There are so many ways to use technology in the classroom, but we want to highlight three ways that teachers used Edcite whole-class. One reason whole class is a great option to consider is that it doesn’t require a ton of tech resources! If you have a projector, you are good to go! Smart board? Great! And, after you do some work together, you can send additional work to students for them to do in a computer lab, on a tablet or ipad, on a laptop, or even on their smartphone!
Today we are going to explore how teachers use whole group instruction (1) to introduce new material, (2) to engage students with game-style learning, and (3) in their morning routines and reviews.
Introducing new material
Graeme Higgins is a primary school teacher in Dublin, Ireland. He teaches Senior Infants (the American equivalent of Kindergarten) and is beginning this year with some basic maths (“math” for our US teachers :)). Their workbook starts by having students count and label the number of flowers in different boxes. This is a question that appears in their book.
He created this assignment to completely align with their practice, so they could go through it whole class. Here is an adapted version in English.
Before sending students off to complete their practice in the books, he modeled how they should use the skill of counting to complete the work. He then invited students up to the board to try it out. This can build excitement while also checking for understanding!
According to Graeme, this is really helpful because he can be intentional with the questions he puts into the whole class practice. Calling different students up for questions that appropriately match their ability and confidence.
“Edcite allows a teacher to create questions that cater to the different learning styles and levels in his/her classroom.” -Graeme Higgins
Interactive Game Style Questions
I worked this summer as a school manager at an elementary school. When a teacher needed to step out of the classroom for a moment, I had to step up and cover the class for twenty minutes.
I called all of the students to the carpet in front of our smart board as I pulled up a question-type on Edcite that could be used for some interactive and fun math practice.
Within thirty seconds I had a math game created–tailored to the skill and level I chose. Because it was an entering second grade class, we worked with addition of numbers 1-20.
You can watch this short clip, if you’d like to watch how we used this to push our understanding of addition. I focused on using the strategy no-opt out–every kid would participate and we wouldn’t let any kid fall behind with the wrong answer.
Having interactive questions is great for building investment in the lesson. So many of the question types on Edcite are conducive to whole-class learning in an engaging way. For me, I love when kids have fun in my class–but fun is not the goal. The goal is the learning, so I love that the question types can feel as fun as games…but ultimately focus on the learning I’m targeting.
Morning Meeting
Ana Bermudez used Edcite in her first grade classroom during her morning review. Many primary and elementary teachers will start the mornings off with a routine. Edcite can complement a regular whole-class routine or review because it is so customizable. If you want to have the students select the weather each day or identify the date each morning, you can quickly create those questions daily.
Ana used it to review short and long vowels in the morning. Check out the question she created before (left) and after (right) it is answered shown below.
There are so many ways to use Edcite in the classroom, and these three teachers only highlight some of the ways it can be used whole group! If you have more ways that you use Edcite whole class, email me at Julia@edcite.com and maybe we can feature you and your class in our next blog post!
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I teach 7th grade Language Arts and I find your site very useful We are actively engaged in preparing for the new PARCC assessments coming up this March. I was just wondering…. Is there any way to get answers to your extended responses? I scan appreciate that there may be different ways to respond to a question, but I think it would be very helpful to get at least an option from you. What do you think would be an appropriate response? Other teachers from our area find this an issue as well. Thank you for responding.
Hi Jill! Thank you so much for reaching out. I’ve just sent you an email with print screens showing you where you can find solutions and rubrics if teachers have included them in the creation of the assignment.
All of our content is created by and shared by other Edcite teachers, so it is up to the teacher whether or not they add those elements. We certainly encourage teachers to add rubrics and solutions to help make their content easy to use by other teachers and would love to hear your thoughts and feedback about how we can improve both the process of finding the solutions and adding them to original content. Thanks again for reaching out and I look forward to continuing this conversation! 🙂