Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

I have been enjoying using the new Google Sites for creating websites with students. It is much simpler to use than its predecessor and the students like learning how to create a website without any hassle. We are a Google Apps For Education district so all students have access to the GSuite of creation tools in their Google Drive. For this project I created a sample website to model the expectations and to give students a reference point in case they needed something to refer back to. I choose the book Me and The Pumpkin Queen. This project was done with a fourth and fifth grade book club group. Prior to starting the book the teacher had me come in and explain the technology component of their club. I showed them my sample site and walked them through how to set up their sites. During that meeting they started the outline of their site by making the home page and all the sub-headers across the top. Under the chapters tab they created sub-pages with a grouping of chapters. Eve...

One of my favorite sites is  www.ducksters.com  for social studies and science articles for kids but it also has a section for biographies separated into categories.  One of the categories is African Americans which links to biographies of notable African Americans through history.  If you are having students conduct research for Black History Month you may want to consider this site.

One of our schools is having a superhero themed curriculum night and in one station (in the media center) students can wear capes and masks and will have a picture taken in front of a green screen superhero background. I used the green screen app Doink ($2.99) on my iPad to take the sample shots pictured here. I have used the app before and I am very familiar with it (I like that it has both a video and photo option and three layers to add overlays). The media center had a green screen wall but the color didn't extend to the floor and we needed the feet showing in most of the backgrounds. We set up a table with a green screen cloth and had a step stool and someone helping students up and down. We do have one school that painted the baseboard green and added green turf to the floor to solve their problem.  When we were setting up the project I started looking for ideas online when I came across this blog  and really liked how she used editing too...

I was in a classroom today and the students were brainstorming goals for the New Year. Later I was randomly emailed a post about students creating digital vision boards using Google Slides...or Google Drawings (which I thought was pretty cool). The picture above is the vision board I created as a demo (I used Google Slides). I added the two add-ons Kasey Bell suggested in her article but I didn't use them so I think you can ignore those. I just used "insert" "image" "search the web". Typically vision boards are made by cutting out pictures and words from magazines, and I have done quite a few in my lifetime. I have to say I really liked the digital version (less mess and having to solicit a bunch of magazines from co-workers!). The article does give some good tips and tricks for how to introduce the activity as well as completing and sharing. Enjoy and Happy New Year!

One of my favorite sites to use with students is duckster.com . It is a great site that has lots of student friendly articles (I use it mostly for the history articles). It is a free site, and as such, has a lot of distracting ads and sidebar information making it easy for students to click out of the intended article. In order to keep students focused on the information I need them to be I use a Google Chrome extension called Print Friendly & PDF. The extension allows you to make a downloadable PDF of the website and delete any extraneous information you don't want. This way the PDF can be shared with students via Google Classroom without sending them to a website, or it can be printed for their Social Studies or Science notebooks. It also works great if you need the information for a lesson but the website is blocked for students. To add the extension simply follow the steps below: To use the extension:

I just noticed some schools are preparing to start their staff Secret Santa. Last year our supervisor organized our departments Secret Santa using https://www.elfster.com/. It was a nice technology twist on something that typically is done, in a very confusing manner, by paper and pencil. The site is free to use and participants sign up, if they are participating, and they can add what they like as far as drinks, snacks, etc. to help out the person they get paired with. The system then randomly pairs people up so you don't have to do it. It is pretty cool and something you might want to pass on to whoever handles your school's Secret Santa sign up. My supervisor has a large extended family and she uses it with them as well. It is very easy to use and would save your organizer man hours as well as help keep the copies down at your school. Have a great holiday season everyone!

If you are looking for a techie way to schedule parent/teacher conferences, instead of sending home slips of paper asking parents to choose a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice, try using the free site  https://calendly.com/ .  The site (which I only use for this purpose) lets you adjust your time in whatever increments you want, as soon as parent books a spot they get an email confirmation, and then the time slot disappears so other parents can't see it.  I made a 6 minute video (above and linked HERE ) walking you through how to set up an account, create a parent/teacher calendar, what the parent sees and what you see when your times start booking up.  I shared this with our teachers but I thought it might help others as well.