Learning About Plants Animoto

Every year my school hosts V.I.P Day where students are permitted to bring a Very Important Person to school for a portion of the school day. Every year teachers become frazzled, anxious, and overwhelmed by the idea of planning such a day. However, every year students boast about how it is their most favorite school day of the year and every year while teachers are exhausted by the end of the day, they too boast about what an amazing day it was to see families engaged with their students and to meet so many moms, dads, grandparents, aunts, and uncles and friends. The Animoto, which I created for my graduate class, EDUC 584 Integrating Technology and Literacy showcases this very special day. As a culminating activity to our second grade plant unit students and V.I.P’s engaged in science literacy based activities that met unit objectives. Students read a non-fiction selection about Strange Plants and responded to what they read. Families created Seeds on The Go flipbooks to illustrate and describe the many ways seeds travel. Using magnifying glasses students and families had the opportunity to look closely and observe using their 5 senses a variety of seeds: dandelion seeds, avocado seeds, tomato seeds, and many more. Lastly, families had an opportunity to plant their very own flower. Families discussed what flowers need to grow and even gave their flowers a spritz of water before they left.  Take a moment to watch us learn and “GROW”!

          Creating the Animoto was a great experience. I found the program to be very user-friendly. Viewing the Animoto allowed me to reflect on the activities that were presented and to see my students “in action” through a different lens. I look forward to sharing the Animoto with my current students as well as next year’s students as a teaching tool and to get them “psyched” for their very own V.I.P day. In addition, I always create a photo album of the year’s events that is shared at our end of the year celebration. Next year, I will use this new technology tool to create a digital photo album. Furthermore, in thinking about additional ways I can use the Animoto program, specifically for my plant unit I think I will use it to frontload plant vocabulary. For example, through the use of images on Flickr I can download pictures of the different parts of a plant. Students will instantaneously become engaged and motivated to learn new vocabulary.

SMART Exchange

Have you ever heard of SMART Exchange? If you have an interactive whiteboard, SMART Exchange may become your new favorite teaching tool.

SMART Exchange is an online community that has a variety of high-quality, peer-reviewed digital content you can use with your classroom technology. Their are thousands of resources including standards-correlated lessons for SMART Notebook collaborative learning software, question sets for SMART Response interactive response systems, links and other multimedia content. You can search for and browse content quickly and easily by subject, grade, curriculum, media type and popularity, as well as filter results according to the SMART products you have in your classroom.

In my classroom, I used this SMART Exchange lesson to supplement my teaching about analogies. This lesson provided my students with the opportunity to review different analogy relationships in a fun interactive way! 

 As you can see you can search just about any subject area by typing your topic in the search engine. A variety of options will appear and you have the opportunity to preview each item prior to downloading them to your computer. Most items are free of charge! Students are even challenged to show their work many different ways.

Possibilities are endless with SMART Exchange! Writing lessons are even directly connected to Common Core State Standards. This lesson is geared toward Grade 2 but once a lesson is downloaded you can edit it to make it your own. Creating additional slides for reteaching and practice is a piece of cake.

YouTube For Schools

YouTube is launching a new tool to help teachers and students with their teaching and learning.  Some schools block access to YouTube because the content can be risky.  YouTube has answered the request of teachers across the country with YouTube EDU.  Now schools can have access to the educational benefits of YouTube without the worry of inappropriate content.  

Here are some ways I've been using educational YouTube videos in my classroom:

I used this video when teaching my students two digit addition and subtraction.




I used this video to teach my students how they can use a number line to add and subtract.

Welcome to My Blog!

Hello!

This is my first blogging experience and I'm so excited to begin the "blogging" journey.  I'm creating a blog for EDUC 584-Integrating Technology and Literacy which I am taking through the University of Saint Joseph.  I hope for this to be a positive experience for my own learning and the learning of my students.