I have spent the last three months teaching in person.

That, in itself, is a multitude of blog post reflections that may be coming soon.

I personally have been exhausted by the amount of energy it has taken to keep students, faculty and staff safe in our learning environment. We have had to rethink so many of our practices. This challenge often has felt reactive, but I’d like to focus on a proactive measure that was taken by the third grade teachers and me: Badge Bingo.

After the spring of 2020, we knew that the incoming third graders for the fall would need to hit the ground running with their tech skills.

I want to insert here that I have never been a proponent of teaching skills in isolation. I believe that digital tools and services help support and achieve the student learning objectives. However, having been quarantined to our homes unexpectedly, we saw what happens when students need to be able to access the curriculum online, and they just don’t have the tech specific routines down.

If you think about it, teachers do this all the time. At the beginning of a school year, you establish expectations and procedures to have your classroom operate smoothly and efficiently so that optimum learning can take place. As a class, you build up slowly and practice what to do. It’s the simple things, too. Ask any primary or elementary teacher if it’s necessary to go over with students how to enter the classroom, where to hang up coats and bags, and pass in homework, and they will laugh at you like you are crazy even to propose such a question!

With the possibility looming that we would be in a distance learning situation again in the fall, the third grade teachers and I knew we had to come up with a plan to onboard the students. Over the course of the summer through a professional development grant, we reflected on what kids needed to know how to do and broke those digital skills down, making a prioritized list. We then ordered the items and came up with a plan of how to introduce and reinforce these skills during the first month of school. Our goal was to get as far as we could before we were sent home to a remote learning.

Essentially, this is how it worked:

Students were each given a bingo sheet that has the 30 identified skills randomly placed into the rows and columns. (We had five different versions of the board so that not everyone’s board was exactly the same.) Below is an example board:

On the first day of school,  boards were passed out to students and introduced as a game that we would be playing daily- often two times per day: first thing in the morning and last thing in the afternoon! Each of these sessions lasted about 30 minutes.

As a skill was demonstrated to students, they would have an opportunity to try out the skill as well. The first time a skill was attempted, students could draw a single diagonal line through the corresponding box on the board. Then within that week, students would perform that skill again. At this second session, students could put a second diagonal line through the box, making an X.

To get a “bingo”, a whole row of skill boxes had to be “X”ed. (We did not count columns to keep things manageable.) Third graders got very excited with the anticipation of each day’s skill and the call of a”bingo”! And what was the reward- besides achieving five digital skills? Students earned a “badge” that was placed at the front of that row. To keep it easy, we used gold star stickers. Plus, one day, we even started a little impromptu song that seemed to catch on. From that point, every time a star was handed out, the entire class celebrated with the tune. You have to love the enthusiasm of elementary kids and how they can keep the momentum going!

It must be noted that once a skill received an “X”, it continued to be revisited since many of the skills were steps in a workflow for getting online and to our Google and other learning services, like Seesaw and Type To Learn.

Badge Bingo was a huge time commitment, but we feel it was worth it!

We somehow made it though to that first week of October in person learning and then a whole month and a half more until Thanksgiving Break. With traveling protocols involving quarantining, we now are teaching remotely during December to remain in compliance and keep everyone safe. I am happy to share that our third graders are doing well using their Chromebooks from home to attend daily live classes and complete their work!

I will begin with a disclaimer.

I took a year off from this blog. I changed my position and school, and finished a CAGS program over the course of this time. Honestly, the blog felt like too much. I rarely take breaks. Although I have been told on numerous occasions that breaks are a good thing. For some reason, I followed that advice for once. Furthermore, it was quite the change professionally and personally for me that included a term of distance learning that upended everyone, right? Quite the year. This summer, I am working on my ISTE Certification, and I need a space to reflect, so here I am… Welcome back!

During distance learning this spring, we used a short list of tools. Many of which were part of G-Suite for Education. The rationale was to keep things simple, and do things well. Use what we knew, and limit what we (teachers and students) needed to learn to hit the ground running. Of course, could we use our favorite tools more strategically and creatively? Absolutely. As I sit back now, I also realize that yet another reason why it was important for this short list: privacy.

As educators, we need to promote Digital Self as a part of Digital Citizenry. That is reflected in the ISTE Educator Standard of Citizen 3d: Model and promote management of personal data and digital identity and protect student data privacy.

What does that mean exactly? We know that data mining is out there, and educators need to be selective in the apps and services that they use with students.

I looked at three specific apps that I have used with students in the past when we were face to face. I purposely chose ones that were not used during distance learning or were not on the short “approved list” (as I know that those “approved” apps were screened by our Technology Department for security and compliance).  These three are apps are ones that I have loved over the years for their ease of use, convenience and ability to engage students, and I was curious, how they held up to data privacy. Two of the apps, I knew were outside of G-Suite for Education. What I learned during this investigation was that actually all three of the services were out of G-Suite for Education, technically. But I will get to that.

The first app is PicCollage Edu Collage Maker. This straightforward app is great for students (and adults alike) to pull together text and images to demonstrate their learning on any subject in a collage format that can be saved digitally or printed. There is a free version, and that one has advertisements; however, I’ve had the resources to be able to purchase the educational version to keep things less distracting and more appropriate for students, especially with social media connections outside of our school domain. In my recent research, I have realized that the non-educational version has accounts. I always knew that we did not have to sign into the educational version, and I bring this point up because of data collection. By simply not having a user account, privacy seems to be more obtainable. This feeling could be a false sense of security, so looking at Terms of Service and Privacy Policies for apps is important. In summary, here is what I discovered for PicCollage Edu Collage Maker (and/or read it yourself here.):

Student data is not being collected for commercial purposes, and any data collected will be deleted upon parental request.

The information collected includes ‘the country you set your device to, the language you use on your device, the type and version of the operating system of your device, and your device model.’ In-app purchases product IDs also will be collected. 

The company, Cardinal Blue, uses this data to improve their product’s performance, and assures its users that all data is kept secure on its servers.

As far as age, the general app is rated 12+, indicating that users must be at least 13 to connect to social media. In the educational version, the minimum age is 4 years old with no social media integration available.

Overall, my investigation of PicCollage Edu Collage Maker was reassuring. The app does allow for you to take photos, and I was a little concerned about if that data would be kept by the company somehow. I further am making note that I want to point out to students when they are using it that we are not signing in, and we are using “anonymous” school devices, and how that affords them some “personal privacy.” What they create in PicCollage Edu Collage Makers lives on that iPad alone, so others at our school may see it if it’s not deleted from the device. However, that is the only data concern, and that is “in house.” Furthermore, we can choose to share it to our Google Drives and Classrooms for safekeeping and protection, choosing who we want to show.

The next app that I use frequently with students is Chatterpix Kids. This app lets you turn any image into a talking animation with 30 seconds of recording. As I’m sure I have explained on this blog previously, the silliness of this app hooks students every time, and we have found countless ways to use these exportable videos in projects to demonstrate learning. Like PicCollage, there is a Chatterpix that is geared toward adult use (12+), giving the user the option to share to social media and/or email the recordings. These features are not present in Kids version that is listed for ages 4+. There is no account sign in for either app, and both are free. Cost sometimes can be a red flag with “free” often having advertising or in-app purchases. That is not the case for these apps as both versions have neither.

Upon inspection of the company Duck Duck Moose’s privacy policy, the following is stated about data for the Kids version: ‘we don’t require you to provide any information and we don’t collect any information about you or your device…’ The only information collected is non-personal in nature, such as how the service is being used in order to improve the product performance. The only exception is that a parent may provide an email to receive a newsletter from the company, and this action is strictly voluntary. The policy also indicates that the products comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (“COPPA”) that protects children under the age of 13. This compliance is a good sign for educators when choosing an app. Likewise, an added bonus is finding out something more about the company’s connections. On its About Us page, Duck Duck Moose clearly explains its mission in creating learning apps and how the company is now a part of Khan Academy, a highly regarded non-profit. Knowing the values of a company and who they are in business with further are ways to promote being a proactive digital citizen. For all these reasons, I think Chatterpix Kids is a keeper.

The final one I investigated is an online, web based service called Blogger. I will admit that I have preferred Edublogs for students creating their own blogs (and mine, too!), and I know of teachers who have a preference for Kidblog as well. Both of those services are paid subscriptions, and when I have had funds, I have indulged as they give a more variance in permission levels to students. In other words, students are not on the same level as the teacher/administrator in a collaborative blog. Moreover, these other blogging services have been geared toward educational communities, scaffolding safe environments. However, when G-Suite for Education (or Google Apps for Education as it was known originally) came on the scene, Google’s Blogger was a great free, place to host student work that was viewable to world-wide audiences with moderation capabilities. The platform also was a good way to teach students commenting (with the teacher again having full moderation rights). From my experience, a lot of teachers have not been interested in having students host their own blogs, so Blogger has fit a need for sharing carefully vetted work to the outside community. The service furthermore is tied to our Google accounts which gives convenience and one a sense of domain security. Yet, does it measure up in data privacy? And as I discovered, is that domain security really there?

When I looked for a specific Terms of Service or Privacy Policy for Blogger, I was unable to locate one. I noticed that Google seemed to have overall policies for their products (Terms of Service and Privacy Policy – check out for great videos with detailed explanations). The first term I came across was that a Google account requires a minimum age of 13. That statement made me wonder if I should be looking more specifically at G-Suite for Education, as obviously many students are under that age. These are some highlights of what I found (or read more in detail here):

‘A G Suite for Education account is a Google Account created and managed by a school for use by students and educators. When creating this account, the school may provide Google with certain personal information about its students and educators, which includes a user’s name, email address, and password in most cases, but could also include secondary email, phone, and address if the school chooses to provide that information. Google may also collect personal information directly from users of G Suite for Education accounts, such as telephone number, profile photo or other information they add to a G Suite for Education account.’

Other data that is collected includes such items as specific device usage and log-in activity. Google states that it does not own any student data and does not subject students to any advertising (that is standard practice in Google outside of G-Suite for Education and is based on the user). Google has taken a seriously committed stance on protecting student data (as detailed here), and touts their COOPA and FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) compliance. I also noticed that they have signed the Student Privacy Pledge. Upon reading that information, I decided to dig deeper and see if the previous two apps had done the same. I noticed that Khan Academy (Duck Duck Moose’s parent company) had. While it is not mandatory for companies to take the pledge, it does give reassurance to schools about a service/app provider’s commitment to keeping students data safe.

Going back to the G-Suite for Education’s documentation for privacy, I realized that there were “core services” and “additional services” listed. I was curious what exactly that meant. (Here is the official run down.)  I found out that Blogger was an additional service that was ‘designed for consumer users and can optionally be used with G Suite for Education accounts if allowed for educational purposes by a school’s domain administrator.’ Google even asks that a school system gain parental/guardian consent before students under the age of 18 use these outside services. This information surprised me. Other additional services are YouTube and Maps. From what I can surmise, these additional services allow adult or explicit content as long as someone does not violate the general Terms of Service. Obviously, the use of such services in a school must be monitored by the school.

What does all of this mean regarding privacy? I know that within the G-Suite for Education settings an administrator can limit sharing core services (Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc) outside of the domain. Furthermore, if enabled students have the power to select to whom they are sharing their files. I wonder if a student or teacher chose to make a blog public and share its content publicly, would they be able to do so without an administrator’s permission? Does the additional service fall under the settings? It seems that Blogger “lives” outside. I definitely need clarification on this thought process. It does seem that Google in general gives its users intellectual property rights over the user’s content and Google does not own what is created, so that a student’s blog content is their own. However, it seems very possible that collecting data for advertising may be happening in these additional services. Honestly, it’s a little unclear to me. My conclusion: Although Blogger is a service that is turned on in my domain, it is best used carefully and thoughtfully with students.

This exercise has been worthwhile. While time consuming to look at Terms of Service, Privacy Policies, company partnerships and company compliances and commitments, it’s important to curate your apps and services beyond how cool and fun that they are, but rather how safe and secure are they for our Digital Selves.

I was reminded of a powerful feature in Google Docs… Voice Typing.

Many students struggle with getting thoughts down on paper or typed on a screen. The numerous steps involved in the physical act of the writing process can be a challenging endeavor for lots of people. How often are ideas lost because a student can’t find a character key or doesn’t know how to even start spelling a word?

Under the tools menu in Docs, you can enable Voice Typing. While it is not perfect, this tool is an easy to use accommodation. I’m even thinking that it could help with the very beginning of writing – brainstorming, allowing a student to get creative ideas out on the Doc without all of the possible hindrances. The student then could copy and paste the notes into the rest of the Doc or on a separate one as their writing unfolds and becomes more formalized.

Check out the video below to see how quick this tool can be be used:

Also, here are some resources to type with your voice: directions and commands.

I wonder how many students take advantage of this feature? I’d love to hear from you.

Some of us never fully developed drawing skills (with no fault to our art teachers). I think I’m good at sketching cows and cats (sitting backwards), but boy, do I struggle sometimes to make a doodle look like what I intend. Therefore, I empathize with many of our students. I totally encourage them to do their best with their own artwork. However, there are times when a little assist may be the appropriate accommodation for a frustrated student (or even adult). Or perhaps, you just don’t have time to devote to many blocks of making illustrations, but don’t want students to use clip art or photos from online.

Take 2 minutes to learn about AutoDraw…

Please let me know if you’ve given AutoDraw a try… or want to do so!

(A thank you to Mrs. Butterline for showing me this site.)

I read an excellent blog post by John Spencer that included this video. (It’s worth the 2 1/2 minutes!)

As I reflect on my time at my school as its elementary digital learning specialist for the past fourteen years, I have witnessed unsure students. I have encouraged them to take risks and try things out. Often, the reaction was hesitation and even some cajoling may have taken place. And then more reassurance. In conjunction with many “Yes, you can” and “What do you think?” quips.

However, the students have not been the only ones who have been uncertain about taking leaps. Teachers also have taken pause about some of the suggestions and ideas that I have tossed out over the years. Doubts have been voiced. Choices to stay the course may have been made. Teachers want to do right by their students, and sometimes that brings extra caution with instructional practices.

John Spencer’s video is a good reminder that we, teachers, don’t have to be perfect. Trying something new can yield innovation or missteps. Both should be regarded as valuable because there is an opportunity to model how to handle success, “failure” and/or where to go next. Showing students how to approach these outcomes graciously and without shame is important for everyone’s growth.

What do you think of the Beta mindset?