Students' tech grades from me will now be Pass/Fail. Pass/Fail grades will be determined by correct completion of assignments, showing that they have learned the skill being taught. I am very happy that the focus will be on LEARNING, rather than getting a good grade.

Third grade is sharing a cart of Chromebooks this year between the two classes. That is very exciting, for the students and for their teachers. They will be learning a lot this year!

We focus more on keyboarding in third grade, but are changing the way we do it this year! Reading the Back to School letter (link above) will fill you in on the changes. They will learn about correct finger placement, and posture. We will talk about how important it is to not stare at a screen, any screen, for too long. Did you know that on average we blink 12-15 times a minute, but when staring at a screen, we tend to only blink 3-4 times a minute? This causes dry eye syndrome, and eye strain. It's important for everyone to take frequent, short breaks from staring at a screen, be it computer, phone, TV, or tablet. 

11/8/18
The students continue to show improvement in their keyboarding skills! The majority of them are now automatically using their fingers on the correct home row keys. We will continue on this for the rest of November. Then December will start a month of coding!

10/26/18
This week our 3rd graders again learned about the keyboard while typing on Typetastic for 15 minutes. For the rest of the class, they once again opened Google Drawings, and followed directions to make a more complicated jack-o-lantern, this time with an entire scene instead of in isolation. These kids are very creative!

Next week, we will move beyond the game stage of Typetastic, and begin learning the home row keys!

10/12/18
The 3rd grade students are doing a great job on Typetastic. So far, using this game-based approach, they have learned where all the keys are on the keyboard. They move more into touch typing as the year progresses.

This week, we did one of our Cyber Safety and Citizenship lessons. The 10 lessons are spread out throughout the year. The one they did this week focuses on altering digital photos and videos, and why people do so. They learned that sometimes people do this for fame and fortune, and sometimes it is  just to restore an older photo that has become damaged. I was really impressed with how much they already knew!

Next week, the students will spend 10-15 minutes on typetastic, and then will use an app called Easy Draw to show their creativity regarding Halloween.