Elementary Technology

I just came across a great website that is developed by  the Wisconsin Educational Communications Board with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and a team of experienced educators It is a sight rich with resources for K-4 students and teachers. The site allows the student to practice eight research based strategies of reading comprehension, Using Prior Knowledge, Making Connections, Questioning, Visualizing, Inferring, Summarizing, Evaluating and Synthesizing. They are all here with online interactive lessons and practice. The teacher area is filled with resources as well, including, songs, posters etc. It is well worth a visit.

http://reading.ecb.org/index.html

For the third year in a row, our school district will host Technology Night. It is a night for parents, students, administrators, Board of Education members and the community to see technology in action in our schools. It will be held on Feb. 25th.  In the past, we have asked the teachers to be the presenters and highlight their use of technology in all different curriculum areas. But this year will be different. We have opened it up and asked the students to do the presenting. Teachers will serve as mentors to the students as they design and prepare their presentations. We will have presenters from grades 1-12 in the areas of math, science and technology education. We have asked students in grades 5-12 to apply to present. I am amazed at the projects that the students have submitted. We are going to see a model smart house, video game creations, a robotic scarecrow, geocaching with a handheld GPS, website creations, building designs with Sketch-up, hydro-power explorations, a hover plane concept, a rubix cube solving robot, and many more. I can’t wait to see it all! 

I heard about Wordle a while ago and tried it out and thought it was pretty cool. I passed it on to our writing resource teacher who also thought it had great possibilities for use in writing lessons. So, I have been waiting to find the right time and the right way to introduce Wordle to some of our teachers. Today, while searching for Martin Luther King resources, it came to me. Create a Wordle out of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and see what it looks like.  Although I have heard excerpts of the speech for the past few years, I have not listened to nor read the entire speech. So, here it is… no surprise to me at which words are the largest. I think I found a great resource for teaching about Martin Luther King and what he was all about. I think he would have been proud of his Wordle.

http://www.wordle.net

For those of you who are just starting to create new lessons on your SMART Board…here’s a gift. I always advise people to search for lessons that may already be created. They may meet all your needs or may need to be tweaked slightly and then will be just what you’re looking for. Here are two notebook files for your SMART Board, ready to go. One for grades K-2 on counting change and one for grades 3-4 on multiplication practice.

Counting Change notebook file

Multiplication Wheel notebook file

And here’s the site they came from with many, many more.

http://www1.center.k12.mo.us/EDTECH/SB/templates.htm

Our school is lucky enough to have SMART Boards in almost every classroom. Today, we held a training session for beginning SMART Board users. As the instructor showed the teachers the gallery section and all the different ways you can create lessons, I saw that overwhelming look come over their eyes. When do any of us have enough time to create lessons while getting to know our SMART Boards? The trainer had some very effective strategies such as dividing up curriculum areas among teachers in a grade level and sharing newly found or created lessons or taking 10-15 minutes a day to use a new tool or downloading the software and “playing” with the notebook when you are relaxed and in the comfort of your own home where you can experiment and make mistakes privately.

I want to take these strategies one step further and offer what I have learned while creating many, many lessons. I always begin by searching for lessons that may have been created already. I am compiling a list of websites where you can start your searching:

Websites with SMART Board Resources

(thank you Barry Williams, Diigo)

I also discovered that many of our teachers have already created outstanding lessons that can be shared. I am in search of a web based presence where teachers can upload, categorize, tag, search and also rate these notebook files. Any ideas?

Studying immigration can help students discover the connection between their past and present. Recently, third grade students studied the journey of immigrants from other countries into the US. They created a Google map portraying the journey of the immigrants they studied. They also added their research to placemarks in the map and ended up with a visual representation of their ancestors’ journeys.  They published them as a part of the “Google Historical Voyages and Events” project, which is a site dedicated to historical events and people.  Students from around the World are posting projects they are doing as they study history.

Ancestor’s Journey