I have been looking over different lesson ideas concerning President’s Day for my students to do in the computer lab this week. The school calendar originally had Monday set as a school holiday, but a Friday SNOW DAY a few weeks ago has us coming to school February 21st. Having just returned a week ago from the TCEA Convention in Austin, I have also been thinking a lot about Facts4Me. Facts4Me is a website maintained by a retired teacher and her business partner. For a subscription fee of $50, an entire school can benefit from its resources for a full year. The reports are written in short paragraphs on a 2nd-3rd grade reading level, which makes it a perfect place to start a web search. This seemed to be the perfect opportunity to put our subscription to good use. (By the way, any one can make use of the website for FREE until March 12, 2011. Just use the username: open password: access to log in and try it out!) Students will choose a president they are not familiar with to research.
Students will fill out a pre-designed form based on the information they find. They will also capture an image of the president and save it to their flashdrive for future use. Using Pages, they will then type a three to four sentence speech where they pretend to be the president using first person and save it to their flashdrive.
Next week, students will record their speeches on the Macbook using Garageband and save it to their flashdrive. Using Blabberize, students will upload the image of the president and their Garageband podcast to create their talking president. We will gather these together by class in a gallery of talking presidents. Stay tuned for the finished project!
For students who finish before classtime is over, Mrs. Cranford has some great President’s Day Fun resources they can check out. Feel free to check them out for yourself!
I am also re-introducing Edmodo to the fifth graders. Fifth graders will log in to their Edmodo account to get assignments from me. They will also turn in their completed work through Edmodo.