Readworks Articles

I'm finding some cool nonfiction articles to attach on Edmodo for my students to read, using Readworks.org. So, as we are reading the novel Island of the Blue Dolphins, I'm pairing articles about animals mentioned in the story to do close reading activities with my fourth grade reading group. Lexile levels are included in each article description, and question sets can be printed in PDF format for quizzes. 

Compatibility with Edmodo makes distributing the articles so much easier than printing copies. Maybe soon I will really will be paperless!

Everyday I learn Something New!

I had an idea to start the new year with my students, talking about apps and sites I had discovered. My surprise was that my students had more to share with me than I had to share with them. So cool to learn something new everyday!

Sock puppets are sock puppets that you can make talk, and save into a movie. So funny and cute!

Then flipagram is a nice little slideshow app, that you add music to, that is so simple it's breathtaking! Nice, nice week with new realizations for me!

QR code on my Christmas cards!

Well, I wonder if everyone who got our Christmas card this year, got our card this year. I attached a QR code to a photo card I had made by Shutterfly. The code, when scanned, shows our family collage photos with music in the background, details about each photo written on the photo, and events in our lives this year. It's an iMovie that goes with the Christmas card. Doesn't hurt that Justin Timberlake's Mirrors song is the background music!

I have heard from a few friends that they got the QR code, scanned, watched, and loved the card! One pal says to tell my husband that we win for best Christmas card, because of the QR code idea! I told him next year the whole card will just be a QR code! 

Photo Gift idea for Parents of my Students

An idea came to me for creating a gift for parents of my students. I wanted the gift to fit with the tech theme we have going on, in my BYOD, 1:1 iPad, 4th & 5th grade combo classroom.

I had students email me photos of themselves, in black-and-white. Then students made iMovie trailers with content all about themselves: what they like at school and outside of school, what they are thankful for, what they look forward to at the holidays. The student-made iMovie trailers were then saved on their iPads (iMovie Theater), and students reinserted the saved trailers into a new iMovie project, creating a voice-over on their trailers.

The final trailers were emailed to me. I saved them on my camera roll. I inserted the movies, individually, in a new iMovie project, and saved each one on YouTube under "unlisted". Then with the links to the movies, I created QR codes. The QR codes were saved on the camera roll as photos.

The student black-and-white photo and matching QR code for the individual student iMovie trailer, were placed together using the piccollage app. The pictures were printed, using my printer in my classroom, on photo paper. The 5 x 7 photos were each placed in a picture frame.

I tested if the QR codes worked, using my iPhone to scan the QR codes inserted in the student photos. The codes worked!

The end products were amazing!

Programming (Hour of Code)

My students went to the computer lab this week, and for the first time tried Hour of Code. 

We all tried to program the moves that the angry bird would make to get to the piggy in a maze.

It was thought provoking and fun for the students.

Then students showed me, later in the week, about computer programming for Minecraft through Khanacademy. 

Parents are asking me about good programming software to purchase at home for their children who are very interested in the activity. For now my answer is those two programs. I'm sure I'll have more discoveries just around the corner, but for now Hour of Code and Khanacademy are pretty good sites to explore!

iMovie Trailer Voice-overs

A reason to go back to the CUE conference every time, is that even one good idea gained (and there never is just one) is so worth it! This week I implemented an idea from CUE, about student-made iMovie trailers with voice-overs. I told students to make an iMovie trailer about something they have learned in Social Studies, from the first trimester of school. It could be any portion we have covered; their choice.

First I showed the students how to make a trailer, beginning with choosing the template theme. Then I showed them how to fill in the outline and storyboard for their Social Studies trailer. Next was plopping photos and videos into the storyboard, then watching their trailer, and saving the trailer on their camera roll.  This was the first half of the process.

Now students opened a new project in the iMovie app, and instead of clicking on trailer, this time they clicked on making an iMovie. The first video clip to chose from, was the trailer they had just saved to their camera roll. They plop that into their new project, and now can do a voice-over explaining their Social Studies topic. 

The results are professional, and limited to a minute long since all of the trailer templates in the app are about a minute.

My idea then was to have students save their voice-over projects to the camera roll and email from the camera roll to me. A huge surprise came when a student told me, "Look, you can email it from the app itself!" Ah...kids...they teach me something everyday!

Apparently a new feature on the upgraded iMovie app is the ability to email the project straight from the app, to who you want to send it to. I still will save all my movies to unlisted YouTube, but since students don't have YouTube (it's blocked) this IS a way to share their creations using the iMovie app.

To top it all off, you get a couple of students who catch on with one explanation, and they become my helpers, instructing other students about the steps described above. When it all comes together, and projects are presented, it's a beautiful thing!

Not Paperless Yet

When I was planning for a BYOD 1:1 iPad classroom, I was looking forward to the concept of going paperless! Three months in to the school year, my big surprise is how much paper is in my room. My classroom printer is in use constantly. Maybe it's all in my head, the idea that I need to print out student work that is turned in online. I'll monitor my progress this year. I want to stive for less paper!

Loving utilizing the iPads for academic tasks! Motivation is high, learning is enriched, quality of schoolwork is enhanced!