Welcome to the recap of wonderful ways to empower littles using Wixie. In this five-minute recap, my goal is to go over what was going over in the session. If you want to access the slide deck, the bit.ly is Wixie Fall 2021.
So let's go ahead and get started. So just to give you a little information about me, I am a tech coach in Fairfax County, Virginia. I blog on Tannenbaum Tech, and you can find me on Tannenbaum Tech, and I'm super proud to be an author of the book, Transform Techie Notes to Make Learning Sticky.
So today, we're going to talk a little bit about promoting student agency, talk about ways to use Wixie to create with littles, and lastly, a little bit about planning with intent. And I'm going to just give you a synopsis of each thing. So if you want to see it in more detail, please check out that bit.ly link, Wixie Fall 2021.
So the first thing I just want you to think about are what are some words that come to mind when you think of littles? Brainstorm some words. I know for me, the word was exhausted. I would help one student and another one would pop up, and I'd be playing this giant game of whack-a-mole.
It was truly exhausting. So for our students to become creators, we need to promote student agency. So this is a video of Pana Asafetana.
And when I started working with my young learners, I was a little frustrated. And in December, I heard her speak. She's amazing.
You should listen to the video in its entirety. I'm just going to summarize it. And she talked about how her students needed handles put on their learning.
And so she talked about, we don't teach kids to learn how to read without teaching them letters and sounds and so on. So she talked about how she used icons and included them in a morning message in order to make her students more independent learners of technology and give them something to hold on to. So here's an example of what it looked like at the beginning.
I would have a morning message where I would add those icons. And this is what I consider icon literacy number one. It ended up looking like this at the end of that first year.
And everyone asked me, where can I get a list of all those icons? Those icons change based on what your students are doing. Every year is different. This year, we're a Schoology school.
So my icons look very, very different than they did before. This is icon literacy number two. I was in a school that year where we did a lot with learning targets.
You can see the icons are now in my learning targets. You can also see I started using signs for username, which is their seven digit username and password. And I also now brought things into an algorithm where I showed things step by step.
This is really, this is our next year, which is this current year. And like I said, we're in a Schoology year. So once again, trying to keep it simple, trying to really focus on the tools.
In addition, I added a spinner to kind of help them build that icon literacy. Wixie makes this process easier by including all of these icons as stickers. So just to kind of give you a little bit of a preview.
So the language of initiative by Ron Richhart says that if we both show students we believe the answers are within them and give them those tools that they're more likely to persevere. Do we rescue them? Are we telling them we believe the answers are inside? In addition, Shay Grams talks to us about the fact that if we give kids videos, then they can control the pace of their learning as well. So if we were doing this as a synchronous session at this point, I would ask you to reflect and tell me a word that captured your attention, a phrase that moved, engaged, or provoked you, or a sentence that was powerful.
We're going to skip that. So now let's talk about for our students to become creators, we need to give them the freedom to get messy. So Wixie gives kids lots of choices.
It gives them choices in how they respond. It promotes collaboration. And there's a variety of tools in one place, including a teacher dashboard.
The next slides that follow should give you lots of examples. I'm going to do a really quick overview, but definitely check out the slide deck. So math, kindergarten, students are able to use the spray paint to show numbers, use either the text box or the paintbrush to add what's missing.
If you go in the slide deck, there's a video of me explaining more. First grade map, students drag these sets to put them in order first. And in this one, they were created sets using the cloning or the duplicating feature to show greater to less or least to greatest, depending on the activity.
In this one, students use the paintbrush tool to circle groups of 10. And later on, they used the spray paint to show groups of 10 in circles and then the extra ones outside. In this one, students are learning two different ways using base 10 blocks.
This is using that cloning feature to show the target number. And then some of them even added video at the end. In this one, this is one of my favorite activities of all time.
Students look at shapes and decide what else they can make of them. A circle is just a circle until you add those colors and it becomes Google or you add that M and it becomes a Gmail sign. Awesome, awesome.
Come on, there we go. This is a science example. I love this one because it really shows the difference in choices.
Some of my students were decided to draw the butterfly life cycle. Some decided to use pictures and then some decided to add videos. I love the variety.
In this one, students are comparing themselves to Stanley, a book character. They're using all the different modalities to share. In this one, students are first listening to a story and then they're making a story web.
They're challenging themselves to use two different modalities. In this case, video and text. In this one, my students had been writing personal narratives in grade two and they had to evaluate their own personal narrative to create a story map.
As you can see, everybody did something a little different, really highlighting the amazing things that Wixie can do. Integrating is not technology is not just about the tech tools, but how the tech tools empower students with voice and choice. So this is my intent framework.
I will let you read through that on your own. And what we did in the session is we kind of just went through how you could use that, how you could identify your learning goals. How could you figure out where handles for learning are needed? Thinking about how Wixie could activate this lesson.
And lastly, but not least, there's my contact information. If you're interested in my book, a lot of this comes from chapter four of my book. There's a special thank you code.
You can click on the link and go to RoadToAwesome.net. There's also my previous Wixie webinar and a tech for learning article. I hope this was helpful. And if you have any questions, you have my email.
Please feel free to reach out to me and use my handle at TannenbaumTech.
