Thursday, October 11, 2012

Homework

In the last two weeks we have been working on the 2012 Global Read Aloud. We started with a 6 Word Story Animoto as a pre-read prediction project. Now we are reading an ePub version of The One And Only Ivan using our class Smartboard. This is a first for us. I wasn't sure if we could all share one book - but we can. We take turns reading, predicting and discussing as we read about 20 pages a day. We take time to check out what other classes are doing and we have started to blog about the book.

We have blogged as Ivan, the gorilla,  and as Stella, the elephant. We have laughed with Ivan as he described humanity and felt his sadness as he lost his best friend.



The class was excited to set up their own websites and blogs and we worked every day this week to blog and illustrate our projects.

I wanted to see how many of my students would try to log in from home and work on their blog as homework. I taught them how to log in but they have never done it from home. We had only made 1 blog together so far, so this is a big leap. In order to complete their next blog they would need to sign in to Dropbox, download their artwork, and then upload it to their blog. Then they would need to type in their blogs and publish them.

As we start new projects I always think that we may have bitten off a little too much...and the children always amaze me.

Of course they stepped up and showed me just how resourceful and creative they could be. About two thirds of my class succeeded in completing a new blog from home.  The rest did last night after some extra coaching from others. 








Monday, October 1, 2012

The One And Only Ivan 6 word stories

Ready to Go!!

 

Wordle: UntitledSept. 28thWe spent the day getting ready for the #glread12 - The One And Only Ivan. After going to the Digital Stories @shareski dinner meeting I am ready to try a few of the digital story ideas he showed us. We are going to integrate them into our Global read Aloud project that we start October first. We have a a new twitter account and will start using it too. 
October 1 
First up - 6 word stories


We started with 6 word stories or  "twitter stories". We uploaded our illustrations of Ivan to our twitter feed and then added our twitter predictions to the illustrations to share with our new buddy classes.  We are also made an Animoto slide show of them.

We will be meeting in Google Hangout with Mr. Hong's class and Ms. Thiessen's class to share as we read. We are also going to use Weebly to blog about the book. We will be starting them as the week unfolds and we read the first 78 pages. We will also read the blogs those of our buddy readers and share comments with them.

A busy week ahead.