I placed students' math unit online. The fifth graders have both an online and offline copy of the unit. The unit includes standards, essential questions, vocabulary, and multiple exercises related to unit skills, concepts, and knowledge.
Today students will access the unit both by paper and by computer. I'll show students how to use tech tools to access text, and we'll discuss the advantages of paper copies as well as the advantages of tech copies. For now, students will keep the paper copies in school and be able to access the tech copies at home.
While this is as much a math lesson as a learning-to-learn lesson, I believe it's important. The online copy will allow students to use a myriad of tech tools to make the text and exercises more accessible. They may use text to speech, highlighting, zoom, color coding, links, and more to learn the content. The paper copy provides the opportunity to write, sketch, and draw which is helpful since writing, sketching, and drawing are valuable ways to learn and memorize information well.
Students are definitely reaching to learn in this fairly new-to-them blended way. We will support them in every way that we can as we know this is future-ready and will equip students for optimal learning now and into the future.
