Technology Medley

If you work in an elementary school, you will love this video created by Karen Rose and her third graders in Melissa, Texas. The video was selected as the winner of a digital storytelling contest this summer at the National Educational Computing Conference.

Listen carefully to the lyrics as you watch. You’ll hear lines such as “Watching videos, hearings audio, yeah, we think they’re ok. But watching out own that we’ve created makes work feel like play!”

Who wouldn’t want to their students to feel this way about their own learning? Enjoy!

As I have mentioned before, I hope to work with every classroom teacher using the laptops at least once during the school year. All teachers are doing a great job helping students navigate through web sites that review and enhance the SOLs, and some students return to those sites from home.

My hope is that we can move forward from there and have the students create their own content. Have them use their understanding of the topic in a project that can be shared with others and used for review later on in the year. Examples might be:

• PowerPoints or online slideshows
• Word documents with original images
• KidPix images and slideshows
• Timelines
• Take digital pictures related to a topic
• Create videos
• Participate in VoiceTheads online
• Create blog posts on appropriate topics
• Create a class wiki on a specific unit
• Create webs in Kidspiration
• Podcasts on almost any topic
• Create original map mysteries in Map Machine

All of these projects can be posted on the school website so students can use them for review as necessary. Let’s keep moving forward with our use of technology in the classroom!

What other projects do you have in mind for this year?

West Salem teachers, I have great news! Our new set of Qwizdom remotes (clickers) has arrived. South Salem teachers have been using these for a few years now, and the other 2 elementary schools haves sets as well, so now we can share quizzes and other activities division wide.

On the student surveys, several students at South indicated that using Qwizdom was their favorite technology activity . South teachers, if you have not been using these, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to keep your students engaged in any subject review at any grade level. West teachers, we’ll have an inservice early in the year to introduce you to this new system.

With the division wide emphasis on assessment next year, these remotes will provide a quick and easy way for you to determine how well your students understand concepts in all subject areas. Most of the time, we use multiple choice questions, but you can design other questions types as well. Start thinking about how you might use these throughout the year with your students! If you’ll give me the questions, I’ll even set up the quizzes for you. (Oh yeah, I’ll need the answers too!)

I added Kerpoof.com to my Delicious bookmarks back in September, but I have only recently begun exploring this fun site. It’s a kid friendly site, and it’s fun for kids of all ages. You can draw, mix and paint with virtual watercolors, create drawings with stamps and backgrounds, and even create videos.

Here’s a link to a simple, silly movie that I just created.

I don’t know about you, but I can get completely lost in a site like this! Those of you with artistic talents will really enjoy playing here, and your students will too. The nice thing is, you do not need to register to play around here, and the files that have been shared have also been approved, so it’s safe for kids.

There is a link for teachers and an archive of newsletters with ideas for using Kerpoof in the classroom.  Check it out!

I came across the following video a couple of weeks ago, and Melanie Smith, reading teacher at South Salem, shared it with me again after seeing it at the VSRA conference. It’s only 4 minutes long and definitely provides plenty of food for thought.

I completely understand how difficult it can be to provide students with the types of technologies referred to in the video with the current emphasis on SOLs and NCLB. By working together, we can provide students with more opportunities to show what they have learned by creating their own digital projects such as podcasts, digital stories, blogs, and slideshows.

Tina and I hope to create a similar video using Salem elementary students that we will share with you next fall. It will be very interesting to see how our students’ comments compare with those of the students in the YouTube video above.

Yesterday, I introduced laptops to the fourth kindergarten class at West Salem, and as always, I was absolutely amazed at how well these little friends adapted to the features of a laptop computer. Once I showed them how to use the touchpad and how to click and drag, they were off and running. Each time I’ve worked with kindergarten or first grade students, my thoughts have been the same. They are fearless! Even though they have spent time in the lab on desktops, using the mouse on a laptop is new to them. However, they are not at all intimidated by it. In fact, it seems as if the touchpad is intuitive for them.

We were using Starfall, one of our very favorite reading sites. Mrs. Gauck had printed the URL on sentence strips and had each student type in the web address themselves. She had previously talked about using the keyboard and showed them where the “dot” was, and of course we had a help a few, but the majority of the children typed in the address correctly. Honestly, I really don’t give these young children credit for doing as much as they are capable of doing for themselves! Hmm, we showed them how to press Ctrl-Alt-Delete, so maybe we’ll have them type in the passwords for themselves next time!

It is always fun to watch the kids once they actually start watching the videos and playing the games in Starfall. Their faces light up, they giggle, they help each other find games, and they stay completely engaged.

As the children were leaving yesterday, several indicated that they didn’t want to go home yet! They were so excited and felt like “the big kids.” Hopefully, all of our young children will have more opportunities to use the laptops as the year continues, and I will be more than happy to come in and teach or to lend an extra set of hands.

Children are just amazing!

Scholastic Keys is actually a suite of programs that interface with Microsoft Office, but the programs are designed to be used by young children. The software is installed in the computer labs as well as on all of the laptops on the mobile carts, and I highly encourage you to check it out if you have not already done so. When you click on one of the Keys icons, you will notice that the Office program opens up first, and then the Keys program. Here’s a very brief description of the 3 components:

MaxWrite

MaxWrite is the kids’ version of Word. Students can type, add pictures or borders, work with tables, and do almost anything you might normally have them do with a word processor. They can add images of Clifford or Ms. Frizzle, or they can draw their own pictures right within the program. They can also search for images from the regular Word images search. The documents are saved as a Word format, so they can be opened later on any computer that already has Office installed.

MaxShow

This part of Scholastic Keys is the interface to PowerPoint, and it’s probably my favorite to use with kids in the classroom. This is a wonderful program to use as a culminating event for almost any unit or story. We’ve had third graders create slideshows on their favorite animals, second graders create slideshows of their color poems, fourth graders create word problems shows….you get the idea. The possibilities are endless! After the children enter their information and images into their slides, they enjoy exploring other options such as colors, fonts, and animations to truly personalize their shows.

MaxCount

MaxCount is a spreadsheet program similar to Excel. There are several activities already built into MaxCount that can be used with the very young children. Older kids might enjoy creating multiplication tables or entering data and converting it to graphs. They love the “magic” of filling the columns with fomulas so the computer does the math for them! This is a great program for working with any type of data including practice with mean, median, and mode. It’s also excellent for showing various types of graphs using the same data.

There is a handout for Scholastic Keys in the blue box in the sidebar. Just click on the name of the handout and select download. I’ll be happy to come in and help you any time you want to use this awesome software!

It’s important that we teach our students how to use the internet safely. Here are a few rules of the road for children that you might want to discuss with them during teachable moments:

• Don’t share your password with your friends or use their passwords.
• Never give personal information to anyone online
  • full name
  • address
  • telephone number
  • places nearby your home
• Do not put personal information in profiles in chat rooms or other web sites.
• If you accidentally open an inappropriate site, tell a parent or teacher.
• Don’t believe everything you read or hear in a chat room. People are not always who they say they are.
• Never agree to meet someone in real life that you meet in a chat room
• Always tell an adult if anyone or anything makes you feel uncomfortable while online.

There are several web sites designed specifically to teach young children how to surf the internet safely. These would be ideal to use during you computer lab times!

NetSmartz

Surf Swell Island

iKeepSafe (Be sure to scroll down to the video links!)

SafeKids 

In David Warlick’s keynote address for the K12 Online Conference, he states

I was probably the last generation who could look at his father and believe that he is seeing his own future……For the first time in history, we are preparing our children for a future that we cannot clearly describe, and this has profound implications on education, on what and how we teach.

Wow! That’s definitely food for thought. The class of 2020 entered Kindergarten this year. What types of jobs will they be preparing for when they enter college? What types of devices will they be using to communicate with each other  and to educate themselves? How different from ours will their lives be as adults? Can you even begin to imagine?

Here is a updated version of the “Did You Know” video by Karl Fisch that some of you have seen before.  This video  provides some enlightening information about how quickly our world is changing….well worth watching when you have a chance.