MI in the Digital Classroom

It has been a very busy two weeks in the classroom. Along with technology and response to intervention strategies, a major focus this year is using multiple intelligences as a way for students to recognize their learning strengths and their preferred learning styles. Because of the age group of the students, I decided to use the idea of "learning smarts". After a brief introduction of the eight "learning smarts", the students completed an online multiple intelligence inventory where their top three multiple intelligence strengths were identified.
http://literacyworks.org/mi/assessment/findyourstrengths.html
The students were asked to reflect on their strengths in our classroom wiki and I was interested in the number of students who were surprised with the results. For example, students who thought they were people smart were actually self smart. This revelation made their need to work alone legitimized and took the pressure off of always feeling the need to be social. Using technology in the classroom is often collaborative and the students who were people smart immediately recognized their proclivity for working in groups and using technology as a tool for collaboration. Self smart students also recognized how technology could be used as an individual, reflective tool and were commenting on how they enjoy the ability to work on their own online journal. After recognizing their three top learning smarts, the students created bookmarks where the smarts were colour coded and then affixed to the table at each student's home station. The idea is to make it easy to make flexible groupings based on the students'learning smarts. For example, sometimes students will work in learning smart alike groups and sometimes in mixed learning smart groups depending on the activity.

First Day...Letting Go!

This has been the first time in many years that I have been nervous to start the first day of school. Not having students preassigned to tables or lockers was a bit unnerving and not knowing how students would react to the less structured environment also was a tad worrisome. However, the students adapted very well to the new environment. Response to Intervention (RTI) is also a school focus and I found the effort I made to de-clutter my classroom and to create an organized environment really suited the one to one computing environment. The students really liked the idea of sitting at tables and choosing where they sat based on their own individual needs. I was concerned that the groupings the students chose would not work because of the distraction of sitting with friends. This, however, was not the case. The students were very engaged in what we were doing and staying on task was not an issue. I was also very impressed with the speed the students were able to unpack their supplies and get ready to learn. Students have their own cubby where they keep their supplies. Not having desks has also alleviated the problem of students having easy access to a myriad of handy distractions. The students were very excited to be assigned their netbooks and all of the students were able to log on quite easily. To save time it really helped to have the computers pre-assigned to the students. It was also handy to have their usernames on hand for easy access for those students who forgot over the summer.
Planning for a one to one computing classroom is the area that I feel the most overwhelmed. Because of my lack of experience planning online I naively thought that I would be encorporating technology into my lessons slowly. However, I have quickly come to realize that in order to effectively and to authentically create a one to one computing classroom that I need organize my lessons online. This has meant for me learning to use a wikispace as the hub of my online classroom and learning to create lessons in Moodle. Organization and creating easy to follow pathways for students is key for a successful one to one computing classroom.

Setting up an Authentic Learning Environment

School starts in a week and I have been busy rearranging my room to accomodate a 1:1 digital learning environment. After meeting with our division's learning consultants and doing some online research, it becomes apparent that desks in rows will not work since working with technology is all about collaboration. After extensive internet searches, I did not happen upon a site that showed me the perfect 1:1 classroom set up. I realize that the perfect classroom does not exist; however, I was hoping to see a few models from elementary school classrooms from which I could glean ideas. Alas, I could not find that model. What I did find were computer classrooms (mainly at the college level) that were designed for collaboration. There were no desks in sight, only tables arranged in pods. The TEAL studio model became the model I followed. For more info., see Kirk Kezema's blog entitled "Out of Snooping Around comes TEALs Classroom Set Up Approach." (June 29, 2010) Thus, began my hunt for tables that would be conducive for learning pods. This was no easy task in a school where trapezoid tables and kidney tables are at a premium. I did manage to finagle the tables that I needed and arranged them in pods. Because one of my main goals this year is to teach using Gardner's multiple intelligences, I also wanted a table for each of the intelligences. In that way, students are free to move to different tables based on the subject and the intelligence that he or she wants to use. Flexibility and choice for students being key ingredients.