Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

Last year I co-taught with a media specialist working to integrate technology into her related arts rotation. We choose a different tool for each of the upper grade levels (3-5). For third we decided to use Google Drawings. The inspiration for this project came from a picture in a tweet , It made me immediate think of a persuasive writing project that one of the teacher's was doing with her class that we could easily piggy back on. I really liked the comic book style picture and reached out, via Twitter, to Todd Nesloney and Tony Vincent (who made the original tweet) and found that Tony used an expensive app called Prisma to get the effect.  We decided to use the free app PicsArt and one of their filters. It wasn't as clean as the picture we used as inspiration but the kids liked the graphic style of  them. If you use the app you can find the filter under "effects" and then "artistic" and then "comic" (or you could try "car...

Google just put out an app/program called Read Along and it looks really promising. It is advertised as being for children ages 5 and up. Video Overview : Fast forward to minute one in the video 👍 I love that it is FREE, helps students to read, gives them starts/points, has a timer, and can be used without internet access (after you have downloaded stories). 👎 What I dislike is that is ONLY available to use on an Android phone or Chrome book (so no iPad, iPhone, or PC availability...yet). Even though the app/program isn't widespread among devices it may be something teachers may want to pass on to parents as something to check out this summer if they do have one of the supporting devices. Video Overview :  Use on a Chrome Book:

If you are at all familiar with Bitmojis you know they, sadly, don't talk but there may be times when you want them to. This was something I gave quite a bit of thought to and roped in my awesome co-worker, Estee Williams, to help. We discovered by simply manipulating the mouth and duplicating slides we could make it appear that our Bitmoji's were "talking". We used this idea to create a video entry into a contest. Later that year I created another video as an introduction to a Bitmoji session I was co-presenting with another co-worker. They were both fun and challenging and when I shared them recently in a Bitmoji Craze for Educators Facebook group lots of people wanted to know how I made them.  I put together a short instructional video with the caveat that there may be an easier way. At the time there was nothing online or on YouTube so we just tried this out and it worked for us.  In other Bitmoji news some awesome teacher shared...

My co-worker (Estee Williams) and I just wrapped up our ninth episode of the P.O.D.C.A.T.S podcast (Personal on Demand Curriculum and Technology Show). We started this at the beginning of the school year as a fun and different way to provide tech PD to our teachers. We wanted to see if there was an audience for it as well as learn some new skills that we could use in the classroom.  It has been challenging these past two month as we have had to record from our separate homes, when we had been recording in person. We did like the challenge though and could now use our new skills to interview folks from around the country if needed. Sadly, we've decided to table our Podcast for next year in lieu of some other tech PD ideas we would like to try.  I thought, as we are closing out this experiment, I would highlight what we did and used tech wise in case anyone wanted to give it a try. The first thing we did was develop our name, logo, and...

A blackout poem is when a poet takes a marker (usually black) to already established text, like in a newspaper, and starts redacting words until a poem is formed. The term "Blackout Poetry" was made popular by author Austin Kelon who wrote a book of his blackout poems. The ideas is if you are at a loss for words then find words that have already been written and create something new from them. I've done this with children in a classroom and it is quite messy when you start dealing with newspaper print and black sharpies. You can make a digital version using either Google Slides or Google Drawings - much cleaner and neater! The way to create this type of unique "found" poem is to start with a wall or slide of text, start highlighting words of interest, from there develop a poem, and then change the color of the background so only the highlighted words show through (I am over simplifying but that is the basic premise). This is a VERY tricky ...