Creating Graphs

My grade 3 students are using this tool to make great looking graphs. I love this tool and if you need a program to make graphs check it out.

http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createagraph/default.aspx

Check out our graphs here:

http://bready3.blogspot.com/search/label/Graphing

Perceptions of Technology

How do we change this:

To this:

When most of the staff at my school view technology the image that comes to mind is the first. My goal (and responsibility) is to transform their perception of technology to the latter.

I am in the enviable position of having a school based administrator who shares a similar vision of how technology to can be used as a tool to enhance learning.  While planning for the next school year she is trying to budget release time for team teaching involving technology and inquiry based learning.

In my mind the only significant barrier remaining is that our system is based on the "lock it down" mentality. Every step in a process presents the students with another barrier. The current deployment of technology does not allow the students to remember passwords for frequently visited websites, they can not choose their own start page, and it makes the desktop apps we want to use unusable (Picasa, Windows Movie Maker).

How can I persuade my school division's administrators that our network should look more like a Swiss Army knife than a series of hurdles?

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. :(

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

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.