I’m currently researching how to teach (my oldest) the art of conversation. She’s been given the gift of gab. And although I know we can use her ‘power’ for good, it someti…
List of websites where you can watch Spanish TV shows online, stations are ordered alphabetically by country, resources/tips for people learning Spanish.
App on xkcd
Straight from Facebook profiles, bad glamor shots and Dating Sites from around the world, more horribly awesome sexy fails!
As I mentioned before, I participated in my very first webinar last night. It was hosted by the STEM Institute, and I really enjoyed the experience. The webinar was called: Communicate, Collaborate, and Create: Building Dynamic Classroom Projects. It was based on the 7 principles outlined by Robyn Jackson in her book, Never Work Harder Than Your Students. I haven't read this book, but I think I need to ... I'm afraid I'm definitely working harder than some of my students most days. ;) The neat thing about this webinar was that it took the 7 principles from the book, and applied them to technology. I want to give you a brief outline of what I learned last night, and some of the sites we were given. I haven't explored a lot of the sites yet ... but as I try them out, I'll share my experiences with you. 1) Start Where Your Students Are ... Adjust your teaching to meet your students' interests (use more technology because that's where their interests are) 2) Know Where Your Students Are Going ... As teachers, we are preparing our students for jobs that don't even exist yet ... we need to prepare them the best we can. 3) Expect Students To Get To Their Goals We want students to reach their goals, but they don't all need to be A+ students - many truly successful people were far from it in school. 4) Support Students Along The Way This is where the technology resources started - here are some websites we were given to help students learn and meet their individual learning styles: www.transl8it.com - (English to text lingo conversion - I blogged about this last night - see my post below). Google Translate - Language translation - spells it (correctly and phonetically), and says it. Skype - great for author conferences, social studies (talk to people in other countries), keep a student connected who has been absent, or is away on a trip. https://posterous.com/ - easy way to create your own blog through your email - great for setting up a class blog to keep students / parents informed. 5) Use Feedback Feedback needs to be descriptive and given in a timely fashion. If feedback is to be beneficial to the students, it needs to be given to them quickly and consistently. edmodo.com - It's almost like a kind of facebook - but you can set it up for your classroom - post questions, reading clubs, etc. and give feedback to students as they answer questions. ed.voicethread.com https://docs.google.com - Students can use this for their writing assignments, and not worry about bringing files back and forth to school. Teachers have access to the page to make corrections / give feedback throughout the writing process. 6) Focus on Quality Rather Than Quantity Get ready for this ... you've got some exploring to do ... edu.glogster.com - I've set up an account with glogster so we can make multi-media posters next year. I can so see myself using this with science / social studies. www.animoto.com/education - A site for making movies and slideshows. photopeach.com/education - Another site for making movies and slideshows. www.jaycut.com - Yet another site for making movies and slideshows - this one looks like it has a few more features (like slow-motion). blabberize.com - Bring your still pictures to life by making them talk - I can so see myself using this next year with my SMARTboard lessons! Wouldn't it be cool to make a fraction talk and explain how to do a concept during a math lesson?!? www.wikispaces.com - I am definitely going to investigate this one further. I'd like to make a wiki for one of my science units next year - assigning students a different part or concept, and then putting it all together. We could even print off the pages later and turn them into our own reference book. livebinder.com - A lot of the teachers at the webinar talked about how they would use this resource to set up student portfolios ... hmmmmm ... intriguing. epubbud.com - Students can create their own ebooks (which other people can access) and display them on a shelf (similar in looks to shelfari). A great way to publish their writing, and make the writing process more authentic for them. www.prezi.com - Another multi-media site great for presentations. Use as an introduction to a new unit, or have students create their own presentations for a certain topic. 7) Never Work Harder Than Your Students To summarize, by using these resources, your students will be applying bloom's taxonomy while exploring new technology and creating fantastic technological presentations. However ... with all these new resources to explore, I have a feeling I'm going to be working pretty hard for a while ... ;) Do any of you these any of these websites in your classroom? If you do, I'd love for you to leave a comment and tell me how you use them. (affiliate link)
Click to enlarge Ginger is a spice commonly found in supermarkets and the kitchen, either as the fresh root or in dried, powdered form. It adds a strong, pungent flavour to dishes as a consequence of several chemical compounds it contains...
Ok, just because I've been gone from 'blogging land' doesn't mean we haven't been working hard in 4B. I've definitely been documenting a lot of what we've been doing! To start, it was clear to me that our old way of peer conferencing just wasn't working. Kids seemed to be goofing around, not really helping each other, and it was a waste of everyone's time. It frustrated me when most of my one-on-one conference time was spent managing unruly PEER conferences. I knew something had to change. I decided to revamp our workshop so that our peer conferences would hold both the author and the peer more accountable AND work on our 6-traits language. I introduced our 'new' method for peer conferencing using this anchor chart to document our process. After students finish drafting, they are to grab a 6-traits peer conferencing sheet and assess themselves by circling all the descriptors for each trait that they feel match their own writing. Mind you, we did a lot of whole-class practice with scoring writing based on the 6-traits criteria so students would feel comfortable doing this process on their own (and being HONEST!). Through our mini-lessons we've learned that it's possible to have high scores in some traits but lower scores in others. That's how we grow! Here you see Devin circling where he thinks his writing falls on our 6-traits rubric. (Note: The link to the 6-traits peer conferencing sheet above will bring you to an even more updated version than the one shown in this blog posting! Just FYI!) Here's another student assessing her own writing after she's drafted. This student has finished assessing her writing using our rubric. She decides on a final number score and circles it to the left of the descriptors. Then it's time to meet with a peer. (We have a peer conference sign-up sheet in our room which helps students know which other students in the room are also ready to peer conference.) Here you see this author reading his story to his peer. After he's done reading, he will explain to his peer the scores he gave himself and why. It's important for the peer to listen carefully to the author because it will soon be her turn to assign a score to this author for each trait . On the lines on the rubric, she will write to explain the scores she gives him. The peer needs to follow the following sentence stems in his/her scoring response: * I give this a writer a ___ because... * This writer needs to work on ... This process requires peers to truly work together, hold each other accountable, and it gets the kids using our 6-traits language a lot more. The second sentence stem helps the writer establish a goal for what to work on when revising! To see more of this peer conferencing process, watch a clip of us practicing this stage! Our focus lately has been on the trait of organization. We've been looking thoroughly at different beginnings and endings of both student and published writing. Here is our anchor chart documenting what we noticed! In other Writer's Workshop news, these are a few additional anchor charts we have in our room to help keep our writing organized. This anchor chart reminds us of powerful words to use to spice up 'said'! In reading we have been working hard on purposeful talk.This is so very important to the social construction of knowledge in any classroom! It's essential to teach students purposeful talk behaviors before even considering literature discussion groups (LDGs). The majority of kids talk like...well, KIDS! So, if we expect kids to talk like mature young people about different texts they read, we need to explicitly teach them how! Talking about Text by Maria Nichols is a great place to start if you're interesting in learning more about purposeful talk behaviors. I taught each of the behaviors individually through two separate mini-lessons - one day to explain 'hearing all voices' in a concrete way (without text), and a second day to practice 'hearing all voices' using text. Then I taught 'saying something meaningful' in a concrete way without using text, and the next day we practiced 'saying something meaningful' using text , and so on. Eventually all of the purposeful talk behaviors kind of blended together and kids started to discover that we often need to use all of these things at the same time in order to truly talk purposefully about anything! We did a lot of practicing, and I've been taping students in this process. Here is a clip of students practicing their behaviors while they talk about their families. (We had read a few books about different kinds of families to foster a safe environment to celebrate the fact that we all have different kinds of families!) We also had students practice their purposeful talk behaviors while discussing their best or worst memory in school (which helped warm up their brains for a timed writing activity we did during writer's workshop). Here is a clip! As a class, we watched these video clips to analyze our body language and other purposeful talk behaviors. I think taping and analyzing is a very effective way for students to learn how they should look and sound in an LDG. 'Keeping the lines of thinking alive' is a tough concept for many youngsters. Sometimes what happens is that students take turns talking, but they don't really build on what the person before them said. In other words, they don't really DISCUSS, they just share and listen. We applauded the first group in this clip because they had good body language and were respectful as listeners, but we discovered their conversation needed to be more 'alive' by asking questions and making connections to each other's ideas and thoughts. Mrs. Pierce and I taped ourselves doing a weak LDG and a strong LDG. As we watched each example, we used dots and lines to 'map out' our conversations (see chart below). In the weak LDG, we discovered Mrs. Pierce and I shared a lot of individual thoughts. The thought started, and then it stopped. There was really no discussion about anything we said; and Mrs. Pierce wasn't even looking at me during part of our time together! How rude! ;) In the strong LDG example, we mapped out a lot of dots and lines that were connected because we took each other's ideas and built on them. We truly discussed the text to dig deeper. We introduced several conversational moves for students to use to help get their voice heard in a conversation. Students also have these conversational moves on a bookmark that they keep in their LDG books. After we learned the respectful ways to speak and act when discussing with others, it was time to teach our kids how to flag their thinking. This is a crucial step to holding a successful literature discussion group because it allows the kids to track their important thoughts while reading so they have ideas for discussion the next day. Here are the 'codes' we use to track our thinking on post-its. We encourage students to use one of our codes to categorize the kind of thought they have and then write a few words to trigger their thought. This helps them when they get into a discussion group; they'll actually have pinpointed ideas to discuss! Students kept a chart in their Thoughtful Logs with all of our codes on it for easy reference. Here's a clip of our students as they practice flagging their thinking for the first time. The next day, students put all their new learning to the test. We put them in small groups to discuss the text "Slower Than the Rest" which is a short realistic fiction story out of Cynthia Rylant's book Every Living Thing. On another day, we used a high-interest two-page non-fiction text about leeches to continue practicing flagging our thoughts. Here's a clip of our kids flagging their thinking just after we modeled it during our mini-lesson. Below are some pictures of the kids' flagged thoughts. In addition to purposeful talk, we've also been studying the historical fiction genre. We've read several mentor texts, including Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner and Dandelions by Eve Bunting. Our first round of literature discussion books are all within the historical fiction genre. Here are a few of our historical fiction LDGs hard at work: Dear Levi: Letters from the Overland Trail Scraps of Time: Abby Takes a Stand The River and the Trace (I think I put my finger over the microphone at minute 2:00!) Oftentimes, historical fiction books will have a flashback in them. One group's book, called A Scrap of Time: Abby Takes a Stand by Patricia McKissick, has a flashback that occurs towards the beginning of the story. I photocopied some of the pages to try to explain this technique during a whole class mini-lesson. In the first section of the book, three grandkids are spending time with their grandma in her attic. They find an old menu and ask their grandma why she saved it. Chapters 1 through 12 flash back to 1960, where 'grandma' is just 10-years-old, living in Nashville, Tennessee at the time of a lot of civil rights protests. The menu is from a restaurant where a lot of sit-ins took place. Through the flashback a reader learns all about life during the 1960s. In the final section of the book, a reader finds him/herself back in the present - in grandma's attic, where the three grandkids ask their grandma some questions about her life during the sixties. There was also another flashback in the story Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner. We also read The Wreck of the Zephyr by Chris VanAllsburg as an example of a flashback in a fantasy book! In other reading news, here is a picture of the anchor chart that stored all the non-fiction text features we've learned. In social studies, we've been studying the economy of the five U.S. regions. Students have been reading small sections of non-fiction leveled readers to summarize a product or industry that is important to each region's economy. Students are typing up their summaries and we're calling those summaries 'articles' as they each create a magazine of our economy. Through this project, students have learned to: * Summarize main ideas * Center and left-justify their cursor * Use the tab key to indent * Change font size, color, and style * Bold, underline, and italicize * Safe image searches * Copy and paste * Cite their picture resources Here is the inside of one student's magazine. Next week we will be using this site to create magazine covers! Lastly, we had a chance to meet with our second-grade buddies earlier this month. We split the buddies up into two groups and one group stayed with Mrs. Adams to play holiday bingo. The other group was with me in the computer lab. Buddies used this site to play a variety of math and English games. One of the most popular games to play was called 'Story Plant' where students could click on different leaves to create the beginning to a unique story. Depending on what leaves were clicked, you would get a different combination of characters, settings, problems, etc. The computer generates a beginning to a story that the kids can print off and finish during writer's workshop! Have a wonderful weekend!
A few days away from the blog due to MetroCon in Tampa this past weekend. If you've followed me for very long, you know that my teenager...
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The latest news about upcoming games and gaming guides for Nintendo Switch, PS5, Xbox, and PC gamers.
I am working on some word work activities for a staff development on Monday morning. A friend just shared a cute word game that was based on a Christmas theme on someone else's blog. I revamped it for St. Patrick's Day. Just add a spinner to the pot of gold, add letter cards or tiles, cut out cards, and you are good to go! Students choose a card, make the word on the card, spin the spinner, and make a new word. They can record the new words they make on their own pot of gold recording sheet. Click here to download Pot of Words. I also included a recording sheet.
What did the ancient Greeks do for us? Learn about how the Greeks changed the world – including philosophy, science, sport and democracy - in this BBC Bitesize year 5/6 primary history guide.
Four claims document remarkable characteristics about Harvard University graduate student Sabrina Pasterski.
Antiheroes . . . those conflicted souls who pawned their moral compass to buy their next bottle of vodka. There’s nothing heroic about them and for the most part they only care about themselves. So why do we love them so much? Antiheroes are far from perfect, a trait which makes them very real and very human. We […]
In a mood to learn something? You can find any piece of information on the web. What’s more, you can attend an online course, find language tools, download a free ebook, or find out how to ma…
