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When You Know Better You Do Better

When you know better you do better is how I describe my journey to becoming a model for crediting sources appropriately. I can remember being a first year teacher, teaching in a very low socio-economic school with very limited resources. As one of nine fourth grade teachers, and the only new teacher, I was the one who had to hunt for and find enough books and supplies for my fourth grade students. This was way back in 1994. I had a set of ten hard cover spelling books for my class of twenty-nine students. Spelling lists and activities are pretty repetitive and it was easy to make ten books work. However, when it came to novels to read, it was another story. I had to teach a short chapter book at the same time as the other teachers. This was the time of iGAP testing and common assessments. I had to teach the book and I had to take the assessment on the same day as the other teachers, but I only had six books. I tried to get extra books from other teachers, our library, and my principal. One of the teachers gave me a photocopy of the whole book and told me to use my month's worth of copies on making enough books for my class. So, I did just that. I had no idea I was breaking copyright law at the time. I was simply focused on getting the books into my students hands. As time went on, I found myself in a graduate class discussing copyright. It was eyeopening. I had a lot of guilt and remorse about some of the things I had done. Since then, with the explosion of online resources and learning tools, I have educated myself on copyright and fair use laws. I have worked hard to cite all of my sources and teach my fellow teachers and students how to do it too. Recently I was helping a fifth grade teacher with her students' research projects. I shared a Common Sense Education Digital Citizenship lesson, How to Cite a Site, using Nearpod. The students were very surprised by the implications of copyright law. They did a wonderful job with their paraphrasing and citing sources. I was very proud of them. I also get to teach graduate ed tech student about copyright and fair use in many courses that I teach. The more I know, the better I do. But now it is the more I know, the more I share about what I know.

Student Citations

Student Citing Work

Women's History Month With QR Codes

March is Women's History Month. To share some famous women with my students I created a set of posters that have a famous woman's picture, a quote by that famous woman, and a QR code. When students look at the picture and read the quote they are to guess who the famous woman is. Then, when they scan the QR code they get to learn who the famous woman is. Kids enjoy learning this way. They also enjoy making their own QR code pictures with sayings or famous people.

If you would like these posters to share with your students you can download them here - https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxOiAHva3B1hb1pnejVheUhoWGM/edit?usp=sharing 

Want to learn more about QR codes? Check out this presentation on QR codes -https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1OOBxDeX8yDcJpcXq_uOz6HXsRsUdNuBtvbBDmqgknzA/edit?usp=sharing

Ancient Egypt PechaKucha

My reading class has been reading the nonfiction book Mummies, Tombs, and Treasure by Lila Perl. We have been enjoying learning about ancient Egypt and nonfiction text features. I was looking for a culminating project that would focus on summarization, because it is a skill that was identified as one we had to work on by Discovery Education Assessment. When searching, I had to look no further than the Discovery Educator Network Spotlight on Strategies Blog. There I found a post on PechaKucha. A PechaKucha is a presentation format where an image is shown and the presenter speaks for only 20 seconds. This was perfect! My students have been working on their oral fluency and summarizing, so this project was great for them. Each student was assigned an image from Discovery Education Streaming Plus. I share the image link with them on Edmodo. They then clicked on the link and logged into Discovery Education. Then, they learned about the image on Discovery Education in the Details section with the image and from other sources. The put their image into a Google Drive Presentation and also put the citation on their slide too. They wrote up a summary that would take them about 20 seconds to read. Students practiced reading their summaries and we used the Chrome App MoveNote to record their presentation. Students ran the recording in move note and showing of the slides live from Google Drive presentation on an iPad on the screen in class presented through Apple TV.


The picture shown below captures students running the recording of the presentation.

The link beolw is our PechaKucha Presentation on Ancient Egypt. Students did all of the recording and directing for the Movenote presentation. Students are empowered when they get to run the show. You will see an authentic project made by students, miscues and all! Please enjoy!

Ancient Egypt PechaKucha


What students liked about the PechaKucha -
- It was very visual. You could see exactly what they were talking about.
- The presentations were short, you did not have a chance to get tired of listening to them.
- They could practice their fluency. They learned that it was true about how many words they read in a minute.

Stop Motion Videos with iStopMotion

My class is pretty excited about the new Lego movie coming out soon. We talked a lot about stop motion and how cool it was. In the past we have done stop motion videos with digital cameras, tripods, and iMovie. It took a long time, but the results were worth it. But now I am loving the app iStopMotion by Bionx. It is just about the best stop motion app I have seen. It is super simple to use, has controls that are familiar to students who use iPads, allows for audio recording after the pics are all taken, and best of all it offers a camera overlay that lets you see where your last pic was. My students watched the how to video that comes with the app and then were off and running making cool stop motion videos. The assignment was to write a story after filling out a story map to ensure they had a complete plot, then they could begin their own Lego stop motion video. In a very short time they came up with some pretty neat videos for their first time.
Here are 3 videos made with iStopMotion
The Stolen Things - http://youtu.be/5hnM_fEV9QE
Joe and Mr. Leego - http://youtu.be/WQ6vzmPl6Xw
Gold! All mine! - http://youtu.be/6778xPzaLL0
In a few weeks we will be reading some Greek myths and summarizing them. Then, the students will make stop motion videos with this app! They are very excited to use the app again and I am excited to see what they create!

Wordle Vocabulary Activity

I have had students work more and more with vocabulary this school year due to the vocabulary push in the CCSS. My school has a subscription to Visual Thesaurus, but www.wordvis.com would work too! In this activity students evaluate the word and the synonyms/words associated with it to help them understand the meaning of the word. This would also be a great activity for the connect part of Vocabulary's CODE if you are using the Core Six Model. After students evaluate the words associated with their vocabulary term they rank them and create a word cloud in Wordle.

Here are the directions for this activity-
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxOiAHva3B1hZWNuX2Rhdmt1UWc/edit?usp=sharing

Cracking Vocabulary's CODE with an iPad Activity

The school district that I teach at has adopted The Core Six: Essential Strategies for Excellence with the Common Core as a guide for us as we work with the CCSS. the last of the six strategies is Vocabulary's CODE. According to the book, "Vocabulary's CODE is a strategic approach to direct vocabulary instruction that helps students master crucial concepts and retain new vocabulary terms. Students work their way from initial exposure to in-depth understanding through a series of progressive learning activities, which help students "crack" Vocabulary's CODE."





This is how CODE is defined in the book.
C - Connect
O - Organize
D - Deep-Process
E - Exercise

These are the apps that are use for CODE.
C - Connect - Safari and go to www.wordvis.com
O - Organize - Card Sorting app
D - Deep-Process - Haiku Deck app
E - Exercise - Haiku Deck app

The step by step directions for this activity are shared here -
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxOiAHva3B1hSGIwUVNJQnU0UVE/edit?usp=sharing