Deb Norton Tech

This past week my students worked on a cultures project.  In our reading series we have been reading about how different cultures have unique celebrations, traditions and foods. To extend what we read and to meet the CCSS, the students each chose a culture to research and gather information on.  We used the research tool in Google Docs to find our information and search for images.  Prior to this lesson, we did a lesson on finding reliable websites called Detecting Lies from this collection . Watch the video to see how the research tool works. Unable to display content. Adobe Flash is required. Click here for the Cultures Research Doc if you would like to use it in your classroom. After the research was completed, students took the information and created a Glogster to display the information.  Here are some examples: Our last step is that we need to link our research document to our Glogsters.  Then we plan to present ...

One of the sessions I had the pleasure of teaching at the Ripon Summer Tech Academy was a session on Google Apps and the Common Core. One of the main parts of this session was too look at actual examples of how teachers are using Google Apps (docs, forms, drawing, presentations, and spreadsheets) to meet the CCSS.   Feel free to take these examples and adapt them to your grade level and content area.  These examples promote collaboration, require higher level thinking and many use the new research tool. Group Research Form Students work collaboratively to decide on an essential research question.  They then use the research tool to find web sites that help them to collect information. And finally the students present their conclusions. Tree Chart Students edit this drawing to insert the topic, main idea and supporting details for a literary piece. Supporting Evidence Chart Students read a literary piece and then answer questions using supp...