09-10 Reflections: 1st Grade

1st Grade is such a great age. They’re still loving everything about coming to the computer lab and they’re able to do more then they could in Kindergarten because most of them are reading and are comfortable with navigating on the computer. It’s amazing to watch what wonderful drawings they can create in KidPix. They haven’t gotten to the judgmental “I can’t draw” phase and they love to explore all of the options and just create and they do a lot of creating in KidPix during the year.

One of my goals with all of the grades is to have the students work collaboratively with others outside of our school through online projects. I struggle with this every year since I feel many of the online projects are not truly collaborative but more like the parallel play that a toddler might do at the park with other toddlers. Just like toddlers though, we’re learning to walk and 1st Grade did participate in two online projects this year.

How Tall Is a 1st Grader

This was the second year that 1st Grade participated in this project. It provides a great tie in to working with non-standard ways of measuring which is part of the 1st Grade math curriculum. I also use it to show how Excel can be used to make graphs of their heights. The students love to find out who’s the tallest and how tall they are and how much they grow during the year. In addition to measuring the students twice a year (in the fall and in the spring) and drawing a picture of height comparisons, the 1st graders also had the chance to play some fun online measurement games.

2009-10 How Tall is a 1st Grader

I started using this to get 1st Grade involved in a collaborative project but it hasn’t really worked out to be very collaborative – even between teachers.  I would love it if this project had each teacher post some measurement information to a shared spreadsheet so it would be easy to do height comparisons. Only six classes ended up posting their spring measurements and most classes didn’t post VoiceThreads. I should have had my students comment on the VoiceThreads that were there but forgot about it. I’m not sure if I’ll do this project again next year or not. If I do, I’ll try to make it more collaborative for my students by commenting on the VoiceThreads earlier in the year.

Winter Wonderland

It was year two with this project also, both as a participant and as one of the organizers of the project. I struggled with the collaborative nature of this project last year but this year some of the activities were more collaborative including Holiday Traditions VoiceThreads and Describe A Snowman January Activity along with the Holiday Card exchange in December. I think these gave 1st grade a more real taste of collaboration especially the Describe A Snowman activity. They really enjoyed making and describing their snowmen and trying to recreate their partner’s snowmen. It was also great preparation for the Monster Project that they will be doing in 2nd or 3rd grade. They also enjoyed the Winter in 6 Words activity which I adapted and used to create a real book at Mixbook which is now in the 1st Grade class library.

Mixbook - Create stunning photo books, cards and calendars! | Design your own photo book with Mixbook’s easy online editor.
Mixbook - Create Beautiful Photo Books and Scrapbooks! | View Sample Photo Books | Create your own Photo Book

All in all 1st Grade had a fun and productive year in the Computer Lab which included learning more about being safe on the Internet and how to use various programs on the computer. I’m not sure that they learned everything I would like them to learn in 1st Grade because I have realized that I didn’t have this well defined. Defining this, is one of the things I plan to work on over the summer.

Lessons I Learned

  • 1st Graders LOVE to draw on the computer. Luckily we use KidPix a lot in 1st Grade!
  • 1st Graders want to learn to type like older students. Of course that could be because more than 1/2 of my 1st graders have older siblings
  • Some 1st Graders are starting to become microphone phobic. They’ll record something over and over and over if you let them because they don’t like the sound of their voice or they’ll whisper instead of speaking up.

Things I’ll Definitely Repeat Next Year

  • Winter Wonderland Project & maybe some other one too.
  • KidPix drawings to support almost any theme
  • The Best Things About 1st Grade
  • Educational Software & websites – these are great for fill in time after students complete a project or activity and are waiting for the rest of the class to finish.

What are some of the technology rich activities and projects that are successful with your 1st grade students?

09-10 Reflections: Kindergarten

Last year, I wrote three different reflective posts about the year (Time Zone Experiences, Monster Project & Scattered Thoughts). I’m still working on posting final projects and as I am working on this I want to capture my thoughts about the year for each grade level starting with my youngest students.

Kindergarten students are so much fun in the computer lab. They love everything about computers and are always enthusiastic and ready to try anything I want them to do. However, Kindergarten can often be my most challenging class too. They come in at so many different levels – some of them have not ever touched a computer and others you can tell probably spend way too much time on a computer.  Most of them can’t read and they often all need my help at the same time but even with all that they accomplish a lot in computers. By the end of the year:

  • They are all very good at finding all of the letter keys on the keyboard. Have you ever noticed that the I on the keyboard looks like a lower-case L? This can be very confusing to Kindergarten students.
  • They know what the Save icon in Microsoft Office looks like and use it all the time
  • They’re great at using the backspace key to correct mistakes
  • They’re getting better at double-clicking or have become experts at single-click enter to get into a program from the desktop

Online Collaborations

This year my Kindergarten students participated in two online collaborative projects: Winter Wonderland project and KinderKids Draw project.  I loved seeing their understanding that other classes from different places were doing the same things as they were when they listened to comments on their introductory VoiceThread for the KinderKids Draw project and when we received Christmas cards from other classes participating in the Winter Wonderland project. I enjoyed both of the projects as did the students but I wish the KinderKids Draw project had been more directed or interactive somehow. I love the concept of this project but I think it needs something so that it doesn’t end up just an introduction and nothing else which is what it ended up being for me this year. I’d love to see interaction on the Teacher Planning page with some kind of discussion about an activity to be done and then a way to vote on an activity each month or each quarter.

Lessons I Learned

  • Repetition is a good thing. I often worried that they’d be bored going to Starfall again or or doing all 26 letters in the alphabet on their Adventures in Keyboarding activity, etc. but they weren’t. They loved doing the same things and discovered new things whenever they did.
  • Include movement whenever possible during whole class instruction. One of the favorites this year was a lesson about the Winter Olympics. The introduction to this was an activity where they pretended to be each different type of athlete and they just loved this. So, my goal for next year with Kindergarten is more movement!
  • 10 minutes is the limit for whole class instruction. There were times I planned what I thought was a really fun way to introduce the next project that Kindergarten would be doing. It was fun but after about 10 minutes a hand would go up and I’d hear “Can we go to the computers now?”. They want to be on the computers and I need to remember to limit anything not hands on to 10 minutes if I want them and me to be happy.
  • Kindergarteners love microphones! As students get older they tend to get more reticent about recording their voices at times but boy did my Kindergarten students love to get their hands on a microphone.

Things I’ll Definitely Repeat Next Year

Do you teach Kindergarten students in a computer lab? Are you a Kindergarten teacher who is integrating technology into the classroom? What are some of the activities and projects that are successful with your students?

Obsessions Become Lesson Plans

Lately I have been somewhat obsessed with Molly The Owl and we’ve even watched Molly a few times in some of my classes. I’m currently planning some lessons for a few of the grades about owls. I am also going to try to contact Carlos about doing something with my 7th Grade class who study Life Science and dissect owl pellets. Here’s some of what I’m working on – each class will do some of these.

  • Life cycle of an Owl
  • Food chain and how it relates to the owl
  • Vocabulary related to owls: brood, owlet, talon, raptor, nocturnal, pellet
  • Drawing (or coloring) an owl picture
  • Owl Math – some math activities using owls
  • Research types of owls and creating a spreadsheet of findings
  • Virtual Owl Pellet Dissection

Just so you can become obsessed too, here’s the feed of The Owl Box:

Live Broadcast by Ustream.TV

CUE 2010: My Turn To Learn

I wasn’t sure quite what to expect from my very first CUE Conference experience as I approached Palm Springs in the early morning on Thursday, March 4, 2010.

Power by Richard Cawood
Power by Richard Cawood

What follows below is the good (and the not so good), the better, the best & even a few regrets.


The Good

I love that this conference is in Palm Springs which is an easy drive from the San Fernando Valley. I procrastinated enough deciding whether I was attending or not that I missed out on the less expensive conference hotels so I got on to Priceline and found something in the area. It turns out it was right across the street from one of the conference hotels and a short walk to the Convention Center and best of all it was just over $100 a night. Well more than that when you add in taxes, etc. but still about 1/2 of what I would have had to pay. Oh, and the room was HUGE with a living room, dining area, kitchen and a separate bedroom!

Living & Dining Room

(And the NOT so Good)

Yes, nothing is all good:

  • $2.50 for a can of Diet Coke?? Really?
  • Spotty, slow and often non-existent wireless access
  • Really busy slides with bad contrast & way too much text in a Keynote Address
  • Teachers trying to figure out how to get out of attending any more sessions in the 2nd session of the conference. This just made me sad.
  • A session that felt more like a commercial (with bad sound since you could barely hear the presenter) rather than inspiration and motivation to use their (free) resource.

The Better

The sessions!! What a treasure trove of ideas and inspiration. I want to implement everything now even though I know I can’t due to the constraints of the equipment we have in our computer lab. I am however already planning things that I can do in the upcoming weeks and mulling over ideas of how to take some things and tweak them so the will work on our equipment.  Here’s just some of what inspired me:

Not the Same Ol’ PBL: Strategies from Kindergarten to College
Christy Keeler & Heather Rampton

The slides in the presentation that showed the correlation between Project-Based Learning Strategies, 21st Century Skills & NETS*S correlated were a light-bulb moment for me. I sometimes have a hard time deciding which NETS*S my lessons are addressing and this gave me some new ways to think about that. Session materials are supposed to be available on the CUE Community Ning but so far I haven’t found anything from this session. I did find an older blog post by Christy with this session’s information on it. If you download the CUE session slideshow you can see the correlations. I notice that some of the links on the blog post seem to be broken but some of them still work. I loved the idea of digital photography scavenger hunts and virtual museums and plan to use these soon.

Sharing Stories with Google Earth
Joseph Wood

I really, really, really wish our computers could run Google Earth but the wheels are already spinning in my head about how to do much of this with Google Maps or Scribble Maps. I love the idea of not just mapping things but telling a story with it and plan to put together and introduction of me for next year using Google Earth. I’ll have to run it on my laptop but it will work! It’s 4th Grade Mission time and my 8th Graders are going to be reading Johnny Tremaine as a class. I’m getting to work on some kind of mapping project for these this year. The resources from this session can be found at http://joewoodonline.pbworks.com/Sharing-Stories-with-Google-Earth.

Hidden Treasures in Your Curriculum: Using Geocaching to Motivate and Engage
Susan Anderson, Jim Holland

I haven’t ever done any geocaching but the ideas presented have the wheels turning. First I have to figure out how to get a few GPS units. They recommended the Garmin eTrex but said that any basic unit that showed your position in real time would work fine with students. The presentation on page on digitalgoonies.com has great basic information on how to use a GPS unit which would be great to use with students just learning how to use these.  The Geocaching Activity Types on that same page has lots of really fun ideas of different things to do with students. This will be a next year thing I’m sure since I have no GPS units yet but I’m excited to try this myself and with students.

Podcasting with 70 Middle Schoolers–RU Crazy?!
Heather Wolpert-Gawron

I tried a little bit of podcasting with my 8th graders last year but I felt pretty disorganized doing it so this session was just what I needed. Heather went over the nuts and bolts of organizing tasks to create a regular podcast. I loved the idea of using a pocket chart to keep track of where in the process things are. I think part of my problem is that I only see my students twice a week for about 80 minutes total so it’s probably going to take us 2-3 weeks to produce a podcast even after the students are comfortable with the technology. The presentation materials are on Heather’s TweenTeacher web site. I just wish they were available in a format other than Keynote since I’m not on a Mac and don’t know of a free way to convert from Keynote to something I can use.

Google for Video
Jim Sill

This was a really fun session with lots of information. What a great idea to use Google’s Wonder Wheel to explore the connections to your subject and I loved the use of the drawing tool in Google Presentations to do storyboarding. How long has the drawing tool been there? And, Magic Auto Fill on Google Spreadsheets – love it! Guess I need to play with things more. The tip on embedding videos that you have uploaded to Google Docs was very cool. I hadn’t ever heard of http://www.freevideocoding.com. It was really inspiring to see the way Jim weaves Google tools like YouTube, Google Maps, Google Docs, Google Search, etc. into the video making process. I also discovered something about me and conferences – if a presenter doesn’t have a sense of humor an hour long session feels twice as long to me. I really appreciate anyone that can have fun with what they’re presenting. Check out Jim’s Google 4 Video page for more information and links.


The Best

How can anyone not love lesson planning with Chris Lehmann? Seriously, just being in the same room with him and his passion for education was an inspiration. One of the attendees at the session said that he’d never had so much fun planning a lesson and how true that was. I had read a little on Understanding By Design (UbD) and had wanted to attend Alice Mercer‘s Cue Unplugged session – Including Technology in your Unit Planning Using Understanding by Design (UbD) – but didn’t get to it. I have watched it since and with inspiration from Chris and Alice, I plan to dip my toe into the world of UbD and try some lesson planning this way.

Loved the closing Keynote by Carol Ann McGuire. Rock Our World is an amazing collaborative project and it was so inspiring to have the students & Petree end the conference with song.

But, by far the very best part of CUE was just being surrounded by all of the educators who are passionate about what they do and the students they teach. It was amazing (and more than a bit of an I’m not worthy moment) to meet and just hang out with some of the wonderful speakers and attendees at the conference. The conversations were never far away from how we can make education better for our students even during the social events such as IPABloggerCon or just wandering around in downtown Palm Springs. Thanks for the fun, the ideas and the conversations.

IPABloggerCon


And, a Few Regrets

There were times I wanted to be two or three places at once but that just wasn’t possible – though I was able to catch a few archived sessions after the fact. I tried to choose my sessions based on things I want to do or need to do with my students. A couple of times that resulted in a session that wasn’t as motivating as I would have liked or that was just plain boring. I don’t know how to completely avoid that but next year I’d like to:

  • Try to attend at least one session with every Spotlight Speaker. I didn’t do that this year and heard I missed some great sessions.
  • Not be afraid to bail on a session if it’s not what I expected or if it’s just plain boring. I should have done that a couple of times this year.
  • Attend sessions given by people that I know are wonderful presenters because I have learned that even if it’s on a subject I think I have mastered they will show me something new.
  • Attend at least one workshop or seminar. I pay for conferences myself since there’s no budget for it at school and I just didn’t have the funds to pay for any of these this year. I really regret missing out on Rushton Hurley’s Flip Into Movie Maker workshop and Kyle Brumbaugh, Diane Main & Kenneth Shelton’s Google Workshop For Educators – Intermediate/Advanced (BYOL) seminar. Time to start saving for next year!
  • Work the Exhibit Hall better. There were many give-aways to be had and I missed out on all but a couple. I used to be good at this when I went to construction and home building conferences years ago when I wrote software. Time to work that skill again.

This was definitely worth attending and I’m already planning for next year. I just wish there were some way I could make it to ISTE 2010 this summer.

Keyboarding & A Broken Arm

My 7th grade students are about 3/4 of the way through a 4-week cycle of keyboarding lessons. They start each lesson with a speed test and record their score on a spreadsheet and then do typing lessons (we use Mavis Beacon) for 30 minutes and then finish out the class with some typing games.

Keyboard Blue Glow by ahhyeah
Keyboard Blue Glow by ahhyeah

On Tuesday, one of my students came to class with a newly broken right arm so I quickly posted a question on Plurk asking for suggestions for keyboarding with a broken arm.  One of the members of my PLN said there were lots of things online about one-handed keyboarding strategies. So, it was off to Google to do some searching. There is a lot out there but most of the links wanted to sell me software or adaptive keyboards or provided information on how to learn the QWERTY keyboard when you only have one-hand for typing.

I didn’t want this student to retrain her thinking to always typing with one-hand and then I remembered that there had been a discussion on the Elementary Tech Teachers Ning about Left Hand Keyboarding and I thought there might be some information on there that I could use since this student had broken her right arm.

Using some of the information on there and a few more searches, here’s what I’ve come up with so this student won’t be learning things she’ll have to unlearn and won’t be doing nothing for the next few classes until we’re done with the keyboarding lessons. Using the custom text option available on keybr.com along with a modified version of the Left-Hand Keyboard Words and a few words from the List of English words containing Q not followed by U from Wikipedia and a few combinations of the numbers typed with the left hand, my student was able to practice her keyboarding – at least with her left-hand. I gave her the option of reading or just playing some keyboarding games about half way through the class but she kept with it getting through all of the a & b words and some of the c words.

Keybr.com
Keybr.com Custom Text

For the remaining classes, I’ll use the same list and have her continue through the alphabet or I may try to put some sentences or phrases together using the words to make it more interesting. I may also have her try to write something in Word using just the words you can type with your left hand. The only problem with that would be punctuation since those keys are on typed with the right hand. During the typing game portion of the class, I am going to encourage my student to play a game or two at FreetypingGame.net using lesson #14 – Emphasize Left Hand. I may also have the whole class play a game during the last class to test their knowledge of the keyboard without actually having to type.

Keybr.com and the Custom Text option could be useful in other situations, too. Even without a broken arm, a student may need practice with their left hand or their right hand. Use the Left-Hand Keyboard Words or Right-Hand Keyboard Words and practice away! Have your students finished your basic keyboarding curriculum or do you want them to practice with something other than the lessons in your keyboarding program? Have them find the lyrics to their favorite songs online and practice keyboarding with the lyrics. Use a site like Read Book Online or Read Print or the Classic Book Library and copy some text from a book or poem or short story into the Custom Text and have the students practice their keyboarding with that.