Our suburban school is 20 years old with almost 1,000 kids speaking 14 different languages. Our student population is diverse: 12% African-American, 27% Latino, 11% Asian, 36% white, and the remainder a mixture of different ethnicities. We're a California Distinguished School and National Blue Ribbon School.
Labels don't erase the fact that 38% of our students are socioeconomically disadvantaged.
An "achievement gap" has emerged over the years within subgroups of students. To counter this, I've turned to project-based learning (PBL) and have worked hard to integrate technology into my daily teaching. By integrating science and math with research, reading, writing, and filmmaking, my students are transformed into active learners. We read literature, write, and do math, but we also craft math tutorial films, other instructional films, public service announcements, documentaries for film festivals, and book trailers for authors. These projects foster and develop my students' 21st-century skills. But to use PBL and to complete these projects, students need access to technology. That's were Chromebooks come in.
My Project
Learning isn't a passive activity, nor is it low-tech anymore. This year students are using and learning to make HyperDocs-a Google Doc that contains key information, links, opportunities to write and reflect, and other resources for students to engage with at their own pace. As they read about the math and science Sumerians used to create a lunar calendar, students can use Google Earth to see where history happened. When reading about the "analemma" and how the seasons are caused by the tilt of the earth, students can click a link and go to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to interact with a sun motion simulator. A Chromebook is the tool that allows students to actively engage in their learning rather than listening to a teacher lecture. Almost daily, students read Newsela, a website made for kids that offers news stories written at five different reading levels. Students annotate text, respond to questions in the margin during close reading, quiz, and submit a written response to a prompt. This type of reading puts has students actively constructing meaning from text, yet it requires a Chromebook.
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