Thank you SET BC for the technology you allowed us to use this year for our projects on Ancient Greece. It inspired our staff and allowed our students to shine in all academic areas. This technology has created a drastic increase in student engagement, written output, motivation and overall academic growth.

These computer programs are amazing and they allow students who need extra support to fit in with their classmates more than I could have ever have imagined. I’ve never said it before, but my Support Workers knowledge of the system enables us to integrate the technology with the curriculum in a way where the students are able to be more successful than I ever would’ve hoped for.

Kurzwell implications in the classroom

- Students were able to listen to a simplified version of “Wrinkle In Time” novel that the whole class was working on. The students were able to complete ongoing comprehension questions and type up chapter summaries the same day as their classmates

- Students were able to listen to specific science sites on Biomes and completed a power point presentation (with the whole class)

- Students were able to listen to textbook information for Science & Socials and were able to cover the concepts that the class is working on and were able to join in on class discussions because they understood the key concepts /ideas/vocabulary.

- Students were able to complete worksheets and tests that were scanned on the photocopier and emailed to specific students so they could work on the same work as the rest of the class and were able to hear the questions, type up their answers with the aide of the Kurzweil program, print them off and put them in their duotangs or handed them in for marking

- Students were able to complete monthly individual novel studies that were scanned onto their computers and they were able to submit similar questions as their classmates

- Students researched Internet information about the year they were born and then used Inspiration to web some key concepts about 1999 (price of gas, top songs, news stories…)

- Students completed snowmath – purchased the parts of a snowman within certain weights and price guidelines and built the snowman. Created a poster to advertise the snowman. Created business cards for their Snowman company.

- The students budgeted for living expenses, salary, car, …

- The students were able to write similar tests on the laptop at the same time their classmates are writing the test. This allowed them to parallel the curriculum and fit into classroom activities. Their work was shared with the class and have been posted to demonstrate the high quality of work they are capable of doing (which has surprised some of the other students).

This is Mrs. Anderson working with her class.

This is Ron! He has been a huge reason for our projects success. Initially, he was the one who loaded the programs, connected the computers to the internet and printers and who has helped me with troubleshooting.

This week the students and I have been working on their Clicker Books on Ancient China. The students really caught onto Clicker Books fast. It was much harder for me to learn this technology than it was for them. I found myself learning quicker ways to do various tasks from them. It just proves how much easier and quicker it is for children of today to learn new technology.  I had a difficult time saving their projects in the beginning and then I ran into more troubles when I tried to email their projects.

I would definitely use Clicker Books again. I found that the program worked similar to PowerPoint, but the students could also listen to their text being read aloud.

A general description of the project – who was involved, what were the goals, what were the anticipated outcomes, what curricular themes/activities took place, what specific technology was used?

 Who was involved?

When this project began the staff involved included: Candace Ostertag (Special Education Teacher), Sharlene Anderson (Classroom Teacher), and Monika Vegara (SEA), Rod Miller (Technology Teacher) and Classroom Students. This project ended up involving all of the Support Workers in the school and many of the teachers. We were so excited when we ended up getting seven computers instead of four. Our whole school is so grateful for the benefits this technology has provided our students with.

 General Description of the Project:

Using Clicker 5 social studies adapted gridsets on laptops in the classroom the students explored the basic content of the ancient civilizations adapted from the textbook.  (The resource teacher built additional resources as needed in collaboration with Kathy Ryan, SETBC consultant.) Then using  Kurzweil 3000 on laptops in the classroom, the students compiled research on the internet, use the textbook (available in ARC-BC) and use library books scanned into K3000,  the students explored and analyzed the concept of civilization as it applies to selected ancient cultures.

The students investigated the social roles within one or more ancient civilizations. Once they have done the research they identified influences and contributions of ancient societies to present-day cultures.  The students then compiled a body of information from a range of sources and deliver a formal presentation on a selected issue or inquiry using two or more forms of representation. The writing features in Kurzweil will also help these students organize their thoughts and ideas into paragraphs. Using the class web page, Mrs. Anderson added web-based resources highlighting project strategies and resources.  Then the groups worked together to create a multimedia presentation that contained video interviews (using a Flip Camera), a Clicker book and a PowerPoint presentation.  

Curricular Goals:

Grade 7 Social Studies 

A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, B1, B2, B3  (IRP – www.bced.gov.bc.ca/irp/irp.htm)

Final Project Outcome(s):

• Student presentations (Clicker and Powerpoint presentations will be submitted to CurriculumSET)
• Teacher support materials (specific lesson/unit plan, presentation plan templates) which can be shared with other teachers
• Video interviews of students – beginning, middle, and end of student projects (describing process, how technologies are used, etc.)
• Final project report (publishable on SET-BC website)

Curricular Activities that took place:

• Integrated units on Ancient Egypt, Greece, and China using the technology we received from SET BC.
• Differentiated learning plan using the Clicker 5 and Kurzweil programs compiled by Candace Ostertag (Special Education Teacher).
• Please see attached documents with units that were compiled by Sharlene Anderson (Classroom Teacher).

 Specific Technology that was used:

• Clicker 5
• Kurzweil 3000
• ARC BC
• 7 Lap tops
• Projector
• Flip Cameras
• Internet research on all assignments

Training that took place and how was it used during the project by the teacher(s) and the students:

• We didn’t end up using the training time that we received. It was my first year in the Special Education position and when job action began I found myself really struggling to find the time to achieve some of my initial goals. I am grateful for the support I had from staff to make this project happen. I found myself relying on Sharlene Anderson, the grade seven Classroom teacher and my fabulous SEAs, support workers, throughout the school that were keen to implement this new technology.
•  I created the differentiated learning plan and was able to spend some time in the classroom introducing the programs and showing the students involved how to use the programs alongside Monika Vegara, our schools technological genius. For the past few years she has been one of our SET BC students support worker.  She has received training from Kathy Ryan, our SET BC consultant and has spent countless hours mastering these programs.
• At first we pulled the four students who used the technology aside and took the time to show them how to use the basic features of Kurzweil 3000. They were extremely pleased when they learned they could highlight and extract information from text.
• Monika Vegara also supported Sharlene Anderson, the Classroom teacher in using these programs throughout the project. She has truly been an inspiration.
• Sharlene Anderson, the Classroom Teacher has compiled her units with a variety of activities that taught the curricular goals. The students used Microsoft Office to create word documents and PowerPoint presentations, Microsoft Publisher to create brochures, posters and completed many drama and art activities. She used the projector on a regular basis and allowed the students to do the majority of their research on the internet.
• Monika Vegara modified a gridset jeopardy game for one of the units. One of our SET BC students was thrilled to share his gridset with his class using the projector.
• Students who required support with reading were able to use Kurzweil to read information directly from the internet. Being able to share the technology that he uses on a regular basis, made him feel extremely proud.  
• Mrs. Anderson also used the class web page to add web-based resources highlighting assignments, project strategies and resources.
• Small groups were able to listen to text that was being read aloud using Kurzweil using speakers. This created a really inclusive educational setting, where the student didn’t feel like they were different; they were experiencing the technology as a group, not being singled out.    
• I had received some training the previous year when I was Classroom Teacher to a couple of students who were using SET BC technology. It was my first year using Clicker and I just touched the surface on the many different things that you can do with this program.  I regret that I didn’t push myself to do more my first year, because I feel it would have really benefitted the students. This year I learned a lot a more about this programs uses. I will continue to spend more time learning more about these programs with the students in our school.  
• This year I participated in a Kurzweil Camp with the Support Workers in our school as well as the children that they work with. Kathy Ryan our SET BC consultant and Jason McAllister our districts Computer Support Coordinator came to train Support Workers and the students they work with. This was truly great because the students need the training to and it was amazing to see how fast they can learn. It great experience for their Support Workers as well as the students involved.
• I have also met with Kathy Ryan our SET BC consultant a few times online as she guided me through some of the programs. On one of our district Pro-d Days I planned self directed instruction, whereby I was able to spend more time using these programs.  I also took a course this winter on Differentiated Instruction which went over some of the ways that technology could be used to differentiate instruction which was very helpful and I implemented in my planning.  
• Our school purchased a laptop cupboard that is located in the Learning Centre with our computers that we received through this grant. We had really old Del computers that really didn’t function properly. Seeing the options these programs provide has motivated many of our Support Workers to get in and learn what these programs could really do.  
• I had one Support Worker, Judy Lee who volunteered to stay one night with me to take the ARC BC training so that she could pull in specific resources on Kurzweil. She joined me in my online meeting with Kathy Ryan, when she was trying to show me how to create my own gridset using Clicker. I also tried to build time into the Support Workers schedules to provide them with time using the programs when I was able to.
• Another student was able to do a novel study on Maniac McGee using Kurzweil on the computers we received. She is a SET BC student who has all programs, but her computer was painfully slow and often froze which created frustration for her as well as her support worker. Now, her support worker, Lorna Coyne is pleased to have access to these computers when they are not being used by Mrs. Anderson’s. She is much happier with the Kurzweil program and far less frustrated with the technology. Lorna Coyne also felt keen to spend volunteer hours after school to better familiarize herself with the program and to create bubble notes on her student’s novel study using Kurzweil.
• Janet Taylor, a Support Worker in our school who works with two SET BC students also spent a lot of her own time talking to other Support Workers about what knowledge that they could share. Judy Lee and Monika Vegara were both key in this process.  I think the biggest accomplishment that our school gained from this project was enthusiasm from success working with technology that worked properly.

Problems that we encountered:

• Initially, it took us a while to get set up for the technology. I needed to have a secure place to store the computers. This ended up being a shelving unit in our Learning Centre. We had our districts maintenance worker, Ryan O’Neil come in and set up our shelving unit with proper shelving units. He also set it up so that all of the computers cords could be plugged in properly.
• Ron Tjurnstrom, our technology support, programmed all seven computers with Microsoft Office, connected them to the internet, and set them up to print. We also ended up having a problem with Kurzweil not connecting to the interned, which he was able to solve. Clicker 5 for some reason had a glitch, which he was able to fix as well. These things all just took time. Fortunately, Ron Tjurnstrom was fabulous to work with. He was flexible and really did his best to make this technology work for everyone involved.   
• Time was the biggest obstacle I faced. This year was my first year teaching in the Special Education position. I had many new roles to fulfill and I needed to have more hands to get all of the goals I set out to achieve accomplished. I didn’t end up taking as many pictures that I had hoped and I didn’t collect quite as many samples.
• Clicker 5 was much harder for me than I anticipated. I was fortunate to receive help from Kathy Ryan, our SET BC consultant. I anticipated that creating a gridset would take me a week and it ended up taking me months. I am much quicker using the program now, but learning how to create gridsets was a real learning curve for me.  
• I also ended up getting sick part way through a missed a lot of work, which really through me back.   I am pleased to say that what we do not achieve this year I will continue to work on next year. My journey in learning new technology, implementing and sharing ideas is far from over.
• Job action also made it difficult for me to spend the extra hours that were needed.
• When we were working with the Flip Cameras I didn’t spend as much time teaching the students how to use them as I should have. I also didn’t install the software onto all of their computers, so they were not able to do their own edits and to compile their videos. I requested that Ron Tjurnstrom install the software onto my school computer so that I could do this myself. In this process we learned that Quicktime also needed to be updated while the computer was not in deep freeze. Once this was done, I found that it ended up taking me too much time and would have been better if I had set up the software on all of their computers.  I also had difficulties loading the videos onto the project blog, because of their file size. Next, year I will do this differently if our school is able to use this technology again.

Project Successes:

• I think the biggest accomplishment that our school gained from this project was enthusiasm from success working with technology that worked properly. The majority of our staff bought into the technology and really tried hard to learn as much as they could to support their students. Having access to these computers opens up so many doors for those students who have significant designations, but do not necessarily meet SET BC criteria.  For the first time I was able to see what 21^st Century Learning looks like and feels like for those involved.
• It is sometimes difficult to make inclusive education actually happen, but with this technology we were able to make all students feel equal. Sure, each student has unique skills and different needs, but they were able to work together and not feel alienated from they’re peers. Watching the students be so proud to share what they know about the technology was captivating. Some of these kids have thought that they are not good enough in life and this gave them the opportunity to shine in their class. Mrs. Anderson has a gift at making students feel like they are a part of the class and teaching students to appreciate difference.
• Given, we did not have the budget for all of this technology it also opened up so many doors for the students our school. This year we had access to programs that so many students in the school benefit from. Clicker 5 makes it easy to modify students who are on designated programs and Kurzweil 3000 made it easy to adapt students programs.  These programs are all extremely expensive to purchase and having access made supporting our students possible.
• As I was working on my blog I was able to bounce ideas off of Rod Miller, our Technology and share some of the ideas I was gaining from our online meetings. I also ended up getting supported from others who were involved in the projects that were reading my blog, which was very helpful.
• Watching how this technology can change students experience in school has inspired me to learn more.
• There are so many different ways that we can access the curriculum for students so that they are learning the same things just in different ways. School is no longer a place of fear and seperation. Same doesn’t mean the same for everyone any longer. There is so much that educators can do to help students be successful in school.

This week we were very pleased to get a new student from Japan in Mrs. Anderson’s class. Fortunately, I have several students using the computers that we received in Mrs. Anderson’s class. After a week of scrambling to get more ESL resources, I have been so grateful for Clicker 5. She has been able to do journal writing on Clicker using the word bank.

We also have her using some basic gridsets to learn animals, sports, days of the week and more. The whole class is so happy to have her in the classroom and are keen to show her the technology that they are using. We also have a few IPADS in our school and have been using the translator program to increase communication between our new student and her peers.

The students have created a Powerpoint Presentations on Ancient Greece that I am planning to share as well. I continue to work on my Ancient Greece gridset at home. It is taking me much longer than I have anticipated, but I try to put in a half an hour each night after school. My goal is to have it finished by the end of next week, wish me luck!

Mallory Burton, SET-BC consultant, suggested that I check out the Ancient Egypt wiki that was created for Harwin Elementary Students during the UDL project. She said that it has lots of useful websites. http://exploreancientegypt.pbworks.com/w/page/19405076/FrontPage. I thought others might be interested too, it is great! Thanks Mallory Burton

Differentiated Learning Plan 

Goals 

Social Studies 7

 Identity, Society & Culture

• Analyse social roles within one or more ancient civilizations
• Identify influences and contributions of ancient societies to present-day cultures

 Skills and Processes of Social Studies

• Apply critical thinking skills – including comparing, classifying, inferring, imagining, verifying, identifying relationships, summarizing and drawing conclusions to a range of problems and issues

 Note: Students in this class have already worked on their Ancient Egypt unit with their classroom teacher.

The students also have experience writing using RAFT.

Goal 1: Desired Results

Transfer: Students will be able to independently use their learning to….

• Understand that the present is evolving from the past through drawing connections between ancient civilizations and present-day civilizations
• Recognize that ancient societies influenced and contributed to present-day cultures

Critique and analyse social roles in an ancient civilization

Meaning

Understandings

Students will understand that…

-  Ancient societies have strong influences and make many contributions to present-day cultures

-  There are various social roles in every civilization

There are relationships between social roles in ancient Egypt and present-day cultures

Essential Questions: Students will keep considering…

How do we know if what we read about ancient societies is fact or fiction?

 How would our culture look without the influence of ancient civilizations?

What social roles repeat throughout history?

Who is more civilized Ancient Egypt or present-day society?

What problems reoccur throughout history?

Acquisition of Skills and Knowledge

Students will know…

v  Some of the ways that Ancient Egypt has influenced and contributed to present-day culture

v  Vocabulary: hieroglyphics, papyrus, obelisk, Sphinx, embalming (mummification), Akhet, Peret, Shemu, obelisk, ochre

v   That there are various social roles within Ancient Egypt

Vocabulary: Pharaoh, nobles, priests, scribes, merchants, crafts people, slaves

 Students will be skilled at…

 v  Summarizing and identifying influences and contributions of Ancient Egypt on present-day society

Analysing social roles within Ancient Egypt

 Stage 2 – Evidence

Assessment Evidence: students will need to show their learning by…

Performance Task      

RAFT:

In this activity you will take the role provided, pretend you are talking to the audience provided, and create using the format provided to explain the topic. Your goal is to describe at least five innovations and influences that Ancient Egypt had on Present-day Society

GRASPS:

In a small group, your task is to create a multi-media presentation that is communicated by a professional journalist. You are sharing your presentation with the community members of Ancient Egypt. The challenge involves appealing to a wide range of social classes.

 Stage 3 – Learning Plan

Summary of Key Learning Events and Instruction. The teaching and learning needed to achieve the unit goals.

Lesson 11-12 -The students will present their projects to the class. At the end of their final presentation day they will describe on a cue card what they liked and didn’t like about is unit

Well I just got back from Spring Break! Now I feel rested and ready to get back into the technology.  

Prior to Spring Break I added images to each page on my Ancient Greece gridset. I took important information from the Ancient Worlds text book, put it into my own words and added it to each page. Over the holidays and added the location of each image on the properties section, so I am following copyright.  At the end, I was having real difficulties figuring out how to add question pages and links and was fortunate enough to get more help from Kathy Ryan, the SET BC consultant in our district today. 

I am learning how to work the explore icon and to re-route and link pages on my gridset. When you are in the explore section viewing the gridset, you need to re-name the gridset pages that you are working on by left clicking and going to properties. Also, on your master gridset you can create writing templates that you can drag and drop onto each topic. When you are doing this it is important to think about their titles and to name the with numbers, but not spaces between the name and the number. If you think this through it helps a lot with rembering where you need to go next. My next goal is to create and link questions to each topic area on my own. With help I was able to get it started today, now lets see how I do on my own.

Tomorrow we meet again in an online meeting room. It has been a  real learning curve for me but I am really enjoying the challenge.

Thank you Kathy Ryan!

Assignment:

You have been recently hired as a news reporter/journalist. Your area of expertise lies in one of the following areas: Headline News (front page of newspaper, most important news), Arts and Life (Egyptian cultural structures), Sports and Leisure (daily lives of Egyptians), Politics (the pharaoh and his role in government), Geography / Environment, Other – please see me to discuss. The challenge of this assignment is to appeal to a wide range of social classes that they can defend.

You are to create a multi-media presentation in one of the following formats: interview (drama or flip camera), radio show (drama or flip camera), newspaper – written or computer format (Microsoft Publisher), or a video (using flip cameras). In small groups you will create your presentation where each group member will focus on one of these topics.

Prior to handing in their assignments  the students created a self-assessment, letting me know how they think they did on their projects.

The short video clip below was one of our groups multi-media prensentation on Ancient Egypt using the flip cameras. The movie size was too big, so I was unable to share that piece with you. This particular group worked extremely hard and had a lot of fun using the cameras.

VID00001