North Carolina DEN

Calling all new fifth grade teachers!!! This is my first year teaching the North Carolina fifth grade curriculum. (With sixteen years of service teaching every grade from pre-k to 4th) I now have a better understanding of the concept for the television game show “Are You Smarter than A Fifth Grader?”

The amount of material to be covered in fifth grade is astonishing. Web surfing has therefore become my newest hobby. All of us are looking for new ideas and with EOG’s over the horizon we all are looking for a neat ways to access what we have taught. Below are a couple neat assessment sites. I have linked the sites to my class blog so that students can use them at home. These would also be great games to play in class.

http://www.internet4classrooms.com/skills_5th_original.htm

this is an interactive site for Math and Language Arts

http://mail.clevelandcountyschools.org/~ccselem/?OpenItemURL=S029E8B7

A fantastic EOG assessment resources ( thanks to Gina Bumgarner for sharing great find.)

 I invite you share any great sites that you have found, and be sure to share these with the 3rd and 4th grade teachers ( there are links by grade levels)

Well, the shopping is over, the decorations are packed up and waiting for next year, and I have some time finally to enjoy a few minutes at the computer. I wanted to find something to spice up a snow globe drawing project for our younger students.  You know, it’s nice to come back after the holidays with something to perk up that January slump –we all need a little sunshine in our winter this time of year.  I found a very interesting wiki project at

   http://elementarytechteachers.ning.com/forum/topics/winter-wonderland-online  

While the project started in December, the invitation is still good and teachers are welcome to join the Winter Wonderland Wiki. Even if you don’t join, you’ll find the wiki full of helpful technology plans and resources for our younger students.

My daughter loves cutting paper. One day, I showed her how to make snowflakes. She had a ball. My daughter hates cleaning up. I cannot begin to tell you how much little snips of paper were on the floor.

Luckily, my daughter also loves to “work” on the computer. Next time she wants to make snowflakes, I am sending her to Make-a-Flake.

http://snowflakes.barkleyus.com/

Make-a-flake is a snow flake maker by Barkely Interactive. This flash games folds the paper and gives you a virtual pair of scissors. Snip away at your paper and you have a snow flake. There is a preview option and even an undo button.

After you have perfected your snowflake, you can save it to their gallery, email it to a friend, or save it to your computer. When saving it you have two options, .jpg or .eps. The .eps file can be opened and manipulated in PhotoShop or Illustrator.

The best part, no clean up!

 During the half day in-service, teachers had an opportunity to enjoy a lunch of “bites” megabytes, kilobytes, (heavy hors d ‘oeuvres) as they “wet their appetites with new technology skills”.

Tina Stevens (new DEN member) spoke to the staff about the importance of using technology instruction in the classroom. After speaking she presented a timely PowerPoint called

“What If” (download your copy by Karl Fisch).

At the conclusion  of the luncheon teachers were encouraged to rotate  to different classrooms for demonstrations on Smart Board, skype, ( free download) and geocaching.  

 Presenter and DEN Council member Deb Bolinger demonstrated blogging, and multiple applications of Discovery Streaming. Many teachers were excited to be signed up as new members of DEN. It was a great opportunity for the staff to learn from their colleagues, as they lead their students to the 21^st Century

What a great week at NCETC! From the opening keynote speaker to the closing luncheon, it was an overwhelming flood of resources and opportunities for those of us who value instructional technology. The focus this year was Unlocking the Power of Technology in 21st Century Schools and the conference certainly fulfilled that promise. I wish I could give you a complete rerun of the week- but short of that I can tell you about some high points and great resources from our week.  The opening keynote speaker was Jim Moulton who talked about how to support our “screen”agers with the 21st century skills and “any century” skills they need. He believes combining project based learning with digital technology will create real world projects that prepare our students to be world leaders. He offers resources for teachers and students at http://jimmoulton.org/1.html.  Patrick Crispen was back with his entertaining sessions that are always packed with information, what’s new with Google, great resources and humor. You’ll find his conference PowerPoints and notes on his website for everyone to use. http://netsquirrel.com/.  Nicole Gray (our blog leader!) and Gretchen Robinson presented an inspiring session on using Google Earth and other online tools to create virtual fieldtrips. I cannot wait to get back to school and try a fieldtrip of my own. You’ll find an amazing collection of resources and their handouts at their website. Click here for that site. By now it should be obvious that the real key here to unlocking the power of technology is a community of educators coming together to inspire, share ideas and resources with their colleagues and ultimately create more engaging and powerful learning opportunities for all our students.  So, get  a cup of something you enjoy, sit back in a comfortable chair and be prepared to spend time with these wonderful resources.

Our school is off to a blazing start with our 1 to 1 laptop learning initiative. We have rolled out 205 shiny MacBooks to our 6th grade students. Lots of preparations have been made to assure sufficient technical infrastructure, professional development, parent communication, inventory control, and more were ready to the computers in the hands our our learners.

Now, the dust is settling and as we round the Thanksgiving break corner and head in to the Christmas Holidays, teachers will be challenged to keep the students focused on constructive learning. One strategy our teachers are using is a– student wiki.

Our district technology department set up an Apple X Server and configured a wiki for our students. We set the wiki up so that students must log in to be able to view anything about the wiki. This would really disqualify the site from being classified as true wiki. But, our 6th graders have been very impressed with it. They have use their built-in sight cams and modify the photo by using effects. They can comment on their classmates wiki posts and poke fun of each others photos. The comments are moderated, which in addition to it not being live to the world is another modification we have considered needed. This brings me to an interesting discovery. The comments so far have been almost all –appropriate. It has to be the fact that it is new and the students know the comments are moderated. The students that I consider our “early adopters” are family with online social network sites.

One cleaver use of the student wikis came from one of my middle school mathematics teachers. Michelle Strickland,  our Academically Gifted and Talented mathematics teacher, came flying into the Help Desk room and shouted- I get it! She was so excited to share that all her students were now doing their homework in her class with their MacBooks. Her 6th grade class of 18 students all had turned in their homework that morning–online. The students posted their work on their individual student wiki page and she had been assessing their work during her planning period. She loved not having to round up their papers, beg them to turn their work in, and not having to put them in their mail box after commenting on their work. I did not ask if she grades each item or whatever, maybe I will ask her next week. [Note to self- follow up with Michelle and see how she plans to use the student wiki to assign homework.]

Our student wiki as generated some interesting applications for learning in one of our computer skills classes. In Elizabeth Roberson’s  8th grade class, her students created PowerPoint presentations and exported the into Movie Maker on their PC desktops in the lab. They attached their final product their wiki page. Prior to this assignment, Elizabeth’s classes posted a response to a writing prompt and photo on their wiki page. The prompt, which I do not have the exact quote, but it asked them to reflect on what strategies they thought they would need to use to successfully transition to the high school next year. I read many of the student posts and noticed many students think the wiki is their cell phone. Lots of “texting” jargon, misspelled words, and punctuation errors. One the other hand, she has some really creative writers in her classes. From a technology stand point, our Apple wiki page does not seem to support .WMV movies. We are looking for a reasonably priced or freeware application that will convert .WMV to .MOV or .MP4.  I use VisualHub to convert .WMVs, but was disappointed to learn they are no longer supporting VisualHub. I downloaded the student’s .WMV files and converted them to .MP4 format files and posted them back to their wiki. Could I have done it for a couple of hundred students- no. So, before we expand this use, we need some way to convert on the student’s computer. Maybe Apple has a plug-in for their wiki that supports .WMV formatted videos. If you know, please post a reply.

Our wonderful journey continues. We are looking for engaging strategies to use with our 6th grade 1 to 1 program. Streaming video was not in our budget this school year. I am working on it for this coming school year. Our alternative school funded their streaming video and I have been hearing raved reviews from those teachers. In my next blog, I hope to have some success stories from their prospective.

It helps to remember– We are all learners and we are all beginners.

P.S. (do people still do this?) Hope to see ya’ll in Greensboro at NCETC, Dec 3-4.  If you on on Plurk, look me up or add me to your follow list on Twitter. My Plurk and Twitter user name:  blakej 

           Thursday evening, I was privileged to attend a screening for Jeff Corwin’s The Vanishing Frog, a new Animal Planet Documentary in Charlotte, NC at the Discovery Place.  Jeff began his presentation by stating “It was hard to get people to see that frogs are sexy things,” and I very much agreed.  He continued saying that there are currently 6,000 species of amphibians and within just a few years, we would lose 3,000 of them (since the 1980’s, 120 of these species have already vanished).  The Vanishing Frog is a documentary about these species in danger.  I found the film to be extremely interesting and intriguing and “Yes, I even thought that the frogs were cute.”
          During the day, Jeff Corwin was able to visit local Charlotte schools and talk with the students.  One of the audience members asked Mr. Corwin about the types of questions that he was asked.  He said that his favorite question from students was always the ones that asked “How can I help?”  His reply was to start by looking in your local town or community for a “species in crisis” or for other ways that you could get involved with any community organization or efforts to help the environment.  He then proceeded to discuss his first encounter with nature.  As an inner city kid, there were no backyard areas to observe nature so his father would take him to the “inner city pond” where he discovered frogs and their world.  He now has a passion for nature that he shares with the entire world through his documentaries on Animal Planet.
          The Vanishing Frog will premier November 20th at 8:00 p.m. (ET/PT) on Animal Planet.  Also on November 20th, subscribers to Discovery Education Science will find the episode available for the classroom.  If you would like more information about The Vanishing Frog, check out the following links:

• Animal Planet:  The Vanishing Frog
• Save the Frog
• Discovery Education’s Save the Frog Lesson Plans

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