When the Technology Fails...

...you have to have a Plan B. 

But first, let me catch you up.


I have been working with 2nd grade on animal research. We spent two classes researching the animals, then we made a powerpoint. Here are some of the examples they have done. I have to point out how great they did with including the citations like we talked about! All the pictures are from clip art in powerpoint.

 Then, today the network crashed and we were without computers - they could not save, they could not go on the internet, I could not even open my SMART notebooks, so I had to do some quick adjustments. Instead of doing powerpoint, we did a paper slide. The kids did a great job working together and most of them finished or almost finished in one class! It is amazing how reliant we can become on technology, but the kids still adapt so well. Here are some of the results from today - they have the same elements as the powerpoints above with facts, a picture of the animal in its habitat, and a citation.

Splitting up the duties

This group decided to each do a picture since they both wanted to do it.

Great work second graders!! What do you do when technology fails?

Wiki What?

I am experimenting with using wikis this year. I am starting with my fifth graders and may work down to younger grades in the future, but I don't know yet. We spent our time going over what a wiki is, how and when you might use a wiki, examples of a wiki, and cyber safety and etiquette. This video was a really helpful introduction for them. (The previous link will take you to the video on TeacherTube, it is also on YouTube, but can't be embedded.)

 We also discussed the roles in a wiki - editor, writer, and reader. The students are so far starting out as readers who can read and comment, but can't edit pages yet. As the year goes on, we may increase the role to writer so they can really get a feel for the point of a wiki, but I wanted them to practice with cyber etiquette a bit first. I am hoping to use this wiki for a few things this year - as an exit ticket sometimes at the end of a class, as a place for students to post book requests, and a place to post book reviews.We may also use it for group work collaboration if we get to the point of becoming writers. Here are some of kids commenting on the wiki.

This is our wiki homepage.

Any other great ideas of how to use a wiki?

Postcard Maker

I found this postcard maker today and thought about using it to write a postcard from one character to another, to show non-fiction information, or to write as a fictional or actual person in a historical period. Here is a sample I made. 

 

The postcard maker includes space for the usual mailing address, greeting, body of the message, and closing, but I liked that it also included space to add at the top a title and description along with a citation for a picture on the front of the postcard. This is a great mini-lesson opportunity to have kids cite an image, to talk about describing an image, choosing a picture that fits the assignment, or just adding some authenticity. Give it a whirl - it is very easy and quick!

Solar System Stories

I promised an update on our solar system stories and here it is! About half of my 3rd grade classes have finished narrating their stories, the other half will be over the rest of this week, but here are a couple examples of what I have been talking about!

Didn't they do a great job? Here are some photos from the recording session. I would definitely do this project again, but try to get the kids to use more of the information they researched in the story itself. I have to give credit to Jessica Moore and Winter Park Elementary School for the idea. I went to a session at NCSLMA about her digital story and that is what inspired me to give this a try! Thanks for sharing with us Winter Park!

Mrs. Hentz filling in for absent students

Finished Product!

They Can Do More Than You Think!

I often hear from people that projects or technology sounds great, but that little ones can't do it. (Not from teachers here of course - our teachers have wonderful expectations of the kids!) This week, a Kindergarten teacher brought her class to the media center to create their first PowerPoint presentation. They did great! They brought their plant journals and we created a slide for each page. Then they went back and were told to add clip art that fit with what they wrote on each page. Now, I know PowerPoint is not a teaching tool in itself and is not the newest thing, but the kids had a lot of fun and it was a fantastic way for them to edit because many of them found as they were typing the words into the slides that they had forgotten words or that they needed to spell something differently. The teacher commented how much they don't really like to edit on paper, but doing this helped them do it in a painless way that made it more relevant with a real life reason why it is important to edit your writing. It might take them a little longer to get it finished than older kids, but they can definitely do it! Of course, that was not news to this teacher since they send emails to their parents using ipod touches in the classroom already! Here are some pictures of the kids working on their presentations.

How do you use PowerPoint in your school?

Help our school win for technology!

I have been nominated for "Best Teacher in America" from Worth Ave Group! Please consider following this link and voting for me by 'nominating' me as well to help our school win! The $25,000 for technology in the school would be well used!! (There is a voter prize as well!) You can nominate once a day per email address through March 31st.  The teacher that receives the most nominations can win for the school:

GRAND PRIZE (1): The winning Nominated Teacher ("Winning Teacher") will receive (1) iPad 2 16GB unit and (30) iPod Touch 8GB units for use in Winning Teacher’s classroom. The Winning Teacher’s School will be given $25,000 to be used for technology in the School.

SECOND PRIZE (5): Each Nominated Teacher who is a runner-up (“Runner-up”) will receive (1) iPad 2 16GB unit as well as $1,000 to be used for technology in the School.

VOTER PRIZE (10): 1 iPad 2 16GB to 5 random voters and 1 iPad 2 16 GB to the persons who referred each of them.

Please consider taking a minute and nominating Holly DuBois at Caleb's Creek Elementary in Forsyth County in NC. (Or taking a minute each day!) Thank you!


http://www.flickr.com/photos/57634636@N00/



Twitter in the media center

Twitter is a forum that I long avoided, unsure of why anyone would care what I was doing or thinking just that second. Recently, I learned the power of Twitter in education if you use it in the right way. By following other educators and leaders in library and technology arenas, I have found many new sources, blog posts, news items, and more that I would not have otherwise stumbled onto. (By the way, if you want to follow me, I am nclibrarygal.)

Source

I came across a news article today (via Twitter of course) about a first grade class using Twitter in the classroom to communicate with parents. It is making me think about ways to use it to communicate with different communities such as parents, volunteers, and so forth.

How do you use Twitter as an educator or as a parent would you be interested in seeing Twitter updates?

Digital Bloom's Taxonomy

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Author: Samantha Penney

I was looking through my Twitter stream this morning and came across a tweet from Jennifer LaGarde about a digital Bloom's Taxonomy. (Edited to add - this site seems to no longer exist but it is where I got the graphic originally.) I am always looking for new tools and ways to build critical thinking so I checked it out. I love this as a way to show teachers that all technology doesn't mean critical thinking, but it can help at any stage of the game. I also love access to new ideas for myself! If you go to the original image you can click the logos to go to the sites.

I wanted to share since I know in our district we have some Essential Standards training coming up next week and some of you might have the same in the near future. You may see some posts on some of the tools in the coming months...

What tools do you love and which part of the pyramid would you add them to? Please leave a comment below and tell me, but you can also see a wiki on the topic here. I can't wait to see what else we can all come up with!

Tessellated

When the fourth grade AG teacher told me she wanted to do a project on tessellations, I admit, I had to get a slight review to be sure I was talking about what I thought I was talking about.

tes·sel·lat·ed   /ˈtɛsəˌleɪtɪd/ Show Spelled[tes-uh-ley-tid]
adjective

1. of, pertaining to, or like a mosaic.
2. arranged in or having the appearance of a mosaic; checkered.

She wants the kids to do something on tessellations in nature. My first thought was this:


Source

What was your first thought? After that I was stuck, but slowly starting thinking of things like:

   





   

Picture Source

I still needed some other ideas so I turned to the internet. (Now I would probably turn to Twitter, but that is a post for another day! I am @nclibrarygal if you want to follow me.) I came across this site that gave me the rest of the ideas I needed. It even gave me some inspiration that I will get to in a second. Our project that we eventually settled on would be to crop in on a picture of a tessellation in nature, and have the students argue whether or not the shape is a polygon. Then on the next slide, show the whole picture along with information (and citations of course!). This was a great way to bring math, science, evaluation, and information skills together in one big bang. I don't expect it will take too long either. We are planning it for the end of February so I will post some examples of the final project when we get there.

Now, the inspiration the site gave me. You can take pictures of tessellations and submit them. Why not have students do a digital photo scavenger hunt and see what they can find on their own to submit?

What tessellations can you think of? Any other ideas on how to create a project around them?

Should you or shouldn't you?

I was recently asked by a 6th grade teacher to help her think of a topic for an argumentative paper for her kids that they could choose a side to argue. I thought about it for a while and wanted something that kids today might have a definite opinion about, but not know all the facts on. I settled on suggesting music sharing/downloading.

Copyright is something kids really don't get in this age of everything is free somehow on the internet. This site would be a great starter to help them better understand some of the ins and outs. They are always wanting to just go to Google images and take whatever they want for projects even though I try to point them in the direction of sites like Pics 4 Learning and other public domain sites like Creative Commons.  This would be a good lesson starting point.

Music is in the same category. If they are not selling it, they don't see the problem. They don't think about the other side issues. I found this site from the NY Times that features a discussion among students about the pros and cons. There is a presentation of the pros and cons in list form here. I would be really interested to hear students' arguments for or against it once they really looked at both sides. Do you have any suggestions for other sources or points to bring up with the students?

Picture source

Big Huge Labs

Big Huge Labs is a site I have heard about for a while but didn't have a chance to look at much until today. I still get the feeling that I am just touching the surface of what I can do with it, but there are lots of ideas already popping into my head! For example, have students do a book 'report' by creating a movie poster or magazine cover. I just recently worked with a second grade class on researching life cycles in different animals and integrated text features into it by having them present the information as a page from a book complete with headings, bold words, pictures and captions, and a citation. The magazine cover would be a great addition to that. There are also trading cards available to create, this would be perfect for animal research or biographies. I might even try it out on a class that comes for Black History month research. Here is a quick two minute example I made of a clown fish trading card.

I think kids would love this! It is still the same learning process but having a more fun way to present the information gets them much more involved and fired up about the project. How have you used it in your classroom? What other ideas do you have for it?

Loving Livebinders

At a district workshop last Monday, I had the chance to learn more about Livebinders. Basically, it is like a virtual three ring binder that you can add links, upload files, or add other types of virtual information. I have heard of it before, but never had the time to check it out. Now, I am a wee bit obsessed. My Destiny homepage has been on steroids for a while now with the number of links I had on there, but this allowed me to put the links in a more organized way. I added one link under several subject areas to my Livebinder, which also allowed me to then sort the links into tabs. I have not tried it with students yet, but I am hoping it will be more organized for them also! I am embedding a few of the binders I made already so you can check them out for yourself! (Of course, I will be editing and changing them over time I imagine as I find new sources or older ones change.) If you have suggestions for any resources for these Livebinders, please let me know!!

Black History Biographies

United States

Underground Railroad

North Carolina

Wordle

One of the really cool online tools I love but never really knew how to use in the classroom is Wordle. I came across this link to a presentation of 52 Ways to Use Wordle and had to share! There are some great ideas here that I would have never thought of. Wordle is a site where you can either type in your own text or copy and paste in text from books, speeches, etc. It then takes the words and sizes them based on use - bigger ones are used more often and smaller not as much. The ideas here are terrific and really help you start thinking outside the box a little more. Some of the suggestions include book reports, spelling lists, word walls,  analyze your own presentation to see if the words you are focusing on are where you want focus to be, analyze famous speeches to see main ideas, compare genres (the example here is comparing history to historical fiction), character traits, word walks, and so many more fantastic ideas to get the wheels turning in your head. One of the suggestions is even as a gift which I did before I ever read this.

Tagxedo is a source I have not played with yet, but could also be fun. You can even enter a search topic, url, twitter id, or other sources to create a word cloud.

What other ways can you think of to use these great resources?

Recordings of Christmas Past

The Library of Congress Jukebox is a collection of historical recordings, mostly from record labels now owned by Sony music who granted permission for the LOC to stream them to the public free of charge. Over 10,000 recordings made between 1910 and 1925 can be found here. They were recorded by the Victor Talking Machine Company, which used large horns to gather the sound and etch it onto wax discs. Find out more about the project here and more about the process of recording here.


Photo Source

All of this brings me to a current use for the Jukebox, Christmas recordings. If you do a search on the Jukebox for Christmas, you get quite a few results. These range from spoken recordings of the Night Before Christmas to The Newsboys Christmas to bible readings and carols. It is a neat way to bring the past into the classroom in a quick way. They even sound like ghosts of Christmas past with the recording scratches and static in the background.


Photo Source

This is also a good way to talk about technology advances, changes in how we communicate, and ways things have stayed the same as well. Showing students a picture of how recordings were made and discussing the process is sure to surprise them. I have no doubt they will be able to tell you several different and easier ways to record in our current day.

Don't wait for your perfect Christmas unit to utilize the jukebox though, you can browse by artists, genres, or playlists plus there are search and advanced search options. Find something for your students today, have them close their eyes, listen, and be transported to the past. Don't forget to also search for an image of the artist to show students who they are listening to.

Blast Off into Good Nutrition

With the changes the USDA recently made from the food pyramid to the healthy plate model, nutrition lessons also needed a facelift! I used this as a way to talk to kids about getting information from a website and also using a website to practice new information with the Blast Off game from the USDA. It is a great way for kids to practice getting a balanced diet of good foods without leaving out the need for exercise! I have to admit, the first couple of times I played it though, I did not make it to Planet Power. You have to be pretty close to the target amount of calories and not over at all, but there is a green progress bar at the bottom to track it for you. I have been using it with Kindergarten as a review at the end of the lesson and they LOVE it! They beg to play it again. It is a good exercise for them because they are still learning what fits into each food group and it gives them a visual of things that fit in more than one group also. Try it out!

Harvesting Unusual Plants in 3rd Grade

A third grade class presented the powerpoints they made about unusual plants to parents today as part of their harvest festival for Thanksgiving. They followed it up with apple cider and dirt with worms (aka chocolate cookies and pudding with gummy worms). The students did a great job. Here are some pictures from their presentations.