While these new tools are great, most are not appropriate for the Early Childhood classroom. My students can't write blogs or shoot videos yet. There are some learning apps that at good for this age, but I haven't utilized them much in the past few years. I use YouTube during music and movement time to share songs with my class and love PBS Learning Media for virtual field trips and high quality educational videos. What I have been searching for is a way to better collaborate planning and organizing my team. I have a Speech Language Pathologist, Occupational Therapist and Physical Therapist who work in my room over the course of a week. They aren't there every day and sometimes are not even in my building everyday. We meet once a month for Team Meetings, which often everyone cannot attend, but finding a day that everyone can get together and plan or carry out activities for an upcoming theme is a challenge.
Enter Trello. This website lets you create boards with lists where you or other team members can add tasks, comments or ideas. That this can be done from a computer or the app, makes it very accessible and easy to add on the go. Let's take a closer look:
Melissa,
ReplyDeleteI think Trello sounds like a wonderful tool! It makes it that much easier to communicate with colleagues digitally. For me, I work with two other 3rd grade teachers and a special education teacher. We do meet once a week but with our busy schedules it is difficult to find time otherwise. With Trello it makes it simply to create task and share ideas. I also see this being beneficial in a student to teacher relationship. Finally, I loved the PBS Learning Media site you shared. I am not sure how but I have never heard of it before, however, it seems really great. I have been looking for more short science educational videos and this site has a lot. Thanks for sharing!
Hi Melissa- I really like this tool that you shared with us! Trello seems like a great app that allows team members to communicate in one shared space. Lots of times I find that getting everyone on the same page or time to meet can be a struggle. With everyones different schedules and sometimes OT's and PT's have to be at other school it can be hard to carve out time to meet. I also really like that you can make a check list and assign other members of the team things that they need to get done. This seems like a great tool to keep everyone on track and to post availability to meet. Thank you for sharing this definitely seems like something I would use in the future!
ReplyDeleteHi, Melissa,
ReplyDeleteThank you for the tour and test drive of Trello. You do a nice job of showing the flexibility of the app. I think that it is pretty cool how it can be used by students or teachers. Not only that, but the way you presented it shows that it could be used by students of all ages. I think that all of us need to keep working finding ways of communicating and collaborating outside of face-to-face. Face to face interaction is often a luxury that we cannot afford.
Hi Melissa,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your comments about finding information to use with young children. I working for Dominican University as a nutrition consultant for the Head Start programs in Chicago. Our team of dietitians provide nutrition services to the classroom as a guest speaker. Our presentations include movement and health awareness songs. As we sing and dance our way across Chicago, we provide new ideas to the teachers. This semester, I also learned about health focus games preschool children can play on line from PBS. Thank you for sharing you ideas that I can pass along to other teachers about Trello.