Skip to main content

12 Days Before Christmas Break (#1) - Eflster


The 12 Days before Christmas Break officially starts for us December 5th here in South Carolina and I thought I would highlight twelve tech tips for the classroom and school leading up to our holiday break (these tips are also mentioned in episode four of our podcast). 

The first tip is to go digital for your school's Secret Santa exchange. Going digital allows you to ditch paper and pencil and organize your participants using the FREE site Elfster. You can send out an email from the site asking interested folks to sign up (remember to give everyone a deadline). Once you have everyone signed up on the site you can have people randomly and non-randomly assigned their secret Santa. Elfster then assigns the participants their match and emails the information individually. Once participants log into their account they can create a wish list so their match can check out what things they like. NOTE - My Elfster emails go to my "clutter" folder so make sure folks know to check that if they haven't received an email.

Our department has been using it for years for our Secret Santa exchange and it is super easy to use. Many of my teammates use it for family and friend exchanges as well.

If you are on your schools Sunshine Committee and want to save a bit of time this year give this site a try!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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