Diving Deep

I think most educators today would acknowledge that they feel like they are almost required to graze the surface of many topics, because of pacing guides, testing, etc. Diving deep into a subject is rare, or if it does happen, it’s by mandate and to the exclusion of deep work anywhere else. That’s sort of from top-down perspective. However, on the flip-side we tend to do the same thing to ourselves by getting sucked into the lists of “Top 30 apps for Number Fluency” or “50 Amazing Literacy Websites,” etc. and then using many of them with our students, so that they never get a chance to actually fully explore the features and benefits of the given tools. I know I have certainly been guilty of it.

As I was leaving a classroom one day, a teacher told me that she really liked a particular app, but felt that it was a deep app, and felt bad that she wasn’t using it to it’s full potential. That phrase really struck me: “deep app.” I’d never heard that term used before, but I think it’s absolutely the right term for some apps, (though definitely not all). There are lots of apps/sites that have tons of stuff on them (abcya, starfall, coolmath4kids, etc.) but that’s not what I’m thinking of. I’m thinking of tools that can be used in almost any subject area or grade level. Often these types of tools tend that emphasize the 4 C’s that are starting to become common parlance: creation, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking.

So what would be some examples of deep apps? Often they are not new, flashy apps, but ones that are extremely open-ended. At our beginning of the year kick-off for the tech cadre group I work with, I proposed the use of some apps that in reflection, mostly fell into what I’d describe as the “deep app” category. See below or the attached link for a description of some possible ideas for these tools.

Camera app on any device:

• Allow students to be the documenter of learning each day and post on social media.
• Create a photo dictionary of classroom vocabulary for ELL students
• Go around campus collecting photo evidence of ideas students could help improve the school
• Create a repository of images students take that can be used for class projects (as opposed to using possibly copyrighted images from the web)

Seesaw: The Learning Journal (app for uploading and creating documentation of learning)

• Write a story and record themselves reading it and showing illustrations
• Post a pic/recording once a month of the best sentence they wrote, to document progress
• Create a long-term story and act out a different scene periodically and post to Seesaw (like a class series of episodes to watch a la Netflix :-))
• Have students take a photo of a pic or cover from a storybook they haven’t read yet and record their prediction of what might happen based on the photo
• Create something in any other app and post to Seesaw to document learning

PicCollage (collage and image annotation app)

• Compile a collage of images of kids using great learning strategies to share every week
• Annotate an image from around campus to show where the angles are and estimate how many degrees it is
• Design a comic strip using a set of random images from the internet, history, or students in the class
• Create a PicCollage that illustrates two sides of the same issue with images and 12 words or less per side

Skype/Hangout (Mystery or otherwise) (Mystery Skype = teachers getting two distant classes together via Skype, etc., and allowing students to play a 20 questions style game to guess where the other class is located)

• Expose students to new cultures by doing a Mystery Skype, and then staying in touch with the other class to learn about cultural differences and similarities

• Do the same series of sessions with a variety of classes in different places to find out about a set of specific questions relating to various settings (i.e., what does each group think about school uniforms, scientific questions about the weather in each location, fairy tales in each culture, etc.)
• Have younger and older classes meet together to read together digitally
• Have high school students create digital citizenship presentations for upper elementary students to share as a webinar and Q&A session
• Bring in an outside expert to your classroom to talk to your students about volcanoes, or butterflies, or anything!

Google Keep (Google’s note taking app, website, and extension)

• Annotate websites using the extensions
• Create plans/notes for projects or learning (which can then be pulled into a Google Doc and submitted as needed)
• Organize class homework via color-coding
• Set up reminders for students for pull-out classes, project deadlines, etc.
• Keep spelling/vocab lists

Moving forward, I intend to focus in on the concepts of collaboration and creation (which often go hand in hand) with my teachers. Because while it’s not difficult to find tech to support the content we need to teach, creating and collaborating on real world, valuable work is not always easy to do. The tools described above allow classes to engage with others and create products that can have a real impact in the world. Do you have any apps/tools that you would add to this list? Please do! Let’s create and collaborate together :-)

image via @archaique on Unsplash