The past few weeks I have been doing some lessons with my K-2 classes on how to publish our stories digitally. We call this digital storytelling. Sounds hard, but its really now! Its FUN! You write sentences and draw pictures just like you would in a journal or on paper, but in the end you record the story and it turns into an awesome video. This first time we have used the Educreations iOS app and we hope to try some other apps before the end of this school year! Check out some of the student samples!! Feel free to comment and give them some feedback!
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This past week we had some extra time to learn about rocks and we will be doing this with my other 4th grade classes this week. There is something powerful to be said about learning through songs. We had so much fun learning about the 3 types of rocks and how they form through song that we had to show off a little.
https://www.facebook.com/163017263741131/videos/1016056425103873/ We are starting Rock reports by choosing a rock sample that we are researching on Google and finding facts about our rock, where on Earth we can find our rock, its luster, and color. We have also learned to use he identification cards to ID our rock samples and their type. The 3 types of rock are Igneous, Metamorphic, and Sedimentary. See if you can hear how they are formed in our performance of Mr. Parr's 3 Types of Rocks song! In the past few weeks in my technology classes we have been using Nearpod to study our various topics. The students had some great feedback about Nearpod. A lot of them liked that everyone got access to what was showing on the screen and that they ALL got a chance to answer when it came time for questions, examples and the quiz. Several stated that it took boring stuff and made it fun! So what are we learning?
5th graders have been studying the different functions of cells and why the are important to our body. 4th graders are studying rocks and how they are formed. 3rd graders are learning about matter and its 3 states. Their favorite feature on Nearpod was the Draw IT application that let them draw examples and label pictures to show what they have learned. Check out this post for all things to help you out to start this school year.
So in training I talked about how you could request my time by using a Google Form.....HERE IT IS! https://docs.google.com/a/pitt.k12.nc.us/forms/d/1x1FUdDdNDzCl54dYlSVzCW8i2VG5VlZz7SjHM25ZAYA/viewform Use this form anytime you need Mrs. Tedder's assistance. This helps me keep track of what people need and helps me get to requests in the order received and in order of importance. PLEASE give me 2 days and times that will work for you....FOR example, if you need me to help you brainstorm for a lesson. Say so and give me a hint of what you are looking for. Then if you are only available during your planning, give me that time (8:30-9) on Tuesday or Thursday. I have classes and other people that need help so this will help me schedule you. I will schedule you through my Google Calendar and I will invite you to the appt and you will get a confirmation. Just click no if it doesn't work and most of the time I will send you an email to confirm first. Also PLEASE make sure to send me your classroom website if you did not already give it to me in training. Anytime it changes, please send to me! ALSO, Throughout the year, any events that are picture or news worthy, please send them my way. I will submit to the PCS Walking the Halls and The Daily Reflector as well as on our school website. PLEASE send a short write up describing the event and tell me who is in the pics if you can. PLEASE Like our Facebook page for updates and announcements! YOU must adhere to Pitt County Schools Acceptable Use Policy and Board Procedures. Acceptable Use Policy for STUDENTS and EMPLOYEES. IF you have ANY questions or need any help, contact me!!! I can't always help right that minute but I will help you as soon as possible. The only silly questions are the ones that are NEVER asked!!! Best of Luck for the new school year! Mrs. Tedder The button above is a link to screencast video I made recently and used in my Technology Enrichment class. It was a great tool to use with the students because they were engaged and were gaining new material. I have become a LOVER of videos for instruction. They give you a new way to present material, even if it is a video of you teaching. In this TV, video game, technology generation you seem to be able to hold their attention with short videos much better than if you stood there and presented the same material live and in person. I would loved to have a flipped classroom model at our school but the issue is most of our students don't have access to Internet or the technology to watch the videos outside of school. I did try a modified flip version by having students watch videos as morning work. Then you run into the issue of students don't all get there before the bell and then the ones that come in tardy. I know there has to be a good solution! But if I knew that, I could probably solve the world's problems!
Many of you have thought about it, considered it, maybe even have tried it yourself...but how does blogging really benefit educators and their students? First of all, what exactly is blogging, you may ask. Well according to wikipedia, A blog (a truncation of the expression web log)[1] is a discussion or informational site published on the World Wide Web and consisting of discrete entries ("posts") typically displayed in reverse chronological order (the most recent post appears first). (Wikipedia.org) Okay, so now how about Tedder's definition, a blog is a place for you to speak your mind about anything and everything (ok well almost...)...a digital journal of sorts. Blogs can also be used as a place teachers to draw in their students on a topic. In my opinion, there is no right or wrong way to blog. It is a place to be yourself! There are many sites that you can use to blog. I have simply added blog pages to my Weebly site. Blogger.com, wordpress, Kidblog.org, Edmodo, and many, many others offer blogging for free! Many companies and websites are beginning to blog. Some are as simple as an announcement about the latest product, reviews on products or materials, or opportunities to announce how their product is being used. Recently my school was highlighted in a blog on the Thinking Maps website. Check it out here. Even celebrities have been on the blogging bandwagon to share experiences that they feel meaningful. But MOST importantly to me is that EDUCATORS and their STUDENTS are blogging! There are MANY missed opportunities in the classroom for students to blog. There is no wrong way to blog, that is the awesome part about it. You just get on the site.....and WRITE!! I am going to share with you some examples of how I have used blogs in the past few years. I and several of my colleagues have used blogs in many ways, remember, there is no wrong way to blog. Click on the links to check out the different ways we used blogs to maybe get some ideas and see how it could work in your classroom! When I was teaching 5th grade I used a blog to make announcements called Cheetah Chat. This was an opportunity for me to make class announcements or have students complete a task such as a survey. For a large part of the school year I did Morning Work through blog posts. This was a place where I often posted a video or picture that pertained to something we were discussing that day or something coming up. I would try to post thought provoking questions to get the students writing. Our 4th grade teachers used something similar called Write into the Day and they would Do this each day as a station during their Guided Reading time. We also used blogs as an opportunity to respond to reading we were doing in class, this was our Reader's Response Blog. We also tried it for math, but this was a little more difficult for students to grasp in the short time we had for Math. This was our Math Moments Reflections. Using a blog was also a great way to announce the upcoming topics for the week. This was my Davis "Hop"penings. Now as a tech Facilitator, I use blogs as a way to post classroom lesson work, show awesome things that we have done in classroom lessons, or awesome things that may help teachers in their classrooms! Ok ....so there are examples that have worked for me. But what made them work? As a way to get quality responses from my students, I pulled up a few blog posts and had the class evaluate them and see if they really answered the questions and if they used complete sentences and punctuation, after a few rounds of student evaluation, their writing improved a LOT!! One thing I did try in Kindergarten was having my students tell me what to scribe for them in a blog. It was fun but very time consuming! They really enjoyed to chance to express themselves. 5th graders were also able to write their own blog entries. I found that through blogging, students were more motivated to write and often wrote more in response to a question than they would on paper. It also saves paper!!! So Why blog? Well why not?!! Give it a try and let me know how it goes. What's it going to hurt to put a little inspiration into your students? While in a meeting today with Media Coordinators in the county, a MC shared a neat Google Drive app called Lucid Charts that helps you make different types of maps.....this would be really handy for thinking maps! Check out my example below as I was plotting out what I needed to do to get ready for Tech Fest!
So I am going around doing lessons in my school and I have started Kindergarten lessons this week! We have had a great time because they are SO excited to learn about the cool iPads! Ms. McBride and Mrs. Best's Class worked so well today that we had a little extra time and after some practice in a few groups on their own with the Sock Puppets App.....we made our own short video about our lesson. It was SO much fun and Ms. McBride can't wait to use it for some great storytelling options! Check out our short video that was SUPPEEERRRR easy to make......some of the kids even made one! Yesterday in Ms. Kehoe's 3rd grade class, we made videos about local government workers using the Educreations App. We also used several other types of technology during our lesson. As technology does.....some of it didn't cooperate with the anticipation of the new software update. BUT we made the best of it and got an introduction to Voice Thread and Nearpod. Students used online resources to help them research their assigned worker and then they created their videos. I am going to share some of my favorites below. The students created them all on their own! Awesome work Kehoe's Cheetahs!!
Today in Mrs. Caldwell's 2nd grade class we had fun talking about iPad safety and doing a few neat activities together. We used the scan App and QR codes made on QRvoice.net. The neat thing about these codes is when scanned they will speak what you type in for the code. We did a spelling activity. Students scanned the QR codes and each code asked them to spell a different word by saying "How do you spell teacher?" The students then spelled the word for their iPad partner. We then scanned a QR code to take us to a lino-it canvas where we added stickies from each student to tell something about our school. Check it out here.
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Melissa TedderThis blog is a place to share Tech Highlights and ideas for my SGE Cheetah team of Tech Nerds! I am also starting my Graduate degree in Instructional Technology so as I come across ideas in class that may be helpful....I will talk them out here, feel free to respond with your thoughts or ask more! Archives
November 2015
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