The Chromebook Infused Classroom

"The Chromebook Infused Classroom provides a fantastic combination of big ideas and actionable information. You’ll find the best practices to lay a foundation for strong teaching and learning with technology alongside activities you can use tomorrow to help students interact and create in digital spaces. If you’re teaching in a Chromebook classroom, add this book to your reading list!"

—Monica Burns, EdD, founder of ClassTechTips.com and author of Tasks Before Apps

THE

CHROMEBOOK

INFUSED

CLASSROOM

CONTENTS

WHAT IS A MICROBOOK? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

SAMPLE CHAPTER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
From Analogue to Digital

BONUS CHAPTER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
About Book Creator

ABOUT THE AUTHOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

WHAT YOU'LL FIND IN THE BOOK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Praise for The Chromebook Infused Classroom

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05

06

10

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WHAT IS A MICROBOOK?

Microbooks pick up on the idea of microlearning, a concept that's revolutionizing education by offering short bursts of learning that can initiate exposure, interaction, knowledge construction and reflection for teachers.

Elevate Books Edu and Book Creator have teamed up to bring you a series of microbooks that impact teaching and empower learning.

These books will offer a glimpse into some of the most popular concepts and ideas in education today, with a link to buy the full book if you like what you see and want to continue the journey.

INTRODUCTION

Why the Infused Classroom?
Why did I write this book?

Watch Holly's introduction video:

The Chromebook Infused Classroom is about students and putting them at the center of the learning.

—Holly Clark

#infusedclassroom

SAMPLE CHAPTER

Your Chromebook Infused Classroom should create conditions in which your students can develop as true learners. They need the ability to ask the big questions. They need information literacy in order to find and validate answers. Most importantly, students need to learn how to learn.

As you go through this new journey with the Chromebook, keep in mind that you are moving toward a focus on process rather than the end result for true twenty-first century learning.

Use the Power of Simplicity
to Change Your Classroom

In this section, we will look at how to go from analog to digital in meaningful and learning-centered ways. As teachers make this journey, though, remember these three words: Keep It Simple.

Technology in classrooms can stimulate teaching and learning but integrating technology is not always easy. For many reasons, teachers often don’t opt for a technology-infused unit.

Fear and discomfort can prevent teachers from incorporating this important resource into their classrooms. Some may not know where to start or don’t know how to effectively use it. Others may even feel they don’t have time to learn it. It can also be intimidat-
ing to teach Generation Z students how to use it.

Nothing could be more absurd than an experiment in which computers are placed in a classroom where nothing else is changed.

—Seymour Papert

How do we solve this? By keeping it simple

Start small. Find a few apps that are easier to integrate and students can use on the fly without too much instruction on your part.

Look for tools that will provide rich information about student learning and growth that are also easy to use and integrate in class. We want to find tools that are more intuitive and accessible for student use, even without an expert’s instruction. To do this, we need to develop a “tool belt” of apps that can more effectively get at student thinking. This can be tricky—we don’t need to search for tools that simply replace what we are already doing in the classroom.

Instead, technology helps us craft a learning environment to better understand the content and give students a platform to demonstrate learning. We also want student learning to be a rich and evolving process. Students should take learning with them, not just regurgitate information and then move on.

Begin by nailing down the essential questions, enduring understandings and transfer of knowledge students should have at the end of your unit. After that, find the tech tool that best enables you to connect with their thinking and understanding. This way, the journey is simple, but the learning is profound.

With simplicity in mind, we use technology to assess student learning and under- standing, to include every student, and to enable all students to share their learning, experiencing a transfer of knowledge. There is time in every classroom for more multi-level projects, but our job as teachers is to know where our students are in the learning process and help them progress on their individual journey of understand- ing. If used right, technology can make this process that easy and profound.

As teachers make the journey with Chromebooks, keep the word simplicity at the forefront. While this example included Flipgrid, consider Google Slides, Padlet, Adobe Spark, Book Creator and Seesaw. These simple tools can easily improve teaching and learning in the classroom. When you begin to think that technology takes too much time or requires an elaborate pre-designed task, just remember it’s simply not true.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

—Leonardo Da Vinci

BONUS CHAPTER

ABOUT BOOK CREATOR

Book Creator is a Chrome-based app that you can find at app.bookcreator.com. This is an Infused Classroom Top Tool and should be used in every reading and writing classroom.

All students and teachers need is a Google account to get started. This app allows students to create books—or in this case, to keep track of their reading by taking interactive notes and adding these to a learning journal of their reading unit.

Click here to see an example unit based on the book Wonder with a middle-grade classroom.