12 Tech Days Before Christmas Break (Days 1, 2, and 3)

Most readers know that I have been working as a Technology Coach for the past couple of years. I still work with teachers who are notebooking but my focused has shifted work wise. This is more of a "tech" post then "notebooking" post so I apologize (but I hope you find it useful!)

This month at work I decided to focus on the 12 Tech Days Before Christmas Break giving teachers 12 useable tech ideas that they could implement in the days leading up to the holiday break (or after).

We get out December 20th so the twelve days started on December 5th for us. I am currently up to day three of my tips and thought I would share what I have passed on so far.

DAY 1

Record a holiday readers theater podcast using Audacity (have children develop sound effects that go with the story).

Here is a link for a free reader's theater download from TeachersPayTeachers “Goldilocks and the Christmas Elves”.

Here is a link to another readers theater adapted from Dr.Seuss’ The Grinch that Stole Christmas.

Day 2

Have students create a Christmas rebus letter in Microsoft Word. In my sample above I wrote a letter to my teacher telling her what I did on my made up holiday break. Students can share them with the class and decide which letter is the most creative. Students can use clipart or google images.

Day 3

Create a winter/holiday picture book trailer using Photostory3 or Movie Maker Live (see sample above).

This is a two day ELA project. Day one students would find/read their picture book and come up with their script. Day 2 they would find the pictures they need and put together the trailer using Photostory3 or Movie Maker Live.

Comments

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.

Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition Activity

I saw this activity at a science conference years ago and haven't had a chance to use it in a classroom until this week (mainly because I didn't teach weathering, erosion, and deposition). It is a great way to reinforce the definition of the weathering, erosion, and deposition in a highly kinesthetic manner. Basically you break the students up into groups of three. One group is "Weathering" another group is "Erosion" and the third group is "Deposition". Add tape to the back because you are going to stick them to the forehead of the children in each group. The "weathering" students get a sheet of paper that is their "rock" they will be breaking down. At the start of the activity the "weathering" students will start ripping tiny pieces of their "rock" and handing it to the "erosion" students. The "erosion" students will be running their tiny piece of "rock...

Bill Nye Songs with Lyrics

At the end of the Bill Nye videos he always has a fun song that goes with the episode. You can find many of the songs as stand alone videos on YouTube. This came in handy because today I am teaching a lesson on layers of the atmosphere and found a song from his Atmosphere video on YouTube titled "Fresh Aire." I really wanted to remix it and put the lyrics on the video (so the kids could sing along and see how the lyrics matched the lesson). The first thing I did was found a site that has all the Bill Nye lyrics posted used my YouTube downloader ( see instructions here ) and downloaded the song. I then imported the video into Movie Maker Live and used the caption feature to put the lyrics on the different frames (cutting and pasting from the lyrics site into Movie Maker Live). I saved the video and reposted to YouTube so other teachers could use the video with lyrics (the finished video is posted above). The process was pretty easy and I am thinking about doing it for more ...

Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

Search This Blog