eBooks and Blog Responses in SeeSaw

We recently had a training on "GALE Resources." GALE simple put are eBooks that students can read as well as listen to. I was really excited to get back to campus so that I could show the teachers that I work with. So far, there is a 2nd Grade and 3rd Grade teacher using it and they are really enjoying it! In 3rd Grade, the teacher really wanted to focus on "main idea" as well as "text features." In second grade, they were using GALE to research people in Social Studies. The teachers made a QR Code which lead the student to the digital library. Once students found the correct e-book, they could either read it or listen to it.

When students were done, they tried out a new feature in Seesaw- "blogs." They were to answer about 3 questions having to do with the book that they chose. Once answered, they were to submit it to the class blog.

Weather Project in 1st Grade Science!

In Science, 1st Grade is starting their unit on weather. In talking with one of the 1st grade teachers, they thought this would be an excellent opportunity to use technology to help enhance what they are learning. Students had to know what words like, "cold" "hot" "warm" "windy" "cloud" "sunny" "temperature" etc meant. In talking with this teacher, we decided that we would take students outside each day for two weeks to have them take pictures of whether or not it was cloudy, sunny, etc. They would also get a feel on if it was windy, rainy etc.  Once they took the pictures, they would use Pic Collage to help tell this information. They would also put the date on the Pic Collage so that when we "smash" it with Explain Everything, and record, they will be able to read the date too.

So the first day we did it, students did a wonderful job taking pictures, however many of them had trouble spelling words. To help with this, we printed out a sheet with common words to help them. Day 2 went much better! Students took pictures, then came inside to label them. In reflecting with the teacher, she told me, "I really think I need to help them with sentence stems so they can write in complete sentences!" Such a great idea! Day 3 went even better than the first 2! The teacher posted sentence stems to help the students. This definitely made a difference!

We are going to do this for about 2 weeks. I am really looking forward to what kind of products the students will be making!

Check out the progress the students have made in just 3 days!!

Force, Energy, Motion, Roller Coasters and iMovie?

So proud of my 2nd Grade teacher! They were learning about force, energy / motion and the teacher totally wanted to incorporate technology into this lesson! He told me that he wanted to have students record a marble "riding" on a class-made roller coaster. Initially, we went with Explain Everything, but fumbling around with the video features wasnt really ideal in what they were trying to accomplish. We found that iMovie had many more features that could be used. A few of the features included "slow-motion" and "mute voice." These two tools were crucial to the final output of the product. Before students recorded, they created a title slide which talked about force, motion, etc. From there, as a group, they recorded the movie. Groups were made of 4 people and each student had a different role.  Take that Tek 2.4!

Land formations + Thinglink in 3rd Grade Science

I am so proud of my 3rd Grade Team! They put a Science project together AND ran it all without me! (I was off campus for training!) Anyways, we decided to take it really slow so that instruction could be maximized. To begin, the teacher placed images of different land formations in a Google Doc and turned it into a QR code so that students could scan and pull from. Once it was scanned, students were able to download the image and put into Pic Collage and label them. The next they logged into Thinglink and were able to "tag" the images and compare them to the other land forms. Students had such a blast doing this! I am including an example (partially done- we are continuing this into next week so I will post more when we are finished.)