Google Doodles

I often tell teachers don't zip past those Google Doodles because they can be a great stepping stone to a good discussion or lesson. For instance, today's doodle celebrates the birthday of Oskar Fischinger. And to my point, I have no idea who he was or what he did. So naturally I go explore, which is what educators encourage their students to do, or at least I hope you do. CNET describes him as a "filmmaker and abstract animator". There is a lot to learn about him and the work he did which was clearly ahead of his time.  Do not jump past those doodles. You might abandon your lesson for the day but anytime you encourage learning and discovering new things is never a bad thing. #lifelonglearner


Kreise (excerpt) by Oskar Fischinger from CVM on Vimeo.

Summertime!

Well I think we can all agree that I am not very good at this blog writing thing but I persist. More to come! Just had to squeeze in a line before it was too bad.

End of Semester and Awesome Podcasts

So apparently it was a busy first semester of the school year as evidenced by my lack of writing. WOW.
I seem to apologize often for my lack of writing. I don't think I am really cut out for this but hey, I try.

What did I accomplish this first part of the school year? Well....I'd have to say that one of the best things were podcasts. Turned out really well but here were the challenges:
1- my students have their own Microsoft Surface devices so I wanted them to be able to use them to create the podcast. Problem- How to record?
2-Audio editing. Yeah, a whole bag of problems there.
3- I needed a place to host the podcasts. Problem- Free? Ease of publishing? Safety/privacy of my students?
And how did all this work out?
1- OneNote has an audio record feature within the program. Unfortunately we were not getting good recordings using the built in microphone (who knows why? they are kids.) so we ended up attaching my Blue Yeti mic. Worked great. Love this microphone.
2- Editing- We needed to add music which we got from bensound.org at the beginning and ending of the podcast. I prefer to use Audacity but that was not an option. I tried finding some other things but I wasn't happy with what I found. We ended up pulling the music and the audio into a Chrome app called Beautiful Audio Editor and it worked perfectly. We were able to save it as a project and reopen it later. We also were able to download it as a wave file which we then converted to an mp3 for easier upload to where we were posting the podcasts. Which by the way, we used Audio Converter from 123Apps. Also was super easy to use. Our creating process was not as challenging as it started out looking to be despite all the bumps in the road.
3- Where to post? I have used other sites before like Podbean and others but I just didn't like the fact that their podcasts were located where they could access other podcasts that were not necessarily those I wanted them to find. Remember, these were 7th graders. Solution? I am a major Edmodo user and created a group just for our podcasts. I am the only member and I made all the posts BUT I made all the posts public. That way anyone with the link to the Edmodo group could listen to the podcasts. By the way- the podcasts were all on Social Justice Leaders and probably would not interest anyone but other teachers, parents and well that pretty much sums up the list so I was not so much concerned about "gee now the whole world can hear your podcasts". This platform gave them the publishing they needed but in a very controlled world. And if you would like to hear the podcasts you can follow this link: SPS Podcasts Unfortunately though there seems to be an Edmodo glitch and even though there are 21 posts you can only see the first half of them. When you click on load more posts it won't. Boo hiss. So what was and is a great way to post podcasts safely for your students has this one very important problem. I've contacted Edmodo but still no solution. Again- boo hiss.

First Week of School

We just finished the first week of school and what a whirlwind that was. Phew! I'm tuckered out. And what did we learn this week?

• don't let 5th graders make their own Edmodo accounts. Well let's just say that didn't go as perfectly as I had hoped. I was being overly optimistic and I didn't take them through the steps like I should. My mistake. Live and learn. I created the second class myself.
• don't make the needed copies of the schedule until you finish the first week of school. Yeah there were some errors and new versions had to be made. I only made one set. 
• I still haven't found the magic potion that gets students to put and keep their hands in proper typing position. Unfortunately some of them are getting really good at text typing so they transfer that to full keyboard typing and I must admit that some are pretty darn fast with two fingers. But we keep trying.
• Practice, practice, practice. We usually use typing.com for
  
  
  
  
  
  our keyboarding practice but for fun I had them go to ABCya and play the typing games their hoping something silly and easy would help them use the correct position. ABCya is a great site for educational games for K-5. I actually had 6-7-8 using the typing games also. I love typing.com because I can create classes and monitor or assign what I want my students to complete.
• I had a chat with the librarian and we decided to do a joint project after Christmas on the Iditarod. She was given a book called Granite by Susan Butcher  (you can find this book on Amazon) about a sled dog in the Iditarod. Very cool story. Have to start looking for resources. Found one already: Iditarod Just not sure what sort of projects we will do. Hmmm..... So be on the look out for more posts about the Iditarod.
  
• AND to top it all off, we are setting up a staff notebook inside of OneNote. It has been not without challenges. But it is going to be GREAT!

And so, the weekend, which so far has been non-stop rain, and back to it on Monday!