Thursday, November 8, 2012
In Flanders Field
Friday, November 2, 2012
Month 2,October Reflections
Blogging, again.
We are up and running again and have restored most of our lost work. We have just finished our Global read Aloud novel and are now busy looking into the endangered status of elephants and gorillas through the World Wildlife website. We have been skyping weekly with our new buddies from a neighbouring school. It has been exciting to meet with them weekly and share our pictures, blogs, and predictions.
This was my first Global Read Aloud. It has been a lot of hard work, but we enjoyed the book, made new friends, and learned how to blog. We are going to work with the other school to create a joint final project. If all goes as planned we will make our first 1 minute video on the book. This is our first inter school collaboration. It has encouraged us to take the time to share and provided new pupose and deadlines for our hard work.
We have also started to use Book Creator to publish our first ebook on Ivan, and made a slide show with Animoto as a pre-read prediction activity.
I attended the first dinner meeting with @shaeski on Digital Storytelling and I tried to use ideas from the session during October as part of my commitment to Designs For Learning. Usually I have students write about their reading and then create illustrations to add to their writing. For October, I flipped that. I started each reflection on the book by having the students make a picture to show me what Ivan or Stella felt, who their favourite character was and what their favourite part of the reading was. After we drew we wrote about our drawings. During this time we also did a impromptu write on Halloween. One thing I observed was that my weaker writers did better with the picture to jump start their thoughts. It gave them a tronger, more visual starting point than a word web or a brainstorm, or a class discussion. I think I will use this more often and next time I will extend it by getting students to focus on describing the setting and characters from their illustrations to add detail and enrich their writng.
As November starts we will be having a seies of First Nation workshops on drumming, weaving, salmon, drawing, potlatches and button blankets. We will be writing about our learning and recording our expereinces with video and photographs. I will take most of the footage and pictures as they work. Usually the students journal or blog about the workshops. This year I will have the students make a video or a digital collage to describe their experiences and then use them to present what they learned as well as blogging like we usually do.
Our next project is Remembrance Day. We have made torn paper poppies and we will spend time finding pictures of the war and using them to make a slide show to remember. We will share with the school at our assembly as our contribution to the service.
I am excited to begin November.
We are up and running again and have restored most of our lost work. We have just finished our Global read Aloud novel and are now busy looking into the endangered status of elephants and gorillas through the World Wildlife website. We have been skyping weekly with our new buddies from a neighbouring school. It has been exciting to meet with them weekly and share our pictures, blogs, and predictions.
This was my first Global Read Aloud. It has been a lot of hard work, but we enjoyed the book, made new friends, and learned how to blog. We are going to work with the other school to create a joint final project. If all goes as planned we will make our first 1 minute video on the book. This is our first inter school collaboration. It has encouraged us to take the time to share and provided new pupose and deadlines for our hard work.
We have also started to use Book Creator to publish our first ebook on Ivan, and made a slide show with Animoto as a pre-read prediction activity.
I attended the first dinner meeting with @shaeski on Digital Storytelling and I tried to use ideas from the session during October as part of my commitment to Designs For Learning. Usually I have students write about their reading and then create illustrations to add to their writing. For October, I flipped that. I started each reflection on the book by having the students make a picture to show me what Ivan or Stella felt, who their favourite character was and what their favourite part of the reading was. After we drew we wrote about our drawings. During this time we also did a impromptu write on Halloween. One thing I observed was that my weaker writers did better with the picture to jump start their thoughts. It gave them a tronger, more visual starting point than a word web or a brainstorm, or a class discussion. I think I will use this more often and next time I will extend it by getting students to focus on describing the setting and characters from their illustrations to add detail and enrich their writng.
As November starts we will be having a seies of First Nation workshops on drumming, weaving, salmon, drawing, potlatches and button blankets. We will be writing about our learning and recording our expereinces with video and photographs. I will take most of the footage and pictures as they work. Usually the students journal or blog about the workshops. This year I will have the students make a video or a digital collage to describe their experiences and then use them to present what they learned as well as blogging like we usually do.
Our next project is Remembrance Day. We have made torn paper poppies and we will spend time finding pictures of the war and using them to make a slide show to remember. We will share with the school at our assembly as our contribution to the service.
I am excited to begin November.
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.
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!!
Sept. 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.
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Thank The Tweeters
Starting Over again.
One thing about teaching...You are always starting over. There aren't many careers that offer a fresh start every year, and perhaps many would consider starting over so often daunting. However, for teachers it is a chance to reflect and renew.
As I start again, I look forward to all of the new opportunities with my new class and question if I can do it all. Every year I wonder how can I capture my students and challenge them. What new tools and resources are there to make learning exciting and meaningful? Can I take a whole new crop of children and turn them into writers, readers, and creators? What can I do to make this year better than last year?
As I am looking for new projects and opportunities I am thankful that I started tweeting. I never thought that Twitter would be so useful. It brought many great teachers and great ideas into my life. I am joining the Gobal Read Aloud because I saw other Surrey teachers excited to take it on. I learned about Weebly from tweets and tweeters I have met and I am trying it out this year.
So far we have created our student pages and are almost ready to publish our first entry. Every year I think this will be a big job. Every year I am wrong. The class got it right away and are already logging in and working from home. They are starting to bring in their own devices and we found some great apps to create digital portraits for our blogs. Using PowerCam and Mobile Monet students took pictures of themselves and used special effects to start their portraits. We will use new apps to merge portraits with our own artwork to create a "me" collage. If they turn out well we can make class and school portraits as well. This year I want to explore the camera and utilize it more.
One thing about teaching...You are always starting over. There aren't many careers that offer a fresh start every year, and perhaps many would consider starting over so often daunting. However, for teachers it is a chance to reflect and renew.
As I start again, I look forward to all of the new opportunities with my new class and question if I can do it all. Every year I wonder how can I capture my students and challenge them. What new tools and resources are there to make learning exciting and meaningful? Can I take a whole new crop of children and turn them into writers, readers, and creators? What can I do to make this year better than last year?
As I am looking for new projects and opportunities I am thankful that I started tweeting. I never thought that Twitter would be so useful. It brought many great teachers and great ideas into my life. I am joining the Gobal Read Aloud because I saw other Surrey teachers excited to take it on. I learned about Weebly from tweets and tweeters I have met and I am trying it out this year.So far we have created our student pages and are almost ready to publish our first entry. Every year I think this will be a big job. Every year I am wrong. The class got it right away and are already logging in and working from home. They are starting to bring in their own devices and we found some great apps to create digital portraits for our blogs. Using PowerCam and Mobile Monet students took pictures of themselves and used special effects to start their portraits. We will use new apps to merge portraits with our own artwork to create a "me" collage. If they turn out well we can make class and school portraits as well. This year I want to explore the camera and utilize it more.
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