Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

It is summer and I like to read. I will normally gravitate to a book in the fiction category specifically urban paranormal fiction. My favorites include Patrica Briggs, Helen Harper, and Lisa Edmonds'...her Alice Worth series is excellent. Typically I will also read YA paranormal fiction. I recently just finished  The Intuitives which was a fun fast read and one I would enthusiastically recommend to students. Luckily for me a few years ago my husband purchased a gift subscription to Kindle Unlimited for Mother's Day (they run a deal each year) and he renews it every May which has saved me (and subsequently him...😉) a ton of money buying books. I do try and utilize the public library whenever possible but I really LOVE my Kindle and the gratification of instantly downloading a book. Each summer I try to add at least one nonfiction book into the mix. Sometimes they are education related and sometimes they are just for fun. This year I picked up "The Edupreneur'...

Original Board Posted on Twitter 2019 Last year I ran across this summer PD choice board on Twitter . As someone who likes goals and lists it immediately appealed to me as a way of keeping motivated over the summer. The original file was posted on Laura Cahill's blog and I made a copy and modified it for my set of circumstances. It was fun checking things off the board throughout the summer. My Modified 2019 Summer PD Choice Board I had filed the idea away to share with our teachers this year (2020) and modified it again with our Beaufort County School District teachers in mind. The week we went out on break I posted it to our district's EdTech Facebook Page (a closed group we started with our district teachers as a place to share EdTech ideas and ask questions). Revised Board for BCSD Teachers 2020 Like Ms. Cahill writes in her blog "The idea is that whatever your situation, there is something you can do this summer that will re-energize you and re...

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...

Last year I co-taught with a media specialist working to integrate technology into her related arts rotation. We choose a different tool for each of the upper grade levels (3-5). For third we decided to use Google Drawings. The inspiration for this project came from a picture in a tweet , It made me immediate think of a persuasive writing project that one of the teacher's was doing with her class that we could easily piggy back on. I really liked the comic book style picture and reached out, via Twitter, to Todd Nesloney and Tony Vincent (who made the original tweet) and found that Tony used an expensive app called Prisma to get the effect.  We decided to use the free app PicsArt and one of their filters. It wasn't as clean as the picture we used as inspiration but the kids liked the graphic style of  them. If you use the app you can find the filter under "effects" and then "artistic" and then "comic" (or you could try "car...

Google just put out an app/program called Read Along and it looks really promising. It is advertised as being for children ages 5 and up. Video Overview : Fast forward to minute one in the video 👍 I love that it is FREE, helps students to read, gives them starts/points, has a timer, and can be used without internet access (after you have downloaded stories). 👎 What I dislike is that is ONLY available to use on an Android phone or Chrome book (so no iPad, iPhone, or PC availability...yet). Even though the app/program isn't widespread among devices it may be something teachers may want to pass on to parents as something to check out this summer if they do have one of the supporting devices. Video Overview :  Use on a Chrome Book:

If you are at all familiar with Bitmojis you know they, sadly, don't talk but there may be times when you want them to. This was something I gave quite a bit of thought to and roped in my awesome co-worker, Estee Williams, to help. We discovered by simply manipulating the mouth and duplicating slides we could make it appear that our Bitmoji's were "talking". We used this idea to create a video entry into a contest. Later that year I created another video as an introduction to a Bitmoji session I was co-presenting with another co-worker. They were both fun and challenging and when I shared them recently in a Bitmoji Craze for Educators Facebook group lots of people wanted to know how I made them.  I put together a short instructional video with the caveat that there may be an easier way. At the time there was nothing online or on YouTube so we just tried this out and it worked for us.  In other Bitmoji news some awesome teacher shared...