Sunday, March 23, 2008

Blabberize

Donna Desroches posted a link to Blabberize on Delicious the other day and the eight year old inside me fell in love with it right away. The problem is how to use it in the class.

I am spending some time during the break planning how to spruce up my Charlotte's Web unit for my Grade 3 class. Much of the stuff I have been able to think of is pretty mediocre.

Then I remembered Donna's link to Blabberize. It may seem pretty immature but I think it would be a great way to post a character sketch online at any age level.

Thanks to Donna for the link, coders who share my juvenile sense of humor, and social bookmarking!

PS - The embed doesn't seem to show up in Google Reader. :(

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Oh...Now I Get It



At our last in school tech support meeting I finally got to put my hands on an XO...but I didn't get it. It felt cumbersome and the apps seemed weak. The eee pc seemed like it had more usable software and was more...conventional. Just this evening I ended up at he XO website and was going through the demos and descriptions and it hit me like lightning. Its not meant to be conventional. Duh! (I'm amazingly slow sometimes.)

It isn't meant to operate in isolation, its all about collaboration, its about simplicity, and its about removing barriers. All the things our current technology is lacking.

Now I get it.
Blogged with the Flock Browser

Monday, March 17, 2008

Learning to Read with SMARTBoards


I have two daughters: Emma is five and Julia is six.  Julia took to reading like a fish to water. Instantly, she seemed to catch on to the idea that each letter represented sounds and you could use them to built words and those words to build sentences.

Emma is a different story.  When we would look at Dolch words or word families you can see her glaze over.  Quickly, she'll ask, "Can I play now?" She gets her attention span from her moth...Ohhh! Look something shiny!

Where was I?  Oh ya, reading.  I decided to give the SMARTBoard a try.  I wrote some words on the board and we read them together (I, a, the, see, cat, dog).  Next we moved them around to built sentences (I see the dog,  I see a dog, etc).  She was able to tell me some words that rhyme with cat (rat, mat, sat hat, fat).  Then she was able to use the words to make a sentence (I see the fat rat).  Of course she thought that was immensely funny.

She wanted to make a longer sentence and ended up with "I see a fat rat on a flat mat."  The part she liked best was when I suggested she make a picture for her sentence using Tux Paint. Yay, Tux Paint!

This experience reminded me of two important things:
1) My daughter is a kinesthetic learner.
2) It is much easier to learn when its purpose is clear.

I think this is the first time Emma has thought of herself as a reader and I could not be prouder of her.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Digital Photogrphy In Art


We were learning about lines in our art class and I had a chance to use a class set of cameras. We decided to go out into the neighborhood and find examples of differnt types of lines. We took about 400 pictures and posted them to Picasa Web Albums and then the students chose three to download, edit, and post on their blog. Not all students are done and many who think they are have some editing to do but I think it worked well. Here is a link to our class blog.

The students seemed to really enjoy the process and they were able to frame their photos much better than I would have expected.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Evaluation of Input vs. Output


First of all, I can count the total hours of sleep I have had over the last three nights on one hand.  Pardon me if I ramble.

I have been struggling with report cards for term 2 because I feel like I have a lack of "concrete" marks in a couple of subject areas.  I could not think why my marks seemed so thin.  Then it occurred to me that I was planning my evaluation wrong.

It seems to me that assigning a numeric value to the analyzing, mapping, and evaluating that students to during the beginning phases of a project is harder to assess than the final product.  We know good output; what does a summative evaluation of input look like?  I think graphic organizers are part of the answer.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Just More Cowbell?

The school division has invested a lot of money in me and my class over the last year. We changed platforms over the summer and when I asked for extra computers in my classroom that request was approved, I was assigned a laptop to assist me in some committee work, I applied for a SmartBOARD as one the teachers chosen in a pilot program, and finally our school received a capital budget grant to assemble a mobile media cart.

Now the onus is on me to produce.

I need to make sure that all this technology (aka money) is going to help promote critical and creative thinkers, consumers and producers; it's not just more cowbell (Sorry, Bruce Dickinson).

Friday, March 7, 2008

"It Just Worked"


It is the best thing that you'll ever hear when helping a colleague.
Last year our school applied for a capital budget request to put together a mobile media cart.  Recently, we were approved and we started to oder and assemble the pieces.  All the core components have come in and I was able to built it this week.

Components:
Cart
iMac
UPS (You don't have to restart the computer when you move it)
External HD (Backups)
Card Reader (We have a mash of different cameras with different connectors/cards)
Projector
Speakers
Keyboard (GarageBand)

Our music teacher had found a great video on YouTube about people making music with vegetables that she wanted to show my Grade 3 class and asked about the cart.

Here is how our conversation went (or at least kinda sorta how I remember it):
Jackie: Is it easy?
Me: Plug it in, press power on the projector.
Jackie: What about when I am done?
Me: Press power on the projector twice, put it back, and plug it in.
Jackie: Oh, ok.

When she brought it back I asked, "So?"
Her reply was simply, "It was so easy.  It just worked."

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Finding the Right Tool Set

I find myself sometimes thinking, "I wish my students had this tool or that (i.e. GarageBand)" or "Cool!  That was just the right tool for the job!"  When I read about people using XO or eee pc it strikes me as being an effective compromise.  While doing some reading I found this post and I couldn't have agreed more.

The question it gets me thinking about is how do we as educators insure that we present our students with the right tool set for the task at hand?

Can we create an experience for our students that is collaborative, stable, promotes creativity, and easy to use?

VoiceThread Success!

Well, we tried VoiceThread earlier in the year and experienced some major difficulties.  We tried it again to retell First Nations stories from a unit we are doing about stories from around the world.

The Process:
1) Read the Story
2) Make jot notes
3) Write script from jot notes
4) plan and make pictures
5) upload
6) Narrate

Issues:
1) The mics cut out frequently (still don't know why).
2) We had trouble loading the pictures onto a thumbdrive to upload to the server (we have gmail now).
3) I forgo to develop a rubric with the class first (oops).

The Product:







Monday, March 3, 2008

School Based PD on Digital Storytelling

Well, I gave my first tech PD of the year and I think that overall it was a success. I thought of several things along the way that would have made it better (i.e. brainstorming how we can integrate several tools through the curriculum).

The reason I think it was a success was:
1) Everyone completed their task.
2) They realized that it wasn't as scary as they thought.
3) Some staff made spontaneous connections between curriculum and the tools we used.

Areas that could be improved:
1) Limit the numbers of tools that we were using.
2) Have everyone in the computer lab (It was an In Motion day for me).
3) Thumb drives or an easier way to share for each group.

Final Products
Check out our work here:
http://breadyschool.blogspot.com/

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Build Your Wild Self



I can't remember who posted this link (Donna, maybe?) but I love this website. Not only can you use it to have the students create an avatar without all the adds and sign ups, yadda yadda. What a great starter for a creative writing project. You could also use it to discuss animal adaptations.