On Friday, I was so pleased to be able to return to one of my favorite days of the year, High-Interest Day at Brookfield Elementary School. This is a day where I have been able to bring the concepts of physics to k-5 graders. You may be asking yourself, "Elementary students doing physics?" YES! Not just experimenting, but understanding the concepts behind the physics of electricity and sound. This is a very special day I have had the opportunity to be involved in since 2017. So, how are we able to bring the concepts of electricity and sound traditionally taught to high school 11th and 12th graders to the elementary level? There are a few keys 1) make it a hands-on experience 2) remove the mathematical calculations and make it practical. In the past, I had the luck of bringing a handful of my physics students with me to guide the elementary students through the concepts that they had learned over the course of the year. But in my new role as a Teaching and Learning Speciali
As we embark on our passion projects, I wanted to find a way to keep up to date on what my students were up to. Last year, I had students create task boards using Trello . While it was helpful in 1:1 conversations, the downfall for me as an educator was the amount of time it took to go into each board to see where students were at efficiently. Now that Google Keep is a part of G Suite, I've decided to leverage it as a tool. I use Keep everyday in my life as a task list an note taking tool, but I never used it in my classroom with my students. The ability to share and label notes makes it quite powerful. So how am I using it? Today, I had students create a task list in their Google Keep and share it with me. I then added a label to all task lists from the same class and archived the list so they wouldn't be in my home Keep page. During class, I had students begin adding projects tasks to their lists. Now when I go to that label page in Keep, I c