Creating eBooks

One of my second grade teachers would like to have her students create eBooks to publish their country studies learning. She would also like to have them record themselves reading the story as they so enjoy using the website Tumblebooks where they can listen while they read. We brainstormed a bit and came up with the following ideas for both recording and not recording voice. Additionally, I showed her the options in this website which include having the students create a real eBook that can be read on portable reading devices. I hope this spurs some ideas in your classroom.

Create eBooks

1.       Use Power Point (our students are secure in this software)

a.       Show them different page layouts

b.      Clip art has many good pictures of both the country and general pictures

2.       From here, to create an eBook that you can listen to, see #3. To create an eBook that you just read, see #4

3.       Add voice

a.       Save the Power Point slides as .jpgs

b.      Insert them in Photo Story

c.       Have the students record themselves reading it (parent volunteer?)

d.      Save them as a wmv file

e.      Combine all the wmv files into Movie Maker to make one movie (or you can make multiple smaller ones)

f.        Upload this movie to the internet

4.       Without Voice

a.       Save the Power Point slides as .pdfs

b.      Upload them to Flipsnack

                                                               i.      You can keep them each separate and have 20 books

                                                             ii.      You can upload three at a time to create one Flipsnack, so that would be about seven for your class

                                                            iii.      Use a website to combine all of them into one .pdf to create one book

Ideas for Integrating Technology in Grades 1-3

For the past two years, I have worked with grades 1-3 as their Technology Teacher, but also helping the teachers integrate technology into their classrooms. Here is a list of some of these ideas that I hope spark some interest in your classroom!

Acrostic Poems and Rebus Stories

In the computer lab this past month, my second grade classes published their November/Thankful acrostic poems. The teachers worked with the students in their classrooms to write the poem and then we used Microsoft Word to publish it. One teacher had the great suggestion of using a table in Word to help align the three parts of the poem: The large letter, the phrases and the pictures to go with it. The technical skills used were inserting a table of the correct dimensions, changing the font size and style, inserting clip art, removing the table borders and adding a page border. As you can see below, they turned out really nice!

 

One of my teaching goals this year to is have differentiated activities at the end of each unit so the students have something meaningful to do when they are done. I had two choices for students who finished their poem before others did. They could either make a new table and compose an acrostic poem of their own name, or they could write a story about a topic of their choice. I found that as long as I reviewed how to insert a table, many chose that option. Just as many chose to write a story of their own. 

A couple of second grade classes needed an extra day in the lab to finish all the student's poems, so I went one step further and taught the students how to create a rebus story. This used the tech skills of center and left alignment, changing the font size and style, insert and resizing clip art and copy/paste as we reused pictures in our story. Their results after just one class were terrific and shown below. 

Authentic Internet Safety Lessons

Starting out the year with lessons on internet safety is usually a good thing. As we use the internet more and more in our classrooms, it is important to discuss how to stay safe, not be a cyberbully and what digital citizenship means. Last year I spent two class periods on this with my third grade students. They watched a video and created a poster. This year we actually practiced internet safety and cyberbullying in grades one, two and three for almost an entire month. This real life application is what cements learning, not a video and poster.

All five first grade classes set up blogs this year with Kidblog.org. Last year, only two teachers used them in the second half of the year and they were instrumental in bringing the entire first grade on board. We started by learning how to comment appropriately and substantively. We replied to a blog post from another classroom in another state and practiced being positive and writing something worthwhile. No more "Cool!" or "Good job dude!" comments were allowed as we stressed the importance of meaningful replies. They then commented on their teacher's post for individual practice. During the following weeks we learned how to write our own posts, comment on each others and finally add pictures from safe picture websites. I really like morguefile.com and pics4learning.com. Both have safe pictures for young students and fall under creative commons licenses. The blogs are currently set as private to only those who can log in (the students and teacher).


Our second graders took a big step in learning to use a Wiki as I wrote about in my last post. The internet safety skills learned included finding safe pictures from the internet, using an online account, not altering others work that is on the same page as theirs (they really wanted to correct things!) and not using full names on the internet. The wiki is set as private (a nice feature of pbworks.com) so that we can learn in a safe environment.


Finally, our third graders learned to use email appropriately by sending one to their teacher and myself telling us what they learned about internet safety so far. They also learned to use an online account, our school Moodle account. In there, we practiced doing a forum, which is where the students answer my question, and then can comment on each others. This offered us the opportunity to learn substantive, positive comments that add value, along with discussing cyberbullying. They also posted a piece of writing and experienced the joy of sharing their work with each other. One of our lessons that provided additional comments even the next day, was showing them the internet site for the city of Mankato. A very real looking, but almost completely false, website. They couldn't believe it was fake and it provides a great lesson on not believing everything you see on the internet, helping you stay safe.

Looking at all the authentic experiences the students had to practice internet safety and digital citizenship this year, I feel they understand it much better than last year's video and poster. As they continue to use blogs, wikis and Moodle throughout the year, these lessons will be reinforced over and over again until they hopefully become habits. Wouldn't that be nice!

Connecting School and Home with a Wiki

Our second graders study insects and this year I wanted to create a home/school connection involving insects. I came up with the idea of starting a Wiki for the entire second grade (six classes). My goal was to teach the students how to insert pictures, so they could take pictures of insects they see at home and post them on the Wiki to share with the rest of the second grade. Yesterday we had our first connection as one student added four pictures from home and shared them in class!

The mechanics of adding a picture were a little complicated for second graders, but I felt the concept was well worth the effort. I began by making a Wiki with pbworks.com as they allow you to create a private site accessible to only those who sign in. The first page consists of  a table with student numbers that correspond to either the computer they sit in my room or their classroom numbers. Six students share a page and also share a log in containing their student number.

As I mentioned, the mechanics of inserting a picture were difficult, but due to the timing of my lesson and their insect lessons in class, I had to start there. This week we are going back in to add general insect information under our pictures. I also created a page for each class, from which we will create a page for each student to record research on their assigned insect.


My future plans include creating your own insect that has body parts of other insects, sort of a remix. The students will use each other's research pages to collect the information, complete a planning sheet and then draw their insect in SmartNotebook. As I did last year, they may then create a Power Point animation of their insect getting food in its habitat and escaping its predators.


Future uses for the Wiki will hopefully involve pen pals with another school and collaborative story writing. There are many other uses here, and as we use the Wiki more, we will try some of them.

Descriptive Writing - Word Choice

Our school uses the 6+1 Writing Framework to teach our students writing strategies. Recently, I focused on word choice, or descriptive writing, with my second grade students. The goal was to paint a picture in our minds as we write. I began the lesson with an introductory video on word choice. Afterward, I went through the video frame by frame to discuss how descriptive words were used.





The students had a good grasp of some descriptive words, but I wanted to show how to use them in sentences, so we read the book "A House for Hermit Crab" by Eric Carle. This wonderfully illustrated book uses many different adjectives and a variety of verbs to say similar things; there is almost a pattern to the writing. After each page, I would set the book down and ask the students to share the descriptive words used by the author.

Finally we were ready to try writing descriptive sentences on our own. While I used a software program that had pictures, you could also do this on paper. I modeled picking a picture of a dog and writing a very simple sentence: "I saw a dog." I then wrote a second, more descriptive sentence underneath: "A fierce-looking dog growled at me as I scurried by." The students were instructed to do the same, find a picture, write a simple sentence and then a more descriptive one. Depending on the time remaining in class, some students wrote a third sentence, some picked another picture and others edited their classmate's sentences to make them even more descriptive. We ended the class with an oral sharing of each student's sentences.


Additional class periods were spent writing a story using the descriptive words found in the book, and any other words the students thought of. The word list is here. Since we have Microsoft Word in our classroom, the students used the highlighting feature to identify their descriptive words. This was a wonderful self-editing tool as some of them saw that they did not have many descriptive words. They also had to evaluate all their words to decide if they were descriptive or not. We ended this unit with our collaborative Storybird.com stories that I have previously written about.

Collaborative Story

Currently, I am working with the technology teacher at Van Meter Elementary school in Van Meter, Iowa to have our second grade students create a collaborative story using Storybird.com. Each week our classes add a page to the story and we have just finished our first one.







This has been a wonderful experience on many levels. First, the students were very excited to be able to create a story with this website. Second, they were even more interested in seeing what the other class wrote each week! They are also proud of what we accomplished. We had just finished a descriptive writing unit and tried to apply those same guidelines to our pages of the book. We can now share it with our parents and school.


Storybird.com has many applications in the classroom in addition to working with another school. You can use it in a reading center, having different students add pages to the story. The students can also do one with their parents. I even have two classes in our school doing one together. Storybird lets you set up a class and even create assignments for your students if you would want to use it on an indivdual basis. Whatever way you use it, your students will really enjoy the colorful, expressive pictures and story possibilities!

Country Visit Scrapbooks

While I only see my students once a week for 25 minutes, my preferred way of teaching is through projects. Therefore, for my second grade classes this month, I planned a small project to tie into their classroom study of different cultures. I knew I had to make the project manageable in a short period of time, but still meaningful.



The project was to create a scrapbook about your visit to another country. To get them in the mindset of traveling someplace and what it involves, we began this project by creating a timeline of what they would need to do to plan a trip. We discussed modes of transportation, what to pack for different climates, and what they might need to plan ahead of time. The following week, we took a "trip" to the school library to look at books about different countries. Each student picked a country and found a book or two about it.


Since the reading level of second graders varies, and the books were not all geared to their level, I chose to instead focus on the pictures in the books. Their instructions were to find pictures of things that are different from what we would see here in our community. This higher order thinking skill has them evaluate what they are looking at, instead of just looking for random pictures. Once they found a picture, they wrote down a title for the picture, and then described it: How is it different than our community? I created a worksheet for this that you can find here. With a little guidance, this was something they could successfully do.




The next week, we returned to the computer lab to create our scrapbook. We used Power Point as the students were familiar with it and it has a large volume of clip art. I instructed the students to first type the name of their country into the clip art gallery search box, and then look for pictures that were similar to what they found last week. We discussed that they will probably not find the exact same picture, but there could be something close. They could also search for something in the picture, like chopsticks if they had written about a family eating dinner in Japan.




Each page of their scrapbook had to have a title, bullet point descriptions of the picture (they could look at their worksheet) and the picture. If they ran out of pictures that they had already found, they could use the clip art gallery just like they did the book. Look for pictures from their country, find one that shows something different than here, and then describe it. Those who finished the required amount of slides, could add background colors and colored text, just like a scrapbook. This part was especially exciting for them.



Each second grade classroom is doing some type of country study on their own. This activity was an excellent introduction and the teachers can have the students show their favorite page to the class.

Money Practice

Near the beginning of the school year when I met with my second grade teachers to plan our technology time lessons, they asked for help reinforcing money counting skills with their students. While I could have just sent the students to a website to practice counting money, I chose instead to incorporate some student choice and collaboration into the lesson.

Using SMART Notebook software, I created two activities, one for counting coins and one for making change. For the counting money exercise, I had all the coins at the top of the page infinitely cloned. The students would drag down any combination of coins they wanted (student choice) and then write down the total. After they did that, they had to ask a neighbor to check their work. Thus, they were not only practicing counting their money, but their neighbor’s as well. I also cloned the page so the students could do ten pages of this activity.

The engagement and motivation were very high with this lesson due to the choices they got to make and also because they could pick any color pen or art pen to write their answer. Even my 8th grade son enjoys doing that! The collaboration added a game-like atmosphere to the activity. For students who finished this quickly, I had a second activity about making change. The premise was similar, but I had a different sentence written on each slide explaining what they bought and how much money they had.

Both activities are great for assessment purposes as the teacher can scroll through each student’s page and see their work. Both files are available for download. I emailed the files to my students, but you could also place them in their directory, or if neither option works in your district, the students can download them from the internet.


Image: 'One thing is not like the others'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/29498428@N00/2382053839

Our Pets

This morning I had the opportunity to help with another great Van Meter Merton connection! Our second grade teacher recognized the need for differentiation of her math unit. Three students who knew the material well and did not need to sit through the lesson again were instead assigned an alternative math project. These students created a survey about the pets students have both in their class here at Merton and their friend's class at Van Meter. Each class completed the survey and the three students used the information to create a game for their class to play.

Once the information was collected, the three students created a column graph showing their data results. Using this graph, they then created questions such as "How many more dogs does Van Meter have than Merton?" Each question also had an answer written on the bottom of the card. The rest of the class will be given a copy of the column graph and the questions to play a math game. I came in and helped the three students use Excel to create the column graph and then use Power Point to make question cards. All three students were very engaged and excited about this project! What a great way to make another connection between the two classes!