Here’s another gem I got from Al Beamon. This Animal Habitat TechQuest was created by a a teacher in Fairfax County so it is aligned with the SOL. If you use the activity, be sure to make alternate arrangements for the quiz. the online version of the quiz emails results directly to Mr. Rossen.
Many of you know Al Beamon, he taught 4th grade for many years at Brighton before he became a TRT. Quite glad he joined our team as he’s a really talented guy with great aptitude for the job. every once in a while Al shares a resource that he has found and is using over a James Hurst Elementary. So Al’s most recent share was for animal habitats. GlaxoSmithKline has created a website on animal habitats. Check it out I’m sure it will be helpful.
Whew!! I’m trying to clean out my inbox. The email upgrade has made life very different for many of us. If you need help with the new interface, let me know or you could take the OWA 2007 class that is being offered in the Tech Tuesday lineup.
So anyway, I’m cleaning up my email and I ran across some info on a great site. The Virginia Trekkers are a group of Instructional Technology Resource Teachers who are creating resources for elementary students. The vodcasts and interactives are primarily targeted towards social studies, but where there is an cross over with other core areas, they make sure to get that in as well. Check out the site…there is something for everyone K-6.
So during my SL adventure tonite, someone made a reference to Wordle. I learned about this application earlier this year, but never posted about it (that I could remember). I think using this application would be a cool way to teach students about Main Idea. The application make a word cloud from your text. Words that occur with more frequency are larger in the cloud. Like a tag cloud. I think this might be a great application to help students learn about summarization too. So I took my post about Warlick and turned it into a wordle:
This is primarily for third and fourth grade teachers. While studying the food chain, you might dissect an owl pellet with your students virtually. Those with an MCPS system or a Promethean Board could do whole group instruction in the class. You also could decide to use the computer lab for this activity so that everyone could have some “hands on” experience.
Apparently it’s quite the buzz. I’m so excited!! Eighteen months ago, I asked the Instructional Technology department to provide a blog portal for teachers at PPS. I just knew that if we built it, they would come. And now it’s happening…we’ve had 6 inquiries about blogs in the last 2 weeks. I’m actually redesigning my blog workshop so that I’ll be ready to give the workshop in our “Tech Tuesday” lineup this fall. There are so many ways that teachers can use blogs. My personal favorite is the virtual literature circle. Here are a couple of examples…
I’ve got bunus points because I’ve got Plurk open!!
Learning to Speak Native:
Reference to Prensky: Natives are multitaskers, they prefer graphics BEFORE text etc… they think differently because they grew up connected. Our schools were not created to accomodate these kids. If educators want to reach NATIVES we will have to “just do it”.
We’ve had an information explosion…161 Billion GB of information. Another key trend flattening the world. Open sourcing and tools on steroids (like cell phones). Also Wikinomics - everyone helping to build something better than they can do on their own. Look at the www.curriki.com project or the fact that some things like Gmail are in perpetual beta …not everything is a final draft. The idea is finding innovative uses for things and not necessarily inventing everything. This is the intersection of tools, experts, and knowledge. It’s the idea of a listserv vs. plurk. It’s a conversation and it’s personal. It’s impromptu professional development. You get ideas and professional development that you didn’t even know you need. People share discoveries, request info, social and personal connection, explore new things, professional development opportunities in real time. We are all DEN STARs and we are supposed to share, so we should use these things. VA has a guide on social networking in grades k-12? I need to get my hands on it…Apparently it’s published by the DOE?
Networking allows us to learn how o do what we do and using WEB2.0 allows us to share what we are learning in bigger audiences. So now teachers are becoming as connected as the students we teach. Then we start doing the same things kids do to try to stay connected at work. If you give a man a fish, if you teach a man to fish, ic you connect a man to a fishing community he’ll have variety in his diet.
Natives attends conferences using Live blogs, podcasts, backchannel, skypecast, twitter, ustream even in second life. During packed sessions folks who stream it out can help folks who want to attend. Then you can sit is second life next to others who couldn’t physically be there. www.mogulus.com a virtual broadcasting studio in your computer? www.qik.com plays nicely with mogulus and you can do truly mobile recording. Can’t get parent’s to come to an assembly during the day? broadcast it live and then they can attend while on break at work. Create an on demand video library…
Find a way to share the info that fits you and stay connected.
Ok, So second grade borrowed my cameras last week for their field trip. I had two teachers ask to make VoiceThreads from the pictures that the kids took. Here is the thread Mrs. Mojica’s class completed. Now if I can only get third grade to bite…
So second grade went to the farm. I’m not quite sure which SOL they were focused on as I found a couple that they covered. The great thing about it is that Ms. Kurrus planned ahead and reserved my Hamilton cameras to take with them. We met the day before the trip to square away some details about the project. I decided to use the three step integration process that I showed the teachers in January. I took some time to teach the class about the cameras and was pleasantly surprised that most of their questions served to clarify their responsibilities. The students took the cameras to the farm and took some really good pictures. Not only did they document their activites while at the farm, they took great pictures of their process. Don’t take my word for it take a look:
I couldn’t have done a better job of documenting their trip myself…those cameras are pretty amazing too…
Mrs. Taxson asked me to do a review activity with her class, so I decided to try out the VoiceThread application with them. They had fun, I had fun, we all had fun!! Wanna see what we did? Check it out:
Thanks to Chrissy for the tutorial on embedding VoiceThreads. I would never have been able to figure it out on my own.
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