7 Ways I’ll Work Smarter in my Next 1:1 Classroom

After using a class set of Chromebooks for the whole second semester of the school year in my sixth grade Humanities class, my brain is spinning with all of the “next time I’ll…” ideas. Here are a few:
1. Simplify & standardize the creation of students’ usernames and passwords. If students are creating an account that is linked to their Google account (GAFE), having them sign in with Google was great! No password or username needed. However, it wasn’t until we had dealt with the annoying, “Um… Mrs. Sullivan, my password’s not working” too many times that one of my students mentioned that there’s a  rule in the library. My school’s amazing media specialist had already trained my students that when creating any online account they had to use their email prefix for the username (complete w/ a sequence of numbers, so no one ever got a message that their username of choice was already taken) and their lunch number for their password. As often happens in middle school- once my students walked out of the Media Center and into my classroom, they disconnected the part of their brain that they used in the Media Center. Luckily, someone had a moment of clarity… followed by a collective, “Oh yeah…” from her classmates!
2. Collaborate in product and credit. Very often I’d assign students to work together on a digital creation. As a partnership or small group they’d present their analysis of a character or pitch a new idea. While working, the students would be using one person’s account, which meant that later if one of the group members wanted to access that product they wouldn’t be able to log in and see it. This really didn’t pose many problems, however at the end of the year it occurred to me that we could avoid problems with a simple procedure. Each time students work collaboratively, they sent an email with the link and embed code to me and all group members. In the subject line, they wrote the assignment title. This was helpful because many students wanted to embed a Powtoon or Amimoto video on their blog or in their digital portfolio, and would need the embed code to do that. Note: this was not an issue when working in Google Docs, as students can easily share access.

3. Classroom Jobs: Technology Managers pass out and collect Chrome books and manage easy to tangle plugs. Help Desk Staff- These are students you can go to for help and who manage a Help Desk webpage to answer Frequently Asked Questions through text/ video tutorials.
4. Have students create and keep a Digital Portfolio Page on their website as a place to display (and reflect on) all of the digital creations they make throughout the year. I wish I had done that along the way, instead my students added it at the end of the year. I’m sure they missed some of their creations.
5. Comment on each others blog posts more often. Next time, I think I’d establish a time frame to keep this going all year. This year on a few different occasions I grouped students (across classes) into groups of 4 students. Each was responsible to comment on each of their fellow group members posts and respond to a certain number of comments. They LOVED doing this and I wish I had done it more. It increased the pride students took in their own published work when they knew they would actually have an audience, and they loved checking the stats to see how many visitors they had, which posts were most popular etc. The possibilities are endless here!
6. Encourage students to be each others’ editors more often. Here’s a rubric that students used to peer assess websites. Here’s a digital presentation rubric that my students used to both peer and self-assess their Genius Hour projects. (I adapted these from others that I found somewhere on the web… sorry that I don’t remember where! If you are the original author- thank you! I love your work, please get in touch so I may credit you!)
7. Don’t reinvent the wheel! Essay questions make great platforms for digital creations. Instead of adding an assignment, try replacing one that’s tried and true. For example, I love this assignment that I’ve been giving for a few years now, where students have to take the perspective of either the North or the South the day after the election of 1860. They used to write an editorial that would have appeared in the local newspaper. At the end of the unit, my students would also find a similar essay question on their test. I still love the assignment, the thinking and the discussions! This year though, they worked in groups… and instead of writing an editorial, they created a video that would have gone viral in either the North or the South the day after the election. They still found the same essay question on their test. This was by far- my favorite assignment of the year.

What advice do you have for someone ready to take the edtech plunge?