Deb Norton Tech

Yesterday I introduced our students to Class Dojo .  I showed them how it works and how they could either be awarded points or lose points for following the classroom rules.   This is a pretend class, not our class. Then, throughout the day I walked around with Class Dojo loaded on our iPad through a browser.  I would often award the whole class for good behavior or take away points from individuals for not following the rules.   The students really responded to knowing that I was watching their behavior.  We barely had anyone break the rules.  At the end of the day I brought up our whole class results which looked like this.  We had a discussion about how we did as a whole group. Then I emailed each student their personal results which looked like this. Unfortunately, the student emails didn't go through, so I'm thinking it is in the Quarantine Summary for Spam.   This site took only a short time to set up and I ...

Wow, supply lists sure have changed over the years.  I've noticed that we have been asking for fewer and fewer school supplies since receiving our 1:1 laptops.  All we ask for are a few folders, some looseleaf paper, some pencils and a few odds and ends.  Don't worry, we still glue, color, cut and create every day.  Today our goal is to fill our students' desks with digital tools that promote creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and problem solving skills. Here are the digital tools our students will need to start the school year: Google Apps for Education including:   Gmail, Google Drive (no more Dropbox for us), Google Sites, Google Presentations and Google Forms                         SMART Notebook 11  this is usually one of our students favorite places for creating projects. Kidblog  most of our students have never blogged before 5th grade.  They lov...

I love this kitchen timer for the classroom!  Check out this useful traffic light for managing the noise level of your classroom. Class Dojo is a website that helps with classroom management as well.  I played around with this a bit and was impressed with how easy it was to set it up for our class.  Watch this video to see how it works.