Collaborative Geometry Riddles Voicethread

This is a collaborative project between my second graders and Ms. Chamberlain's first grade class. We made some geometry riddles that describe different plane and solid shapes and posted them to Voicethread. Ms. Chamberlain's class is responding to the riddles. In this lesson I used the smartboard to review attributes of geometric shapes and to build an attribute table (see lesson).

One of the fun aspects of this lesson is the independence that my students have in using technology. I know I can just give them the video camera and they will film it and check it to see if it came out clear. We lost a file when they had to upload it to the computer but with a little help they found it. I don't know if it was a good idea but I gave them my username and password for Voicethread so they could upload the video themselves. Who could imagined that they would have this level of autonomy in second grade!

Our voicethread is below:

1st and 2nd grade video resources to accompany Storytown reading program

I’m excited for this year and have already begun incorporating technology in a couple of ways: First I am using Excel to house and display my student reading assessments. I needed a little refresher on conditional formatting in version 2007 so I just watched a quick Atomic Learning video. (Don’t forget our new login is at http://www.atomiclearning.com/login/adams14 Just login with your district network login credentials). Next, I’m using the SmartBoard quite a bit for math and literacy. A great resource I also use quite a bit is DiscoveryEducation.com’s video library. Last spring Tara Ward and I put together a list of video resources for first and second grade to accompany the Storytown reading program. These video clips are largely from Discovery education and YouTube. The resources can be found here: http://eslpages.pbworks.com/StoryTown.

It Takes a Village

Our First Graders created a community as their summative assessment for our My Space Mapping Unit. As a class we created a list of what communities need and want. They were very creative in creating their buildings. Three students were ill and unable to create a piece at home so I improvised and they had 15 minutes to create a piece using KidSpiration. Students presented their piece (as you can see on our VoiceThread) and the next day, students created the community. They were extremely engaged, eager and collaborative as they built their community. Two students weren't able to complete their project at home, so they were responsible for road development. At the end of the VT there will be pictures of their city along with their final reflections (we'll get this done tomorrow!). Please check out their hard work. They are very proud and their buildings include everything from a bank to a mall!

Class Blog
VoiceThread

Many Irons in the Fire

This semester has been great with all the collaborative projects

and fun things I've been trying. Right now it seems like I have a lot of irons in the fire. (photo courtesy of iansand at flickr).

I've wrapped up the Fall Project with Tita Martinez at Haskin Elementary. I'll let her tell you all about it. My students have completed their Monster stories, drawings, and recreations for my project with Esmunda Talamantes at Hanson. I've got a voicethread project going with Sara Zaleski and another just among the students I have for English Language. I'm building a multimedia database to accompany StoryTown stories for second grade for a Star teacher project. I'm as busy as ever but really having a good time. I'll post links later.

On another note. I encourage everyone to nominate the Global Learner Blog as the Best Group Blog for the 2009 Edublog Awards. Follow the rules here and make the nomination from your personal blog. You can see my nomination here.

Reflections on the Collaborative Plant Project with

I had a really fun time with the Plant Experiment project we did with Kelly's class. My students learned a lot about plants from each other but also from Kelly's class. Her students commented on our VoiceThread and our Students commented on theirs. Kelly's students reflected very nicely and made some comparisons between our projects and theirs. This turned out to be several lessons which extended the learning opportunities from the anticipation phase through the reflection phase.
One thing I liked about VoiceThread was the ease of recording comments and deleting comments if they made a mistake. This lesson would have been better if we had done it a little earlier because it would have given more time to reflect more deeply and to do some experiments from the seed stage rather than starting with potted plants.
Kelly set up her VoiceThread in a more student and inquiry-friendly format with each student group posting on a separate VT. What made it fun was pausing the VT after her students explain their experiment and having my students record predictions about what would happen then resuming the video to check the results.
Overall a great lesson for Science Standard 1 (process of scientific inquiry) and appropriate for this age of student.

First Grade Animals Internet Inquiry Lesson

Here is an Internet Inquiry lesson on animals. An internet inquiry lesson is a student-directed research activity in which the students choose what they want to study and research it on the internet. An important element of this type of lesson is the student reflection on the learning process. For first grade I have narrowed the topic of study for them and given them a single resource (kids.nationalgeographic.com) to go to using a bookmarked internet site to scaffold the learning process.
This is an interesting look at what can go wrong in a technology lesson. We had several interruptions, a camera problem, and a computer missing the bookmarked site. I left these parts in the video because it’s a realistic part of teaching. We were filming using the Small Wonder video camera but the batteries died. We improvised by taping the webcam to the tripod and filmed for a while using that until we could get some more batteries. As a result the video quality and sound quality is very poor at about minute five.
The lesson plans for this lesson are at https://sites.google.com/a/adams14schools.org/mrfisher/lessons (Animals Internet Inquiry.doc). The student artifacts are posted on my blog at http://mrfishergloballearner.blogspot.com/2009/06/animals-internet-inquiry-student.html

Kemp / Alsup First Grade Collaborative Plant Project

Here is the Voicethread for the Kemp / Alsup collaborative plant experiment. We look forward to sharing comments with Kelly's class. Each group created a question they wanted to pursue as well as a hypothesis. Then they designed their experiment and logged the results.

Lesson Enhancement in First Grade Habitat Lesson

I've just posted a lesson on habitats to my blog. I'm taking a course in using technology for students with special needs and some of the interesting things that I learned about are Lesson Enhancement strategies and Student Learner strategies. I've used a Concept Anchoring Routine and an acronym strategy.

You can find my lesson here.

First grade collaborative plant project

First grade collaborative plant project.
Kelly Berry, Jon Fisher
Students will develop a testable research question and design an experiment to test their question. They will make careful observations of their test and control plant. Students will share their observations twice per week using VoiceThread. Students will collaborate with their distance learning partners by asking questions and making predictions via the response features of VoiceThread.

Example questions:
What happens if you cut off half of the leaves?
What happens if you cover some of the leaves with foil?
Will a plant grow without soil?
Will a plant grow upside down?

We are looking for some feedback to get our project started. What are some other questions to investigate? We would likely start with nursery pre-potted plants. Does anyone have suggestions as to the best plants to use?

Kinder and First Grade Collaborative Reflection

Dorothy (Kinder at Rose Hill) and I (First Grade at Alsup) hosted our initial collaborative lesson.

Lesson Overview/Objective (Original) - Students will collaboratively create a pictograph with another class as an introduction to Data and Graphs. Small groups (11) from each class would complete a pictograph representing the number of letters in their names. Using Dabbleboard, students would write their name, then the other class would move the name to the correct vertical position on the pictograph. This continued alternately for 10 students to put their information on the collaborative whiteboard.

Positives
*ALL students were excited about being on camera.
*Students were initially engaged as they saw each other through the web camera.
*Students from both classes received an introduction to graphing.
*Students collaborated within their own classroom as well as through the web.

Challenges
*Everyone wanted to have their 15 seconds of fame!
*Explaining to 5, 6, and 7 year olds about the internet delay.

Ideas for Improvement
*Use smaller groups (maybe eight from each class).
*Give students more opportunity to be on camera.
*Others???

We're excited to try our next project and we're thinking about using Dabbleboard or Twiddla. Using the online whiteboards are a challenge for both of us, but we think they offer a great resource to capitalize on the abilities of our students.

First Grade Virtual Manipulatives on the Smart Board

This evening we just had a great skype chat on Using the SmartBoard in the standards-based classroom. The focus was on what was working well and we talked about engagement, math, and literacy. The consensus was that there was a need for more training or refresher courses. Some ideas where bandied about regarding students teaching other students or creating short training sessions in peer to peer learning. I like the idea and I'm going to share some screen capture tips in one of my subsequent postings. Much of the focus was on math and so I'd like to show a short clip of some place value work we did this week using the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives at http://nlvm.usu.edu/en/nav/vLibrary.html.


Specifically we are using base blocks to represent place value. This address the Grade Level Essential Target of 1.2C: c) Uses objects to show meanings of = ,<, >, from 0 to 100. e) Uses multiple models to develop initial understanding of place value of ones and tens (base ten blocks, abacus, computer, manips). This is a great place to differentiate because while all first graders need to represent up to 100, many of my students can use blocks to show numbers in the thousands. (Please note this website is available in Spanish as well) What I like about the base blocks virtual manipulatives is that they are easy to move around, you get immediate corrective feedback from the number counter, and it is a fast way to demonstrate mastery of a difficult concept.
Here is a short video of my class doing some base block exercises. In the first two segments I am filming but for most of the class work my students film everything and do all the documenting with the digital cameras. Each week I assign a class photographer who take all the pictures and videos. They are filming the third segment. As you can see, it is a bit shaky (Note to self "Get tripod"). Mildly reminiscent of the Blair Witch Project.

Click this link to view the video.

Cross posted on Mr. Fisher's Global Learner Blog.

First Grade Internet Workshop

An internet workshop can be a great introduction to working on the web for your students. An internet workshop helps:

develop content knowledge

develop strategies for using web resources

develop skills for working collaboratively

For my class at Walden University I've developed an internet workshop that I will be using with my students.

You can check out the internet workshop here.

Using the Smart Board for Phonics Instruction

As a teacher at a Colorado Reading First school with very explicit and systematic literacy instruction I often find it hard to integrate technology during my Core Literacy time. One of the nice features about the Smart Board is the ability to manipulate text and graphics. For many lessons I hand write the words to emphasize letter formation and because the speed at which I write is a good speed for first graders decoding on the fly. For this particular lesson I pre-typed the parts of the words. I wanted to emphasize common end blends. I used the Smart Board to quickly move ending “L” blends to the initial consonant. (GLET 1g: Uses word and letter recognition skills. Produces sounds to common letter combinations. ) Here I've embedded the screen cast from my blog for that lesson.

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Organizing student data in Excel

Since our district has adopted DIBELS as a literacy measure I would like to share how I use Excel to help me organize and analyse my student data. The Dynamic Indicators of Early Literacy Success tests has an online feature that is helpful but I like to keep student data in a format that allows me to group students more meaningfully.

First I create a spreadsheet with the DIBELS Benchmark measures. I add a column for nonsense words recoded. Then I add columns for data from the core phonics survey.

I select each column and then apply conditional formatting to populate the cell with a specific color based on a number range to indicate if the student skill is considered benchmark, strategic, or intensive. I use the DIBELS ranges for the DIBELs measures but I have my own set of cut-off ranges for Core Phonics data.

I then sort the data by Nonsense Word Fluency and NWF words recoded. Letter Naming Fluency is also a good indicator of reading ability for first graders (though sometimes not a good measure for ELL students). This gives me a general layout that allows me to make general groupings. I use the more specific Core Phonics data to fine tune my groups.

Finally, I set up additional worksheets within the Excel document for progress monitoring and for Winter and Spring Benchmark data. I add a worksheet that details what letter sounds and letter names have not been mastered for each student so that I can differentiate my instruction at the individual level. I add district writing scores and CELA scores so that I can have a very robust data set at a glance.

Cross posted at Mr Fisher's Global Learners

Quiet, but on my way back.

Well, I had become somewhat overwhelmed in the fall. I chose to take a step back with how much my students and I produced. We have been working with many of our technological resources, just not showing everyone.

This week Cameron Weise came through and video-taped our first lesson. I'm sure many of you may agree this isn't necessarily the most comfortable situation. The students did well as they navigated through the First Grade Explorations My Space Wiki page.

The main objective was for the students to apply their knowledge of the cardinal directions why gaining an understanding of vastness of the world. As we look at a map the United States, and I already said it was the U.S., the students innocently ask, "Where is the United States?" They still have a long ways to go to develop their awareness of the globe, but this class definitely has had more exposure than my classes in the past!

Blogging Improves Writing...

Here is a link to an article I received through my classblogmeister group. I found it very fitting after my first trial with first graders and the laptops. Their behavior was wonderful in preparation for writing their first blog article. Once they turned the laptop on and I got them started, they were able to navigate quite well. Once I showed them one thing, they taught the other students who were a couple of steps behind.

They copied their writing into their blog after writing a draft on paper. Wow, they got right to work on their article knowing anyone might look at it. The only instruction I gave them for their article was that they had to choose a topic they wanted to share with the world. Now, if only we could work on using the space bar...

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0910/p09s03-coop.htm

Our class blog
- check out their articles, they did a great job!