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We just had a collaboration day about Technology and the things we are going to do in our classrooms for Friday, our schools Technology day! There are so many cool tools out there to help students learn! The kindergarten team is going to video tape our students teaching a lesson. Each teacher chose different content and we will break up our content into 5-6 lessons (for the small groups in our classrooms). Once we are finished we will all post our videos to a shared blendspace so we can ALL access the videos! We will each record 5-6 videos but we will end up with around 25+ videos of content all created by students! Blendspace is a website I learned about that crates a mosaic of videos that you can choose right there through the search. For example, one of my blendspace lessons are letters, so I searched letter videos on blendspace and was able to create a mosaic of songs about each letter of the alphabet! I also have blendspace lessons for sight words, math songs, digraphs and blending, brainbreaks and many more! Here is an app I came across when I got home later that night and spent my whole night technology surfing on the web! Oh the life of a teacher! :) The colAR app is an app where you can download images off of their website for students to color and then when you open the app and hold your device over the colored image, it comes to life on the app! It becomes an interactive 3D image on thedevice . I think I am going to use this in our class for one of our writing assignments. I will let the students color the hot air balloon image I downloaded for FREE from the colAR website. We have just had Dr. Seuss week at our school so I will use the colored hot air balloons on their lockers and then use another app, Aurasma (below) to show a video of students writing and the "Places they wills go". They will write & then read about what they want to be when they grow up and their goals for the future! This app looks so fun! A co-worker showed me this app. She linked up locker name tags with videos of here students using the Aurasma app. Here is a video I found that explains Aurasma better than I can explain it. I'm thinking of using this app for my library corner. Students will open the app, point it towards the book they want to read and then I will pop up reading the story to the student! I would like to see if just my voice could be on there so that way students are still looking at the words and images on the page as I am reading, even when I am not actually there! I would also like to record my students reading their reading series! I would also like to do this with some of our vocab. words. They can point the device towards the vocab. word and then see an example as well as the definition of the word. Another app I learned about was Plickers. This is a quick assessment app where each student gets an answer card that has choice A, B, C or D around the outside edges. Students turn the card to hold up the correct answer. The teacher uses their device to take a picture of the cards and the answers are automatically recorded. This saves time with grading and can work as a quick exit slip to see if yes, students understand or no, students need more practice with the content we practiced that day. Similar to Plickers is Kahoot. This is a website where you will create a list of multiple choice questions and students, on their own devices, will click the correct corresponding answer. The trick with this one is that all students need a device, but it is much more kid friendly than Plickers. My students LOVED Kahoot, we just have to rent out schools laptop cart to use it. Oh my goodness do my students LOVE GoNoodle. This is a brainbreak website with tons of videos already there and safe for students! There are also videos for indoor recess! Every time you watch a video you get a point and your end up building characters! My students love to watch these characters take shape and every time we finish one we print them and start a new character! If you don't use GoNoodle I highly suggest it! I have learned so many col technology tips in the last year that my head overflowing with ideas and things I would like to do and try out in the classroom!! I will continue to post these as I learn more and more! :) Today for our grammar review we played a game. I am currently teaching summer school so most of the topics we cover are review. While the students seemed to be doing fine with nouns, they were struggling with the types of sentences (Declarative, Interrogative, Imperative and Exclamatory) as well as Relative Pronouns (Who, Whom, Whose, Which and That). I decided it was time for an intervention and some fun!
To review these topics I broke students up into groups with various levels of understanding within each group. I then gave each group member a sheet of colored paper to create the blue team, the green team and the yellow team (you could always have more!) All of the student sat in a circle around a bucket in the middle of the circle. Then came the review! I began asking various questions to the whole class: "What type of sentence is this: Go walk the dog!" "What do you put at the end of an interrogative sentence?" "List 3 proper nouns" "Write a sentence with 2 common nouns" "What does a pronoun replace?" "What are the 5 relative pronouns we have been discussing?" And the overall review question: "Write a declarative sentence that has at least 1 noun and 1 pronoun. After each question, students would turn to their group to discuss their thoughts and ideas about the answer. Once each student had talked with their group, they wrote their answer on their colored piece of paper and shot their piece of paper into the basket in the middle. This became a competition and students couldn't wait to answer so they could throw their piece of paper into the bucket. When normally you ask a question and you get a couple students raising their hands to participate, I now had all students in my class participating and being brave, answering questions even if they weren't sure if their answer was correct!! After all students have shot their papers, the ones that made it into the basket were pulled and read out loud to the class. We could tell what team the paper came from because of the color. If student's answers were correct, their team got a point; if student's answers were incorrect, we discussed, as a class why and their team did not receive a point. The students seemed to really enjoy this activity! I was able to see some great collaboration and team work as well as hear discussions about the topics to assess where students thinking was. This activity is so easy to modify and the students were so engaged! I will definitely be doing this activity again! Then came the review! I began asking various questions to the whole class |
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