CTE-PLC

What is CTE? Career and Technical Education is a broad branch to cover all the technology courses and certifications in a district. Students in elementary are exposed to an introduction of technology to include basic operation functions, Microsoft Suite-in our district, and fundamentals of web browsers. I was blessed to find our elementary CTE-PLC group my second year into teaching STEM as a special area. What an amazing group of educators! I live for the meetings where we share curriculum ideas, websites, and ideas to implement to further our students in technology. Not every school has an introduction to technology course so we are a group of about 15 that regularly meet or even chat in Teams troubleshooting and sharing. Our leader is the famous Debra Dumas and she is a gem! We try to meet in one of our classrooms and that is amazing for photos and ideas. Yet with drive time we are sometimes on a short schedule so she found a neutral spot for us to meet-Dave & Buster's!!

YES you read that correctly. Did you know they have wifi and a small conference room where we are able to have a webinar with Animation-ish from Fable Vision? It was a perfect setting for a technology group.

The sound was great, food was available, and we were from all over the district in one room. If you need to have technology PD why not at Dave & Buster's.

Debra even had door prizes for us after our meeting.

Keyboarding is for everyone

I wanted #CCEstem to include technology for everyone K-5. To be honest the first year there were so many apps I taught in my 1st grade classroom that I wanted to share with the rest of the school so I used them in a variety of ways. Then I started to think there has to be a sequence and I needed to develop one for the grades. Our school district uses Microsoft and Office 365 products.  I wanted 3rd grade to use Word and 4th graders use PowerPoint and 5th graders to use Excel.  I thought those are the BIG topics but where and how do I get there? Typing and keyboarding weren't taught and they needed the skills so I set upon finding resources to use to teach what I so took for granted.

Thankfully we had a CTE learning group that I became a part of and soaked up every thing they were doing in their classroom.  We had meetings in each others' rooms and I took photos.  I wanted to learn how they were planning to make their students successful using technology. Years ago we could auto log in students with a generic password but that process went away and students had to learn an alpha code and their 8 digit birthday to log in to any computer on campus. Yes the imagine of 20 kindergarteners trying to find letters on a keyboard, yelling where is the 1? and timing out because they could not find the keys quick enough. I learned the hard way that does not work. You need to model and practice and find activities that are engaging and interactive for them to learn and practice with a partner before they go solo.

YIP skip I found Brittany Washburn's large keyboards. My mom helped cut out letter cards and arrange all the velcro dots. Whether you have 2nd graders or kinders this was a puzzle to put together and they loved racing one another. We could even do it as a quick start or end to my lesson when we had time. I made sure to have a few extras for the students that wanted to work by themselves even. I noticed it helped with our ELL learners as well to learn the names of letters and where they were on the keyboard.  

 Yes, that is B. Washburn's giant keyboard on the wall that I reference often.

 These keyboards were an unplugged activity to help students learn so we could move to the ipads and laptops to use Typetastic! Hands down one of the students favorite things to do and it is free for students and teachers to use! These kidners are using Typetastic and I know I have more photos to upload. Typetastic gives a game like format starting from piecing the keyboard back together to problem solving to find letters on the keyboard to working with and training home rows keys. Did I mention the kids cheer when there is time for Typetastic?!? I will tell you one VERY helpful hint use 1 ipad and Air Drop Typetastic to each ipad in the room. *You will need to teach them how to press Accept and not Decline but wow what a time saver-not having to type Typetastic out or them for that matter. You will need to click Start Learning at the top> then K-2 Elementary> Unit 1.  They should start at Unit 1-level 1 because they are multi-level and it does get harder as you move along. Soon I would allow 1st grade to select from level 1-2-or 3. Level 5 Ducky Trouble is tough but end of 1st graders can figure it out to be successful. Unit 2 moves to working with Home Row keys and 2n grade gets to this level and become experts.  Besides being free and fun, Typetastic works on laptops-touchscreen or traditional or iPads. The students want to use it at home and I do have it marked on my class Google Site. More to come on keyboarding and tips to help that I learned along the way...