This is a screenshot of an individual event for a student at Roots. The color tells the student where they need to be, a picture of the teacher tells them who they should be working with, and the activity tells them what they need to be doing. Students only see one “appointment” at a time and will not see their next learning activity until the next transition.
Roots teacher, Mackenzie Wagner, shares how iPads are introduced to and used by students throughout the school day and year.
Transcript: Mackenzie Wagner: In the beginning, it was really tricky. The iPads are obviously something that are totally new in terms of scheduling for them, so they use their iPads – their world is centered around that iPad throughout the day. It always tells them where to go, and most of our students, we notice, spend probably a month of having the iPad schedule, pretty much knew when it was time for a small-group flex center versus when it was time to switch into content time. But, their iPads are not the same day-to-day either. So, they’re always at content at the same times, but what they’re doing in between those times for flex is always rotating. So, they’ve basically run their whole world around the iPad. They have to make sure that they scan it at every center they go to because that’s how their iPad updates and changes to give them the next station. But yeah, they use their iPads have a color splotch on them that corresponds to the colors on the ceiling above that center. And then also, the teacher’s face, and the actual written activity of what they’re gonna be doing, which is nice because in the beginning of the year, they got everywhere based on the color that they saw because they weren’t reading yet. And then once they began to start reading, they can look more at the specific activity that’s right in front of them there.
Roots Director of Operations and Innovation, Jill Tew, discussed early modification needs and how those needs will change as students develop more skills and grow.
Transcript: Jill Tew: A lot of what we did this year was to make it easy for prereaders to access the tool. Well, as our scholars get into third, fourth, fifth grade, that becomes irrelevant. What might become more relevant is building in more agency or more autonomy for scholars into that tool. So, those sorts of things I could certainly see us expanding the functionality of the tool by working with developers to kind of add bits and pieces to it.
Roots ED and Founder, Jonathan Hanover, discusses how the school built customized apps to integrate with their Google tools.
Transcript: Jon Hanover: the apps that we built around Google Calendar that interact with the API – the first one is the one that basically takes that information from their calendar and makes it readable for a five year-old who comes in to us usually as a prereader, doesn’t have a great concept of time, et cetera. Right? And it basically just makes whatever is coming up on their calendar visual and easy for them to comprehend.
This screenshot shows one student’s schedule over the course of a week. It illustrates how different each student’s schedule can be day-to-day at Roots.
This picture shows two students Monday and Tuesday schedules at Roots so that you can see how flexible scheduling allows for personalization.
Roots has each student follow an individual Google calendar for that day’s tasks at hand. This view shows student schedules from the teacher’s point of view. Roots has developed a simple app that pull from this calendar to show a student exactly what is next on their schedule in a simplified manner.
Roots master schedule illustrates how much they allow for flexible movement and personalization within their schedule.
Roots teacher, Samantha Gambino, how she uses Google Calendar to support daily instruction and student workflow.
Transcript: Samantha Gambino: the way that we know where to be and what to do is – everything is run off of Google Calendars for us. So just like if you would if you were working in a business with all adults, we all are calendared for everything, so I know exactly when to pull my small groups of kids. I calendar them as well. So like, little mini-grownups, I put them into Google Calendar, and they come and show up to my door, and I wait for them there. So basically, our day is laid out in terms of content teachers, which I am, is that we have flex time, which is small group time. Then we have content, which is whole group time, and then we go back and forth throughout the day.
Roots ED and Founder, Jonathan Hanover, shares more on how Google Calendar is used to direct student and teacher workflow throughout the school day.
Transcript: Jon Hanover: basically, Google Calendar powers most of the logistics. All our scholars have Google accounts. Our teachers schedule kids for lessons using their Google Calendar. So, you might say, I want to pull these seven scholars for a guided reading from 9:30 to 10:30 on Wednesday, and you would just invite them to that calendar invite, and that would flow through to their individual calendars.
