Gunston Middle school

On Thursday 2nd, March some of us went to Gunston Middle school to see how the teachers use technology there.
It was very interesting to see that the approach is based on letting the students choose from a variety of resources which ones they consider more appropriate to use in order to accomplish a certain task. Therefore, some may use pen and pencil while others may use the tablet or do some kind of drawing depicting the concepts they learned.
There are three important key aspects to consider when learning from this school:
a- every student has an i_pad
b- the students cannot download any app from the app store, but the apps that the school has selected.
c- there is a coordinator of the program, who is controlling and planning with the teachers how to use the technology in a proper and efficient way.

Something else I noticed is that when doing reading activities, the teachers usually use "newsela" ( I mentioned it in the previous post). And when they want the students to compete a chart the students usually use the app "pinnic".

Similar to "pinnic' is the webpage "www.padlet.com". It allows the students to post notes online at the same time...and every student sees what the others wrote. To use this page, the teacher only has to 1- SIGN IN,
2- Create a PADLET
3- copy the link (it is generated automatically when we sign in and create the new "padlet") and paste it for the students to access and be able to post comments. !! :)


Below you can see a list of the apps used at Gunston...: