The 3rd graders will have a treat to look forward to this week.  We will be Skyping with the 3rd graders from Mrs. Brady’s computer lab at East Elementary School in Sharon, Massachusetts.  This will be the second time we have met with them over the internet.  We have been sharing weather information.  The last time we Skyped with them, they had four feet of snow on the ground!

The 3rd and 4th graders have completed their research of their chosen president and saved an image of the president to their flash drive.  Last week they completed typing a four to six sentence speech using first person to record for their blabberize project. My original plan was to have the students record their speech using Garageband on their Macbook.  I liked the fact they could change the sound of their voice in Garageband.  This weekend found me very disappointed when I could not upload the sound file from Garageband to the Blabberize website without getting an upload error. I was also having trouble getting the blabberize website to allow access to the internal microphone to record the sound in that way.  I ended up having to download audacity on each computer in the lab.  Students will record their speech in audacity, export it as a .wav file and save to their flash drive.  I am hoping they can then access blabberize and upload their image and speech from their flash drive, although I had problems Saturday getting the mouth tool to work.  According to the blabberize website, they should be able to create a video of their project.  If all else fails, they should be able to save the embed code to their flash drive and paste it to their blog page.

Fifth graders are also beginning a President Research Project.  I have placed their assignment on Edmodo.  They will access their account in Edmodo to find out who is in their group and to print their research forms.  They will choose a president to research in a random drawing.  The research information will be used to create an ABC story of their president and first lady.

Eden Owens, our fifth grade Language Arts teacher sent a TAKS Terminology list to the enhancement teachers and asked us to incorporate some sort of practice with the students when they come to us.  I decided to make flashcards in Popling and have them pop up on the screen every three minutes as a review while the fifth graders are in the lab.  The flashcards show the word and its definition.  After a few weeks of this review, the flashcards will show the definition and the students will supply the word.  This way, the students will be exposed to the words and their definitions while they are working on their research project.