KetchupTime!

Sorry- the good old ketchup joke is a third grade classic. Now that I have a slight break, I have some time to catch up on my blogging.
I'll try and make up for the lack of updates with some quality blogging over the next few days!
So expect quite a few updates.
In the meantime, my class made the finals in the e-Instruction contest! Congratulations to this amazing group of kids! Help them win big by voting for their video:
http://eimakeover09.shycast.com/submission/show/291/
They need all the votes that they can, so please spread the word to your friends.

Glogster 2.0 is here- New and improved!

While it is very hard to pick just one, Glogster Edu is probably my favorite Web 2.0 tool. It is AMAZING! I love the fact that they have an edu section very different than the regular glogster.com. (Make sure students and parents understand this difference) They seek input from teachers and really listen. They have adjusted their galleries slightly to reflect a more school friendly environment. (Though there is still a very benign animated .gif of a boy and girl giving each other a kiss that every single student will find within 45 seconds of being on the site.) They have just upgraded to Glogster 2.0 in which teachers can add or delete students, reset passwords, moderate comments, and now students can only privately message the teacher as opposed to having the ability to message each other.
My parents and students alike love the e-portfolios my students make on glogster. I love to embed our class project glogs on our wiki. They look so impressive, and yet they are so simple to create. I have started turning more and more of the glog making to my third graders. At first, I made all the class project glogs. It's like scrap booking!



Then I started letting them type in the text.


Now I have started letting them make the whole glog. Like this one:



While they aren't quite as aesthetically pleasing, the kids love having ownership over it. It is also fun to see how some students do have a very natural knack for design. Check out this very nicely student designed glog.

Of course I don't totally give up my glog making hobby. Here is my most recent glog for our wiki:


Head on over to http://edu.glogster.com/ and get started!

Long Time- No Blog!

Things have been very busy in third grade! Check out our class wiki to see some of the many projects the students have been working on. Right now I just want direct everyone to the video we entered in the E-instruction Classroom Makeover Contest. The students worked so hard on it, and I know they really deserve to have a classroom with all the tech tools that are offered to the winner of the contest. Check out our video at http://eimakeover09.shycast.com/submission/show/291. Be sure to register and give our video five stars!

CICFF

Congrats to my class from last year- their video "Hope for Technology" was the runner up in the Shortie Awards International Student News and Film Festival in June. After our success in that competition, we were invited to submit our film for the Chicago International Children's Film Festival.

"The CICFF is North America's largest and most celebrated film
festival devoted to films for and by kids, and it's the only
Academy®-qualifying children's film festival in the world! (That means our
winners in the short film category can go on to compete for the
Oscars®! In 2008, the Festival featured 250 of the best films and
videos for kids from 40 countries. The Festival welcomes over 26,000 Chicago
area children, adults, and educators to hundreds of screenings. More than 100 filmmakers, media professionals & celebrities attend the Festival to lead interactive workshops with kids." CICFF

I am amazed at how much this little class project has achieved! It will be shown as part of a collection of short films by kids. Click here to see the list, or look at the screen cap below. There are a lot of different countries represented! I am SO proud of their hard work.

Our First Vegas Project!

Hooray! I was able to get a simpler version of Sony Vegas Video installed on a student station. Doug and I use the full version of Vegas on our projects. You can do lots of neat effects with Vegas. This is probably my favorite video special effects wise:

Even using the stripped down version, my kids will eventually be able to green screen and scan and pan. (We will see about the pan and scan- I still have trouble with that task!) I started the kids off easy with a simple project- putting pictures with sound clips and adding transitions and music. They made the pictures and recorded the words with their first grade book buddies. I tried to explain that using a different transition for each picture is like using a different font for every word in your story. At eight years old, they think using a different font for every word in their story is very cool as opposed to distracting and looked completely dejected when I suggested they pick only one transition to use. Not wanting to stifle creativity on the first project, I let them use different ones. What can I say- I too love all the different transitions. :)


I was really impressed with how well they cropped the pictures, timed the transitions and were able to find the correct sound file and match it to the pictures. I did go back in and adjust the volume levels on some of the sound clips, add the titles (which they could have done if time permitted) and made the timings a bit sharper. This is most certainly still their work though. They even typed up the e-mail we wrote together as a class to send out to everyone.. They learned how to insert a hyperlink and the function of the caps lock button.

(Click to view picture full size)

They then wrote about how they did it all on our wiki. Check the project out and if you know any firefighters or police officers, please forward it on to them. We are keeping track of our page hits. So far in one day we are up to 16 views on each page. As as side note I should also point out that when they updated the wiki, they managed to delete every single thing on the front page and somehow lose the scroll bar. It was a fun evening activity to try and go back and make it like it was. The scroll bar is still missing in fact. Their update looks great though! Two steps froward, one step back!

21st Century Learning Skills

We hear the word Digital native used a lot. We all recognize we are teaching digital natives. The question is are we teaching them the 21st Century Learning Skills?

Digital Native: Simply someone who has grown up in a world where technology has always been around- they have never lived in a world without computers, Internet, and cell phones. It was a term created by Marc Prensky, who has written extensively on the education of digital natives. He used it in a well known article Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, which is a short read if you are interested.



21 Century Learning Skills: You could read for hours about it. This is a good short article from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. Or even easier, here are two quotes from the article:

"Twenty-first century skills combining technology literacy, critical thinking, creativity and mastery of core subject matter are the lifeblood of a productive workforce in today's global, knowledge-based economy," Susan D. Patrick, director of educational technology at the U.S. Department of Education.

"Successful businesses are looking for employees who can adapt to changing needs, juggle multiple responsibilities and routinely make decisions on their own. We must infuse 21st century skills into K-12 education in order to better prepare students for the realities of work and life in the 21st century."- Karen Bruett- Dell

Now, I am a person who sometimes over simplifies things, but when I put these two things together, I come to the following conclusion:

Bloom's is more important than ever. Only now, kids need to be working collaboratively on projects that incorporate technology and fall in the upper levels of Bloom's.

It's easy to forget that it's not just about using computers. It's about being able to make decisions, handle responsibilities, working together, and creating things.

It's about making sure our Digital Natives are both engaged AND working on 21st Century Learning Skills.

I guess this also means that when my kids are working on a million different things, getting their fingerprints all over the computer screens, and having to start their whole project over because they didn't save it in the right folder, they are just becoming prepared for the future. :)

First Claymations...

While making a good high quality and competition worthy claymation very intricate, time consuming, and difficult, making a simple claymation that demonstrates a basic concept is surprisingly easy and something the students absolutely adore. Here is a simple claymation that one group made last week to demonstrate expanded form.

Materials You Will Need:

1. Cheap Modeling Clay (It never dries out. The kids figures from last year are still perfectly mailable. We did learn something the hard way though. Don't store them on the windowsill. They won't dry out, but they can melt!) I buy my clay at US Toy- 24 sticks for $1.99. I put 12 sticks on a table and that is all they can use- It is a great lesson. They have to work together and compromise for the colors they all want. It has somehow always worked out without much trouble.
2. Digital Still Camera
3. Tripod (You need to be able to keep the camera still- tripod is best, but setting it on a book or table will also work.)
4. It is good to put up some sort of background, in this case they used two file folders. My husband says it is too cheap. I say it is really EASY.
5. Screen Capture Program
6. Microphone (they can use the one on your laptop)
   

We took 15 minutes before lunch one day to create their characters. They will use these same characters for several claymations. I made one claymation with a few volunteers as the class watched, then they were on their own after that.

The most important rule to stress it to NEVER pick up the figures, only move them slightly. They will break this rule often, and when they see how it totally messes up their scene, they usually stop. No matter how much they think they are putting the character back down in the same place, they aren't.

The project above was one of their math centers for the week. They complete the center in groups of 4-5 students and had 25 minutes to decide on a number and take all the pictures. The next day I took 15 minutes and taught each group how to turn the pictures into a movie.

It's pretty simple.

1. Open the picture folders and make sure you delete any mistake pictures. (Like ones with hands in them)

2. Select view as slide show and hit the pause button.

3. Open Camtasia and select the area you want to capture. (If you don't have Camtasia, JING is a great free alternative that has received very positive reviews.)

4. Hit record and Camtasia will capture your screen and your voice as you click the mouse or the right arrow button to flip through the pictures. (It's the digital version of a flip book)

5. If you have Camtasia, you can then add titles and transitions.

Here is another example of the finished project:

They will get faster and faster at the process. This week a couple of groups made another claymation showing how to order numbers. They were able to take the pictures and almost finish editing it in the 25 minutes. By the third time, my goal is to have the students be able to shoot and complete editing in the 25 minutes. Once they start to understand the basics of claymation through these academic tasks, they can move on to using it as a storytelling task, with characters, plot, and more advanced movement. These take much more time, but use the basic skills they learned in the short versions. Here is a sample of one from the end of last year....

You can also use Power Point to create a slide show of the images, but it requires inserting each picture into a slide. Using JING or Camtasia to capture the "view as slide show" function is much faster, and you can very easily add their voices.

This isn't always a smooth process. It requires a lot of collaboration, problem solving, and patience with each other. Don't give up when the first time you try it they are fighting over who gets to take the picture and a clay figure gets stuck to the bottom of another kid's shoe (Or your shoe-I'll never forget the look on the little girl's face when we found Lewis attached to the bottom of my Nikes). Even when they are proficient at the process, they will still have struggles to over come. Give them some room to work it out, and if they can't handle it, shut it down temporarily and allow them to try again another time. One group will be able to do it, and when the class sees their finished project, they will be eager to try and work together to get theirs done too. If it is just one person causing the trouble, simply remove them and give them an alternative assignment for that day. Chances are very high they will do better the next day- or the day after. This activity is as much about learning planning, problem solving, and cooperation skills as it is about demonstrating the academic concepts they are working on.

E-mail distribution lists

Just a quick post to make sure everyone knows how to make an e-mail distribution list in outlook. It isn't difficult! There are probably lots of ways to do it- this is just how I do it.

1. Click on Contacts

Easy enough!

2. Select the arrow next to new and choose "Distribution List"

Still Easy!

3. Title your list, type in everyone's e-mail address, and hit save and close.

Easy-(though a little bit time consuming)

4. To send an e-mail to your list, click on contacts again, double click on the list you want to send it to, then click on the "send mail to list shortcut."

A new mail message will open up and voila-you are good to go.

If you haven't used distribution lists before- I highly recommend them.

To add a person later, just type in the name box and click add.

To remove a person, click to highlight their name on the list and then click on the remove button.

Happy distributing!

Getting to Be Mrs. Shepherd

Tech Application: Setting up a blog

Usually this will be a blog for me to share different technology applications that I use in my classroom, but in honor of my NJWPT Reunion lunch tomorrow, I will start with a narrative. The first version of this story was written just days before I started teaching. The revised version below was actually my anthology piece when I went through the NJWPT training six long years ago. Ok, too much talking already- on to the story...

I don’t know exactly what made Mrs. Shepherd so precious to me. All first graders love their teachers, but the admiration I had for Mrs. Shepherd was much deeper than that.

(I LOVED Mrs. Shepherd!)

Maybe it was the way she gave me the nickname K.R. Maybe it was the time my mom made me wear a horribly ugly hand-me-down dress, and Mrs. Shepherd told me how beautiful I looked.

(I certainly wasn't winning any style awards!)

Perhaps it was the way she didn’t get angry when I over watered the plants and flooded the counter. She understood it was an accident and just handed me the paper towels. It could have been the way she convinced me that I could cross the scary pedestrian bridge near our school playground by myself, and maybe it was the way she celebrated after I crossed the bridge even though I ran across it with my eyes closed. It might have been the way she always said she knew the task at hand was hard, but she knew I could do it; that I WAS doing it. The funny thing is that when I think about Mrs. Shepherd, I don’t really remember how she taught me to read and solve math problems. I remember the way she made me feel. I remember all those special things that she seemed to do just for me. Those were the things that made the difference. Those were the things that inspired me to be a teacher. Even then I knew I wanted to grow up and be just like Mrs. Shepherd.

(My first public announcement of my intention to become a teacher.)

Seventeen years after spending that magical year with Mrs. Shepherd, I finally became a teacher. I started my first real teaching job at Truman Elementary teaching transitional first grade. However, the thing that really made my first year special was that my own beloved Mrs. Shepherd turned out to be a teacher in the room next door- a very significant coincidence considering that my old elementary school was more than 100 miles away from Truman.
On my very first day as a teacher, I was re-introduced to Mrs. Shepherd. While she remembered me very clearly, she didn’t remember the individual incidences that are so clearly etched in my mind. Similar little incidences have happened to her thousands of times over the years. However, they only happened once for me. I only had one Mrs. Shepherd, and she made me feel like I was the most important student in her class.

(We all felt like we were the most important student in the class.)

I started my first year of teaching on the ultimate high note. Teaching was my passion, and I had waited 17 years for my chance to shine. After years of hard work and numerous reprimands for trying to take over my classrooms, my dream was finally coming true. I was going to be the one celebrating my student’s achievements. I was going to be my student’s only Miss Rose, and I was going to make each of my students feel as if they were the most important student in my class. Of course the best part of the situation was that my own Mrs. Shepherd was going to be right there to witness all of this. I couldn’t wait to amaze her with my teaching skills.

Looking back, I had very similar feelings as I entered first grade. I had waited six long years to become a reader, and I was consumed with a passion for reading despite never having read a whole book without help. After years of hearing the legends of my genius sister who started reading Reader’s Digest at age three, I was finally going to be able to pick up and read those lovely petite sized magazines. I figured learning to read would only take me a couple of days. I couldn’t wait to grab one of those Reader’s Digests from the stack on the coffee table at home and discuss its contents with Mrs. Shepherd. Forget that book with the train on it- I was headed for the big time. At the rate I was going to learn, I would probably be reading Faulkner by the end of the year. It was going to be fabulous! I was going to be the best kid in the whole class, and Mrs. Shepherd was going to be extremely proud of me.

(From the start, reading was all about magazines.)

When I first started teaching, I quickly learned it was not all wonderful moments and happy feelings. Not only was I not the terrific teacher I wanted to be, I was horrible at quite a lot of things. I carefully placed all the important papers I was given in a folder. Then, I carefully placed the folder in a safe place. Unfortunately, the location of that safe place remains unknown to this very day. I was unable to get my students to behave for twenty seconds and quickly discovered that I only thought I was a patient person. Guided Reading Books, which came from the library in sets of five, always became a math lesson on subtraction when it came time to return them. I had great ideas and exciting lessons, but nothing was working the way I wanted. Passionate feelings were being replaced with feelings of disappointment, and it wasn’t long before I wanted to quit.

The worst thing was that I had a direct comparison to what I wanted to be. Thanks to huge windows that allowed one to look inside the classrooms, I could always see Mrs. Shepherd’s Class lovingly engaged in the learning process. Her student’s eyes were forever lit up with that magic sparkle, and her student’s sounds of learning created a soft harmony with the stimulating music that always played in the background. Mrs. Shepherd was always happy, and her face and body was so tense free, it looked as if she was enjoying a calming yoga class instead of teaching 22 second graders.

Then there was my room. My students were having fun. They had that magic sparkle in their eyes as they created artistic masterpieces that covered not only their canvases but their clothes as well.

(The concept of smocks was unfamiliar to me.)

Our stimulating music was silenced after a far too active puppet show came to a dramatic conclusion that knocked over the large shelf holding the entire block and manipulative collection. It not only crushed the community of counting bears hibernating in their plastic tub, but the class CD player as well. And while the sounds of learning could always be heard in my room, I don’t think it was good that prolonged exposure to my sounds of learning could cause permanent ear damage. It was clear I was not Mrs. Shepherd. It seemed I was failing at my life-long dream, and I would often head next door to share my frustrations.

(14 boys + 5 girls= lots of noise)

Interestingly enough, this wasn’t the first time Mrs. Shepherd had been barraged with my frustrations. It turns out that learning to read in first grade didn’t take a couple of days. I needed that stupid book with a train on it, and that completely exasperated me. I was horribly annoyed that here I was at age six and couldn’t even understand the pictures in those lovely Reader’s Digests. I made it clear that I did NOT want to read from the train book, that I did not want to sit next to disgusting Dusty at reading group, and that I wasn’t about to fold my paper into squares and draw pictures and write words on it. I wanted to read Reader’s Digest. How on earth was drawing a picture of a balloon and copying that word that I could only guess spelled balloon going to help me get at that stack of magazines?

Miraculously, and despite my stubbornness, Mrs. Shepherd managed to not only teach me how to read, but she even instilled within me a great love of books. (I even learned to love the one with the train on it.)Looking back now, I know it isn’t that I don’t remember how she taught me to read. I know I didn’t learn to read by folding my paper into squares and drawing balloons in boxes. I learned to read because of how she made me feel. She taught me to be patient with myself even though I wasn’t a perfect student, and it was all those little moments I remember that allowed me to get through first grade. Thanks to Mrs. Shepherd’s patience and encouragement, I regained my passion for reading, even though it was still quite a few years before I could understand those lovely slick magazines on the coffee table.

Just as in first grade, it was the little moments that allowed me to get through my first year of teaching. It was the little moments that taught me to be patient with myself and helped me regain the passion for teaching that I’d started the year with. I don’t really know exactly how Mrs. Shepherd did it. Maybe it was the way she didn’t tell me I was over reacting when I announced that I probably wasn’t coming back in January because after three months I still couldn’t even tear butcher paper off the roll straight, let alone educate children. Maybe it was the time I wore an atrocious purple dress simply because it was comfortable and never needed ironing, and Mrs. Shepherd told me how nice I looked. Perhaps it was the way she didn’t laugh at me when I shook up the orange tempera paint without the lid on it and covered myself and the navy blue carpet in the cold liquid. She understood it wasn’t funny to me and simply handed me the paper towels. It could have been the way she encouraged all of my crazy educational celebrations at the end of each theme unit, and maybe it was the way she celebrated even when my brilliant everyday hero unit ended in the greatest cupcake making disaster any classroom had ever seen.

(Somehow having 19 six year olds make 110 cupcakes seemed reasonable at the time.)

It might have been the way she never missed an opportunity to tell me that she knew the task at hand was hard, but she knew I could do it; that I WAS doing it. I didn’t end the year as the perfect teacher I wanted to be, but then again I didn’t leave first grade reading Reader’s Digest either.

After my first year, I left Truman to take a job out of state. Mrs. Shepherd also moved far away from Truman to go back and teach at my old elementary school. It was just as hard leaving my beloved Mrs. Shepherd then as it was when I had to go on to second grade, but just like one year was enough to inspire me to be a teacher, one year was enough to teach me what it means to be a great one. And now, when I sit back and indulge my regained passion for reading as I enjoy the slick pages of my Reader’s Digest each month, I can’t help but think of the regained passion I have for teaching and how much I love being in the process of learning to be just like Mrs. Shepherd.

(The end of another year with Mrs. Shepherd.)