Karen Bosch’s “Great Tech-spectations!”

I will be presenting a seminar called “The National Park Project” at MACUL this Thursday, March 19, at 2:30.  I’ll be sharing about a project that I did last fall with 6th graders that incorporated research, creating a wiki, and differentiated instruction.  If you are attending MACUL, I’d love to have you join me!

If you aren’t attending, I have posted lesson plans, worksheets, and resource links here:

The National Park Project

I am asking help from all of my social networks (so pardon me if you’ve already heard this).

I spent many hours in December working on a Holiday Tradition project in school. One of our Smilebox slideshows from this project is one of six finalists in a contest to win a digital camera for our school. Could you take a minute and go to the Smilebox blog and leave a vote for “Holiday Traditions with Mrs. Veldman’s Class?” Thanks so much!

Smilebox Blog

And here is a peak at the entire project, if you are interested:

http://decemberholiday.wikispaces.com/

Recently I have been experimenting with Scribblar, an exciting online collaboration tool that has both chat and a whiteboard.  It is easy to use because it is a disposable room that you can set up without needing to make an account or have email or have passwords (which is a real advantage when working with younger students).  Everyone that connects on the page can work together on the whiteboard at the same time.  There are a variety of text and drawing tools as well as the ability to upload graphics.   Here is a screen shot of what the “room” looks like:

To set up the activity for use in the classroom, I made 10 different rooms (so easy - just enter your name and it creates a room for you).  I made a wiki page that had links to all the rooms and I gave each room the name of a color - red, blue, green, etc.  Then I put a sticky note on each student’s computer with the color of the room they were to use for their project. Each student was paired with a other student on the opposite side of the room.  They were to do the project without verbal talking to each other, using only the chat and the online tools to collaborate.

The assignment was for each team to come up with their own version of the 12 Days of Christmas.  I used this online Cat’s 12 Days of Christmas as a model. Each team had to use the chat tools to decide on a topic and then work together to write and decorate their project.  I supplied of folder of public domain clip art from this site that they could use to decorate their project if they wished.

Now, this is the week before Christmas. They are sixth graders.  They never stop talking to their friends.  Did I mention that there is only one week of school left???  But once they started the project, the room was dead silent except of the clicking of their keyboards.  They used the chat window to brainstorm ideas and then to divide up the tasks.  (”You do the even days and I’ll do the odd.”)  There were some conflicts about ideas, some people who erased their partner’s work - both accidentally and on purpose.  But they learned to work together on a simple, but real collaboration and had a blast doing it! One group even opened up a second tab on their browser so they could search for ideas to use that went with their topic.   Here are some of their end results:

Note - all of this was done with no talking!!  What a teacher’s dream!

We did run into a couple of glitches.  At first, we discovered that when the chat was left inactive for a few hours, the whiteboard was wiped clean.  Oh no, all the projects were gone!  When I emailed the site to ask if there was a way to save their rooms, I heard back from Stephan Richter, who said they were hoping at some point to use this as a deluxe feature, but they kindly TURNED IT ON for us since we asked!  WOW!  The students were pretty impressed by this.  We had to recreate the work from the previous day, but when they returned to the chat room the following day all their work was as they left it.  We also had a few people lock part of their work and then were unable to unlock it to edit it. A few times someone couldn’t see text that the other person had added. Usually if they logged out and then back in everything would be back in sync.

I really liked this tool and am hoping to try some more activities with it. Any ideas, anyone???  Thanks, Scribblar!

Here’s a little Christmas slideshow from Smilebox - some Christmas trees created by the first graders using KidPix.  Enjoy!

Make a Smilebox slideshow

I recently ran a 3 week after school class where  2nd and 3rd students created a book using Kidpix.  Each child wrote and illustrated a 5 page story, and most created a title page, end page, and an “about the author” page.  The pages were printed out and then I bound the stories into hard covers.  I used book covers from Lintor Publishing as an easy way to bind the books into a professional looking hard cover.  If you buy the covers in bulk, they cost around 6 dollars each.  I’ve found many parents are willing to pay to have their child’s project bound into a hard cover  because it makes a great keepsake.  (Silly me, I forgot to take a picture showing the covers!)

The system to bind the books is quite clever and simple.  Here are the steps:

First you staple the book pages between the 2 binding pages.  These pages have a kind of contact paper which is facing to the outside.

Here’s what the pages look like after they are stapled:

Peel off the contact paper on the back side:

Press it down onto the back cover:

Remove the contact paper from the front side.  Press the front cover down.  Then open up the book, and bend the cover gently.  The contact paper binds the cover to the stapled pages.  (The white page below is the contact page pressed to the cover.)

The students are always thrilled to have a “real” book which they created.  It is fun to watch them reading the stories to their friends and showing them off.

I spent a good chunk of my weekend putting together an online project for lower elementary.    I am hoping to connect our school with some other schools in a project where early elementary students share about their family and/or cultural traditions during the December holidays. This project is designed so that it does not require a lot of classroom time to complete and does not involve very complicated technology skills. It also will introduce teachers to Smilebox - which is a neat free tool for sharing images on the web and easily allows students and parents to leave comments.

Here is the link to the wiki where there are details about the project and how to sign up:

http://decemberholiday.wikispaces.com/

And if you have never looked at Smilebox, here is the link to the Teacher Tool Page to get a free teacher account:

http://www.smilebox.com/occasions/teachers-toolbox/

Here is a fun activity to do in the Fall using Kidpix. Scan or take digital pictures of real leaves on a white backgound. Bring the images into Kidpix and save each one as a separate file. (I have a red, yellow, orange, and green leaf file that I use and I let the children pick the color of leaf that they want to use.) They use the wacky paint brush and stamp tools to turn the leaf into a person. I always use this lesson to teach the children how to “flip” the stamps so the the ears and feet go in matching pairs!Here’s an example, and yes, the child told me it was Indiana Jones!

Click here to see all of the students’ pictures:

Leaf People Gallery

I took individual pictures of each picture on an orange background, and used Smilebox to create this little slideshow. Enjoy! Here is the link to the Smilebox.   Please visit our page and leave a comment!  Thanks!

SmileBox Video  

The second graders have been learning about communities in Social Studies. They have studied urban, rural, and suburban communities. They recently made illustrations of these communities in the computer lab. Here is a video which features their work:

We recently did a neat project where we used video clips in a Kidpix project to make a movie about ocean creatures. This is a perfect way to use Discovery Streaming video clips. Here are the steps:

1. Students picked an ocean creature and did research to learn some new facts about it. We used books in the classroom, but you also could use the internet. Students came into the computer lab with a paper that had one or two sentences about their ocean animal already prepared.

2. I had downloaded video clips in Quicktime format from Discovery Streaming and stored them in advance in a file that the students could open. I made sure that there was at least one or two clips for every animal.

3. Students came into the lab and started a new Kidpix picture. I first showed them how to import a video clip onto their page and position it at the top of their page using “IMPORT > MOVIE” from the top menu bar. Then they used the paint bucket to color the page a solid color. Finally they created a text box and typed their sentences about the animal. When they clicked the green arrow button, the movie would play on their screen. Here is a picture of what their pages looked like:

(Another great way to use this process would be to let the student select a clip to import into Kidpix. They would watch the clip, and then write a sentence or two that told about something that they learned from the clip!)

5. Bonus: The students stopped the movies when there was a good picture of each animal on the screen. We printed 2 copies of their pictures. One copy was to hang on the wall and eventually go home. The other copies we bound into a hard cover so the class would have a book. We use book covers from lintorpublishing.com to create our books.

6: Double Bonus: I saved each one of the pictures as a individual Quicktime movie file using FILE > EXPORT > QUICKTIME MOVIE. I saved these files on our server. Then I used iMovie and dragged each individual file in. Now all the clips were combined as one movie. I extracted the audio off of each clip. Then I had each child come and record their text. (I think you could record the narration in Kidpix as well, but I think it is quieter to do it one at a time.) I added a little background music and then burned the entire movie as a DVD. Now the class has their own movie where they can watch everyone’s video and hear their report!

I offered a 3 week after school digital photography class this fall. The students had so much fun and took some incredible shots. Here is a link to a gallery of some of their best photographs.Digital Photography Gallery