This morning RCET kicked-off the 2016 Fall semester in the AT&T Classroom welcoming Ms. Caitlin Fortson and her fourth graders from Ravenna City School’s Willyard Elementary. When the AT&T Classroom opened in 1998, Ravenna City Schools was the very first school district to participate and it is always a pleasure to welcome Ravenna teachers and students back to our classroom and the Kent State campus. Today the fourth graders received an orientation to the AT&T Classroom and the devices they will be using over the next month. Each student was assigned a laptop and an iPad so that they will have opportunities to build expertise with both PCs and mobile tablets as well as web-based and iOS platforms. Using their laptops, the students were introduced to Symbaloo, a free visual bookmarking tool used by teachers to organize websites frequently used for specific subjects and/or projects. The class has a Symbaloo site where all of the websites they are using in the AT&T Classroom are bookmarked. Their class Symbaloo can be accessed from any device with a web browser from the following url:
This morning the fourth graders also logged into the Google Classroom domain that they will be using in the AT&T Classroom. Google Classroom is a learning platform designed to provide a safe digital learning space where teachers and students can communicate and share content. Within Google Classroom, teachers can create an assignment and choose how students complete the assignment (e.g., individually, small groups, whole class). The teacher is able to track who has completed the assignment and who has not and also provide feedback to individual students. Students are able to keep track of what’s due on the Assignments page and access their work from any device with a web browser. Today the students learned how to use the Stream feature of Google Classroom that allows the teachers and students to post questions and replies. Ms. Fortson posted a question prompt to the students for practice with math factors.