce that we will be getting 15 iPads for our classroom, as well as money to purchase apps that will help improve reading fluency, comprehension, and math concepts. My goal for the grant was to be able to use technology to help students improve in their reading and math achievement, but also to connect parents to their children's learning through the blog and other online resources.
Over the break I have worked on finding new resources to use, as well as setting up classroom logins to be used both in the classroom and at home. Below I will explain what each of the different resources is, as well as provide our specific codes to sign up your child for their own account. I will be going through this process with them this week in class in order to help them keep track of their usernames and passwords. This page can be used for you to access the different sites for the rest of the year.
Edmodo: This is an online community for the students in our classroom to participate in classroom discussions online, as well as look at assignments, and turn in assignments electronically. I am still learning about this site, but my hope is to also use the grade book that is associated with it so you can keep track of your student's missing assignments and grades by signing into their account.
newsela.com : This is a website with great non-fiction articles based on current events which are leveled. Most of the articles come with a quiz that the students will take to give me feedback on their comprehension. These questions are very similar to questions they will see on the new SBAC state test next year, and are of course good practice for OAKS.
(Look for homework from this site at times!)
Once in the site, students will be able to look at their "Binder" where I will place articles they should read and take the quiz on. These would be great articles to reread at home for their Reading Log, or feel free to search the site for other articles that are of interest as well.
CPM Online Textbook: I have now signed up each student for their own online textbook. I will give each student an already created username and password that they will use to login. This site has everything that is in the paper textbook, however they can now access the different electronic tools we use in class to help solve problems, get extra copies of the resource pages if they need them at home, and get hints on the homework problems if they are stuck. Your child can access this textbook from any device that has internet. They will need to access the textbook from a class specific link:
Their username will be their first and last initial with the number 1. Example: Kayla Dessert= kd1
Their password is a four number combination I will give to them in class.
Oxford Owl: The students are familiar with this site, as we have been using it all year. There are preloaded leveled books on this site that they can read or listen to. Even good readers can benefit from listening to a good reader's fluency and expression too! Great for reading time at home and your younger readers as well.
As you can tell, I'm very excited to get back to school and dig into learning again. Please e-mail me if you have any questions or need help with any of these sites at any time. Let's let our Little Techies explore and soar!!
