NOW Classrooms, Grades 6-8. Meg Ormiston
themes adapted from the 2016 ISTE Standards for Students.
1. NOW Classrooms, Grades K–2: Lessons for Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Technology
2. NOW Classrooms, Grades 3–5: Lessons for Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Technology
3. NOW Classrooms, Grades 6–8: Lessons for Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Technology
4. NOW Classrooms, Grades 9–12: Lessons for Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Technology
5. NOW Classrooms, Leader’s Guide: Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Technology
Instructional coaches might use all five books in the series for project ideas at all grade levels and for leadership strategies. We have scaffolded the lessons across the series of books so they all flow together. We have organized all the grade-level books in this series in the same way to make it easy for our readers to see how the ideas fit together. We believe this series will save you hours of preparation time.
Using This Book
This book features a series of lessons written for grades 6–8 teachers. As teachers, we know how challenging it is to come up with fresh ideas for the classroom each day, so we wrote our lessons in a way that makes getting started simple.
Each of the chapters includes multiple topical sections, each with three lesson levels—(1) novice, (2) operational, and (3) wow, spelling NOW. Once we arrived at the three levels, it felt almost like a Choose Your Own Adventure book instead of a step-by-step recipe book. Make your lesson selections based on what your students can already do. For example, in chapter 3, we introduce the topic Becoming Knowledge Constructors (page 64). The novice lesson in this section covers using Boolean operators to improve search engine results. But maybe you have students who already know how to do that. You can advance those students to the operational lesson, which is all about using advanced search engine features to filter search results even further. Students who master both concepts are ready for more advanced research techniques, hence the wow lesson on using digital tools to annotate web pages.
Each lesson begins with a learning goal, phrased as an I can statement, written in student-friendly language. These statements help students understand the learning goal and make the learning experience purposeful. When students more clearly understand what they can do and where they are going, learning happens. This is important because it means that students are taking ownership of their learning. We then explain to you what students will learn from the lesson and the tools you can use to make it work, and we provide a stepped process you can follow to accomplish the learning goal. All lessons wrap up with two or more subject-area connections with ideas you can use to adapt the lesson to different content areas, like English language arts and mathematics. Along the way, we provide teaching and tech tips in this book’s scholar’s margins to help provide useful insights. Finally, we added discussion questions at the end of each chapter so you can use this book with your team for professional development.
Chapter 1, “Embracing Creativity,” includes lessons to help students create multimedia products, rather than just consume them. You will help students become more sophisticated at using imagery, video, and audio in their projects. These lessons also have students edit their own multimedia and mash up media by putting different files together to demonstrate what they have learned.
Chapter 2, “Communicating and Collaborating,” covers the communication theme as students actively engage in online discussions to enhance their learning and then share what they learn with an authentic audience. In this chapter, you will learn why publishing their work online helps prepare students for a world of online collaboration that will stay part of their future in college and beyond.
Chapter 3, “Conducting Research and Curating Information,” helps you teach your students to identify information and validate its reliability. Students will build on their media-literacy skills to find credible, unbiased solutions to real-world problems.
Chapter 4, “Thinking Critically to Solve Problems,” covers how to help students effectively identify the tools they need to communicate with peers and complete a task. It also covers helping students to find better resources and keep them organized. Finally, this chapter helps you introduce students to the world of data analytics by offering lessons that engage students in creating surveys connected to learning objectives, consolidating statistical information into infographics, and publishing their research to wider audiences than just classroom peers.
Chapter 5, “Being Responsible Digital Citizens,” helps you teach your students to understand their digital footprint and work on creating a positive online identity that reflects their real selves. Cyberbullying and online deception are critical aspects of digital citizenship that challenge students and educators alike. We include lessons that offer strategies, tips, and tricks to protect both persons and data; to engage in legal and ethical behavior that respects the value of ownership; and to ensure that each student’s digital footprint enhances his or her character, rather than diminishes it.
Chapter 6, “Expanding Technology and Coding Concepts,” explains how to help students manage their digital lives by using basic troubleshooting techniques to overcome technology problems and by using online resources like cloud-based storage and digital portfolios to better organize and present their work. We conclude the chapter with lessons designed specifically to engage grades 6–8 students in developing vital coding skills that will serve them well no matter their future career trajectory.
In the appendix, we include an alphabetical list of technology terms and resources. This includes a comprehensive list of every app, website, and technology tool referenced in this book along with a description of each resource.
Building Background: Know Before You Go
Readers should be aware of a few additional concepts regarding this content before they begin engaging with the lessons and chapters that follow. We want to briefly mention suggestions for the sequence in which readers use the lessons in the book, discuss the concepts of learning management systems and common education suites like G Suite for Education that are a critical part of this book’s lessons, emphasize the importance of following policies regarding student privacy and Internet use, and discuss how assessment connects with this content.
Sequence of Use
Although we organized this book in an optimal way, we invite you to move among the lessons in whatever sequence you like. Lessons range in difficulty so that you may meet your students at their level. Some eighth graders will need novice lessons and some sixth graders will be ready for the operational or wow lessons. You know your students best, so use our NOW lesson format to fit their needs.
Each of these lessons requires some form of app or technology platform to accomplish a learning goal. We offer a variety of suggestions you can deploy with each lesson, but do not limit yourself or your students to our examples. Apps change. They disappear entirely. The best app for a job when we wrote this book may not remain the best one for the job when you read this book. As you read this book, we hope you find apps and websites that are new to you and you come up with your own creative ideas for applying technology to your teaching and learning goals. Also, many grades 6–8 students will enter your classroom already with expertise in certain apps and platforms and can offer you their own suggestions for ways to connect the tools with learning goals—take advantage of their knowledge, and allow students sandbox time to freely explore new and different ways to use apps! You don’t need to arrive as a technology expert. Invite student groups to learn new apps right along with you, and then use the group’s knowledge to teach the rest of the class. We designed each