Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

Posted "I Can" Statements for the Activity Today I worked with a group of two fifth grade classes recording and editing a breaking news radio broadcast about the attack on Pearl Harbor. We used Audacity to record and edit. The students had some experience back in December when I worked with them introducing them to the tool. I wrote about my experience in a previous blog post. The December activity was designed to be fun and show them the basic tools they would need in the program to record and add sound effects.  The activity today was designed to show them the structure of a "breaking news story" on the radio in the context of their Social Studies curriculum. Each group will be working on their own scripts within the next two weeks with their final project due March 24.  I worked with the teacher Mrs. Gannon with our sample recording, as a way of walking through what we thought might work with students. We decided to use the Who, What, Why, Where,...

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...

The other day I worked with a 5th grade class teaching them how to use Audacity (free, open source, audio software). They had to recite the shortened poem , "Twas the Night Before Christmas" and add in eight sound effects (that I curated for them). The project was leading up to a larger one after the break where students will be making WW2 era radio broadcasts in their Social Studies class.  Finished student poem project - Tyler's Recording Audacity is available in our district software center for students to download. It looks intimidating to use but there are really only a few things that students needed to learn how to do (I made the cheat sheets above so they could have some reference materials to refer back to). My goals for the students were to teach them how to: - Record an audio track - Delete an audio track - Split and move audio tracks - Trim audio tracks - Import audio tracks - Fade In and Out - Reduce the volume - Know the ...

Try this “ Where in the World is Santa Going Next ” geography activity where students have to enter in specific longitude and latitude coordinates in Google Earth to find Santa's next stop ( answer key ). If you have students who don't celebrate the holiday I created a separate sheet (same activity) just leaving out references to Santa ( answer key ). Google Earth has come a long way from being a program you have to download to being able to launch in Google Chrome. Once students get into Google Earth they will need to click on “Launch Earth in Chrome” and it may take a few seconds to load (mine took about 30 seconds). Once they have it loaded they can use the search bar to type, or cut and paste, the coordinates. I found it useful to have students search the school or their address in order to play with the tools before starting the activity.

I liked the idea of having students create fake Instagram posts but really hadn't got past the "idea" phase. Last week in my Classy Graphics course with Tony Vincent he had us working with pictures and gave us free reign on the assignment. I used several of the techniques he taught us to FINALLY create a sample Instagram post that could be easily duplicated by students. I used Google Drawings, which is an under utilized tool in our district, to create the final product. This is a great activity to showcase several "how to's" in Google Drawings. I also used Pixlr to edit a photo of myself to remove the background I was standing in front of. I made a "how to" video as well as the simple screen shot "how to" . The video is a little more in-depth for any teacher wanting to try it out first. If you wanted students to make an Instagram post you might want to make a more specific video for your students to reference back to, particular...

I was looking for Boston Tea Party resources when I came across an   adorable picture  where events of the Tea Party where drawn in a giant eye. That picture led to a blog post that led me to another blog post that led me to yet another post and I absolutely loved all the ideas! As far as I can tell the original idea stemmed from the drawing above. Apparently someone posted it on Pinterest and noted that it could be used for a point of view activity. Instead of the clouds and sun in the eye the student would draw what a character in the story or in history might see from their perspective. Brilliant!!!! So for the Boston Tea Party the eye would be that of a British solider or supporter of the King. What a great way to teach that there is always two sides to every story. I think I would want students to explain what they were "seeing" on the back. In my Boston Tea Party lesson plan I would have students write a letter home on the back as if they we...

Flow Chart Notes are a fun way to take notes particularly in a Social Studies class where many of events are told as a story. I read about Flow Chart Notes her e and decided to make a graphic organizer to support the format in my Classy Graphics Class with Tony Vincent.  (our first assignment was to make a graphic organizer in Google Drawings using the align and distribution features). CLICK HERE for a copy of this graphic organizer. It was made in Google Drawings so you can go to "file" and "make a copy" to have your own editable version. To download it as a PDF simply click "file", "download as", and then "pdf".                                 I liked how it turned out and I decided to download it as a PDF and use Kami to fill it out as a test run (see first picture). Kami and DocHub are free add ons to Google Classroom that allow students to write or draw on a PDF on a tablet (not an iPad)...

This week I tried a Mystery Skype for the first time with at 2nd grade class.They have a serious amount of mapping skills in their standards...and the teacher asked for a tech project tie in. I first wrote about Mystery Skype in this post . In preparation for the activity I had my super nice boss order these place mat maps on Amazon (we ordered 12 based on a class size of 24 so that students could pair up). This was a two day lesson (the class has a 40 minute Social Studies block and I took two days of it). The first day was reviewing what the class had learned and then (focusing solely on the United States) we taught them the four regions of the U.S. (NW, SW, NE, SE). We had them draw it out multiple times on their map. Once we did that we played a mystery state game. I left the classroom and the students came up with a state I had to guess when I came back in. This was done so that I could model questions a couple of times (crossing out states that I had projecte...

I saw this "flextangle" activity on Facebook and thought I could modify it for academic content. In the example I choose WW2 (primarily because I recently worked with a Social Studies teacher and her standards were fresh on my mind). It was pretty easy. The student would need to come up with 12 short facts about a topic and be able to illustrate it somehow (my illustrations range from good to poor but I was able to depict my thinking so really that is all that mattered). It could work with science as well as social studies. The end product is pretty small size wise which is why I recommend short facts. A teacher friend of mine posted that - they actually demonstrate the math concepts of frieze patterns, reflection, rotation, and translation (here I was thinking they were just "cool" :). The original post I took the idea from can be found HERE . This is also where you go to get the instructions for putting it together and the pattern.  If yo...

I recently worked with two teachers helping to put together a research project using www.blabberize.com as the presentation method (the subject was explorers - grade level 4th). Blabberize is a free website that allows you to manipulate the mouths of pictures to make them "talk" with your recorded voice. Click on the picture to see how the site works and a sample of an "explorer interview" or CLICK HERE ) The first group of children used two pictures - one of them and one of their explorer and recorded their voices. They turned out fine although we had a lot of problems with the microphones. Based on my experience with the first group I introduced a change to the project for the second group. Students had to conduct an "interview" with an explorer. The program can handle a total of 10 scenes so that meant that five questions could be asked. The teacher and I had to explain and model good interviewing skills. The kids did extremely well and if it...

I was looking up different techniques for digital storytelling using PowerPoint when I came across this cool video onYouTube .  I liked the spinning effect and thought it could be used for an animated acrostic. I talked a teacher friend of mine into doing it with her class (4th grade) during their colonial unit and they turned out pretty good (the ones that finished). The hardest part was getting the kids to pre-make the acrostic! If you click on the video above you will watch a 6 minute tutorial on how to make the effect happen (or you can click on THIS LINK to go directly to my YouTube video). I tried something new with this class. Normally we go through all the steps together but I wanted to see if students could follow a detailed tutorial so I could just be there for support. I made a 9 minute video and told them that if they followed all the steps they could do this project. I had maybe a total of five students in the class who finished with little or no help ...

I saw this in one of the hallways at a school I work in and I really liked the concept. The art teacher tied in learning about people in the American Revolution, jobs/apprenticeships, and art all in one activity. I thought this would make a good "right hand" assignment in a notebook. The left hand side could contain the poem "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (YouTube has a pretty good dramatic reading of the poem - HERE ). The poem could be introduced in an ELA class in relation to poets, stanzas, and rhyming schemes. The children would then make "silver" teapots for the right hand side of the notebook.

Day 7 - Social Studies Practice reading latitude and longitude lines and figure out what cities Santa will be visiting over the holidays. Watch this YouTube video about lines of latitude and longitude (download using a YouTube downloader).  Have students complete the latitude and longitude worksheet as practice from this website - Super Teacher Worksheets. Pull out the laptops and have students go to www.googlemaps.com and have them type in the latitude and longitude coordinates I have listed (1-15) on this worksheet.   They have to identify the location (famous places and monuments) where indicated. A couple of the places require that the students go to the street view and move around to find the monument. For example #12 will take the students pretty darn close to the Leaning Tower of Pisa. To get to the street view click on the “A” listed on the map as the location and then click on “street view” (see picture above). Location #6 (Big Ben) will ...

Here is a short video of a project I had to do in an Earth Science class I am taking (I am going for my second master's degree in Elementary Science Education and will hopefully be done next spring). The project required that teachers put together a "Wonder Box" of Earth science items and design a lesson plan around the box. This reminded me of a project I had done with fourth graders during my student teaching in Social Studies. I had students work in groups and they had to design a museum box that held "artifacts" of specific Native American tribes. I put together a short 1 minute 30 second video that highlights how I made my "Wonder Box" (or museum box) and how it can be done in a Social Studies class and how the activity can be incorporated into a notebook assignment. This could also be used in science. Student's can create a biome box and have artifacts of what might be found in that biome and why. Student's can create an animal box ...

I was working with a couple of teachers coming up with end of year project ideas (after our state testing is through mid-May). I wanted someone to try the pull out tab project I wrote about earlier in another post so I put together a sample of a fifth grade project using poster board and the axis powers. I think the fifth grade teacher I showed it to will try it with her groups. I also showed it to a fourth grade social studies teacher and he has a G/T group that is ahead of the others and thought this would make a good enrichment project for them so he had the group pick a person and create their pull tabs. He said it went well with the group although he had to do some "tab surgery" with some of the smaller pictures.

Earlier I wrote a post about this fun pop up card site. I haven't had a chance to use it in a classroom but two Social Studies teachers I know have. They had their fourth grade students make the pop up explorer ship and write facts about Christopher Columbus. One teacher had her students put it in their notebook and the other teacher put them out in the hall. They turned out very cute! I did do pop up cards with my Girl Scout troop using the turkey and though that might make a good ELA lesson. Students could practice their writing skills and let their families know what they are thankful for.

A teacher that I worked with years ago did a fun assignment with her students around the holidays. She had her students rewrite Christmas carols to go along with the units they were studying. She wrote about it in her blog . I filmed a few of her students singing their revised carols this year and thought I would share.