Elephants & Technology Integration - Common Core Style

8 times a year, our school closes early for teacher planning called Early Release Days, 8:45am-1:15pm.  The morning schedule gets wonky and in order to preserve a common planning time for all grade levels, so we (the support teachers)  all pitch in and help teach an extra special or two.  This morning I taught Mrs. Strutz's 3rd grade class...some students I regularly have for reading groups and some students, I don't.  I had 50 minutes to do a stand-alone lesson with them so here's what I did (to support the Geography, Environmental Literacy & Culture SS strand):

1. Checked out the 2nd floor laptop carts.

2. Found two articles online about Elephants.

3. Read Article #1. 

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4. Created a Google Drive (formerly Google Docs) FORM...

 for students to answer Right There text-based questions with text-based answers.

 Here's what that looked like:

5. Read informational text #2 - "More Space, Please!"

6. Create another FORM with more open-ended response options, with a mix of lower level and higher level opportunities.  Here's what that looked like:

7. Create a Group on Edmodo just for this assignment called, Elephants at the Lake.

8.Wrote the following on the board for students to follow 

once they checked out a laptop as they passed the cart on their way in the classroom door.

The pictures captured at the top of this post are priceless.  They show students getting straight to work, reading online text, navigating to the FORM window, some students even opened both windows at the same time to avoid toggling back and forth between questions and articles...super impressed by that! One student asked for sticky notes to get the text-based words just right "admiration and imaginations" for the FORM.  Overall, I was really impressed with their skills...they are really starting to get this "text-based answers" piece.  I realize that all the questions I created were not hard higher level questions, but all RIGHT THERE questions. In our building, there is this phenomena happening where overall, students in general are getting all the higher level questions right and missing many of the easy RIGHT THERE questions, hence why we are hitting on this right now. The last question on the first FORM was "What is the problem and solution suggested in this article?" and Jaxon said, "Mrs. Jones, question #10 is not a RIGHT THERE question, it's hard!" And so they know the difference between a RIGHT THERE question and a AUTHOR & ME question! 

When students complete the answers, Google Drive dumps all the answers into a nice neat spreadsheet where you can quickly glance at all student answers at once and see who "gets it" and who needs more help. 

It looks something like this:

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P.S. In the 50 minutes, we had 24 students were able to log in, read the first article and answer the first set of 10 questions...if students want to log in from home to complete the rest, they can.  I have a feeling some of them will...Jeremy said, "Mrs. Jones, this was fun!" (Hey, if you think that was my objective, I'm happy, because learning is FUN!)

Happy Reading! - Jen