The Wildlife Experience Powerpoint project

My second graders recently took a trip to the Wildlife Experience in Parker, CO. As part of our project we learned some vocabulary prior to going, practiced documenting with video and still cameras, then I set the students loose in teams at the Wildlife Experience to learn and photograph the parts they were most interested in so that we could create our PowerPoint presentations.
We decided to use the Smart Notebook export to PowerPoint feature for our PowerPoints. It is definitely easier for my second graders than making slides in PowerPoint. One draw back, as you can see in the attached SlideShares of our presentations, is that when you convert files you get some strange font size changes. We messed around with it for a while trying to fix it. Ultimately by the last Powerpoint we found that if we took a screen capture of the page we had built in Smart Notebook and then deleted the original page it uploaded all the content as an image.
The lesson is posted here.
The slideshows we made are on my classroom blog.

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:

Canada 2.0

(photo courtesy of Garcia, Rosamar, pics4learning.com)

I am excited to tell you about a recent project I'm undertaking through ePals. My second grade class is corresponding with a class of first and second graders in Ontario, Canada. We began the lesson while we were still studying money so it was great to learn about their different money.

It was also a good opportunity to use Google Earth.

Once we finished our initial email and our second one to learn how to attach a file I pretty much let the students correspond on their own. I didn't correct for spelling or punctuation but encouraged them to communicate independently. Some of them managed to log on from home and showed their families. Some surprises were the trouble with capital letters and all caps, misspelling of target email addresses, and hitting send multiple times. Overall it was a blast! I wasn't sure the students could log on and send emails by themselves but they did remarkably well!

The lesson is posted here.

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.

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.