and our learning targets, we must think about the important skills of what the Partnership for 21st Century Learning (2015) calls the four Cs: (1) communication, (2) collaboration, (3) critical thinking, and (4) creativity. Technology will change, but the four Cs will remain a critical part of student success, both for students’ schooling ahead and for their future workplace success, regardless of the devices, apps, or technology they encounter.
Each chapter in this book is rooted in the ISTE 2016 Standards for Students and the four Cs. For example, the idea of creating creative communicators is a crucial aspect of giving students voice and choice in their learning. As our team delivers professional development, we see that many educators find this idea of student voice and choice challenging. Often, it scares grades 6–8 teachers to let students have freedom to select apps and websites to create projects because they (the teachers) may not know every feature of each app. As a writing team, we often talk about the need to give up a little control to implement great creative projects where students can teach adults new apps and approaches. In fact, we celebrate this! It gave us a sense of freedom as we wrote this book together.
Let’s compare this concept of less control and more freedom to a common classroom approach where the teacher selects one tool, app, or program and then has all his or her students create the same rubric-based project. This approach creates a recipe for groups or individuals to follow—a recipe that stifles creativity. Contrast that recipe model with a model that allows for student voice and choice, resulting in wonderfully creative and varied student products. Students in these grades 6–8 classrooms, individually and in small groups, select the appropriate technology tools based on their project’s goals and the digital tools available. Students direct their learning, and the teacher serves as a mentor to support their creative work. These magical classrooms buzz with activity and productivity that result in students and teachers alike sharing their work beyond classroom walls using a variety of methods, including social media.
We understand that change is hard and it takes energy, but we believe this important change to enhance student voice and choice better prepares students for the world beyond school—their technology-rich future universe. Because digital tools, devices, apps, and programs are ever changing, students must adapt if they are to grow. It’s our job as teachers to create lifelong learners who understand how to research technology tools and make them part of the creative process.
To that end, each book in this five-book NOW Classrooms series focuses first on teaching and learning, using digital tools as an accelerator to support these efforts.
Focusing on Goals, Not Technology
This theme of using technology as a learning accelerator is critical because teachers and instructional coaches need to first consider the lesson’s learning goals and only then what app or device might help facilitate reaching that goal. We don’t want to see what we call drill-and-kill technology abuse in classrooms. In this scenario, students have devices out and jump from app to app, but no one monitors their progress. Students look busy, they use the technology, but little high-level problem solving or critical thinking takes place and students aren’t focused on learning goals. In other words, just having a device turned on doesn’t make a student engaged. When technology fits with lesson goals, it enhances learning. We believe teaching and learning transformation should lead, not devices.
The NOW Classrooms series focuses on changing the technology-first model to one that has carefully constructed lessons you can use in your classroom to help students simultaneously reach both academic and technology learning goals while also giving students voice and choice in how they demonstrate their learning.
Using This Series
We wrote the NOW Classrooms series for teachers and instructional coaches who are ready to focus on teaching and learning first and digital devices second. As we designed the lessons, we included technology devices, including tablets, Chromebooks, and laptops. We also designed the lessons with many opportunities to collaborate around devices if you do not have enough devices for each student to use one (often called a 1:1 classroom). The series includes the following five titles, all organized around grade-level-appropriate 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,”
