Turn Your Blog into a Book

I found this cool site: blogbooker.com which can turn all of your blog posts into a book.  It will change your blog posts into pdf book format.  This is a cool idea for those that need to have or prefer to have actual copies of their portfolio for the year.

Setting Student & Teacher Expectations

For the past couple of years, I have had the students list what they see as characteristics of a idea teacher and student.  In the past, I would then have the students go through those lists to come up with 8 key terms that could be used to culminate all of the characteristics mentioned.  This year to save time, I decided to use wordle instead.  I had every student come up with a list of characteristics for a model student and a separate list for what a great teacher would be like.  I then typed each of those words into a google and doc and copied and pasted that list into a wordle.  I really liked how this turned out because I was able to pass out the expectations to the students as well as hang them in the room.  The way wordle works is that the more often a word was mentioned, the larger that word is.  This helps point out the characteristics that students feel are most important without leaving out any student input.  I was then able to post that on the front page of my class website.  I can then review these expectations throughout the year and use them as a reminder to myself as well.  I am planning on doing a student survey in the middle of the year to see how they believe I am doing on each of these characteristics and then I could also have a discussion with each of them.

Tech tools students can use for presentations

Glogster.com
prezi.com
blabberize.com
commoncraft.com
Easel.ly  
http://www.thinglink.com/
http://www.mentormob.com/beta/splash
Themeefy lets you grab pretty much anything you want off the Web, and add your own materials, to create a personalized magazine that can be shared/embedded wherever you want. It looks pretty neat and simple.

Blogger is the new Journal Notebook

As an ELA teacher, I remember many years when I tried to implement the journal prompt a day.  While this was good in idea, the difficulty I had was in keeping students accountable for doing their daily writing.  I can remember taking 2 large boxes of notebooks home for a weekend in order to read through, respond, or grade these journals.  With all of the other writing that needed to be graded, I was also lucky if I was able to do that twice a grading period.  Therefore, I give you:

5 Reasons why I think blogger is going to be great this year:

5.  Students can see progress and growth throughout the year

4.  Their journal can double as a place for notes which we know is what would really happen to a journal notebook anyways, even when it was supposed to stay in the room cubbies.

3.  I will get more than 1 word responses and real thoughts and opinions.  Afterall, some students spend hours on online social communities where they are more than willing to share their lives, ideas, thoughts and opinions with an entire world through a little screen... and they enjoy doing this.  I'm not going to tell them that one of their hobbies is actually journaling.

2.  I will no longer have to haul boxes of notebooks home with me

1. Students can't really say they lost their blogger and the dog can't eat it.

Digital Classroom Supplies List

I recently went shopping for my kids' school supplies.  On the first day of class one of the first things teachers go through with the students is the list of supplies needed for the class like a binder, notebook, folder, pens, pencils...   That leads me to think about how I can bring the traditional school materials into the 21st century classroom tools.  Some ideas:

1. binder for resources online:  Evernote combined with google drive
2. Journaling and taking notes: Blogger
3. Scissors, glue, construction paper, crayons, markers...:  Prezi, Powtoon, and other presentation tools that I will discover this year.

Will all of my resources be digital?  No!  While computers open up endless possibilities, this can also be overwhelming.  Variety of Key.

Great for Last Minute Sub

Breaking News English is a great free resource for connecting current events news with reading comprehension skills.  It contains interesting articles on current events and then has pages of activities that can accompany that article.  I will say that most of these are more of your read and recall and don't require the deeper thought that the common core expects but it does make for a last minute lesson for a sub as you can just pick and chose from the many activities that go with each article.  It would be great if in the future there could be more activities or lessons directly related to the common core that go with each article.

Summer School Ipad Class Summary

This year's summer school ipad class (Ilearn with Ipads) has come to an end and has again been a favorite for many students.  For each session kids left the first couple days saying, "I love this class."  Part of this was because they can't help but love a class where they feel they are just playing games on an ipad.  What they don't see is that the "games" they are playing help students develop their problem solving skills, creativity, artistic side, math facts, vocabulary, or spelling.  Every year I am frustrated with the amount of time that needs to be spent up front finding and testing apps but in the end I always feel good about the class that I was able to offer.

When choosing apps, my primary objectives are to find apps that:

• help students develop problem solving skills and the ability to think outside the box to find answers
• help students persevere when apps become challenging rather than give up
• offer students a list of challenge or academic apps that they can add to their own home devices 

I can consider an app successful if after introducing the app:

• students come in to tell me they just put the app on their own device
• students come in and can't wait to start playing an app so they can get to the next level                 (One T Draw was good for that 2nd session)
• play the apps I introduced during challenge and school time instead of playing old favorites            (Big success when these apps beat out minecraft or clash of clans)

Apps used this year 

Most often played during free choice (and beat minecraft or clash of clans :)

• Falling stars: Also introduced in a music class
• Magic Piano: Cool and new this year for kids
• Smule Sing
• Pottery:  Always a favorite
• Draw N Guess: played most often.  Students liked the social aspect of playing over wifi against friends.
• Spy Mouse: probably most downloaded by students on their own devices
• One T Draw
• Dump Truck
• Flockwork
• HairSalon: students would create their own hair style and have students vote on which they thought was the best do.  What I thought was cool is that they specifically explained why they liked one style over another.

Students liked but didn't often play on their own

• Educreations
• Soundrop
• Sketchin
• Brain Lab
• What Pic
• Scratch Pic
• 4 Pics 1 word
• Brain School
• Stack the States
• Google Earth
• Flow: Favorite last year but most kids had already played it
• Munch Time
• Greedy Spiders: always a difficult game but kids still enjoy it
• Slice It
• Quell
• Flockwork
• Where's Perry
• Where's my Water
• Where's my Cheese
• Lazors
• Doodle Destroy
• Math Evolve
• Math Zombies
• Numbers
• Math Ninja
• Math Rocket: played only the first session.  Turns out you don't even need to do math in order to build the rocket.  Kids cheat.
• Letris

Introduced but not really hits:

• Educreations:  Great App for introducing themselves the first day
• Animation HD: some kids did great with this but others didn't really want to put the thought or time in to create something nice
• Singing Fingers
• World of Oil: Tough game for a lot of the kids to play
• Toy Physics: Again, kids struggled
• Connect the Bulb: Students didn't really understand the game.  I really liked it though.  Maybe it was too difficult

Ideas for next year:

• More social games!  Maybe even a class of just social games with the ipad??  Will need to pay for many of these or create game center accounts.  Each ipad could have a generic account.

Fun Ipad App for Practicing Conventions

The common core states that students should spell correctly and have control over sentence structure.  This leaves many teachers wondering what this means and how do you teach that.  One app called Grading Game helps students practice skills in conventions and it's a lot of fun.  The basis of the game is that students need to find errors in a paper in order to win points or money.  When a student points out an error, the correction is made and explained in a word or two.  At first I thought that it would be easy for students to just click anywhere in the writing until they came across an error, but the app covers that as students will lose time if they are incorrect about an error.  I know I had a lot of fun playing.  The timer is only a minute so it keeps things exciting.

Grading with CCSS?? How does it work?

If science and social studies is integrating with com arts, how do you grade that?  With me teaching com arts and science and social studies to be in different classes, ideas are: do writing together with the other class and both teachers grade it (one for com. arts and one for content) or have a category in the subject area for com arts. The concern with the second is that a student can be really good with science but score poorly because of the com. arts.  The difficulty with the first is having to coordinate the grade to figure out which hour a student has social studies and then having to refile for when they have com. arts.  Key to this would be having students always label a paper with content hour & com arts hour.  After grading one paper, Carrie can refile for me to submit the grade.

Standards Based Grading: Active Grade

Trying out standards based grading for a possibility this year.  I will be teaming with social studies and science along with the common core except that I will be focusing heavily on the com arts skills.  One program, ActiveGrade costs $4.99 per month for a single teacher and looks pretty comprehensive and easy to use.  Currently we are using Skyward so I am looking into how I can use skyward for that same purpose.  It may just be that I put a separate grade for each part of the rubric.