Karyn

My work this school year for the Digital Tools PLC has been with our kindergarten and first grade ELA-S students. The particular focus of my work has been with our two classes of first grade ELA-S students. I worked directly with our technology teacher for part of the year and the schedule dictated a change in that. Now a lot of the work I do with the students in the library is supported by her work in the lab. For this project I wanted to use at least a couple of digital tools to help enhance the learning and my instruction of these students. I hoped that it would give them a variety of sources of information, ways to express what they learn, and engaging instruction. With these grades I have used the following tools extensively: Bookflix, Tuxpaint, the CPS, and various fiction and non-fiction texts.

One of the activities that we have used is Tuxpaint to illustrate something they have learned from various read alouds or thematic studies. We also used it as a tool for demonstrating things they were working on in their classrooms (such as "how to's") In the slide show on this page, I have scanned two samples from students in one particular class. The first example is from early on in the year, and the second is from a later point. Overall, a noticeable difference was seen in the keyboarding, illustration, and general understanding of what they needed to do.

As we worked along, I noticed that many of the students could **do** the work, but were lacking in the oral language to describe their work. We then started putting a special emphasis on being sure they had more opportunities to use that language as they spoke to us, as well as to their peers. The CPS test results included indicate a huge change in scores on a strictly language-based test of their skills. With much more direct focus on allowing for the language development, they were able to use the language better with us and that is indicated by most students' test results.

Overall, the basic keyboarding and Tuxpaint skills that we focused on improved for virtually all students over time - practice, further instruction, and remediation helped to ensure this. The real change in my practice was in no longer taking the opportunity for developing the oral language to go along with this work away from them. I feel that I found out from early test results that I had really been doing this. Although I can't make a clear, direct link to the improvement of their work to the focus on language skills, I strongly feel that it made a big difference in them being more certain of what was being asked of them. This, in turn, led to better skill performance.

As the year has progressed and I have continued the focus on the language to better support the work students are doing, the improvement has continued. It is fabulous to see some of our most struggling students performing so well on their work. Through the use of digital tools and the data I gained along the way, I was able to change my instructional practices to ensure a much higher level of success and confidence in my ELLs.