Editor’s Note: This guest blog post is from Aimee Clarke, an Instructional Technology Specialist in Virginia Beach. You can learn more from Aimee by following her on Twitter at @VBTechTeacher.

I was excited to be approached by my school counselor, Blair Sutter (@FESCounselor), this past month with the question of how we could take a digital approach to our celebrations during the Great Kindness Challenge (January 27 – 31, 2020 ).

She wanted to develop an activity that incorporated the 5C's (collaboration, citizenship, critical thinking, creativity, and communication) into her lessons that went beyond our typical use of GSuite. When I think about the 5C's of transformational learning, there is one immediate resource I ALWAYS want to go to and that all my students love - Wixie, the powerhouse instructional tool!

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Representing and interpreting data is a common theme in elementary mathematics instruction. Unfortunately, most activities seem to "spoon feed" the representation, typically a bar or line graph, to students with the x- and y-axis, labels and scale all completed and ready to go. What happened to the good old days when students were handed a piece of graph paper and had to create the representation from scratch? I can appreciate the need for students to efficiently demonstrate their knowledge, but I feel strongly that students need to create graphs 'from scratch' like we used to (as recorded in black and white movies!) when we were children.

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Students can always create in Wixie starting from a blank page! But many students (and teachers) work best with more direction. The Month-by-Month activities in Wixie’s Template library provide this direction and make it easy to integrate technology into daily classroom learning.

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The friendly letter is a ubiquitous elementary project, but without a meaningful context it often ends up as a rote exercise in following formatting rules. With the advent of digital tools and social media, the rules for formatting a friendly letter writing are also changing. While many bemoan this change, digital tools also made it easier to both edit writing, add visuals and voice, and share immediately with an audience beyond the classroom.

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Students in first grade are learning more about subtraction and addition, place value, and geometric shapes. They are ready to build foundations for understanding how to subtract and add numbers, measure lengths as units, and classify shapes.

Wixie's curriculum library includes a range of math-focused templates you can use for formative assessment purposes or to support student thinking as they use virtual manipulatives and a blank canvas to construct understanding.

Teachers can assign Wixie templates directly to students, or customize templates to differentiate them for specific learners in their classroom. Instructions for students show in the Wixie interface and you can ask students to record their voice to explain their mathematical thinking.

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