Part 5: Make Google Sheets work for you
Save time contacting parents, gain clarity tracking student progress, and just have fun creating certificates!
Let's dig into Sheets from the perspectives of managing communications, assessing students, and creating cool documents that integrate data - student certificates! - and see how you can gain greater clarity while saving time!
$25.00 to register!
We teach our students how to use maps and memorize places, but have they arrived at geographic thinking? Help students go from finding their house online to understanding the world around them and becoming a global citizen. We’ll take a deep dive into the powerful and engaging geo tools available online such as Google Maps, Google Earth Engine Timelapse, Google Earth Projects, and MyMaps that will help your students get where they need to be in the world. From novel studies to social studies, these tools can help you make your students really understand how the geography around us shapes our lives.
No charge to register.
Although Computational Thinking has been around for a long time, our new Alberta Science Curriculum is the first to pull it out and articulate it within an Organizing Idea across the Science curriculum from Grade 3 Science onwards: “Computer Science: Problem solving and scientific inquiry are developed through the knowledgeable application of creativity, design, and computational thinking”.
This session is as practical as it is conceptual. Come prepared to participate in a computational thinking activity yourself, and leave with a kit of instructional approaches and practical project ideas using online tools and devices such as little robots (that can be borrowed from the ATA Library) that will help you bring computational thinking into the mainstream conversations and activities within your classrooms and schools.
No charge to register.
Part 6: Let’s weave it all together with a Google Classroom and a Google Site!
Crafting a Classroom with Google Workspace for Education apps and SMART Lumio is very much an individual activity where you as the teacher are weaving together activities and resources into a kind of digital tapestry over time, posting in your Google Classroom.
How might we engage students in processes that connect them to the way the world works beyond the classroom itself? And how can we do this within the scope of today’s curricular expectations? And how can this be both doable…and fun for all?
Join this session to participate in and explore the value of design thinking in classrooms today and to share and evaluate makerspace stories, strategies and tools that can provide a fun new dimension to your classroom projects.
Leave knowing how best to set up maker activities in your classroom, with a list in hand of makerspace items that are more worthwhile than others (and why), and links to where you can purchase kits for your school or classroom collections - as well as borrow--“try before you buy” them--from the ATA Library.
No charge to register!
Beyond the basics, explore how Lumio supports instructional strategies and provides opportunities for student engagement in new ways.
Part of the beauty of Lumio is it contains tools that support learning at each stage of the learning process. Whether igniting interest in a topic with a video or hands-on sorting of ideas, engaging students in group brainstorming as they enter a common learning space, providing spaces where students can work individually or collaborate in groups on a common task (in school and/or online), or challenging them with formative and summative assessments, Lumio is on an ever-evolving path that helps us support student learning.
The purpose of this grant is to support member research and innovation projects, where the results learned have value to the wider community.
- Any ATLE member who has approval from their Administrator / Supervisor may apply.
- ATLE has up to $6000 available to be dispersed to member projects.
- At an appropriate time, a presentation will be given by the project leader to the membership to share the project process, results and future plans.
Qualifying projects should:
- explore new ideas not widely used in the community or province.
- implement pilot/model programs that can be shared with ATLE membership.
- be more effective, equitable, or sustainable than existing approaches.
Grant Applications are due by 4:00 pm, February 15, 2023
In this Technology in Schools I Cohort Seminar Session, participants participate in a round-table conversation about cohort questions raised in the Design Thinking, Computational Thinking, and Makerspaces sessions held earlier in February.
Join your colleagues and Texthelp (in person!) for a day of thought leadership around Inclusive Learning, and learn about the latest updates to Texthelp's literacy and numeracy tools to support all students. At the end of the day, leave armed with all the knowledge and skills you need to successfully implement this exciting evolving tool suite with students and staff in your district.
We are so pleased to be joined virtually by renowned Inclusive Learning leaders, Chris Bugaj et al., authors of the ATLE/blendED Book Study selection, Inclusive Learning 365, to provide our blended keynote presentation at 9 AM, "Creating a Culture of Inclusivity: A Quest".
Being inclusive ourselves in the opportunities this virtual keynote can present, we are excited to open up this keynote to all, even if you are unable to attend our inclusive learning day in person. If you would like to attend the keynote virtually yourself click HERE to register for the virtual event.
Whether you’re feeling intimidated by coding or just looking to expand your toolkit, Google’s CS First is an easy way to get your students coding no matter what level of experience you have! With CS first, teachers can easily share scaffolded projects that guide students through fun activities with videos and instructions. Your class will learn the basics of Scratch block coding in a creative and fun way. Come learn how easy it is to get started with coding in your classroom right away!
No charge to register!
Digital Breakout or Digital Escape Room activities have provided many teachers with a fun way to engage students in fun curricular-based activities that challenge participants to use their distributed knowledge and abilities to solve a problem together. Competing against other groups in the classroom, the first team to solve the puzzles that reveal the knowledge needed to solve the narrative problem at the start of the breakout is the winner!
Today's assessment landscape can be easily supported by integrating educational technologies that provide students with more voice, choice and subsequent ownership of their learning.
Leave this session with a co-created and teacher-validated list of tools and strategies that you can tap into when planning your next steps in your classroom assessment journey.
No charge to register!
Like any good pedagogical approach, gamification in our classrooms can help us strategically challenge students to grapple with subject matter in ways that they might have found less engaging otherwise. Whether engaged in a quick little “Monster Quiz” review of some math facts, a class-long digital breakout activity grounded in review concepts from a unit of study, a short-term Minecraft project that demonstrates a series of learning outcomes at the end of a unit, or a longer-term entirely gamified classroom, it makes sense for us teachers that when so many of our students are engaged in gamified activities when not at school, we can leverage that literacy to help engage them in the content we want them to learn while at school.
Whether you’re interested in quick little tools that can help you create fun online review games quickly, or longer games-based project ideas, come to this session and get inspired!
No charge to register!
In this Technology in Schools I Cohort Seminar Session, participants participate in a round-table conversation about cohort questions raised in the Edtech Assessment Tools and Gamification sessions held earlier in March.
- Why do we play?
- What are the popular game titles schools are playing?
- What leagues are students participating in?
- What does a competitive Esports team look like?
Your students already use Google Docs, Slides, Drawings and more, but did you know there are hundreds of templates at your fingertips to take their publications to the next level? Join this session where we will look at some fun, engaging, and powerful ways students can demonstrate their understanding through images, audio, and video, and the best ways they can share that work with you! Together, we can turn learning experiences into something creative, memorable, and meaningful for students.
No charge to register!
In this practical session, we'll examine how we can save time and keep organized by using Forms to support specific stages of the instructional process and streamline classroom routines. We'll create (and share) SEL check-ins and class entrance slips, create surveys to check the class pulse re: perspectives, show how to monitor progress over time (Forms/Sheets), and create signup slips, quizzes, exit slips. Leave with ideas and even premade templates today that will help you save time tomorrow.
There are several tools that ALL students can use on Chromebooks to help them become better readers, writers, and learners in general. This session will help you address the diverse needs in your classroom. Empower your students to become more independent and use the tools they need to help them be successful. In this session, we will look at the built-in accessibility features of Chromebooks such as dictation and select-to-speak. We’ll also cover the features of Read&Write with specific lessons that allow students to use these tools in their everyday learning.
No charge to register!
Whether in a face-to-face, online, or blended learning environment, you can design your learning space as one where every learner, with their “unique abilities, backgrounds and preferences” (inclusive365.com) can feel supported by your demonstration of an inclusive mindset. In this UDL-inspired presentation, we will explore some tried-and-true and some less familiar strategies and tools that can support all learners in demonstrating their learning successfully.
Leave this session with some new tools in your toolkit, some old tools revisited in their new renditions, and some great ideas to help you support all learners back at school and beyond.
No charge to register!