Coaching Stories - Maisie Bradley

Teacher: Maisie Bradley (@maisie_bradley)
School: Chadwick International - Songdo, South Korea
Grade: 5
Coaching Cycle: October 2021 - December 2021

Goal(s): 

• To help students use technology to develop creativity and communication skills
• ISTE Connection: Creative Communicator

Before Coaching

Students were not confident in different ways of publishing/creating. Most students were using Docs to publish their writing. Some students commented about using drawing apps at home, but most were not using these talents for school projects.

During Coaching

I came in while students were preparing to publish their narrative writing pieces. I showed them three new tools to explore (Keynote, Scratch, and Canva). Maisie practiced offering different tools like Book Creator and Google Slides for #booksnaps and other activities. Students were excited to try a variety of tools, and started to give good reasons for choosing a tool to publish in. After a few short weeks students were using at least six different tools when I came in for an open-ended publishing day.

Looking Forward...

Because of working on these goals, Maisie and I came to the realization that the grade 5 How We Express Ourselves unit (currently taught by specialist teachers) could be an opportunity to cover some of these gaps. Students could be thinking about how they can creatively express themselves when publishing or showing new understandings, including purpose, audience, and the tool they choose. In the future, when selecting mentor texts for literacy units, grade 5 teachers can also consider widening the range of texts to includes ones that are not published in a book - this could include videos, interactive stories, websites, podcasts/audio books, etc.

Read more of Cindy's Coaching Stories here.