Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

I ran across this project through Pinterest and forwarded it to all my friends who teach (preK through 6th Grade). http://projectsbyjen.com/Projects/HCE2012/hce2012.html   It is a global Christmas Card Project that looks extremely well organized. The site includes videos from previous years projects, the standards the project address and comprehensive instructions. It can be done with a classroom teacher or even in conjunction with the art teacher. The theme this year is SNOWGLOBES (fun!). Jen (the project organizer) even includes a link to her pinterest page with snowglobe ideas. If I had a classroom group this year I would definitely do this with my students. Please note that registering for this project ends this TUESDAY (November 20th) so if you are interested you will need to sign up ASAP.

In one of my schools fourth graders are working with a local Audubon club to explore birds (as part of their Organisms and their Environment unit). This week they are working on dissecting owl pellets. I put together this short (6 minute) video about owl pellets for the children to watch prior to the activity so they would have some frame of reference going into it. Basically I found several YouTube videos and downloaded them. I put them together using Windows Movie Maker Live into one longer video for the kids. In conjunction with watching the video students will also work on a virtual owl pellet dissection on this site -  http://www.kidwings.com/owlpellets/flash/v4/index.htm . This will all take place the day before the actual owl pellet activity. I am curious to see how the video and virtual experience will compare to the actual owl pellet dissection (having never done it myself!). I'm going to ask students to compare the two and tell me if they felt that the pre-activi