New Teacher Boot Camp Week 2 - Using VoiceThread Editor's note: See the full archive of the five-week boot camp. Week 2: Using Voicethread in the Classroom Welcome to our second week of New Teacher Boot Camp! Today we're going to be exploring VoiceThread. About VoiceThread VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slideshow that allows students to comment on images, documents, and video through text, video, and audio files. p> Introducing Megan Palevich Megan Palevich is curriculum specialist and 8th grade language arts teacher in Chester County, PA. Before reading on, please take a look at this example of a VoiceThread from Megan's eighth grade class based on the novel The Red Kayak, by Priscilla Cummings. Megan Palevich, Curriculum Specialist and 8th Grade Language Arts, on Using VoiceThread This year I used Voicethread as an alternative way to discuss literature. Instead of a traditional read and respond or read and discuss, VoiceThread could offer my students the opportunity to listen and reflect through text, audio, or video.
Continuing to Learn with the iPad- Storytelling In an attempt to document the trials and errors of using a classroom set of 20 iPads in our K-8 school, I am adding a new post to the collection of iPads in the Classroom: 5th Grade- Storykit- Creating a story in Hebrew One of the Hebrew teachers approached me with an interest in having her students create a story book in the target language on the iPads. We chose to test the free app Storykit with this project. Students read a poem by Leah Goldberg called: (That’s Not Me). We had the Hebrew letters added to the iPad keyboard by going into: Settings> General> Keyboard> International Keyboards>Add New Keyboard> Choose Hebrew Once the International keyboard is added, a globe appears on your keyboard. Once the storyboards were finished, students were ready to work with the iPads. I showed students how to go to Microsoft Office ClipArt, search for images and download or take a screenshot and edit the image. Students also used each other to stage scenes from their story to take a photo. Like this:
Reflect, Refresh, Recharge:Architects of Summer Although I don't recall school being particularly stressful when I was a child (no high-stakes anything back then), I can readily call up the delicious feeling of summer. It was a spacious time—an opportunity to do nearly anything. As kids, we reinvented ourselves daily. I remember fireflies and kites and sandwiches on the beach and books and pick-up sticks and popsicles from the corner store. We got shoe boxes from our parents and made a string-drawn trolley-like thing from them. After supper, we gathered on the corner, readied our shoe-box trollies for a parade, and walked around the block several times with the seriousness and dignity our work suggested. I can summon the sounds, sights, and smells of those evening parades in a way that evokes a kind of joy and unencumbered tranquility that we should wish for all kids. I like to go back to that summer place in my mind for many reasons. Adulthood is a different season of life, one anchored in and fashioned by responsibility.
How should we use technology in assessment? I'm looking for brain-storming ideas. You can either share ideas you've tried, or just half-baked ideas that you think would be interesting. Let's make sure not to bash each other in this post, our objective is to think of as many ways as possible to use technology as a tool in assessment. I'll give 10 ways to start the ball rolling. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Reflect, Refresh, Recharge:Take Time for Yourself—and for Learning I'm no longer in the classroom, yet I still have to remember to take my time eating lunch. Too often, I race through it, thinking I have to pick up students from the cafeteria, return parent phone calls, review test data, and quickly cue up three interactive whiteboard activities for this afternoon's lesson on oxidation. As I concentrate today on having a more leisurely lunch, I slowly chew my food and think relaxed thoughts. As we move into summer vacation this year, let's pause for a moment and imagine the possibilities for recharging our personal and professional batteries. Many of us have family duties each summer: We must find suitable summer activities for our children, paint the house, pull out the tree stump in the front yard, move older children into college dorms, serve as head timer at summer swim meets, or attend to aging parents. In the midst of all that, however, might there be opportunities to reinvigorate our personal and teacher selves? The best teachers remain dynamic.
Tune-Ups and Teachable Moments - Finding Common Ground Children are not supposed to be perfect all the time. Adults certainly aren't! When I was in seventh grade I had to go to the principal's office. My early teenage brain had gotten the best of me and I was rude to a teacher, which is something that did not please my mom and I heard about it when I got home. The middle school principal was eight feet tall. The classroom where I made my grave mistake was on the second floor of Queensbury Middle School and the principal's office was on the first floor. The principal talked at me for about five minutes, which seemed like an hour, and I left his office vowing never to get in trouble again. As an elementary school principal, it's interesting to me that students may leave my office feeling the same way that I did in seventh grade. Many parents get embarrassed when their child gets sent to the office, which is human nature. The Principal's Office The principal's office has changed. A typical administrative goal every year is to be visible.
Students Who Challenge Us:Eight Things Skilled Teachers Think, Say, and Do Among the many challenges teachers face, often the most difficult is how to engage students who seem unreachable, who resist learning activities, or who disrupt them for others. This is also one of the challenges that skilled teachers have some control over. In my nine years of teaching high school, I've found that one of the best approaches to engaging challenging students is to develop their intrinsic motivation. The root of intrinsic is the Latin intrinsecus, a combination of two words meaning within and alongside. It's likely that our students are intrinsically motivated—just motivated to follow their own interests, not to do what we want them to do. Teachers' challenge is to work alongside our students, to know their interests and goals, and to develop trusting relationships that help students connect their learning to their goals in a way that motivates from within. How can teachers do this? What Skilled Teachers Can Think 1. 2. Which mind-set we hold makes a tremendous difference.
Rubrics for Assessment | Classroom activities: Assessment and Technology Seven Bridges of Königsberg Map of Königsberg in Euler's time showing the actual layout of the seven bridges, highlighting the river Pregel and the bridges The Seven Bridges of Königsberg is a historically notable problem in mathematics. Its negative resolution by Leonhard Euler in 1735 laid the foundations of graph theory and prefigured the idea of topology. The city of Königsberg in Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia) was set on both sides of the Pregel River, and included two large islands which were connected to each other and the mainland by seven bridges. The problem was to find a walk through the city that would cross each bridge once and only once. The islands could not be reached by any route other than the bridges, and every bridge must have been crossed completely every time; one could not walk halfway onto the bridge and then turn around and later cross the other half from the other side. Euler's analysis[edit] Euler's work was presented to the St. Significance in the history of mathematics[edit]
Students’ Assessment through Portfolio | School of Educators | Classroom activities: Assessment and Technology Love2Learn » Blog Archive » The Vitruvian Man – a context for learning Finding a quantity given a percentage (or fraction) is a useful skill yet considered to be an extension topic for year 8. I thought I could give it a go but set the scene, so-to-speak, without the oft-used context of shopping and sales. Enter the Vitruvian Man. Lesson Activity My ‘hook’ question to the class was “How do forensic scientists figure out the height of victims given minimal data?” I showed and explained the Vitruvian Man. Divide the class into pairs (or small groups).For each pair, give a card which showed one of the proportions (e.g. 1/4 of height = shoulder width) as well as a measuring tapeThey take the fractional measurement of their partner, i.e. the item to the right of the equation, e.g. shoulder widthDemonstrate how to calculate the height given a known percentage (or fraction); in my example, multiply each side of the equation by 4Finally, measure the actual height and compare to the calculated height Discussion points How do the actual and calculated height compare?
The “I Don’t Know” Zone: Student-directed and Inquiry-based Learning » The Cloverleaf School of Atlanta Students at Cloverleaf spend the last class period of each day working together on a project of their choice. They recently wrapped up their two-month long elevator inquiry, in which they rode a gigantic elevator, built a working elevator, watched elevator videos, read books about elevators, researched outstanding elevators around the world online, and wrote letters to an elevator technician. We explored the elevator topic in as many different ways as we could think of. I was trained in the inquiry model during my time spent teaching in New Zealand. When students are given the freedom to come up with their own ideas, they immediately feel a sense of ownership over their learning. I’ll be the first to admit, the learning style can at times be frustrating, but in the most wonderful way. It also doesn’t come naturally to me as a teacher (as I’m hoping other teachers/parents can relate!) Overall, I couldn’t be more proud of what the kids accomplished in this inquiry.
Math Thinking | Sharing thinking about math from students Imagine you numbered each note of a scale, and then played the mathematical sequences on the notes like they were music. What would 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,… sound like? What would it sound like if you automatically jumped back down an octave every time you passed a multiple of 7? You may find this tool useful for actually listening to the sequence of numbered notes you generate. What would the sequence of square numbers sound like? What would π sound like? Chris Hunter writes on his blog about a student explaining how they would express 0.500 using ten-frames: One student expressed this as 500/1000 and 0.500. Showing 500/1000 or 0.500 using ten-frames Have you seen examples where students come up with innovative ways of representing numbers? Screen-shot from one of the puzzles included in the block game. I wrote this puzzle/game last year with the hope it could be used to help generate some thinking about area, multiplication, and addition. Some specific things which students might model: