Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

I'm always up for a fun foldable and I got one from a friend of mine. She got it from a museum course she took with her daughter and snagged a couple of templates for me (Yay! Thanks Nichelle :) It seems a bit complicated with all the mountain and valley folds but I have used it with several fourth grade classrooms and they got the hang of it pretty easily. It can be used with any topic. I choose magnets because the finished foldable reminded me of a bar magnet. To get a  free copy of the foldable template check out my GOOGLE SITES HERE .

I recently worked with two teachers helping to put together a research project using www.blabberize.com as the presentation method (the subject was explorers - grade level 4th). Blabberize is a free website that allows you to manipulate the mouths of pictures to make them "talk" with your recorded voice. Click on the picture to see how the site works and a sample of an "explorer interview" or CLICK HERE ) The first group of children used two pictures - one of them and one of their explorer and recorded their voices. They turned out fine although we had a lot of problems with the microphones. Based on my experience with the first group I introduced a change to the project for the second group. Students had to conduct an "interview" with an explorer. The program can handle a total of 10 scenes so that meant that five questions could be asked. The teacher and I had to explain and model good interviewing skills. The kids did extremely well and if it...

Two posts this week! My February tech newsletter is up on my google site - HERE.  Lots of good ideas for how to present research topics. Enjoy!

Every Monday and Friday I would pull up the weather channel's 10 day forecast for our city. I would have dry erase markers and boards at the table and would ask a series of questions based on the data. - What day will have the highest temperature? - What day will have the lowest temperature? Or what day are you going to have to dress the warmest? - What is the difference between those temperatures? (math!) - What day(s) has the greatest chance of rain? Or what day are we most likely to have indoor recess? - What day(s) has the lowest chance of rain? - What day is going to be the windiest? - What day is going to have the greatest drop between their day and evening temperature? I always look at the weather so I figure why not make it a classroom thing! Luckily we studied weather in the fourth grade so it was easy to incorporate it in my lessons but even if I taught a "non-weather grade" I would still do it. It was amazing to see how difficult it was for the k...