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

Secret Messages - How To (Light and Color)

This was fun activity that I got from Roper Mountain Science Institute. They suggested red theater gel to reveal the message, which can get pricy. Another idea I heard was to ask movie theaters to donate left over 3D glasses, which also have a red filter. A guest speaker we had last year said red jello would work. Tried it this week and it worked like a charm. The students thought it was very cool. I found my "attention challenged" students had trouble focusing on making their own secret messages so I was very glad that I had made extra copies of the sheets from the GEMS Color Analyzer book that they could color and then check under the jello.

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.

QR Project - Open House

Twitter Post Link -  https://bit.ly/3Umic7r I saw this adorable QR code project on Twitter and decided to try it out with a couple of third grade classes. We have several schools in our district who are "Leader in Me" schools and I asked a teacher if I could come in and make them for her open house (you don't need to be a "Leader in Me" school but I know they do a lot of goal setting and mission statements). She loved the idea! I decided to use Flip (formally Flipgrid) to do the recording. The web based program is free for educators and automatically generates the needed QR code. We started on a Thursday. I pulled students into the hall to get a picture of them holding a square piece of paper prior to an ELA block. The paper acted as a place holder for the QR code (which is square) and ensured I got the correct hand spacing so the students looked like they were holding the QR code. I found a spot that didn't have anything in the background. The background...