When I started working at Westlake Charter School at the beginning of last year, I was excited about the types of lessons I would be able to construct because all of my students had access to a Chromebook every day, all day. That wasn’t the norm for schools in the area at the time, but I was very comfortable ready to jump into that world.
I started out having them do almost everything on their Chromebook. Tests, reading passages, taking notes, making images, etc… But I had one student who would request to do all of her writing with pencil and paper. She would ask me to print out each assignment, and she knew exactly how she needed it to look in order to make it work for her. She would set it all up on her computer, with the right amount of space entered in, so that when I printed it, she could easily do the same work on her paper.
On writing assignments I would have students occasionally ask if they could write it out on binder paper instead of typing it. I wasn’t opposed to having 2-3 students do that every time. I also had several parents question the use of tech, commenting that it was harder to keep up with what was going on in the classroom with no papers coming home.
When I asked for student feedback half-way through the year, I got this:
So, while some students loved the tech, others didn’t, and I started questioning more deeply when to use it, and when to provide a paper option. I’ve been a lot more deliberate about the mix of tools this year, and have offered students more choice between mediums when appropriate.
As an example, we are studying NGSS.5-PS3-1: Use models to describe that energy in animals’ food (used for body repair, growth, motion, and to maintain body warmth) was once energy from the sun.
Students have been taking notes from Safari Live guides on the ecosystem of a game preserve in South Africa.
They do this fully on a Google Doc, individually.
Next I wanted to make sure that students understood the importance of the sun and the producers within the whole system. I printed them all a paper copy of this infographic and handed it out.
Because a lot of the vocabulary was unfamiliar to them, I wanted them to grapple with the content in a few different ways. First, I taught them how to look at an infographic differently than you would read an article. Then, I had them spend about ten minutes skimming, scanning, and jumping around the paper in order to connect 3 things from the infographic that they could put into a sentence. They wrote their sentence on the paper. Next, they typed their sentence into a 1 question Google form so that I could collect all of their ideas at once. I used this as a formative assessment to see if they understood the overall idea. It wasn’t important to me that they understood every detail.
Student sentences
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With all these molecules, sunlight, and different kinds of atoms, it metaphorically helps us make food.
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We get energy from food, also water and corbon dioxide is needed in photosynthesis to help plants have energy to,so then suns light will be absorbed in the flower and will give it energy.
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I understand that the humans and animals get energy from the food that they eat, the light shinning from the sun is absorbed from the plants cells, and the plants use light energy from the sun to produce the food that they need to survive, this prcess is called "Photosynthesis".
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Next, I copied all of their responses from the Form’s spreadsheet and pasted them into the word cloud generator at abcya.com. (One of my colleagues suggested I use the tool at https://www.mentimeter.com/ instead of going through all of the above steps, but I haven’t tried it yet).
After they were through checking out the words on the word cloud, and figuring out where the words were that they had typed, I had them find the 10 largest words. These will be the words most often typed as part of someone’s response. Students then had to go back to their paper and circle these ten words from the text wherever they were found on the infographic. Finally, we were ready to read. We choral read the infographic, whole class, with some discussion along the way. I could tell that they understood the idea of photosynthesis when we moved on to our next step.
We began to categorize the plants and animals that were present in the ecosystem from Safari Live by making a food pyramid from their notes. Students had great discussions about what went where and why. This was done first individually, and then in collaborative groups where they compared their pyramid to others in their group to add missing information.
Student Samples: (She put a link on each category to her examples from her notes that she organized on a different Google Doc.)
The next step is having them break into groups and physically build a giant food pyramid, based on their notes, on one of the walls in the classroom. Students are grouped by category: Producers, Primary Consumers, Secondary Consumers, Apex Predators, Decomposers, and the Sun. They are using tech to research what the animals/plants look like, and paper/pencil or tech to create them. They will need to put vocabulary and definitions beside their creations as well.
(This is last year’s creation. I can’t wait to see what this year’s will look like)
The summative assment is a paper pencil test where they will use the vocabulary concepts to build a food pyramid on an ecosystem we haven’t studied. If they understand how the energy moves through a system, and what the vocab means, they will be able to construct a model on their own.
It feels so rich to teach using a deliberate combination of paper/pencil, tech, individual, and group work. Hopefully, it feels just as rich to learn in this way as well.
