I captured this bee activity on my iPad 2 while sitting by the pool yesterday.  Leave a comment to tell me what this bee is helping with that begins with the letter “P”.  Don’t forget to leave your FIRST NAME ONLY, the grade you were in last year, and your homeroom teacher’s name so I can get your prize to you at the beginning of the year if you are the first person to post the correct answer!

Summer is almost here. If you have internet access at home, be sure to consider my Summer Challenges. When I run across something interesting over the summer, I will post a picture or video and ask you to answer some questions. The first person to comment on the post with the correct answer will receive a prize when we return to school. Be sure to leave your first name (remember, NEVER post your full name on-line), the grade you just completed, and your last homeroom teacher’s name. Example: Nina 4th McCurdy. I look forward to hearing from you this summer!

Here is your first challenge:

I can hardly comprehend that my students will be in the lab only two or three more times this year.  I had so much more I wanted them to be able to do.  I find that I have gotten myself in somewhat of a bind, especially with the fourth graders.  Last year the fourth grade students, at the request of the social studies teacher, researched and created Animotos for famous people of Texas.  I placed the Animotos on a glogster poster for them to refer to while taking a quiz in Moodle by matching the name of the person to their accomplishment.  I had intended to allow this group of students to do the same, but have run out of time.  They still need to complete the quiz before the end of the year.  I looked at creating folders of the 20 famous people with an image and the accomplishment and having the students upload the images to Animoto, but did not like how long it takes to create the videos.  I believe it would require at least two technology periods just to create the videos.  There was my dilemma.  I remembered I had placed an app on my recently acquired iPad2 for use with digital storytelling called Storyrobe.  (Click HERE for a great tutorial on using Storyrobe).I decided to check it out.  After playing around with the app for a while, I decided it would be the perfect tool to solve my time problem.  With my macbook, I typed the name of the famous person (one at a time) in Pages and took a picture of it with my iPad2.  Then I searched for an image of the person.  I placed the image in Keynote on a slide and clicked on Play Slideshow to take the picture with my iPad2.  Using Storyrobe, I created a video with the person’s name and image. I recorded the person’s name and accomplishment and created the video.  Then I simply uploaded the video to my Youtube account.  I then created a Page document with the accomplishments of the famous people listed in the same order as in the Moodle quiz.  Using the Youtube video url, I created a QR code for the video. I printed the code and pasted it under the listed accomplishment on my Page document.  I have 12 iPod Touch 4Gs the students will use to complete the Moodle quiz.  Each student will log in to their Moodle account and go to the Famous People of Texas quiz.  Using the pdf document of QR Codes, they will us the iPod Touch to scan the code using the Inigma app which will take them to the Youtube video. After watching the short video, they will be able to complete the quiz.  Below is a short video of how I created the pages of QR Codes.

Well, it is getting close to the end of the year. Time to start getting things organized in order to be prepared for next year. In technology, we will be cleaning out and organizing our headphone bags. I will save the 3rd and 4th grade headphone bags with their name tags, web license, headphones, and flashdrive for next year. I keep their headphone bags in a large drawer, one for each teacher. I have five carts with three drawers each. That works out perfectly because I have a 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade class each day of the week. Once I get the classroom rosters at the beginning of the year, I will separate the bags out once again by classroom teacher. I will make new nametags and headphone bags for the 3rd graders. I will also create their web licenses when they have completed the Digital Citizenship course in Moodle. I am adding another element to our organization this year. This week the students will be organizing the information stored on their flashdrives. They will learn how to rename the items and create folders. Right now, their flashdrive serves as their E-Portfolio. I see that changing to blogs in the near future. The video embedded below shows the simple steps to renaming items and creating folders on a flashdrive.

The glogster poster below displays a sample of the completed project the third and fourth graders have been working on for the last month or so. This project has taken longer than I anticipated due to some unexpected problems. We discovered the Blabberize website does not work well using Firefox as our browser. Once we switched to Google Chrome, the problem of defining the mouth was solved. I had the students record their speeches using Garageband (.mp3) and Audacity (.wav) because sometimes Blabberize would upload the wav file when it would not upload the mp3 file. On the Blabberize site, you have the option of converting to video. This feature is offered free until June. Most of the time when students attempted to use this feature, the conversion would never process. The students were able to copy the embed code so they could add the Blabberize to their own webpage. As a result of this project, students have saved on their flashdrive an image of their presidents’ face, a speech typed and printed using Pages, the audio file of their speech using GarageBand and Audacity, and the embed code copied and pasted in a Page document to later paste to their blog page.

My son is getting married this weekend in Mississippi, so I will not be at school Wednesday through Friday of this week. One of my greatest challenges as a teacher is preparing lessons for a substitute when I have to be out. There are a great deal of procedures that I do automatically that would fill several pages if I had to write them all down. That is where JingPro comes in. With JingPro, I can create videos of my computer screen and the steps I need the substitute to demonstrate for my students. The files are created as mp4 files that I can drag in to iMovie for editting or post on a Glogster poster. I also use my flip video camera to make short instructional videos of my procedures to put on a flashdrive for the substitute teacher to access. The 3rd and 4th graders are continueing to work on “blabberizing” their president. There are several steps to this project, and some students are ahead of others in this process. To make it easier on the students, myself, and the substitute teacher, I created tutorial videos using JingPro and placed them all on a Glogster poster for the students to view.

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.

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.

Life is learning. I learned what an alevin is today. An alevin is the term used for a trout or salmon that is newly hatched, before it becomes a fry.  What is really neat to me is that I did not learn it by coming across the term in the dictionary or some blog post.  I learned it by seeing it with my own eyes, right in my own school! White Oak Intermediate School is involved in a hands-on Science project thanks to the efforts of Scott Floyd and Michael Gras. Scott Floyd’s son and my own 5th grader are part of a crew that monitors the water each morning.  I knew something was up this afternoon when I returned to the computer lab from putting students on the bus to find my child missing.  I immediately grabbed my flip video camera and headed to the Science Lab.  Sure enough, I found Mr. Floyd with his son and my son by the aquarium.  Below is the video I shot of the event.  You can keep up with this project by subscribing to the White Oak Intermediate Science Lab blog.  Click on the Aquarium Cam tab at the top to see the live cam.  Feel free to leave a comment and tell us what you think will happen to the alevin anomaly.

I am in Austin, Texas this week for the Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA) Conference. This will be a week of presenting and attending workshops focused on integrating technology in the classroom. Below is the presentation I will be giving on Tuesday, February 8th on Digital Citizenship during the Technology Applications Teacher Network (TATN).