Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

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...

A school asked if I could help them duplicate the cover of a book for a project they are doing with teachers. The basics were pretty easy but I needed to find free graffiti font. I initially tried the dafont website , which is my go to for most fonts, but nothing really matched. I did a Google and YouTube search and came across this free, super cool,  online graffiti tool . Honestly I just started playing around to try and figure stuff out but what I couldn't figure out was how to download it. So I went back to YouTube and found this  VERY HELPFUL video ...which would have saved me a lot of time in the design process (so definitely watch it first). I used the site remove.bg to remove the background of my picture and the background of my words, after I went through the saving steps. TIP: make sure to set the background of your words to white first. Normally I use Google Chrome to access the remove.bg site but I couldn't get it to take any of my jpeg images this morn...

I've been playing with grateful and gratitude apps the last month. It is one of my goals in 2020 is to focus more on being positive and I wasn't sure exactly how I wanted to go about it. This past year has been a little rough in terms of watching the news, budget cuts at work, gaining weight, getting older and I've been focused a little too much on the negative. At first I thought I might want to just share my grateful thoughts on Facebook but I didn't want to annoy anyone with my posts (you know the ones that start in November and lead up to Thanksgiving Day and we get it...YOU. ARE. THANKFUL not to mention FB posts are super hard to sort). Anyway I thought of a employing a "happiness jar" but I didn't want my husband to ask me "What is that?" and me having to explain. This is more of a "me" thing than a "him" thing I am not sure he has every been "unhappy" so he wouldn't understand (I am assuming that...

Last year (2018) I randomly ran across a 12 Days of Twitter Challenge about the same time I was getting into Sketchnoting . One of the teachers/tech coaches I follow Wanda Terral , an early sketchnote adopter, challenged folks to sketchnote their responses to the challenge. I was trying to sketchnote digitally and so I took on the challenge. Sadly I did not complete it. Sketchnoting digitally took up a lot more time then just paper and pencil.  I was using Kami as my online sketchpad...even though it isn't its intended use...it had all the tools I needed for use on my tablet.  Fast forward to December this year (2019) and the challenge came up on my Twitter feed again. The challenges seem to be run by different folks on Twitter but more or less have the same components.  This year I decided to use paper and pencil and sketch out simple vs. elaborate responses. I did it while watching TV at night with my husband and moved days ahead with my responses. I...

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 ...

Sorry for the overload of holiday ideas. We have one more week of school here in South Carolina (which involved a hurricane makeup day) and teachers are looking for creative ways to keep students engaged. This idea of making emoji book trailers came from working with staff at Whale Branch Elementary School. Their Literacy Coach wanted to have every teacher in the school record a book trailer. The idea was to share one a week (Friday) on the morning news but she needed help planning and recording staff.  We met up to record our sample trailers and to discus the project and potential pitfalls. Initially I think we were both thinking of recording the teachers using the green screen but for a school wide project that would have been a lot of work. I was also thinking of the teachers who would refuse because they ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY don't want to be recorded.  That is when Flipgrid popped back on my radar. It fell off my radar last year when Microsoft took it over ...