Wow! Today marks the fifth day of 5 and 5, the Tech Takeout crew went to 5 different schools in 5 days to work in different grade levels on different math and language arts skills. As a group we discussed the areas of need in each of the schools we visited. The teachers provided us with data explaining the needs of their students. Every school we made sure to focus on area of need for that particular grade level.
For the opening activity the students did a quick opening pre-assessment with Plickers. Plickers is a great student response system that takes the need of multiple devices out of the equation. As long as the teacher has a smart device that has the Plickers app loaded onto it they could use this platform in their classroom. The way students respond with this student response system is by holding a Plickers card, which can be printed from the Plickers website. One of our 
favorite things about Plickers is that all of the cards look different. This keeps students from looking at a neighbor’s card to copy their answer. Mrs. Wright made a quick five question pre-assessment of various language arts skills. The students and teachers both had a great time participating in the Plickers activity.We were so lucky to visit Glen Lea Elementary today to work with the fifth grade. In every class we used different digital tools to hit different language arts skills that the students needed a little extra help with. We worked on inferencing, synonyms, main idea, and summarizing.
Julie Smith and Stephanie Wright worked on inferencing skills using real commercials. The students watched different popular commercials that did not use any dialog so it required the audience to use inferencing skills. While watching the commercials the students discussed how inferencing was used in the commercials. After the discussion the students made their own Comic Life that focused on inferencing. The students chose an emotion o
n which to focus and took a picture of themselves displaying that emotion. The trickiest part about making their Comic Life is that the students could not say what emotion they were displaying. Once all of the students finished their Comic Life they saved them as JPEGs and then uploaded them to a collaborative Padlet wall. The students did such a great job, and LOVED the activity!
Jim Covais and Matt Caratachea focused on main idea with their group. The students were given a short reading passage and were tasked with identifying the main idea. Once the students decided on the main idea they headed over to Bitstrips to show off their knowledge! The students created a one panel comic showing the main idea of 
their passage. When they finished their comic the students took a screenshot and saved it to their desktop. Mr. Covais created a Padlet wall for the students to share their work, so after the students took their screenshot they went to the Padlet wall for today. Padlet is such a great tool for sharing work! It is a digital collaborative corkboard. The students simply dragged their comic onto the Padlet wall to share their main idea with their classmates.
Karen Hues and Sarah Green had the students engaged in non fiction learning! Students used newsela.com to read non fiction articles at different reading levels. Then they used Vocaroo to record themselves reading 
their article to practice their fluency. After listening to the recording, they wrote a summary in TodaysMeet to share with the rest of their group. They were limited to 140 characters, so it was important to condense their article into a concise summary.
Jessica Robinson and Garry Marshall had a blast today with their students! Mrs. Robinson and Mr. Marshall focused on synonyms as well as inferencing. The students were given cards with an emotion listed. Once the students received their emotion card they started by taking a selfie using the Dell Webcam. After dragging their 
image to their desktops they headed over to BigHuge Labs to make a trading card for their emotion. This is such a great web resource because it can easily be adapted to any content area. The students uploaded their picture and then typed sentences using at least one synonym describing their emotions. This activity was really useful because the students were able to work on multiple skills at the same time. The teacher can then print out all of the cards and use them as task cards in a center. Once the students finished their card they uploaded it to a collaborative Padlet wall.
