The 5C’s Club

I started something at my school…

Wyoming’s 5C – Club. Now in education you probably have heard of the 4C’s: Creation, Communication, Collaboration and Critical Thinking. My school’s theme this year is Community, hence the fifth “C”. In the past, teachers would have an opportunity, on Wednesdays, to signup and visit other classrooms. This gave the educators a chance to see what others were doing. This year, with the Covid 19 restrictions in place, the teachers couldn’t do that. So after bouncing this idea off of my building admin, we felt this could be a great opportunity to:

• reflect upon the school year & technology usage
• discover how their peers/colleagues integrate technology
• leverage technology to meet one or more of the 5C’s

With my Scouting background and being an Eagle Scout, merit badges were a big component. Plus, I personally feel having a tangible (whether physical or digital) representation of my learning is an important factor for engagement and motivation. So I used my PTO funds and purchased “membership” pins. I lucked out and was able to jump on a deal offered by StickerMule for enamel pins (I’ve purchased stickers from them in the past and signed up for email notifications of deals). When a teacher submits a Google Form, they receive a pin from me.

So how did I orchestra this… I have a Google Site (which I can’t link to because my district restricts viewing to within our domain–I am going to embed some different items in this post to help visualize).

Explanation Video

 

Example Doc created via autoCrat (add-on) from data collected in Google From

 

I then have a second page on the site where teachers can view submissions. We wanted to have this data sortable, therefore I modified the Form’s Google Sheet to have another tab of data (hiding the form submission tab) showing which can be filtered. To explain to my teachers how they can sort, I embedded a tutorial video (below).

*** I received a notification on Clubhouse that a room was starting with an amazing, fellow NJ technology coach Kathi Kersznowski and her co-author & educator Becky Keene around the topic of “Sail the 7 C’s” (also the title of their book). I was intrigued, joined in, and discovered in addition to my five, they’ve added Computational Thinking and Change Making. In my opinion, wonderful additions! I would recommend taking a look at their book (I’ll be adding it to my summer reading), now I know what your going to say once you see it, “Dan, their book is about Microsoft and you’re Google, why would you recommend that?” The reason is simple, we can find ways of integrating technology, no matter the tool, because it’s about the skills. ***

Have you started an initiative at your school? I would love to read about it in the comments below.