distributing them to classrooms, but we know not every school makes this the case. Chapter 1 is especially for you if your school leaves technology management up to you.
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 second graders will need the very basic lessons, and some kindergarteners will be ready for the advanced lessons. You know your students best, so use our NOW lesson format to fit their needs.
Each of these lessons requires some form of an app or a 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. Because of this, we designed each lesson to have adaptability so you can use it with whatever tool best suits your classroom. We don’t teach the app; we teach the classroom process.
Learning Management Systems and Education Suites
Just because learning sometimes looks messy, it doesn’t mean it lacks structure. Imagine a whole new world without a stack of papers to grade in which the assignments students submit are all organized and recorded in digital folders. Access to technology allows teachers to eliminate the stack of papers and create digital learning experiences that are meaningful and even more powerful to both students and teachers than paper. Schools in the 21st century use many different software programs and web-based applications, or learning management systems to stay organized. Most LMSs have some free features and premium school or district solutions, but regardless of the platform, they operate best when everyone uses the same system so students and parents don’t need to learn a different LMS for every class. These systems allow teachers to message students, assign and collect documents, report student progress, and deliver elearning content. Throughout the book, you will notice we provide steps for how you can give digital files to students and then how students return the digital files to you through the classroom LMS.
Common LMSs include the following, but you can find hundreds of others on the market.
• Schoology (www.schoology.com)
• Showbie (www.showbie.com)
• Seesaw (https://web.seesaw.me)
• Canvas (www.canvaslms.com/k-12)
• Edmodo (www.edmodo.com)
• Otus (http://otus.com)
• PowerSchool Learning (www.powerschool.com/solutions/lms)
• Blackboard (www.blackboard.com)
• Moodle (https://moodle.org)
• D2L (www.d2l.com)
One option that needs a little more explanation is Google Classroom (https://classroom.google.com). Google Classroom, which is free to use, is a cross between a document management system and a learning management system. It does not contain all the features of an LMS, but it is a great way to get started with managing a digital classroom.
In addition to an LMS, many school districts use an education productivity suite like Google’s G Suite for Education (https://edu.google.com/products/productivity-tools) or Microsoft Office 365 for Education (www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/products/office). We focus on Google’s platform because it’s the one we are experienced with, but if your school or district uses a different platform, you will find corollaries with them that allow you to adapt our content to your needs.
With G Suite for Education, every user in a district has a unique Gmail login and password to enter their own part of the G Suite, granting them access to the following services.
• Google Docs for word processing
• Google Sheets for spreadsheets
• Google Slides for presentations
• Google Forms to create quizzes and surveys
• Google Drawings to create illustrations
• Google Drive to store and share files
Using these online environments, students and teachers can communicate and keep documents online and available on any device that connects to the Internet. They can keep these documents private or share them with others.
To highlight the value of a product suite such as this, note that our writing team used Google Docs to organize and write this book. Twenty-seven coauthors took part in writing the NOW Classrooms series, and none of us can imagine how we could have done this without using a collaborative platform like G Suite. Collaboration, improving work based on formative feedback, and working with digital tools will help even the youngest students prepare for an increasingly technology-driven world so that they can adapt their skill sets to fit newer and better tools as they get older.
Student Privacy and Internet Use
As educators, we make it our goal to prepare even very young students for the world beyond the classroom. For that reason, in many of this book’s lessons, you will see students share their work beyond classroom walls. This connection to the outside world is an important one, but before you start tweeting pictures or sharing student work online, make sure you understand your school’s and district’s policies for sharing information on social media and other public platforms. Talk to your administrator, and ensure that you understand what you can and can’t share online. In addition to staying mindful of school and district policy, you should familiarize yourself with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 before you have students publicly share their work.
With this information firmly in hand, you should also make sure that parents or guardians sign release forms for each student that give you permission to post their work online. Even with a signed release form, never share students’ full names when you post content on their behalf. Posting work as a class or using private blogs that only parents have access to are also safe and fun ways to introduce students to publicly sharing and receiving feedback on their work. Because Twitter and most other social media platforms require users to be age thirteen or older, if you use one of these platforms to share student work, make sure it is an account that you or the school owns.
Assessment
Formative and summative assessment are integral parts of teaching and give invaluable information on how students are progressing. These assessments also help K–2 teachers to streamline their data and adapt instruction accordingly. We recommend that you use your classroom LMS to house your
