NOW Classrooms, Grades 3-5 - Meg Ormiston

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all of which help you make your classroom magical.

      Super skills include the four Cs of communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2011). These are not just soft skills but essential skills students need to be successful, lifelong learners in the 21st century. Preparing students for the future is the fundamental reason for formal education, and our students need the four Cs more than they ever have. Every student deserves to become ready for the future as he or she learns how to learn in an ever-changing landscape. With this in mind, we have based the lessons in this book on a foundation of students applying these skills.

      We need to develop these super skills in students because in many classrooms, students have not experienced student voice and choice, meaning they have not been allowed to decide how they present the information they learn. By giving students the opportunity for voice and choice in the content, process, and product of their learning, students will develop communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity skills that are specific to their learning styles. NOW classrooms look very different from traditional classrooms because students own their learning path and goals in NOW classrooms. Students become independent directors of their own lifelong learning as they cultivate and apply these skills, ensuring their success outside the classroom.

      We know the future is all about change for our students, and we wrote this book for that reason. Collectively as authors, we have seen the good, bad, and ugly when schools roll out technology. When schools issue new technology rollouts without professional development, it leaves teachers to figure out how to transform lessons using the new devices. In these schools, some teachers and students experience success with technology, while little changes in other classrooms across the hall.

      We take a different approach to technology in the classroom. We focus on the goals for teaching and learning, and then we look at whether and how we can use technology. Most technology rollouts in schools take the opposite approach by focusing on websites and apps rather than the learning goals. Teachers use the technology tools, but they do not make a connection to a learning outcome or the four Cs. In this model, using technology becomes an event rather than part of the fabric of learning.

      You may ask, “What does true technology engagement look like?” This book answers that question by demonstrating the opposite of technology misuse. It features students using technology to create, collaborate, explore, investigate, and share their creations beyond classroom walls. This book structures higher-level thinking and problem solving into every lesson. It includes meaningful lessons with purposeful technology uses that directly tie into International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) 2016 Standards for Students. ISTE (2016) education technology experts developed the following seven standards for students.

      1. Empowered learner: Students leverage technology to take an active role in choosing, achieving, and demonstrating competency in their learning goals, informed by the learning sciences.

      2. Digital citizen: Students recognize the rights, responsibilities, and opportunities of living, learning, and working in an interconnected digital world, and they act and model in ways that are safe, legal, and ethical.

      3. Knowledge constructor: Students critically curate a variety of resources using digital tools to construct knowledge, produce creative artifacts, and make meaningful learning experiences for themselves and others.

      4. Innovative designer: Students use a variety of technologies within a design process to identify and solve problems by creating new, useful, or imaginative solutions.

      5. Computational thinker: Students develop and employ strategies for understanding and solving problems in ways that leverage the power of technological methods to develop and test solutions.

      6. Creative communicator: Students communicate clearly and express themselves creatively for a variety of purposes using the platforms, tools, styles, formats, and digital media appropriate to their goals.

      7. Global collaborator: Students use digital tools to broaden their perspectives and enrich their learning by collaborating with others and working effectively in teams locally and globally.

      Each chapter in this book provides lessons and instructional practices that support one or more of these standards.

      We wrote the NOW Classrooms series for teachers and instructional coaches who are ready to focus on teaching and learning first and digital devices second. As we designed the lessons, we included technology devices, including tablets, Chromebooks, and laptops. We also designed the lessons with many opportunities to collaborate around devices if you do not have enough devices for each student to use one (often called a 1:1 classroom). The series includes the following five titles, all organized around grade-level-appropriate themes adapted from the 2016 ISTE Standards for Students.

      1. NOW Classrooms, Grades K–2: Lessons for Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Technology

      2. NOW Classrooms, Grades 3–5: Lessons for Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Technology

      3. NOW Classrooms, Grades 6–8: Lessons for Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Technology

      4. NOW Classrooms, Grades 9–12: Lessons for Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Technology

      5. NOW Classrooms, Leader’s Guide: Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Technology

      Instructional coaches might use all five books in the series for project ideas at all grade levels and for leadership strategies. We have scaffolded the lessons across the series of books so they all flow together. We have organized all the grade-level books in this series in the same way to make it easy for our readers to see how the ideas link together. We believe this series will save you hours of preparation time.

      This book features a series of lessons written for grades 3–5 teachers. As teachers, we know how challenging it is to come up with fresh ideas for the classroom each day, so we wrote our lessons in a way that makes getting started simple.

      Each of the chapters contains two to four topical sections with three lessons each. Instead of labeling the lessons for grades 3–5, we assigned three levels based on the acronym NOW, which stands for novice, operational, and wow. Teachers can provide novice lessons to students who are new to the skill or task, operational lessons to students who have had some experience with the skill or task, and wow lessons to students who are ready for an extension. Once we arrived at the three levels, it felt almost like a Choose Your Own Adventure book instead of a step-by-step recipe book. Depending on your experience with the technology and your goals for your students, you might jump around to the different sections or move linearly from novice, to operational, to wow. Each lesson has an I can statement, written in student-friendly language, to identify the learning goal, and a list of steps to follow for the lesson. We feel that the I can statements are important to help the students take ownership of the learning goals. Throughout the book, we also include teaching tips and tech tips to help simplify teachers’ use of technology with students and save planning time, and connections to support students and teachers.

      Chapter 1, “Embracing Creativity,” shows educators how they can support students’ voice and choice by giving students options for creating multimedia. These skills will allow students to demonstrate what they know via various types of media. Students start creating and collaborating as they snap digital pictures, create videos, and work with audio. In this selfie-crazed world, we know our students can use audio, take pictures, and create videos on their devices, but now, we will connect those skills to the curriculum.

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