Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

I thought these two classroom doors were too cute not to share. This is in a school with a school wide nautical theme and the top one was for Browder's Beacons and the second was for Porter's Pirates.  For the pirate one she used contact paper for the black parts and a plastic table top for the bandanna.  For the beacon one she used yellow and red bulletin board paper outlined in black electrical tape. 

I ran into this project walking the halls at one of the schools I go to. It was done in Leslie Larussas' fourth grade class as a creative writing piece. The students were to take one negative thought they had and find three positives within it.  I love love love this assignment! What a great way to teach children to turn their thinking around (I know several adults who need to do this assignment...on a daily basis :) She took pictures of the kids thinking and they created speech bubbles around themselves. She let the kids color it...which made some of them hard to read but they were all really good negative-to-positive examples.  Since I am a technology coach I looked for a way that the project could be done on the computer hence the last picture (FYI - our district is going to 1-1 iPads in grades 3-5 next year so the last project was done using an app called educreations as an example.)  It was inspired because I had just finished the couch to 5K a...

I'm always up for a fun foldable and I got one from a friend of mine. She got it from a museum course she took with her daughter and snagged a couple of templates for me (Yay! Thanks Nichelle :) It seems a bit complicated with all the mountain and valley folds but I have used it with several fourth grade classrooms and they got the hang of it pretty easily. It can be used with any topic. I choose magnets because the finished foldable reminded me of a bar magnet. To get a  free copy of the foldable template check out my GOOGLE SITES HERE .

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...

Two posts this week! My February tech newsletter is up on my google site - HERE.  Lots of good ideas for how to present research topics. Enjoy!

Every Monday and Friday I would pull up the weather channel's 10 day forecast for our city. I would have dry erase markers and boards at the table and would ask a series of questions based on the data. - What day will have the highest temperature? - What day will have the lowest temperature? Or what day are you going to have to dress the warmest? - What is the difference between those temperatures? (math!) - What day(s) has the greatest chance of rain? Or what day are we most likely to have indoor recess? - What day(s) has the lowest chance of rain? - What day is going to be the windiest? - What day is going to have the greatest drop between their day and evening temperature? I always look at the weather so I figure why not make it a classroom thing! Luckily we studied weather in the fourth grade so it was easy to incorporate it in my lessons but even if I taught a "non-weather grade" I would still do it. It was amazing to see how difficult it was for the k...

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 ...