Malchow's Tech Bytes👩🏻‍💻 ~ Nov 29th

 

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Malchow's Tech Bytes~ Jan 4th, 2021

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Malchow's Tech Bytes 👩🏻‍💻~ 10/19

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Just a reminder that #EpicPals is now up and running! Want more information? Click on the EpicPals tab at the top of this page.

Malchow's Tech Bytes👩🏻‍💻~ December 9th 🎅🏻🎄🦌

'Tis the season... with a late Thanksgiving this year the holidays are truly just around the corner. This week's Tech Bytes has several ideas and activities for you to enjoy and get a jump start on getting ready since we only have 2 weeks before many of us are on holiday break.

Don't forget, this week is 💻 Computer Science Education Week! Be sure to take a peek at last week's Tech Bytes for Hour of Code resources!

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Malchow's Tech Bytes 👩🏻‍💻~ Nov 18th

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Malchow's Tech Bytes 👩🏻‍💻~ May 20th ☀️⛱

Gearing up for the end of the year? You'll find a great Flipgrid idea to implement as well as a summer PD opportunity.

Malchow's Tech Bytes ~ May 20th

You can access all slides at bit.ly/malchowstechbytes2018

👩🏻‍💻 Malchow's Tech Bytes~ March 31st

Spring Break is over and it was an amazing week. We took a quick road trip out to Colorado with the boys to go skiing. We left at noon on Saturday, drove 18 hours straight to get to Colorado, got to the ski hill on Sunday morning and skied all day, crashed that night at the hotel, skied again all day Monday and Tuesday and then headed back home. The weather was gorgeous and the sun was shining all day on Monday, which unfortunately led to a very burnt nose and cheeks. Lesson learned- bring sunscreen!

Now it's time to hunker down and finish out the year strong. This week's newsletter has some math resources as well as a great, yet super simple, way to engage your students as you head back~ the#EggDashChallenge. Your students will love the excitement that the challenge will bring to your room!! This can be modified to any theme you want, you simply need to be able to put review questions, math problems, etc in some sort of container (plastic test tubes, brown paper bags, plastic treasure chests, you name it!) I hope that you'll give it a try!!

Malchow's Tech Bytes~ March 31st

Malchow's Tech Bytes~ Sept 24th

Malchow's Tech Bytes~ Sept 24

I've been encountering some issues with the blog for the past few weeks and am working with tech support to hopefully have them fixed SOON! 

If you are unable to click on the image to get to slidedeck, please type in this shortcut to get there: bit.ly/malchowstechbytes2018

Tech Bytes~ April 9-13

Tech Bytes~ April 9-13

Tech Bytes~ Jan 15-19th

Malchow's Tech Bytes~ Jan 15-19

Patterns, Patterns, everywhere!

We've been prepping for weeks now to get to get ready to work on our chapter for the global iBook project, TWIMA3, which will be all about patterns. The outcome of this book will be stunning I'm sure as it is being put together by one of my fellow Apple Distinguished Educators, Mr. Jon Smith (@theipodteacher) from Ohio. You can check out his blog here. When the book is done it will be available free on iTunes. I know my students will be ecstatic to see all of their hard work come together in a book that they will be able to share with others and enjoy for years to come!

So, back to the project- Over the course of the past few months we've talked about patterns, found patterns, and analyzed patterns in all sorts of places around our school. We've found them even when we haven't been looking for them!  Currently we've mainly focused on repeating patterns but as we work into our unit on patterns in math in the coming weeks, we'll also learn about growing patterns. Unfortunately the deadline for submission is prior to that so our submissions will just focus on repeating patterns.

Today each students were given the task of:

1. Finding something in our room that had a pattern and take a picture of it
2. Using hands-on materials of their choice from around the room to build their own pattern
3. If they had time- they were also able to create a pattern on the iPad using an app of their choice. Kiddos chose apps such as Magnetic Alphabet,  Pattern Blocks, and Drawing Pad to create their masterpieces.

I was pleasantly surprised by their choice of apps as I wouldn't have thought to use some of the ones that they chose. NEVER underestimate the power of a first grader and their thought process! The collaboration, creativity and critical thinking skills that were used as we worked through the tasks was phenomenal! Many students began with basic color or shape patterns but as they worked through each task, their ideas and creations became more and more elaborate. As I conferenced with students I encouraged them to think differently to dig deep and to stretch their imaginations.

As we continue on with this project we analyze the patterns we found and created and work to explain and describe them to others by either writing about them or recording information about them. We will again be using a variety of apps depending on their personal preferences. Apps may include PicCollage or Explain Everything. We'll see what others they feel will work the job. I'm excited to watch and learn from this great group of kiddos. They never cease to amaze me!
I'll be sure to update this site as we complete our submissions and also add a link to the book once it is published in the iTunes store.

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On a side note, I apologize for not posting here as regularly as I have in the past. I am a member of a new 12 person team in my district that is working to help our district teachers embed technology into their teaching. This, along with full-time teaching and family life has really eaten into my blogging time. I encourage you to also follow our classroom blog, The Dog Blog to see what we are doing on a more regular basis. You will get an overview of projects that we are doing to enhance our learning just not with as much detail.

Authentic Assessment with SeeSaw app

Our school utilizes the PBIS (Positive Behavioral and Interventions and Supports) system. As part of this system, we focus on teaching positive social behaviors.  The way we have our system set up, students are able to earn "Knightly Notes" or tickets for expected behaviors. They are then able to cash their tickets in for classroom rewards (such as sitting at the teacher's desk for the day, lunch in the classroom, choosing something from the prize box, and oh so much more).

Each week when we count our tickets, we put them into piles of 10s and 1s. This has been a great reinforcement of the place value concepts that we are continually working on in math. After putting their tickets in piles, I've been having the kiddos take a picture of their piles using the app, SeeSaw . Once they have their picture, they then use the drawing tool and write the numbers for their piles on their picture to show how many tickets they have. They also record themselves counting their tickets and then send their learning to their parents through the app. This has been a great way for me to authentically evaluate my students' 10s and 1s knowledge and for them to also practice writing 2 digit numbers. You can view a sample of what this looks and sounds like by clicking here. 

Parents are also loving this as they are getting a glimpse of what we are doing in the classroom in addition to being able to leave written or audio comments for their children.

iTunes U- Math Integration

I have been a follower of Karen Lirenman for quite some time. For those of you who don't know, Karen is a K-2 teacher in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada. She is an Apple Distinguished Educator and is a phenomenal advocate of integrating technology into the early primary classroom. You can check out her blog, Learning and Sharing with Ms. Lirenman or follow her on Twitter at @KLirenman. 

I was BEYOND thrilled a few months back when Karen contacted me to ask if she could include some of my math integration ideas into an iTunes U course that she was creating. Of course I said yes and am happy to report that her course, Using an iPad to Enhance a K-3 Numeracy Program is now available in the iTunes U store. This is a fantastic resource and has many examples that you can easily implement into your own classroom. I highly recommend checking it out. Best of all, it's FREE!
You can access this course via an iPad by clicking on the link above or the image to the right. 

Picture It Project 2015

We are once again participating in a Projects by Jen online project. This time we are participating in Jen's Picture It Project. The project is set up to be a collaborative project with 23 other classrooms around the world to create a collaborative piece of artwork. This years' project has us creating a quilt. Each class is responsible for creating a 7" x 7" quilt square in whatever fashion they choose. We will also be filling out an "All about Us" sheet that will be sent along with our artwork. 

I chose to embed some of our "About the Class" info directly into our quilt pattern and then turned our project into a color-by-number to reinforce turn-around facts and symmetry. 

In hindsight, I wish I would have let the kids pick their own 3 colors for their code so that each of the quilt squares would have had their own look and feel. Live and learn. Seeing as each piece will be going to a different school, so will be part of it's own unique quilt, it won't be a big deal. That's what happens when you try to save time during a busy time of year and not let the creative juices fully flow. Our piece will be similar to the one seen here. This is my digital master of our finished square.

As our pieces come in from the other schools we will locate the states/countries on our map using clues such as, "This state is in the northwest corner of the US" or  This state is north of Florida". This has been an authentic and engaging way for my students to practice and reinforce their map skills. Once things get going they always look forward to finding out if we received any mail. After we locate the states we will place each piece in the hall, along with the information that each class sends us, to create our quilt. I'll post an updated picture as our quilt begins to take shape.

If you've never participated in one of these projects, I highly encourage you to look at the various projects that Jen offers. There are many and they span multiple grade levels. They are very engaging, collaborative, cover multiple standards and are a great way to embed technology into your curriculum.

Mystery number Skype

We had a great time participating in our 1st mystery number Skype with our buddies in Canada. We've been planning this for awhile but have had various technology glitches that have pushed the date back. Yes, technology glitches happen in my room too. You have to learn to roll with the punches and always have a back-up plan.
Mrs. Draper made this wonderful Mystery Number anchor chart to help our students. This proved to be a great visual for us as we practiced playing the game.

Each class then picked their mystery number. We were only able to play one game on this particular day due to our tech glitches eating up half of our time. We let Mrs. Draper's class go first so they worked to try and guess our number. They had some fantastic questions and as they worked to guess our number, my class used a 100 grid on their iPads to x out the numbers that their clues used. 

You can see a small clip of one of the questions below. This is definitely an activity that I will do again as it ties in very nicely with so many of our math skills- place value, odd/even, number grid patterns, etc. in addition to promoting collaboration with an authentic audience!
Thanks Mrs. Draper and class! We love when we are able to get together to learn with each other!

Do you ever feel....

Do you ever feel like the "fly by the seat of your pants" moments sometimes end up being some of the best moments? I had that happen to me today. Our new math program is completely web-based and as much as I like having web access to lessons (no more carrying home a teacher's manual as big as a pizza box) and student playlists (the projected lesson) what I don't like is that none of it is very interactive. I want kids up and moving, I want everyone to be able to participate (ACTIVELY) and to be engaged in what we are doing. I also strongly believe that 1st graders need to be able to manipulate their learning as much as they can to better understand complex concepts.

 So that being said, today was a "fly by the seat of my pants" day in hopes of bringing these concepts to my lesson.

Kiddos capturing a picture of the displayed
dominos from the lesson

We are working on the addition strategy of making 10 right now. 2 days ago we had the manipulatives and 10 frames out to help us visually explore this concept but today, we were given just a projected domino and expected to talk it through. It was still too soon for my kiddos to make the jump to the abstract but in order to move them forward a little bit more, we brought in the iPads so everyone could be actively engaged and take part in the lesson. There's no room for just sitting and daydreaming on a day like today. LOL 

For each displayed domino, I had the kiddos take a picture and import it into DoodlecastPro (Yup, another must-have app!!) Once they were in DoodlecastPro (read more about it here)  they had to write the addition problem that the domino represented. The also had to be able to explain which strategy they used to find the sum (count on, make ten, etc) 

Student representation of the make 10 strategy

I love the way this student circled the extra dots from the 5 and put an arrow to the other side to create 10. It was a great way for this child to move a little closer to the abstract understanding of the Make 10 strategy.

For the 1st two dominos, kiddos took the pics, wrote the problem and it's turn-around fact and then turned and talked to a neighbor about their strategy usage. For the last problem, they followed the same format, but had to go and record their strategy usage on the iPad. 

The first 2 tries gave everyone practice in talking through their strategy use, helped strugglers to hear it from a peer and hopefully helped them to take another baby step toward the abstract. I'll upload a finished Doodlecast tomorrow so you can hear how the kiddos described their strategy usage. It was awesome to hear in their own words what they did.

We have been working on comparing 2 digit numbers less than 100 in math this past week. We've been building the numbers using base 10 blocks, using both traditional blocks as well as virtual base 10 blocks on our iPads. We've been noticing and discussing how the 10s place is what helps us to know if the number is larger (as long as the 10s place numbers are not the same- we talked about what to do with that debacle as well). As a quick assessment this week, I gave each child 2 different numbers to build using the app, Number Pieces Basic. This is a great app for students to build, compare, add and subtract numbers with and best yet, it's free! Click the link above to check it out for yourself.

After building their numbers on the app, each student took a screenshot of their page and then imported that picture into the app, Doodlecast Pro. Doodlescast Pro is an app which allows us to write on our pictures, as well as record our thoughts. This is not a free app, but there is a similar one called Screen Chomp that is free. Students then had to tell what their numbers were, which was larger and explain the thinking that they used to know which number was larger. When we were done, I had my students email their videos to me. I listened to each one and then forwarded it to their parents along with a note about how they were doing with the concepts we were working on. I had a dad email today with the following comment, 
"This is awesome! Get to see his learning and development of concepts in action."
Yes! That madde my day as a big part of why I think the iPads are such a great tool is that our classroom learning can be transparent to parents and the world!

Double Digit Numbers and Pic Collage

Our new math program has little lessons called Investigations built into the curriculum. Today we did an investigation having to do with double digit numbers. We spent a few minutes discussing what a double digit number is and giving some examples. We then brainstormed some places that we thought we might find these kinds of numbers. After our discussion, students were paired up and spent 10-15 minutes walking around our classroom and school looking for double digit numbers and taking pictures of them with their iPads.

It was amazing to see some of the places that students found double digit numbers, everything from clocks and calendars to classroom door numbers and  even entrance numbers to our building. I absolutely LOVE this picture of one of my students getting this picture.


After we got back to the room students were asked to import the pictures they took into the app, PicCollage to show their learning. The only stipulations were: 1) you have to work collaboratively and creatively with your partner 2) You must have your names on your collage
3) You need a title for your PicCollage

We've used PicCollage several other times and my students are getting quite adept at maneuvering their way around the app. I did introduce them to a new feature today- cropping their photos, which came in very useful for some of the pics they had taken. They really enjoyed trying this out and it definitely made their learning come more to the forefront of their creations. 

Last time we used PicCollage kiddos figured out how to import photos from the web as their backgrounds. We had Minecraft and Halo backgrounds which really distracted from the learning we were trying to showcase which lead to a fantastic discussion of what would be a better choice. Today,  I again reminded them of that conversation and asked that they find backgrounds that complimented their collage versus taking away from their learning. At that point I let them create as I didn't want to micromanage what may come out of their brains. I was quite impressed to say the least with the choices they made for their backgrounds and their ability to work together so collaboratively from start to finish!!! 

Number stories

Earlier this week we spent some time learning about addition and subtraction word problems. Students have been learning about subtraction language (flew away, broke, got eaten, etc). I really do love the way our new math program introduces subtraction to students. The seem to have a better grasp of it and it doesn't seem to send them away screaming like it did in the past. Well maybe not screaming, but crying definitely showed its ugly head on occasion.

Student creating visual representation of the
pirate problem above

One thing that I have found helps students internalize subtraction language is having concrete examples. We started earlier in the week with these types of examples and then began to work into visual representations. Students were given a word problem and together with a partner had to determine how they were going to solve the problem. Was the language telling them to use addition strategies or subtraction strategies. Once students decided on how they wanted to tackle the problem they worked together to visually represent the problem using Doodlecast Pro. I chose this app as I wanted them to have audio capability to record their thinking once we were done. Thinking about the SAMR model, the beginning of this lesson was just substitution, but the engagement factor of using the iPads definitely helped to keep the learning at the forefront.

As we continued on, students were then asked to record the math sentence that matched their thinking. As they finished, they used the record function of Doodlecast Pro to explain their thinking. This is a fantastic way to delve into the thinking of your students, especially your out-of-the-box thinkers, as it gives you new perspective into the thought processes they are using. I encourage you to give this a try. It has definitely opened new doors for me into how my students are tackling problem, something that I am not always able to discern in a whole group conversation. In the case above, I thought students would make the 9 muffins and then cross of 3 to find out how many muffins were blueberry but instead they used the addition strategy of counting on which they explained in their audio.

In addition to sharing their doodlecasts with me, we also used Air Server to project some of our projects and to share our thinking with the class. For students who are shy this has been a phenomenal way for them to share as they are often comfortable enough to create their audio with a buddy but are uncomfortable in front of the whole group. When we Air Serve they are able to play back their Doodlecast without the pressure of having to be on the spot in front of the group.

Pic Collage for assessment

Yikes, pics uploaded last night, too tired to write the post... better get it up as it's been favorited already. LOL

Over the past few days we have been learning about capacity in math. We've done several hands-on explorations and learned a whole body representation of full, almost full, half full, almost empty, and empty~think head shoulders, knees, and toes with a stop at the hips for half full. The kids loved it and the representations definitely seemed to help them, although half full is still throwing a handful of my kiddos for some reason when having to identify it in real life examples or in their journal. How do I know this you ask, well, for starters, we did an collaborative, real world assessment of these concepts using the app Pic Collage. 

Here's how it all shook down (sorry for the not so pretty Smart board resource on the first image)...
When the kiddos came in on Wednesday I had the Smartboard on with the word capacity and an image of the PicCollage app icon displayed. We had a quick discussion of what capacity was and then I told them they were going to work with a partner to take 5-8 pictures of items around the room that had capacity. After taking their pics, they were to work collaboratively to create a Pic Collage to represent their findings and label the items they found. Seeing as we are first graders, we quickly wrote our capacity words so that teams had a resource to refer to. With the exception of that bit of information, teams were sent on their way to begin the task. It was great to see them talk about the items they were finding and discussing if the object truly had capacity. 

Once their pics were done, they headed to a cozy spot and began working together to create their collages. Again, the conversations were rich with vocabulary and "tech talk". Students began grouping and arranging their pictures, discussing and labeling their examples and of course, putting their creativity to work in designing their piece. 

On a modification side note:
I have one student who is visually impaired and utilized braille as his primary form of writing and reading. Even with his visual limitations, he and his partner were able to complete this activity to the benefit of both. They worked together to find the objects, felt them to check for capacity and when it came time to create on the iPad, my little gal every so gently guided him to move images around using descriptive language such as "Slide it more to the right". Our VI (Visually impaired) specialist also brailled the capacity words which my student used to discuss the items they photographed and when it came time to label on their collage, they took pics of the braille words to use as their labels. It was a great team effort for this group and was a true testament to the fact that kiddos can be supportive of each other no matter their abilities. Both learned from each other in this instance, and learned so much more than just math concepts!

Once we finished our assessment, we got back together as a group and students used Air Server to project their collages onto the SMARTboard. Yes, my students Air Serve independently! (For those not familiar with AirServer, this allows you to mirror whatever is on your iPad through a projector. This has been a fantastic tool for us to share our works with the whole group in a format large enough for all to see. It's also wonderful when introducing apps to students, but more on that another time)
Once their collage was up, groups came up and shared their pics and what they knew about capacity. One of my students even made the connection that iPads have capacity as well. This was an interesting discussion as most first graders need more concrete examples to see how something would be filled and obviously "seeing the iPad fill" is very abstract. To put it lightly, I was simply amazed!! I truly believe that many times we underestimate what our younger learners understand.

Some add'l learning came out of this project as well in regards to presentation as a couple of groups figured out how to add backgrounds from the web and chose Minecraft images to enhance their projects. The kids LOVED them and all wanted to know how to do it, but we found out quickly that the learning was overshadowed by the cool backgrounds. We talked about when a Minecraft background might be more appropriate and what the focus of our collages was. It was a fantastic authentic way to show this without me having to be the bad guy to say, "you can't use ___ or ___ for your backgrounds". The power of this conversation was in the fact that they all experienced it firsthand. Once students know the basic functionality of an app, I try very hard not to micromanage their creativity but rather let the little things like this guide our discussions and learning. Don't get me wrong, students still need to be shown how to use the apps appropriately as "they don't know, what they don't know" but I prefer to be the guide on the side once we have the basics down. It is amazing what I have learned from my students over the years that I wouldn't have learned had I limited them solely to my standards.