Speaking of helping classmates, I encourage students to help each other and learn from each other. I tell them this in the first class of the year. One thing I've learned is that you have to demonstrate to students "how to help". I explain that you shouldn't do the work for the student having problems. You should talk them through it and let them do the work themselves. That way you can make sure they understand. Sometimes I have to remind myself to "practice what I preach".
I just watched a video on the benefits of Active Learning and it got me thinking... The reason kids like computer class, art, PE, kindergarten, etc. is because they are engaged in active learning in these classes. As a new teacher, I learned very quickly to keep the lecture portion of class short. At first I tried to include every detail of information I could think of when introducing the days lesson, but quickly realized kids were tuning out or getting disruptive. What I learned is, kids are more receptive to learning when they are fully engaged in an activity and the information provided is timely to their needs. When I'm helping them with something - they see everything! They see every menu item and mouse click that I make and listen intently as I talk myself through fixing issues. I am acutely aware of this when I over hear them helping a classmate who is having the same problem.
Speaking of helping classmates, I encourage students to help each other and learn from each other. I tell them this in the first class of the year. One thing I've learned is that you have to demonstrate to students "how to help". I explain that you shouldn't do the work for the student having problems. You should talk them through it and let them do the work themselves. That way you can make sure they understand. Sometimes I have to remind myself to "practice what I preach".
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In third grade we don't just learn about fonts, we make our own and then use them in a project. It's a great time to do this project because they have mastered printing, are learning cursive, and are learning about using different fonts when working on the computer.
Experiential learning is not a new concept. John Dewey talked about its benefits in 1938. As teachers, we have all seen the tangible benefits. In this project, not only do the students remember what the word "font" is, but they also learn:
This one fun activity gives students a much broader understanding of a simple concept. And because it was done through experience and not lecture, they will remember it for a lifetime. They might not know how to add the font to Microsoft Office, but they will remember it can be done. Here is a link to Font Design lesson plan. Here's an example of the finished project from 2013-14 (by Charlotte): I spend a lot of time curating online activities for teachers and students to use. Today, I created my first online math activity and I'm very excited to share it with you. It teaches students how to "add time". In this activity students need to figure out how long a song is. The number on the left of the status bar shows the elapsed time (that's the amount of time the song has already played). The number on the right hand side shows the time left to play of the song. Add them together and you have the full length of the song. Students can click on the album cover to see if they got the right answer. You can click here to see the full Adding Time activity. Here's an example:
Every Monday morning I get to spend time with the FIrst Grade class for iPad Mondays. I work with groups of 7 students at a time and we do activities based on their word study words, math, or other subject. Recently the first grade teacher, Mrs. Dixon, suggested we do something related to Ancient Egypt, a topic they were covering in social studies. The first week, I showed students on a map, using 360 Cities, the location of our school. Then I zoomed out and showed them the location of the school in relation to Virginia and then the United States. Then I showed them Africa and finally zoomed down to Egypt. I pointed out the Mediterranean Sea, Red Sea, Nile River, and deserts. Then I showed them how to use 360 Cities to explore panoramic photos of the Pyramids of Giza. Last week students tried their hand at using a hieroglyphics typewriter. They typed in a word (either an Egyptian vocabulary word that was supplied to them or their first name), then they gave their iPad to someone else to decode the message. The kids enjoyed it so much, we're going to do it again next week. In the coming weeks we'll make cartouches to hang on their cubbies for their Ancient Egyptian day celebration, they'll play Senet, an Ancient Egyptian game, and take a virtual field trip to Egypt using Google Earth. We even put together a page for the kids if they wanted to learn more about Ancient Egypt at home.
This is a topic I have been struggling with since I started teaching - How to do a project using online digital images and teach the students the importance of following copyright laws, to properly cite sources, and maintain a focus on the project itself. The difficulty wasn't teaching them the concept of copyright laws and citing sources. The difficulty for me was:
Pick Better Apps Any application with clip art such as Microsoft Office and Pixie is helpful. With the younger students I use applications like Haiku Deck because it makes searching and using creative commons images easy and automatically cites the source. I also like it because it is simple to use and helps students to have an aesthetically pleasing presentation. Another app that automatically cites sources is Weebly when you use the "search" for images function. I encourage the fifth grade students to use that function when they are building their own websites. Resource Pages When I work with younger students (grades 1-4), I coordinate with the classroom teacher to determine what photos the students need for their project. Then I create a page of images that students can use. I include the citation information and we reference the project back to that page. Here are some examples:
Copyright Friendly Search Engines For the older students, I try and find image search engines that help them find copyright friendly images (creative commons or public domain) and/or help them with the citations. The two I recommend most frequently are Wikimedia Commons and Comfight.
Copyright Friendly Image Collections
It is very exciting to see a movement by organizations to open up their image collections and make them available to the public in a copyright friendly manner. This is happening with museums, libraries and other organizations. I add links to the different collections to my student site under "clip art and images" which they can find under "research". It seems that whenever I'm especially excited about a lesson, something unexpected always goes wrong. This week was no exception. I woke up on Monday morning to a new message from Barack Obama to kick off the computer science education week. He talked about how more than 48 million people had signed up for the Hour of Code. I was excited we were going to be a part of it. I posted the new video on the website and we were off and running.
We started with the first grade class. They watched the presidents message and then did Kodable on the iPad. They loved it. We were off to a good start. I was planning on having the 3rd grade class do the LightBot Hour of Code on PCs, I tested it at school in the morning and everything worked fine, but when the kids tried to run it later in the day, it never loaded. So we tried a couple of activities on Code.org. It was slow and glitchy. I let the fifth grade select from a wider number of activities and they had a little better luck. Overall the kids were disappointed and frustrated. I explained to them that these were web applications which means you are running them on a remote computer - actually lots of computers. And that with over 48 million people signed up, the servers must be overwhelmed and that's why performance was slow and sometimes things were timing out and connections were being dropped. I realized they were having a hard time imagining banks of computers and the magnitude of 48 million people. One 3rd grader was crying because she lost her connection and still didn't understand why. So I used an analogy. I said it was like shopping on "Black Friday". Normally when you go to a store, you walk in, find what you want to buy, you pay for it and leave. But on "Black Friday", you might get to the store and not be able to get in because it's packed. Or you might get in and only be able to find some of the things your looking for because so many other people have bought up some of the items you wanted. And when you finally want to pay, there might not be enough cashiers and you have to wait a very long time. Maybe so long that you finally decide to leave without purchasing the items because it took too long. That seemed to help them understand what was happening. With the 5th graders I mentioned the recent Health Care sign up issues where the systems were overwhelmed and they all nodded their heads in understanding. It's funny, last week when I was preparing the kids for the Hour of Code I was telling them that "making mistakes" is part of coding. If you make a mistake in code it's called a "bug" and figuring out what went wrong is called "debugging". I explained to them that sometimes you learn more when you make a mistake than when you don't. In some respects the same thing happened with this activity. If everything had gone well, the kids may not have learned as much. Last year, we updated our strategic plan and in the process revamped the school's mission statement. There was a lot of discussion around the term "Launching Learners", but we all agreed it is what we do, even if the statement makes us chuckle. I recently remembered that some of the students created photos of themselves being launched from a trebuchet. It was part of a 5th grade project called "Travel into History" where students had to superimpose themselves into a photo that related to something they were learning about in history class and then write a short article to accompany it. In the project, they were learning how to Chroma Key. They used a photo editor called Paint.net which is full featured, easy to use, and free! I took the two trebuchet photos and used a free online application, Automotivator, to create a motivational posters of our new mission statement. I got a good laugh out of it. I hope you do too. It's a great example of how you can have some fun with your students by using online photo editors.
When I left the tech industry to start teaching primary school students over 4 years ago, I was curious what "digital natives" had already learned about technology outside of school. I found that most students still needed to learn basic skills like how to hold a mouse properly and how to edit a document. I was surprised to see students delete half a paragraph to fix a typo or put "enters" at the end of every line to double space. So just like in other subjects such as reading, it is important for us to teach students the basics. As I watched them, I developed a series of fun projects (fun is all relative) to help in each area. Here are some of them:
Personal GPS Project
Microsoft Office Mix Microsoft Office Mix is a new free add-on to PowerPoint 2013 that lets you (teachers) quickly make extraordinary lessons by adding audio and video narration, screen captures, screen casting (video capture of what you are doing on the computer), inking (writing and drawing on the screen), and quizzes and online activities to your existing or new PowerPoint slides. The tools show up as a separate MIX ribbon within PowerPoint and the features work like other PowerPoint features. I found it pretty intuitive to use. I was pleased to see that the new MIX elements are simply objects just like other PowerPoint objects. For example, the screen capture is a jpeg which can be sized, cropped and grouped like other images. I like the fact that you can narrate your entire lesson and then edit the narration on each individual slide. In other screen casting tools like Camtasia the recording is one monolithic video. In addition to the cool new features, Office MIX gives you detailed analytics on who has watched your lesson. You are able to track which of your students have watched a lesson, how long they spent on each slide (pretty awesome, huh?), and how they scored on each quiz. Another great feature is the ability to "remix" lessons that other teachers have created. You should definitely check it out: Microsoft Office Mix was designed for teachers to create lessons, but as you can tell from the Personal GPS activity, I think it has a lot of potential to be used by students to demonstrate their knowledge and to teach others. Here is an Office Mix I created this summer with some students where they demonstrate their knowledge of math and science: One last thing I want to mention is that the PowerPoint slides with Office MIX features still function the same way. They slides can be moved, copy and pasted, and deleted. Nothing has changed there. That means your students can each make their own MIX and you can combine the slides later into a single presentation.
Here are some links to other MIXs I created for UNC this summer:
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