Monday, June 15, 2015

Anchors of Support for June 15-19 Morning Tech Snacks

It's a new week for the 2015 Curriculum Writers Cadre and with it comes new morning tech snacks.

Anchors of Support are available for this week's morning tech snack topics.

AISD Anchors of Support

An anchor is usually seen as a heavy object tied to a boat to keep it from moving.  In this case, our Anchors of Support are connecting teachers to a constant source of support documents for the technology being used in classrooms today.

Teachers can search their Google Drive for "Anchor of Support" or just go straight to them at bit.ly/aisdanchors .  This link takes you to a growing collection of support documents that will continue to be updated and added to throughout the year.  We will be highlighting some of these on this blog, so come back and search the site or look for the "Anchor of Support" in the right margin.

Discovery Education- SOS Activities

Discovery Education not only provides quality media for teachers and students to use in class, but they provide Board Builders and a great new resource, the SOS Activities.  These activities provide highly effective instructional strategies that can increase student engagement and deeper content discussions.  This anchor, bit.ly/aisddiscoverysos , provides support for getting started.

One SOS Activity that students enjoy is The Snowball Fight.  (This link explains this strategy in a video, or search 'Snowball Fight' in Discovery Education to get the video and PDF resources.) After watching a video or reading a passage, students write one thing that they learned on a clean piece of paper.  The teacher announces "Snowball Fight" and everybody throws their page into the middle of the room. They retrieve a new page, read it, and then add one new idea to that page. After repeating this a few times, the students have at least several ideas to bring into final discussion about the video or passage. 

Kahoot 

Teachers are using Kahoot with students as a easy Formative Assessment tool. Our Anchor (http://bit.ly/1efDsXF) provides information for getting started using this tool on desktops, laptops and mobile devices.  Students do not need an account and can easily use their personal mobile devices without installing any software. 

Want An Anchor?

For what classroom instruction would you like to see an Anchor of Support? Share a comment below so we can make sure you get what you need for your instructional time.