Author Archives: Matt Caratachea
Discovery Education Board Builder
I know teachers have been using Discovery Education for many years in Henrico County. Liz Jessee and my 3rd grade team at Short Pump Elementary School showed me Boards, which was a new feature to me! With the board builder students and teachers can make digital posters displaying material that they learn in class. These are …
Writing Assignments in Google Classroom
Ms. Jessee’s third grade class has been using Google Classroom to complete their pre-writing assignments. As a class they use the Stoplight Writing outline. Instead of having her students complete this on paper Ms. Jessee put the outline into a Google Doc and shared it to her class through Google Classroom. There are SO many …
Making Maps With Mrs. Wash’s Class
Earlier this year Mrs. Wash’s 2nd grade class put their map making skills to the test by making their own towns. We used an online map maker to have the students make their town. I really like this tool because it is SO simple and the kids love it. It also includes a couple of crucial …
Math Busters Invade Fair Oaks and Trevvett!
Last Friday I had the pleasure of participating in a ITRT meetup. ITRT meetups are a lot like a food truck meetup. The only difference is less food and more technology. (We don’t have a catchy name for our group, so if you have one please tell us!) We traveled to two wonderful schools, Fair …
Shake It Off
With all of the changes going on this year the Elementary ITRT team decided to make a song/video showing some of the struggles teachers in our county are going through. There are so many changes that sometimes it seems like teachers are spending all of their time and energy keeping up instead of teaching. We …
Google Work Collector in First Grade
When we switched so many things this year saving student work was one of the things that we knew would be tricky. The students have something called Desktop Sync on their computers, but we have seen that this doesn’t always work. Google is the best option to save work for sure, but what about for …
Ms. Aquilina’s Postcards
Ms. Aquilina’s second grade class has been hard at work making digital postcards. They have been studying the continents and oceans in class. They got in small groups to research the continent of their choice. After researching they went to www.vocaroo.com and record themselves reading some of the findings. The groups then chose between Pixie and www.jukeboxprint.com to …
3rd Graders and Google Classroom at Kaechele
Today was my first real experience with Google Classroom, and I have to say that it was awesome! Since we are using Google so much in the classroom it seems like the natural thing to do is to start using Google Classroom. Like me, Mr. Whichard at Kaechele was using Edmodo in his classroom in …
Mrs. Darden’s Kindergarten Educreations
Mrs. Darden over at Short Pump Elementary School wanted to introduce the iPads to her class, so we did that using an app called Educreations. She wanted her students to learn an app that could be used across different subject areas. After a quick discussion about the iPads the students used Educreations to create a …
Coding in the Classroom
Mrs. Palkovics, a teacher at Mehfoud elementary who works with first and second graders with Autism, has decided to use coding in her classroom this year. She was telling me that she saw a news report showing young children with Autism coding and how it was positively impacting their lives. Mrs. Palkovics then tried it at …
