Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

Earlier in the month I wrote about making Black History Month Sensory Poster with Google Drawings. I did the activity with third grade students and they did such a good job (a few of their projects are featured above). The students were able to follow along with my video tutorial and the teacher and I were just there for technical help. My favorite part of the day was one of the students, when packing up, said "That was way more fun than we normally have in ELA." 🤣 To be clear, I think he was talking about putting the project together tech wise and not the researching and writing part. The hardest part, obviously, was getting the students to put in quality facts in their graphic organizers . Like most student projects some were good and some needed extra help and guidance. Another teacher, also third grade, tried it on his own with his student and they did it together as a group and he had them put in three sensory facts vs. the five or six on ...

https://flipgrid.com/s/c81ecb2228a7 This past week I worked with a Media Specialist, Mrs. Waters, to teach a class of fourth grade students how to use Flipgrid (free for teachers/students). Since it is Black History Month we used the picture book "Mae Among the Stars" as our retell project. Mrs. Waters read the book, but I also liked this YouTube video , mainly because the words are on the screen. I also enjoyed this Ryan and Craig read aloud . If you have not heard of Ryan and Craig's read alouds you definitely need to check them out ...they are hilarious and kids LOVE them.  Photo - https://amzn.to/2GYgR21 Students were tasked with using the tools within Flipgrid to retell the story using between five and ten sentences.  Once Mrs. Waters read the book to students we explored all the tools within Flipgrid to see what could be used to help us with our story retell. The emojis were very popular and we discovered a cool space helmet and career emojis that...

My friend Abby posted this picture on Twitter and I loved it. It looks like one of those inspirational posters you find online about "Determination", "Confidence", or "Character". Since it is February I started thinking of ways that students could make them for Black History Month. So I took a shot at it: My initial thought is that Media Specialists (or classroom teachers) can have students make them in order to encourage other students to find out more. So the "six words" need to be a pretty good to draw people in. Here is my second attempt (see my play on tennis words there 😁?). I clearly like the black and white text.  What I really like is how quick the project would be to complete. Students could access some basic biographical information (via books or websites) and come up with their six sentences and make the posters easily in Google Drawings (which is what I used). The finished 8.5 x 11 "posters" coul...

As stated in earlier posts I am currently enrolled in Tony Vincent's Classy Creations online workshop. One of my favorite benefits from his workshops (I have taken his other two as well) is sharing our weekly projects. I ALWAYS look at what other people have submitted to get ideas on how to use all the different ideas from Tony's weekly videos. I loved these Black History table toppers that Janet W. submitted this past week so much that I added a couple more people in order to print out six for all the tables in one of our smaller media centers. I have been inspired by so many table topper ideas this week (among other project ideas shared). That I be looking at creative uses for them in the future.

This month in school PLC's I am focusing on online research skills and websites for grades K-5 within the context of Black History Month. I posted earlier about a sensory figure poster using Google Drawings for grades 3-5, that I created in week one of Tony Vincent's ClassCreations workshop , which will be the "project" end of my training for those grade levels. Unfortunately our K-2 students have iPads and Google Drawings is not an option for them. Students can definitely recreate the same idea using the  Seesaw .or Keynote apps. However many teachers like a nice paper project. Since my goal is to use online research sites and strategies I thought I would highlight both digital and paper versions of the project for this grade level. Below you will find the digital example from Seesaw and Keynote. If you go this route Seesaw is easier for students to complete and turn in. Keynote would be slightly harder unless you use the Google Classroom app. In Seesaw you ca...

I have a class of third graders who has invited me help them with their Black History digital sensory figures next month and I am excited to try it. After meeting with teacher we came up with a game plan. Since this is supposed to be a fairly quick project (not taking weeks) so we decide to use the Itty Bitty Bios in Epic as their research tool. The books are quick reads and "should" give students enough information to fill out their graphic organizer . Epic is an online digital library which has a FREE component for teachers and media specialists. You (and students) are able to use the online library as long as it is at school or in the library. It is not to be used at home unless students have a paid account. For more information about their FREE educator account CLICK HERE . I put together an Epic collection of biographies for the project. This is the link to the collection that the teacher will assign to her Epic class - https://www.getepic.com/app/user-co...

Sensory figures is an interactive notebook assignment that I have seen used in Social Studies notebooks  in the past.  They recently popped back up in my thoughts after having a conversation with another teacher about digitally presenting research that wouldn't take a long time to complete. The idea hit at the perfect time for me because I am taking a Tony Vincent online course this winter. For our first week assignment we had to use some of the highlighted tools in Week 1 to make any graphic we wanted. I decided to flesh out the idea of a digital sensory figure, created in Google Drawings, to showcase student Black History research projects. I used Google Drawings as the canvas, changing the dimensions to a printable format. I used Google search tools to find royalty free images. The pictures were uploaded to the site remove.bg to remove the backgrounds.The speech bubbles were created using the Google drawings shape tool and the curved font, around...

On my news feed at the beginning of the month StoryLine Online posted that a new book was added to their growing library of videos where celebrities read books online. This one is called As Fast As Words Could Fly written by Pamela M. Tuck and read by Dule Hill. The video tells the story of Mason Steel, a young African-American boy living in the south during the civil rights movement, who supports his activist father with the help of a typewriting in the fight for racial equality and ending segregation. According to the press release the video comes with supplemental activity guides for both home and school, aimed at students in 3rd - 5th grades. Since February is Black History month it would make an excellent read aloud (that you don't actually have to read aloud) in the classroom.