I’ve compiled information from the Seesaw website for our teachers and placed it in one place to make it easier to find basic information. The Seesaw developers have a wealth of information which can be a bit daunting so these are some of the basics.
Did you know that November is Picture Book Month? Mrs. Murphy and Mrs. Hebert, our librarians, issued a challenge to the Lower School to read picture books in an effort to beat last year’s goal of 4,370.
For the past several weeks, we’ve been discussing blogging when the students come to the lab. To correlate with blogging and the library’s challenge, I asked the third graders to bring a picture book to the lab. They were to produce a book talk and upload it to their blog.
We started class by taking a picture of their book cover.
The next step was to read the book.
Writing isn’t always a favored part of a third grader’s life but the students did understand that this step is important to organizing thoughts and really makes the recording go much more smoothly.
The next step was to choose an app. I gave the option of Tellagami (free; available on App Store and Google Play) and ChatterPix Kids (free from App Store). Both have a limit of 30 seconds so students needed to be concise in what they said. Both also allow the user to import photos from the camera roll. With Tellagami, the students created an avatar that “spoke” their recorded message. With ChatterPix, a “mouth” line is drawn and that moves to the narration. The students enjoyed creating a mouth on their book cover.
The students recorded, made sure they were satisfied with the sound, saved to photos, then emailed the video to me. Once students completed the process, I put them to work helping others.
Finally, the children uploaded their video to the KidBlog app. Next week their first grade buddies will be listening to the book talks and making comments on their buddies’ posts. I also posted all the book talks on TVS TechnoWizards.
Class Blogs:
Below is a visual of the apps we used for the project.
After discovering a tweet from a student in Kristen Wideen’s class telling how the children were representing 2-digit numbers, I shared the idea with the 1st grade team. They were excited to have another way for the children to practice number sense.
After brainstorming with the teachers, we decided to use a combination of manipulatives and apps to represent numbers. The children use concrete manipulatives throughout the year so they had lot of experience working with money and base ten blocks before moving to apps.
Individual White Boards – to draw tally marks of their number.
Dice – We first started out with 2 regular dice (1-6). Those students who had chosen a number with digits greater than 6 quickly discovered regular dice didn’t work! This turned into a perfect problem-solving activity. Should we change the number? What else could we do to show our number?
Hundreds Chart – We chose the free, easy-to-use SchoolKit Math app. The hundreds chart is one of 10 activities within this app.
Base Ten Blocks – We used the Number Pieces app. (Thanks to Mrs. Wideen’s class for recommending the free app!) We asked to draw a T-chart and label it with tens and ones.
Money – One of the choices of the SchoolKit Math app is money so this is what we used. The students were asked to represent their numeral using a couple of different money combinations.
Process:
Before starting, we reviewed how to use the camera and tips on taking a clear picture. Then we practiced taking a screen shot. We also talked about cropping images and I was amazed at how quickly the children picked that up!
Next, we went through each method and “built” our numbers.
Finally, we were ready to pull everything together in Pic Collage. The students LOVED building their collage and trying out the wide variety of backgrounds!
Because we ran out of time during our first session, we met later to have the children post their collage to their blog.
The children loved the activity (as did the teachers). Plus, it was a great way to check to see how students were doing with their number sense using 2-digit numbers.
The students at work:
Mrs. Malone’s fourth graders came to the lab for their music/art/computer rotation last week and they went all out on the alphabet alliteration creation! (see previous post describing the activity)
Here is their alliteration video created with the Drawing Box and ChatterPix Kids apps:
After reading a blog post by April Requard called Bring Literacy to Life with Technology! (A HUGE thanks to April for sharing this idea!). I thought this would be an excellent way to have our students create alliterations that could be shared with younger students.
We started with the book The Z Was Zapped, by Chris Van Allsburg. Most of the students had read the book before so we just went through a few pages, noting the art work used to aptly illustrate each letter.
We discussed alliterations and how to create a fun, light-hearted sentence that could be illustrated in the Drawing Box app (free and paid versions).
After drawing, the students pulled their picture into ChatterPix Kids (free) – a very easy app where a “mouth-line” is drawn that moves with the recorded narration. Stickers and more can be added to enhance the picture. Once the video is saved to the camera roll, it can be air dropped to the teacher iPad where I combined it into one video in iMovie.
The students enjoyed this “different” way to share learning.
Hint for recording: What we discovered when we combined some of the videos was that a few words were cut off when moving from one clip to the next. It’s important to tell students to wait a second after pressing record and when they finish talking, to again wait a second before tapping the stop recording button. We had to re-record a few and we still have some clips that run together but it’s better that it was!
Mrs. Zhang, our Lower School Chinese instructor, came to me a couple of weeks ago and asked how we could create something to share with parents so they could hear what their children were learning.
She had been working with her 3rd graders on family vocabulary while the 4th graders had been learning animal names. The students had made paper booklets by cutting out images from a worksheet and then had learned a sentence about each picture.
3rd grade – families
4th grade – animals
What we decided to do was have each child use the Book Creator app to create an ePub book. This would enable students to take a picture of their paper booklet, insert into the app, and record their narration.
In making the book, the students learned about taking focused photos and then cropping them. They learned that the pen tool in Book Creator is perfect for writing their name in Chinese characters. And then the recording began!
What an authentic way for children to share their knowledge of another language with their parents! I don’t know about you, but when my boys were younger, they weren’t very eager to share much about school – now parents are able to open the book and listen to their child speak a sentence in Chinese. Due to a lack of time to get everyone recorded, we did not ask the students to read the sentence in English; but they can always share that with their families.
If you would like to see the books the students have created, visit the 3rd and 4th grade Chinese ePub book pages. While on an iOS device, download a book and open in iBooks.
Our third graders have been discussing bullying behavior and leaders – how leaders can be good or bad. Bad leaders try to get people to follow them in making poor choices that hurt others. Bullies can be leaders but they are not the kind of leader a person should follow! The students took sticky notes and wrote what makes a strong, positive leader.
Here are some of the attributes and qualities of a good leader according to third graders:
Two students even listed classmates who they considered to be positive role models.
I love to see children recognize leadership qualities in their peers!
What a fun and exciting day we had on December 11th as the entire school celebrated the Hour of Code! Here is a snippet of what occurred that day.
As usual, I planned far too much for 15 minute periods! How could I really think that we could work with 3 or 4 apps in that short amount of time? (See previous post: Getting Ready for Hour of Code). But, that’s alright! The students had a wonderful time working with apps, online programs, and coding with cups during P.E.
I loved watching the thinking processes that occurred as the students worked. You could almost see their brains spinning as they practiced how to solve each level! The collaboration among the students was fantastic. If someone was “stuck” another child quickly and willingly stepped in to offer guidance. The best part was watching the students help their teachers! I even had one teacher who apparently worked with the Cargo Bot app all day; giving up his planning periods to move up through the levels. He even searched for me after school to discuss it!
Our coding day was a resounding success. My part was with Lower School but I know exciting events were going on in our Middle and Upper Schools as well!
Enjoy a longer animoto video of the day.
Scratch 2.0 is now out and it looks to be a very good upgrade. One of my goals this summer was to become more familiar with Scratch so that I could more effectively share it with my 4th graders. So, I was thrilled to discover the Creative Computing Online Workshop; a six-week course for those who want to learn more about using Scratch in the classroom.
The course started on Monday, June 3. Unfortunately, I was on vacation with my laptop and NO internet access! All I could do was read the multitude of posts coming through on my phone. It was very frustrating! Of course, the purpose of the vacation was to relax! So, upon arriving home today, I started working on this week’s projects.
Karen Brennan, along with several others, designed this course and if this week is any indication, it is going to be extremely useful in helping me learn how to better use Scratch with students.
One of our activities was an “About Me” project. Yes, mine is very simple but I was able to successfully use the broadcast block which has given me trouble before.
I’m looking forward to the upcoming weeks. It will be a challenge but I can tell much learning will be taking place!
Our wonderfully creative Lower School librarian, Kirsten Murphy, introduced an Olympics theme for summer reading. Yesterday, the students gathered for the “Parade of Athletes” as Mrs. Murphy and principal, Sandy McNutt, announced that we had 100% participation this year! And that statistic is true for 2 years in a row! Wow! We DO have awesome readers! After the parade, all students visited every classroom to view the fabulous projects created by the students. I tried out my new iPad to video a small portion of the excitement.
Gold Medal Readers from Trinity Valley School on Vimeo.