Last Week of School and my Sanity

I teach music at my school so I am in the crazies of December with a Christmas program coming up. We were supposed to have it last Tuesday (Dec 10th) but with the icy weather we moved it to Monday (Dec 16th). So I have been trying to keep my sanity while doing the last bit of rehearsals, etc for the program. However, I do have classes that are not in the program so what to do with them? Well I had some of them bring their netbooks to class and I showed them my favorite Christmas fun things to do. Here is a short list of my favorites:

 Make-a-Flake - definitely one of my favorites. Do you know how many kids do NOT know how to cut out a paper snowflake? It really is sad. This is a virtual one but you can save the image, send it, share it and you can probably create fancier snowflakes than you could in real life. Very fun to see what your "cuts" will create. (and not paper scraps on the floor!) This would be a fun activity to do with students and then make the actual paper ones. I actually like to do "snow" activities in January since there are plenty of Christmas things to do in December. And in Texas we tend to get our actual snow in January or February.

Virtual Cookies? Here are two sites.
Old Fashioned Christmas from Theoworlds.com. I like the simplicity of this one. You can email it, get the link, get the code to embed but there is not an easy way to exit and go to the beginning other than to reload the page. Still fun.

Get your own! | More Flash Toys from TheoWorlds.com

From Sprint there is SprintSweets and the Gingerbread Man with Everything. Save it, share it, send it. Decorate with icing and candies. Easy to start over but you can't just undo a step. It is all the way back to the beginning if you mess up and want to fix it. I do like how he is on the little cookie sheet though! Cute!

Decorate a Christmas Tree Cute, simple drag and drop, can add snowfall. Save or print image. This does have ads though (boo!). The way this image comes out you could photo edit and add your own message on the right side of the tree.

Christmas Tree I like this one. No ads. Simple drag and drop. No save or share but you could snip it. Turn off the lights and the fireplace and tree glow. Nice for the Smart Board. Reload page to do again. 

From Castle Arcana there are other links like Build a Snowman, Musical Christmas Tree, or how about The Christmas Carol for Guinea Pigs. Okay, maybe not?

One hint to searching for fun to do on the Smart Board is to search with the word "interactive". You will find more that will work on your interactive whiteboard. There are lots of Smart Board lessons for Christmas fun also out there. You won't be at a loss for things to do during this last week before the Christmas break.

Have fun!

Science Fair

I missed November.....Can we just pretend Dec 1st is really just November 31st in disguise? Yeah- probably not. It's been a busy month. Ok moving on...

Science Fair is coming up and your kiddos probably are already (or should be) working on their projects. Project should have been picked at the the beginning of the year because there are some that might take a few months to investigate. I thought I would poke around the web looking for tools to help with those projects. And remember parents- it's not your project.

There are plenty of sites out there for science fair project ideas but here are a few I found interesting:

Science Buddies Awesome site!
As a student I can take a survey that will help me decide on an area of interest for my project. I love the first question in the survey "When is the project due?". Too many don't realize the time involved in a good project. The following questions are grade level, did your teacher assign a particular area of science or are you free to choose and then what is your reading level. I went with these answers: due: more than a month, area: free to choose, grade level: 7, and reading level: average. After clicking continue it gave me a list of 26 questions that ranged from if I liked plants, the space program, working with batteries to have I ever worked with computer codes on a project not required by my teacher. I now have 586 recommendations! I went back and re-evaluated my "sometimes" answers and now I have 583. As a student I don't see myself going through all of these so I need to narrow the list a bit. If I choose an area of science, like Earth Science, I now have 61 suggestions, a more manageable list. I can go through the list and select favorites to help narrow even further. Once a project is selected you are shown a complete description of the project including time requirement, cost, difficulty. You are also given background, materials, procedure, how to make it your own, help and resources to learn more. I could go on and on about this site. It really is an excellent site for anyone interested in science or to encourage someone to consider science. TEACHERS: the section for teachers offers lots of downloadables, including rubrics for all steps of the project. Create a free account to access some of them. If you teach science definitely go visit Science Buddies.

Discovery Education collaborated with Scotch brand products offer a nice
Science Fair Central. It has a neat little widget that will help you choose a project. No personal survey here but it will lead you through some ideas. However there is also an Idea Finder that will give you more detail and choices.
There are resources for parents and the science fair coordinator. You can find a sample judges scoring sheet as well. You do not need a Discovery Education account to access all of this. I love anything from Discovery Education because you can count on the credibility of the material.

Some others to peruse:
Science Fair Project Resource Guide - contains many good links to other resources.


Need to create a graph? Create a Graph make bar, line, area, pie and XY. Easy to use.

Online Chart Tool - no account needed to create and save

Timelines? Try these:

Class Tools Timeline

Timeline Maker from SoftSchools.com- can have up to 12 events- other good resources here also

Mathematical and Scientific Symbols

Science Images- FREE images, photos, sketches, diagrams- free to print or download

Science A-Z also has "printable and projectable" science diagrams. Be sure to check out their other resources also

Hopefully this is a list of sites that might be helpful to anyone involved in Science Fairs. Once I started looking there are many to be found. 

UDMC and Avatars

I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to present at the University of Dallas Ministry Conference on Oct. 25th. I was a part of two very different presentations- one tech, one not. The non-tech presentation was done with my very dear friend and colleague, Beth Belcher. Beth and I spent nine years encouraging children to have reverence and familiarity with Church devotions and Mass. If you might be here and looking for "The Catholic School Mass- Better and Better" there is a QR code to the right. If you scan it or click it you will find the shared Google folder. If there is an error please be sure to let me know. You can also find Beth's site in my Blog list.

The other presentation I was involved with another dear friend and my "partner in crime" Carol Mayo,  was "Encouraging Writing with Weebly". A great session but our tech was less than desirable. It was pretty sad. The laptop we had access to was XP, no flash installed, not hard wired to the internet, Office not registered and who knows what else. My mac and the projector wouldn't talk to one another so we were left with static images (and not enough of those!) and our enthusiastic speech. Despite the tech glitches we had a nice sized group that stayed, asked good questions, and were most kind about our tech problems which we had absolutely no control over. I thought it still went well. It was just so disappointing to not be able to demonstrate how easy Weebly is to use. You can find some of the information we use to present Weebly by following this link.

I think I mentioned before about my elective at school where I introduce some fun tech for my class. I am always looking for things that don't  require you to create an account and you don't see a gallery of inappropriate items. I have found my students love to create things online. Recently I showed them two different sites for creating "avatars". They had a lot of fun with them. The first is DoppleMe . You can make a fun avatar for free. To save it you would need an account but we just snipped it and saved it.

The other site I showed them was Build Your Wild Self. I was afraid they would think this site was more for little kids but they spent more time here than the other. This site comes from the New York Zoos and Aquarium so you can imagine that it is very kid friendly. Again free. You start with creating a "normal" looking avatar and then begin to add animal parts. When you complete your new wild self it gives you a name based on the parts you chose. It also explains what each part is, from what animal and some information about it. (When I created this one what I clicked on was not what I was getting so I don't know about the glitch.) You can send to a friend or snip it and save or print it out. I really enjoy this site also.

"After" the animal parts!

My normal avatar before the animal parts.

Quick fun Tech

The middle school students where I teach get to choose an "exploratory" or elective type class once a week. It can vary from sign language to drama. They go to this class for one quarter and then get to pick another class. I usually do a Tech Tools for School topic. I try to pick fun, easy tools the kids can pick up quickly since our class time is only 30 minutes. Sometimes we find a way to use them for school work and sometimes they are just for fun. I thought I would share some of their favorite fun links.

GeoGreeting

It's amazing how they could spend 30 minutes looking at every letter of the alphabet. The cool thing is that it tells you the location of the building (city) and then they want to either try and find it themselves or they go off and do some independent research on the place where the building is. Well look at that- self motivated learning at it's finest!

Spell with Flickr 
Another fun site, although today the letter N was not working on my computer. I tried all the browsers but nothing. When things like that happen with my students I remind them that it is a web based tool and sometimes things don't work perfectly. So we go to plan B! What I really like about this one is there are different letters to choose from. When you click on a letter it cycles through about 5 or so letters and you can pick the one you like. You are not stuck with one choice as in GeoGreeting.

CoolText

Another pretty cool text creator with some really neat fonts. You have many controls like color, size, gradient, the list is long. Some you can download the image in a variety of formats. One word of caution- this site does have ads so use it carefully.

So there you have it- Three fun tools to create your headings, use on powerpoints, anywhere you can use an image.

Remnants of past conferences- Exit Cards

 

I am sitting here going through a pile of flyers, business cards, conference programs, etc., that I picked up from some of the different conferences I attended recently. It was one of those things I said to myself "I'll go through this at home when I have more time". HA! I'm actually looking right now at a program from 2010. Seriously?

Well in the midst of all the junk (and the throw away pile is much larger than the keep pile) I am finding a few things worth keeping and repeating. I thought I would share them with anyone who happens to find my ramblings here.

A find worth mentioning was from a talk on Assessment. I remember this one. I felt it was important to hear what they said but I do remember it was not a very stimulating talk. Good information: Bad delivery. However- what I found in my pile here was about EXIT CARDS. Many of you probably have used exit cards before and I have heard different questions, etc, that teachers use. Maybe you will like this one. They suggested a 321 CARD:

• 3 things I learned
• 2 questions I still have
• 1 way I see _______ used in the world around me.

It was the last part of that that I really like. I think that is one of the most important things teachers need to remember the relevance of what we teach to the students' life. We really need to consider that if they do not see how it benefits them, unfortunately they probably don't care.

Tech tools to use for your 321 CARD? How about Socrative? I talked about that in the last post. Another you could use is Padlet (formerly known as WallWisher). I like Padlet, which is like a bulletin board with sticky notes, because you can make it private and you can moderate the posts. And it's close relative Primary Wall that is very similar but geared toward the lower elementary crowd.

August Squeeze! Socratve and LiveBinder

I did this! Not such a slacker, eh?

 I seriously though about this being the last day of August and if I wasn't going to be a total slacker I better get a post in. So pathetic!

But- I do have two good tools that if I did not mention before they certainly deserve a closer look. Let's start with Socrative. Awesome FREE Web 2.0 tool. Create a free account and your students are able to log in either through the web or the iPad app with no account necessary from them. Once there you can use Socrative for review questions, exit tickets, test, and more. Socrative is especially helpful for formative assessment because it makes the checking quick and easy. There are games to play with any of your tests or quizzes. My students loved the Space Race. If your students have access to computers or iPads on a regular basis you may find this a regular part of your lessons. 

The other web based tool that I finally used to create and share with people is LiveBinder. LiveBinder is exactly what it sounds like- a binder, with tabs and everything. What I used it for was a professional development session my principal requested I help him put together. He gave me two videos he wanted us to view and a series of questions to answer. The challenge was how could I put this all together online and keep it all in one place? LiveBinder to the rescue! 

What I discovered was that by using the tabs and inserting the different content choices I could put videos on a page and have sub tabs underneath each main tab containing a question to answer. I then inserted a Padlet (another great web tool) right on the page. All the teachers had to do was read, click, type and they were done. So simple! I also love the option to make the binder private and require a passcode to enter. This made our PD just for our school.

My principal was happy, I was thrilled and I think the teachers found it easy also.

I have been at workshops where a leader has used LiveBinders to organize the details of the workshop but I had never used it to create something for someone to actually use. So....Go check out LiveBinders. There are many great public binders that might be helpful for your own use. But do think about how you might be able to use this for your students.

Slipping in July

So it seems once a month might be a good goal? I'll keep trying.
Okay watch the video for my post about Screencasters. My pick: Screencast-o-matic

ISTE 2013 Day 1- sort of

So today was kind of the first official day of ISTE for me here in San Antonio. Awesome day. Went to some great poster sessions. I love those! When I was at ISTE in Philly I spent quite a bit of time in the poster area because you can take out as much as you want or as little. I can't even begin to list all the things we saw today. We visited Jason Ohler and how he used Aurasma. I've tried Aurasma and I

think it has some great potential but I don't find it particularly user friendly. I've had some glitches in using in and I know if it doesn't work easily and smoothly teachers will give up on it and stop trying. But, I really think Aurasma is pretty cool so I've going to keep at it and see how I can solve my issues.

Learning management systems seem to be the up and coming thing. First there was Moodle and Blackboard. I've never really used Blackboard for a class. I've seen it but not used it personally. I took my entire masters courses using Moodle and it was okay. Not very fancy. Kind of plain jane of sorts but fairly easy to get around. Well now there is Schoology and Canvas who are going to make those old two step up their game. Both Schoology and Canvas offer many options and seem to flow seemlessly from one thing to another. We are going to meet with a teacher that uses Canvas. I am looking forward to hearing what she has to say. I use Edmodo regularly but will check out these other two on their "free" side.

Well I just tried Schoology and your students have to be 13 and over to create an account. So, is this a platform only for the upper middle and high school crowd? I will need to visit Schoology booth to find out more.

Teachers and Technology and QR codes

I've just finished helping the professional development director for the diocese do five different tech workshops for teachers. We did two workshops on using the SmartBoard, one on using QR codes in the classroom, one for ELA projects using the iPad and then Encouraging Writing with Weebly. Everyday went very well. I was quite pleased and I think all in attendance were too. I was also happy to see a nice group from my school present. Yippee!

My favorite of the week though was our QR Code workshop. We sent our participants on a sort of QR Scavenger hunt that led them through different ways to use a QR code. I know some people think QR codes are old but they are simple to make and easy to use and that my friend is what teachers will actually use.

Of the many ways to use QR codes there were two that I would use. One- put a QR code on homework that when scanned will take a student to a tutorial to help them remember how to do their assignment. The tutorial could be teacher created or linked to a video elsewhere or maybe a website with a game to help them.

The second one that I think is brilliant is to put a QR code in the front of a student's take home folder or whatever they use. The QR code is linked to the homework assignments for the day, week, month, whatever you choose. No excuse for not knowing the homework! You could even have a QR printed out for the parents to hang on the fridge so they could scan it. Too many uses!

**hint hint** did you scan the code?

Writing and more

My original goal for writing was once a week. And then I realized that was not realistic so I went for once a month and often I was able to manage more than that but....yeah here we are...June..and I haven't posted since March. Needless to say I think I fell off the earth for a while. It has been a very busy spring but I'm back and I once again make my blogging promise to post a minimum of once a month. I will try to make up for my lack of attention to my writing.

So I guess this post is my apology and whining for being such a slacker. I could go on and on about the reasons I have not written and there are plenty of mostly legitimate excuses. But truth be told I suppose it's just life and living that gets in the way sometimes! It's all good though.

Enough of my noise. Moving on!

And BTW- is that not a cool dragon? Phillip Martin Clip Art one of the best collections of free clip art. Beautifully done and so many choices.

Marching In and Ocean Tracks

You know the saying about March coming in like a lamb and out like a lion or vice versa? Well how about March coming in like a whirlwind? That is how it has been since I returned from TCEA and TMEA. Quite a flurry of activity. I spent considerable amount of time when I came back preparing a video for our school's auction. Many, many hours were spent but it turned out great. Although, last minute, I get a phone call asking if I can change the size of the video because the projector resolution was not what I set the video up in. I knew that was going to happen! Should have done 2. Live and Learn.

Really cool site here for science teachers or anyone interested in tracking sharks. A fellow teacher shared this site and I spent far too much time looking at it. Ocean Tracks displays the tracks of selected marine animals tagged by CSIRO and their partners. Using interactive maps you are able to "follow" the path of one of many tagged animals. You can follow Tazzi the Tiger Shark or meet the scientists who are behind the tagging. I especially enjoyed the interactive "dive with this fish" that takes you into the water to "see" and follow it. Very cool! There are also postcards and tips for teachers to download and print for their classes. It is sites like this that make me wish I taught science.

Third Grade Common Core

It seems there is much discussion over the Common Core Standards. Lately I have seen postings surfacing about it and I've been in more than one conversation in the last 3 days concerning Common Core Standards. Well now, from CoreCommonStandards.com comes a workbook to help guide teachers in implementing the standards. This book is filled with so many resources for teachers. Worksheets, activities and listings of the standards arranged in an orderly manner with colorful and easy to read pages. The workbooks available here are a must have for teachers who are trying to navigate into the adoption of the Common Core Standards for their state.

Currently on their site, workbooks, such as the Third Grade Common Core Workbook, are available. The workbooks are downloadable so the resources are easy to access right from your computer while you are planning your lessons. The site also offers links to the standards for all states who have adopted the Common Core, plus you can look at standards by grade level or by subject (English or Math).

Be sure to take a look at the Core Common Standards and all that is offered here.

TCEA 2013 , 360 Cities and iBooks Author

I am back from a great week spent in Austin for the TCEA conference. So many wonderful sessions. My brain is still jumbled and I will need to sort through my notes of links and things. I also had the pleasure of presenting three sessions with my partner in crime, Carol Mayo, the director of professional development for the diocese. On Monday, we presented Websites with Weebly. Full session and lots of great comments afterwards. Likewise for our Tuesday session of Award Winning Websites with Animoto. And finally, a small but very enthusiastic crowd for our Paper Slide and Mime Videos. All of our session material can be found on Carol's website, Hold the Mayo (cute name isn't it? A nice play on words with her name!). If you are interested, please take a look. There are even some of the completed projects from the attendees. Among the links posted is a link to our STARCamp wikispace. This is a teacher tech camp that we have taught for a few years. Carol also does lots of other trainings and her resources can be found within the site.

I think one of the things I most benefited from this year at TCEA were the sessions on working with iBooks Author with Alexis Carroll Cline, the publications specialist at TCEA. (You can follow her twitter feed here) I had played with iBooks Author before but I feel I have a much better grasp of how to work with it now.

Another favorite session was Digital Field Trips with Naomi Thompson from the Fort Worth ISD. She shared some links I don't remember seeing before. I was really intriguied by 360cities.net. There are so many places from around the world to visit. Perhaps you would like to show your students the Colosseum in Rome up close (be sure to follow the arrows to look inside), or the magnificent Machu Picchu, or maybe a peek inside the Louvre in Paris? I could spend many hours just perusing all of the listings in this site. 360cities.net can be used in any subject, visiting a battlefield, home of an author, or the interior of a cathedral. 360 can take your students on that field trip some may never take.

Many of the presenters had handouts for their presentations which can be found here. Check out the list, there may be something here that interests you.

All in all, it was a very good week. I will try to post more of what I learned in the coming weeks. So much to digest. This coming week is a trip to San Antonio for the TMEA/TI:ME conference. More learning!

Paper Slide or Pantomine Videos

January 2013? We are more than half way through the month and I think I have been writing 2012 still. Well I hope my dear reader that you are more focused than I am. I am gearing up for 2 conferences, TCEA (Texas Computer Educators) and TMEA (Texas Music Educators). TCEA will be in Austin, Texas and I have the pleasure of presenting 3 sessions with my good friend Carol Mayo. They are all 3 hour hands on sessions and we are very excited. Monday, February 4, we will be presenting Weebly, Tuesday the 5th will be Animoto and then finally on Thursday will be Paper Slide videos. Which brings me to my post today.

I knew I had written about Paper Slide videos once before so I went back to look at the post. Not much to say was there? I was disappointed that the video from our teacher tech camp would not play and I have tried fixing it to no avail. Recently, however, I used PSV (Paper Slide Videos) with one of my music classes. I introduced the concept to an 8th grade class, gave them the song they were going to use and let them at it. The song, by the way, was chosen because I knew they had just finished studying this in their science class. I gave them one class period to complete the pictures and to film.
The next week I had them take the same song and they had to pantomime the words. Lots of fun and they did a great job. They were very willing and I enjoyed watching them come up with their ideas. This link will take you to my classroom page where you can view both the PSV and the pantomime version.

An idea like PSV or pantomime really is quite easy to do with students. I did very little prep with them other than showing them an example of other students' work. I supplied them with paper and markers and their section of the song. I do think that any PSV should be relatively short in length, a few minutes at most.

So I reccommend to you to not be afraid and try it with your kids. There are many examples out on youtube so no matter what subject you teach you should be able to find an example. It does not have to be song like I did but have your students explain a concept they have just learned. Diagram a sentence, do a math problem, create a "how to" video, so many things you can do!

Here is quick (and kind of lame) PSV about PSV!

Paper Slide Video about Paper Slide Videos! from MKuterbach on Vimeo.