Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

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...

  I ran across a YouTube video from an art teacher, Darren Maltais , explaining how to use color gradients to make a night sky scene in Google slides. I liked how easy it was and started looking for a way to use it in the classroom. He has another video for sunrises but the idea is interchangeable.  Since April is poetry month, I thought I could tie it into a writing activity and picked Haiku’s for the simplicity.  I targeted third graders and approached a teacher friend to let me come in and try it with her group. It didn’t go as smoothly as I hoped but I did learn a lot! I made  a video of the entire process  if you want to check it out. I naively thought we could do the entire project in one 90-minute ELA block. That includes all the tech components AND writing an original haiku. We should have broken it up into two parts: 1. Writing the haiku and 2. Adding in all the tech elements.  To be fair students had only worked on haiku’s the day before...

I have been using GIF's for awhile to provide fun feedback to students but I never thought of putting them into a "sticker" format before.  The idea was presented in a session I attended recently at GaETC21 (Georgia EdTech Conference 2021) and I LOVED it.  The conference session was presented by Meredith White  a high school Spanish teacher from Georgia. She got the idea and template from Ester Park and ran with it sharing how she used her stickers with students to provide engaging feedback.  Ms. Park provides a video overview of the process and I created my own video , just in case her video ever went down, and to share more specific details with teachers in my district.  In all my samples I used Ms. Park's sticker template. If you wanted to change it up they seem pretty simple to make. It looks like she did her wording in another program and inserted them as a picture but I used Google fonts with Google Word Art for the most part in my sample above.  I'...

  With masking requirements being implemented across states, prior to the start of the 2021-2022 school year, I was looking for a creative way to share a department photo without actually having to put anyone in close contact.  Last year I created a fun Brady Bunch style picture but I really like the comic book style this year.  For anyone wishing to duplicate it there were a few steps. The first is obviously to get pictures of your team. I had some from previous years and I started stalking Facebook for some backups. Once I had the pictures saved I emailed them to myself so I could open them up on my phone and save the pictures to my camera roll. I used the app " Photo Lab " to "cartoon" the pictures. It is free with in-app purchases but you may have to wade through quite a few advertisements. I never paid for any features. It is not super intuitive to use so I made this short 2 minute video .  I took screen shots of the finished cartoons versus saving to my camera...

  I put together a full day of Thanksgiving themed activities  (click to link...you will be forced to make a copy) into a single editable Google slideshow for students. It was designed for self-contained 4th and 5th grade classes. Third grade teachers would need to review and possibly modify. There are 12 activities. I made sure that each activity had an accountability piece. I used a variety of free programs, as well as ones we have available to us in our district.  1. Create a Six Word Story based on a Thanksgiving image. I linked a video from Discovery Education explaining what a six word story is (we have a DE subscription). There are some six word story videos on YouTube that could replace the Discovery Education resource or a teacher could simply explain and model the process. 2. Read a short Thanksgiving fiction piece in ReadWorks (free to educators) and respond to the question set. 3. Mystery Picture Math - Thanksgiving Word Problems (I created it in Google Sheets...

  😍 I ran across this awesome Twitter post by Amanda Sandoval  last week and LOVED that she had her students summarizing The Bill of Rights using emojis. I was so engaged trying to guess what the emojis represented that I actually looked up The Bill of Rights.  🤔 That got me thinking of other ways student's could use emojis to summarize or show learning.  📕 I went with a book report summary, as I made my examples pictured above, but I could have easily summarized a video, an article, a lesson, and so much more.  🛠️ I built a template to share with teachers in my district and thought I would share. You will need to click on "file" and "make a copy" if you wish to edit and assign to students.  📹 In the template I put a six minute video overview of the project designed for students. In the video I cover: three ways to get emojis, how to resize them, and tips and tricks for searching and being creative.    💡 The idea to include a video was to...

  One of my favorite activities to do with students is this visual vocabulary project using Google Slides. I've done it in grades 3-5 and the children love it! I came up with the idea after taking Tony Vincent's Classy Creations course. Think of it as a high tech Frayer Model. The idea is to reinforce vocabulary with the use of images.  In this case: found GIF's, created GIF's, found pictures, and created pictures. It introduces children to new tech skills and sites ( Brush Ninja and Chrome Canvas ) As a teacher I go over the activity with students and we do the first four slides together. This works well in a face-to-face environment. In a virtual environment you may have to adjust. I would recommend making a video for each of the first four slides so students can reference and complete them on their own. Google Slides allows you to "house" videos off the side of the slide so it doesn't interfere with work on the actual slide which makes it a handy place...

I love the idea of stop motion animation but not the headache of it. It is something I have always wanted to try in the classroom but when I started thinking about all the "stuff" it requires - props, lighting, storage space, a fixed camera, software, oddles of time...I pretty much said: I follow an art teacher (Tricia Fuglestad) on Twitter who does an excellent job blending art and technology together and she did a recent post on stop motion .  This got me thinking about a "Flipbook with Google Slides" session I took at a conference last summer with Abby Schiferl where I created a vocabulary animation for science .  I decided to use digital tools to try and re-create some of Tricia's samples. They were super easy to make. I did find one of the best and most helpful blog post  from Matt Miller regarding formatting tips for animating with Google Slides, which helped greatly, I made the "cheat sheet" below from it....

I was tagged on a "Doodle Your View" challenge on Twitter the other day. The idea is that you take a picture during the day and then you add drawings on top of the photo to go with it and then post to Twitter with #doodleyourview .   People were getting super creative with their submissions. Here are a few of the posts: https://bit.ly/3dEMIDT https://bit.ly/374Ct9o https://bit.ly/374TvnR I was tagged by art teacher Tricia Fuglestad who had an animated element in her view . That inspired me to see if I could animate my doodle and I opted to draw a tablet bag and animated it to drop into the collection box beneath it (see first image/GIF).  It was super fun to make and I combined several FREE programs to do it (they all do require logging into a Google Account though): - Canvas to create my doodle overlay - Google Slides to create the illusion of movement between slides - Tall Tweets to animate my slideshow into a finished GIF I made a six minute video overview of the pr...

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 ...