Roxi Thompson

This week has been super busy! But it's that awesome kind of busy where I am working on multiple projects for January that I am SUPER excited about!  Kinders on Chromebooks We are preparing for our 3rd Quarter EdTech session, and we are planning to include resources specifically designed for our K-2 teachers. We want to create videos in which we model strategies that K-2 teachers can use to help their students learn how to login to Chromebooks. My EdTech teammate reached out to the Kindergarten team at one of our schools, and they were kind enough to open their doors to us!  We will be working with this team on the first day back from Winter Break in January. Our plan is for me to lead the first session while another EdTech team member records the lesson and assists students as needed. We will be sharing the video footage, along with other K-2 resources, with our teachers during our sessions throughout the 3rd Quarter. This week I am trying to build a Google Si...

As the new EdTech and Social Studies Specialist, part of my job includes planning and facilitating professional development for our social studies teachers. Our main PD sessions take place once a month on Wednesdays when teachers are released early from their school sites. Leading these PD sessions was a part of the job that I was SUPER excited about when I first started. However, there are some challenges that I wasn't prepared for that have caused me to reflect and rethink the way I have been planning.  Challenges 1) We have 32 schools in our district, and there are three different release times. To honor everyone's time and make sure teachers don't have to work outside of contract hours, we decided to have two different sessions with a half-hour of overlap time. I set up the activities in Google Classroom, number them, and include videos and directions so that teachers can work through them at their own pace when they arrive.  However, some teachers have a d...

I was recently asked to go out to a school to support a workshop-style tech training session. Teachers were asked to come to the session with an idea of something new they wanted to try or learn more about that involved using tech in their classroom. There was a group of teachers that were interested in helping their students learn how to digitally annotate a text. We spent some time trying different options before they chose one that they felt would work best for their students. I first learned about this digital annotation strategy in a blog post on Matt Miller's blog, Ditch That Textbook . This was actually a guest post written by Joe Marquez titled "Redefining annotation: Ditch That PDF and hyper-annotate."  In this post, Marquez encourages teachers and students to "level up" annotation practices rather than just substituting a digital highlighter and doing the same things they are already doing on paper.  Marquez provides several awesome ideas for h...