Why self-assessment?
Self-assessment provides students the opportunity to build awareness and reflect on what they understand and do not understand. Self-assessment provides students the opportunity to empower themselves through:

• Promoting the skills of reflective practice and self-monitoring. 
• Promoting academic integrity through student self-reporting of learning progress. 
• Developing self-directed learning. 
• Increasing student motivation. 
• Helping students develop a range of personal, transferable skills.
• Learn more about self-assessment from Cornell Center for Teaching Innovation

What is a single point rubric?
The first step is making sure students are able to identify where they are in the learning through self-assessment. This means providing them with a tool like a single point rubric. We first learned about single point rubrics from the amazing Jennifer Gonzales at the Cult of Pedagogy blog. With a single point rubric, you, as the teacher, provide students with one column of a traditional rubric and the students reflect and decide on whether they match it, or are below or above that place. Learn more about single-point rubrics from Jennifer Gonzalez.

• Know Your Terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single-Point Rubrics
• Meet the Single Point Rubric

Why would we want to share a single point rubric with students?
By focusing on one criteria, it narrows and simplifies the learning path for students. This self-reflection through the single point rubric helps to determine if the student is on the path, off the path and needs reteaching, or ahead of the pack. Students will step up to the responsibility of identifying where they are at on this path and share their reflection and evidence back.

How will students use a single point rubric?
To introduce students to the use of a single-point rubric, consider the ‘I do, we do, you do’ structure. Providing students with a body of work (with low cognitive load) and working through the single-point rubric to assess gives students the opportunity to practice.
As students move to independently use a single-point rubric, giving them a space and giving them time to work on this within the classroom is essential. Whether you are asking them to physically look at work or giving them a digital space where they can compile their work, you need to make space for this reflection to happen with work that they have already completed. This process will not work overnight and will require modeling, patience, and perseverance.

• Digital Space through Google Slides coming during Part II of our series

What will teachers learn about the students when they go through this process?

• Identify where the gaps are in the instruction.
  
• Learn where instruction is the strongest. 
• Begin to see how students can be learners in the learning community.

What will students learn about themselves when they go through this process?

• Learning is a process.
• Identify personal gaps in the own learning. 
• Make personal connections across content lines.

Be part of the conversation! Share in the comments or reach out to us on Twitter--@DLGWAEA

~Beth, Amber, and Mindy

Coding can be done asynchronously and socially distanced. AND, it provides students an opportunity to be creative and display content knowledge

Scratch is a FREE Coding Platform that has endless opportunities to allow your students to begin creating with Code. We created this Scratch Starting Place Learning Slide Deck to help you get going with wherever your starting place is with Scratch. Learn some of the teacher basics as well as build your Coding skills with simple overviews of the Code Block Families. 

Tip: Check out the Scratch 3.0 Tutorial Cards - Link to all cards

‘Creative constraints’ has been a common phrase heard on Think, Make, Innovate. In our current reality of self-isolation and quarantine, creative constraints has become our anthem.

Recently, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles challenged the community to recreate famous works of art with household items. The community responded with gusto! This seems like the perfect challenge for our students, but with a bit of a twist! Because Grant Wood is our famous local artist, we wanted to challenge our teachers, students, and own Grant Wood staff to recreate famous Grant Wood artwork.

A few suggestions or tips we have to get started:
Get your family involved.
Include your pets!
Household items, toys, and food are great items to create with.
Use lighting to your advantage.

Get inspired by checking out our Wakelet with some examples from the Getty Museum Challenge and see a small collection of Grant Wood Art that is just waiting to be remade.
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We can’t wait to see what you make! Make sure to share your pictures with us by tagging @DLGWAEA or use #HaveFunMaking. You can also email us at makerspace@gwaea.org.

~Amber Bridge and Mindy Cairney
​Digital Learning Consultants

Recently, we wrapped up our last meeting of the Creativity Cohorts with our year 1 and 2 participants.  We asked them on an endnote, how are we taking what we’ve learned during this time to alter our instruction for the future?  What they had to say was so wise, we captured it and are sharing it with you.  

Here are their lessons learned:

• Grateful. We will be grateful for every moment in the future that we will spend with our students.
  
• Technology’s use can no longer be underestimated in its role in the classroom
  
• Flexibility to roll with whatever may come our way needs to be our new way in the classroom
  
• Personalized - we are working to connect with our students where they are at in a whole new way
  
• Our focus needs to be on learning and not compliance
  
• Parental involvement has always been key, but with their current increased involvement there may be a new connection moving forward
  
• Connections that’s what this is all about
  
• This is the ultimate teamwork exercise. We are all collaborating together apart trying to make all of this work
  
• All of this are life skills in practice
  
• Good and bad, we are getting feedback that is shaping what we are doing
  
• Technology is not hard or scary and can be useful in preschool classroom
  
• Kids are learning how to compromise and collaborate while completing creative challenges
  
• We have the gift of time to develop ideas for kids and share them with educators
  
• We are grateful for many types of community - global, school, educators, family
  
• Challenges didn’t always go the way we hoped but both the kids and the teacher learned a lot by giving it a try
  
• Relationships are being built that can be leveraged in the future.
  

Life right now is the ultimate creative challenge.  Teachers, students, and parents are being asked to do things we have never had to navigate with constraints that have never been placed on our lives before. As you connect remotely with your students, consider how you can release control to them and allow them to make some creative choices to help foster their own creative confidence.

What are the current lessons you are learning and how will they impact you when we finally arrive at the doorstep of our classrooms?

~Amber Bridge, Corey Rogers, Mindy Cairney
​Digital Learning Consultants

Do your students listen to podcasts? These bite-sized audio nuggets can be a great way to practice all kinds of curricular skills. Speaking and listening standards are a great place to start. Listening comprehension is fundamentally linked to Literacy. That's why it is an important part of common core standards from Kindergarten all the way up to 12th grade. In the classroom, or at home, students can put that into practice when they listen to a podcast and speak (or write) about what they just listened to. 

Podcasts are also a great way to vary the formats that you are using to disseminate content. Text can be a barrier for many students. It is important that students know how to read and analyze text, but if we only present our content in this way, we risk alienating students that find text a barrier to their learning. Audio can be a more accessible format for these students. It can remove barriers from your classroom whether you are recording the audio yourself, or using podcasts you have found elsewhere. Furthermore, when reading is no longer a barrier, students are able to listen to content and comprehend material that is several grade levels above what they would be able to read in a text format.

The only remaining problem is where to find the podcasts that you need, and this is exactly what this blog post is for. It is not an exhaustive list, but the links below are a curation of some of the more popular podcasts that are made for kids of all ages. They cover Literacy, Science, Social Studies and more. For your convenience, they are embedded in the Awesome Table below. If you can't see the list below, feel free to follow this link to find the best podcasts for kids.

If you have suggestions of your own, things that you would like to have added to this list, please let me know. I am more than happy to update this with anything else that would be useful for students and teachers in the classroom. My contact details are below.

Jonathan Wylie, Digital Learning Consultant
Grant Wood AEA  |  jwylie@gwaea.org  |  @jonathanwylie

In a time before social distancing, we were able to capture our last classroom in maker action with one of the participants of the Creativity Project class, Keri Annis and one of her library classes at Pierce Elementary in Cedar Rapids.

In this challenge, students tackle the idea of creating models from a fairy tale that could move.  The students created pigs that could move or roll into the three houses in sequence with the story.

To get started, students randomly drew a card from a bucket that either had a pig or a house on it.  Then, they found the student who had the same card as them and that's how they found their partner and prompt for this maker challenge.  Quick and easy way to jump in and start creating!

We love a makerspace mash-up and this episode, the students incorporated green screen technology to place their models in a fairy-tale setting.  Check out what the students created in the student edition below.

The three little pigs are so popular! We have actually used them in a prior Think, Make, Innovate and there are so many different interpretations of the story, which is an amazing test of creativity in itself.

Here are some unique versions we have stumbled across:​

• The True Story of the Three Little Pigs
• The Three Pig Ninjas
• The Three Little Pigs: An Architectural Tale

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Have you come across a unique version of The Three Little Pigs or another fairy tale that could inspire movement?  Leave us a comment and help get our creativity moving! 

Our Maker Community wants to see what you make! Please email pictures and videos to makerspace@gwaea.org. You can also tag @DLGWAEA on any social media platform! And make sure to use... 

​#HaveFunMaking!

​~Amber and Mindy