Catching up & moving forward...

The last two weeks have been a frenzy...
... we are getting all classes set up & doing basic vocabulary review

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Some quick-key reveiw

Week 1 is in the books!

The first week of school is officially behind us!

This week was an entire week of firsts. Every period was a new class (with one exception - Ms. Bookman's class is the only one that has Computers 2x a week). We got all of the "first day" stuff out of the way, the rules & routines...
... next week we get into the nitty gritty....

• 2nd grade - we'll be reviewing login procedures, basic vocabulary and discussing password creation
• 3rd grade - same as 2nd plus organizing last year's work into new folders - a quick folder creation & management lesson
• 4th grade - same as 3rd plus the beginning a re-fresher Word document (a quick assignment to review what was learned last year).
• 5th grade - same as 4th, but the goal will be to start & finish the document in less than 20 minutes

Each year I build on the last. Each year we start by reviewing the previous year. The initial document is a way to do a quick assessment of the things remembered & forgotten (much like the initial reading assessments all teachers give in September). As the grades progress the document should be easier and easier to handle, hence the diminishing time allotted.

The next 2 weeks will be about all of that as well as troubleshooting. After a summer of shut-down the machines often need a little fine-tuning. We also ensure all student accounts are functioning properly, software is updated, and so forth. By the beginning of October we will be full-steam-ahead on projects and Google Apps for all grades...


Looking forward to it!

Welcome to the 2013-2014 school year!

Welcome back!

As we begin the 2013-2014 school year I want to give everyone an overview of the approach for this year and the new platforms we will be using.

In the past everything was centered around the "mrcasal" name. There was mrcasal.com, mrcasal.blogspot.com, @mr_casal, and so on. This year I wanted to try something new. I wanted to center everything not around me but around what we do in the PS 10 computer lab, starting with the focal point of the year, this site.

ps10tech.blogspot.com is the new hub for everything we do in the computer lab (with Mr. Casal). Instead of one site for curriculum (mrcasal.com) and a different site for blog work (mrcasal.blogspot.com) I have put it all here, at ps10tech.blogspot.com

For the 2013-2014 school year everything we do will be based off of this site. There will be blog assignment homework for students in grades 3-5 just as there has been in previous years. Those assignments will be on this site, ps10tech.blogspot.com.

In addition to posting student blog assignments & curriculum on this site, I will also be updating it periodically with happenings of the lab. I'll post information about assignments, activities, portions of student work products, and general artifacts of the lab.

As always, I am a huge fan of Twitter. @PS10Tech is still active and will still serve as primarily a live student in-lab publishing tool but I will also be using it to post news & information about the lab.

A quick overview of what students will be doing:
(for more in depth curriculum outlines use the grade-by-grade tabs at the top of the page)

• 2nd grade - Microsoft Word to support the writing process - creating & saving, typing, editing, revising, formatting, inserting pictures - by the end of the year 2nd graders should be able to create, from a blank page, a fully edited & revised publishable piece of original writing.
• 3rd grade - Microsoft Word - a review of all things covered in Grade 2 + longer form writing assignments, Microsoft Powerpoint as an alternative publishing tool, proper internet reseraching techniques and blog commenting
• 4th grade - Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and internet research review. 1 research-based presentation. Blog commenting. Student blog post creation on a shared class blog
• 5th grade - Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and internet research review. 1 research-based presentation. Blog commenting. Independent student blog creation

The goal is to support the writing & publishing process across the grades by giving students exposure to a few of the most common content creating products. In addition, each grade builds upon the previous, ensure the core skills are reinforced while also moving more and more rapidly as the years progress to cover more and more ground.

Do we get to every aspect of technology in a year? No. Each class gets 50 minutes a week in the lab, no where near enough time to cover a fraction of what's possible. The goal, however, is to give each student the core skills to present & publish their ideas in the most possible ways. Ideally, they'll leave me & walk in to middle school with skill ahead of the expectation curve.

The biggest new thing for 2013-2014 is that every student in grades 2-5 will have unique @ps10.org Google Apps accounts. They will not have email access, but they will be able to use Google Drive to create projects & have access to their work beyond the computer lab, and beyond the walls of PS 10. The student are of the @ps10.org Google Apps domain is restrictive & customizable so some classes and/or grades might have more or less access than others. The full details will be outlined in a future blog post.

If you have any questions; student, staff or parent, feel free to post a comment here or email me.

Looking forward to a great year!

Tweeting with Students

Recently, I decided to create a Twitter account for my classroom (the computer lab @PS10Tech).

I was inspired to do this by Ms. Glembocki, a 2nd grade teacher here at PS 10. Ms. Glembocki tweets fairly regularly, sharing news and information about her class with her followers, many of whom are parents. Recently, Ms. Glembocki decided to assign a student tweeter for every day. It's a new classroom role for the students. One student a day is in charge of her twitter account, and the student uses an iPad designed specifically for classroom use to tweet the happenings of the day. Students introduce themselves and sign each tweet. In addition, she uses the hashtag #2310st to designate the tweet is coming from a "student tweeter of class 2-310." Her 2nd graders "live blog" the day. It's a fantastic idea and I wanted to do it for my lab.

The subtle difference between Ms. Glembocki and me is roughly 570 students. She has her self-contained class of 30, so managing a single tweeter a day is not a daunting task. I, on the other hand, see five classes a day, or roughly 150 students (for those of you keeping track of the math, I see a couple of classes more than one period a week and not every class is 30, so the unique student count is just shy of 600 total per week). It would be a bit much to manage five or more tweeters a day on my @Mr_Casal twitter account...

... And so was born @PS10Tech. This is the account solely dedicated to documenting the happenings in my computer lab, tweeted 99% by students.

Why I use Twitter with students:

• It's writing
• It's writing in a new medium
• It's writing digitally
• It's writing for a broad audience
• It's publishing
• It's publishing, instantly
• It's publishing beyond the classroom walls
• It's publishing for a global audience
• It's limiting
• I love the 140 character limit as it forces you to write efficiently, concisely, and with purpose

And we have protocols:

• All tweets will be written exclusively on a single @PS10Tech dedicated iPad, displayed on the board (via AppleTV)
• All tweets must be written using proper sentence structure, spelling, grammar, capitalization, etc. Twitter is writing, and writing in school, and these tweets represent not only the lab, but the entire school community as a whole.
• The first tweet a student composes must be an introduction:
• "Hi, I'm firstname from class.  - FL #ps10st"
• The "-FL" represents the signature, in this case "-FirstinitialLastinitial"
• The hashtag #ps10st is added, representing a "ps10 student tweeter"
• Folow up tweets by that student may include pictures of students working and/or pictures of student work products
• Any tweet documenting studnet work or students working mush have the hashtag #ps10sw to denote "ps 10 student work" in addition to the hashtag #ps10st
• Before the "Tweet" button is pressed, I, Mr. Casal, must approve the content. If the "Tweet" button is pressed without my consent, the tweet will be deleted and the student will no longer tweet
• Pressing the "Tweet" button is publishing to the world on behalf of the PS 10 community, so it must be approved

We spend a full period discussing the basics of composing a tweet and the technological aspects of it.

We also spend much of that period discussing appropriate writing and the reach Twitter has. @PS10Tech only has 18 followers (as of this writing) and we discuss what that means. We also discuss my 800+ followers and how I can "retweet" or re-publish the writing to my 800+ followers.

The biggest demonstration of the power & reach of Twitter is a conversation I had with a college classmate of mine, Dave Kerpen:

The @PS10Brooklyn hashtags (#ps10st, #ps10sw, #ps10bk) have gone well beyond the PS 10 followers and well beyond my followers... Those hashtags have gone out to 50,000+ of Dave's followers... Twitter has powerful, instant, broad, and global reach. I demonstrate, illustrate, and stress this point to all my students. We are no longer writing for ourselves, we are writing for the world to see.

(big thanks to Dave for helping illustrate this point!)

What about student accounts?
The big question I always get from students: "Can we sign up for our own Twitter account?"
No.
With the follow-up being, "If I sign up at home, can I log in at school?"
No.
I don't say this to be mean or controlling or negative. I do it because online social media platforms with elementary school students is a bit of a tricky situation. Twitter does not have an over-13 age restriction (like Facebook does). Anyone, of any age, can sign up for a Twitter account. But, you need an email to do it and most email providers require users be over 13... See, a bit of a tricky situation...

... I tell students they are more than welcome to discuss tweeting with their parents and make a decision at home whether or not to have a Twitter account, but since we can't permit every student to have a personal account, we will only use the single @PS10Tech account for all students.

I do hope this inspires students to have the conversation with their parents about writing online, but a personal Twitter account for an elementary age student is 100% between the parent and students.

My final thoughts...
I think Twitter is a great way to introduce another form of writing and publishing to the classroom. Since I only see most classes once a week, having a class tweeting allows me to integrate another writing and technology platform into the 45 minute period. With Twitter I can now have students working on a PowerPoint, commenting on a blog post, and tweeting all in a single period. As classes have gotten accustomed to the tweeting protocols, I am able to have 3-4 student tweeters per period. Tweeting has opened up a whole new avenue of technology, pubishing, communicating, and docuementing.

The best feedback I've gotten on this to date, aside from the smiles and excitement from students, is from a parent. She came up to me and said "I love the Twitter account. I have it open at work and follow along with what you guys are doing. It's so cool. I even showed my co-workers how my daughter's school was tweeting."

Writing, publishing, documenting, engaging... Twitter is an amazingly powerful platform and @PS10Tech is a way to introduce my students to this amazing tool...

Twitter @PS10Brooklyn - Our hashtags!

In the previous post, Twitter @10, I wrote about Twitter as a platform and offered a solution for following Twitter users without actually have a Twitter account, or even a smartphone.

The previous post also listed all the teaches with Twitter accounts at PS 10.

This post is more geared toward people with a Twitter account looking to get a more streamlined PS 10 experience out of the Twitter platform...

... PS 10 has a school-wide Twitter account, @PS10Brooklyn, which we use to publicize general news and events related to the school. We also use @PS10Brooklyn to share & promote the great things teachers are doing in their classrooms.

With so many teachers using Twitter, and so many great things being published, it can be a bit daunting to follow all the teachers or hope @PS10Brooklyn will promote all teacher posts (it wont, it can't, just not enough time in the day).

To make the filtering of PS10-related tweets we have created hashtags for the school. Hashtags are basically searchable/filterable terms to simplify finding things.

The PS 10 hashtags are:

• #ps10bk - this references general happenings within the building
• #ps10st - this references a student doing the tweeting. Tweets with this hashtags are written, with supervision, by students from the teacher account. 2 examples of this are:
• @MsGlemboki - she also uses #2310st to further filter class 2-310 specific student tweeters
• @PS10Tech - the Twitter account for the Lab, 99% of tweets are student writen
• #ps10sw - this references student work, or students working. This hashtag will showcase student work products and student efforts throughout the building

You can also follow these hashtags in a very visual format from a browser, without a Twitter account, by visiting our TagBoards:

• #ps10bk TagBoard
• #ps10st TagBoard
• #ps10sw TagBoard
• #2310st TagBoard

Hopefully these options will help make the PS 10 Twitter experience more enjoyable for all members of the PS 10 community, not just the twitter-ers among us...

Twitter @PS10Brooklyn

Twitter is a great resource. It is no longer just Ashton Kutcher talking about what he ate for breakfast (although, I'm sure there is probably still a lot of that going on).

These days teachers are using Twitter as another method of communicating with parents. There is a PS 10 Twitter account that posts school announcements, shares classroom work, and in general acts as another way to connect the school with the community. A lot of parents have signed up for Twitter (its free) just to follow their child's classroom feed or the PS 10 feed. There are many teachers who speak highly of the home-school connecting Twitter fosters and the instructional engagement it supports.



So, Twitter has value as a communication tool. But what if you don't want to sign up? What if you have no way to check Twitter? If you don't want a Twitter account, or don't have a phone capable of downloading an app, you can follow Twitter via text. Here is how it works:

Just text Twitter at 40404 and then type any of the following commands:Follow [username] - allows you to receive updates from that user.OFF or STOP or LEAVE - turns off receiving updates from the users you are following.ON - will turn on device updates and you will start receiving tweets again.WHOIS [username] - retrieves the profile information of the user.STATS - returns the number of people that you are following.GET [username] - retrieves the latest update that user has posted.

taken from: http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/2013/05/3-ways-to-use-twitter-fast-follow-to.html 


Feel free to follow any or all of these PS 10-based Twitter accounts!

A full list on Twitter available here: https://twitter.com/PS10Brooklyn/staff/members

Official school account:
@PS10Brooklyn

Ms. Scott, Principal
@PrincipalScott

Ms. Watson Adin, Assistant Principal
@MsWatsonAdin

Madeline Seide, Parent Coordinator
@MaddySeide

Mr. Casal, Technology 
@Mr_Casal

Ms. Buie, Kindergarten
@MsABuie

Ms. Camastro
@MariaCamastro

Ms. Fajgier, Kindergarten
@MsSandyPS10

Mrs. Reyes, Kindergarten
@MrsRReyes

Mr. Bowen, 1st grade
@Mr_CliffB

Ms. Buntley, 1st grade
@MsBuntley

Ms. DeGennaro, 1st grade
@MsKarenDG

Ms. Glembocki, 2nd grade
@MsGlembocki

Ms. Graham, 2nd grade
@Class2309

Ms. Karamitros, 2nd grade
@MaramitrosMs

Ms. Baron, 3rd grade

@Ms_Baron

Ms. Bookman, 3rd grade

@HeidiBookman

Ms. Chan, 3rd grade
@Ms_J_Chan

Ms. Hackett & Ms. McMahon, 3rd grade ICT 
@HackettMcMahon

Ms. Mazzola, 3rd grade
@Ms_Mazzola

Ms. Bruckler, 4th grade
@MsBruckler

Ms. Kertesz, 4th grade
@MsKertesz

Ms. McCormack, 4th grade
@Ms_McCormack

Ms. Morrison, 4th grade
@MsMorrison10

Ms. Venier, 4th grade
@MsVenier

Ms. Cypher, 5th grade
@JaneSkates

Ms. Henderson, 5th grade ICT
@DeandraHenderso

Mr. Magliano, 5th grade
@Mr_Magliano

Mrs. Reitzfeld, 5th grade ICT
@GReitzfeld

Ms. van Doren, 5th grade
@MsvanDoren

Ms. Thill, Lower Science
@MsGThill

Mr. Ellis, Music
@Mr_FEllis

Computer Lab - tweets from students during computer class
@PS10Tech

Welcome to Tech@10!

Welcome!

This blog is centered around technology here at PS 10.

In a sense it is an extension of Mr. Casal's blog, but it is very much it's own being and will encompass far more than what Mr. Casal's blog does.

Tech@10 will:

• post updates about technology at PS 10
• be authored by both Mr. Casal & Mr. Waisome with updates relevant to their respective classes
• have student authors creating original blog posts 
• cover topics both in and out of the computer lab
• be open to all areas of technology, for staff, students, and parents alike

Welcome to this new endeavor, we hope you enjoy the updates!