ETC_Final Project

1.    Target Audience – A small enrichment/gifted group of 4^th grade students, who work at or above grade level

2.    Materials – Computers and access to Glogster and other Internet based search engines, such as Google, Yahooligans, or Teacher Tube. Reference books.

3.    Objectives – *SS.4.A.3 Exploration and Settlement/ American History

                        Grade 4

•  They students will use Glogster to demonstrate their knowledge   of Florida’s first city of St. Augustine.

·      They will apply their knowledge from their research to find important facts.

·      They will produce a digital poster

* http://www.floridastandards.org/Standards/PublicPreviewIdea.aspx?IdeaID=764

4.    Procedure –

·      Students will be given time to gather information. They will make trips to media center to check out reference books.

·      They will be given two; one hour blocks in the computer lab to pull up pictures and videos for their project. They may also work at home with their parents to research more images, videos and facts.

·      They will bring their pictures to class, or email them to the teacher.

·      The teacher will compile a folder on the shared drive that students can access with all the pictures.

·      Students will go to the computer lab and begin to design their individual digital poster.

·      It will take about a week to complete the posters.

·      At the end of the week the students will present their findings

5.    Web 2.0 Tool – Glogster- a web 2.0 tool that makes digital posters/multi-media presentation using images, text, and videos.

6.    Social Participation/Social Learning – The students will have to discuss the important aspects of St. Augustine. In small groups they will go over the facts that they have collected. They must discuss what places should be included and why. They will take a group vote on what is the most important information they have. Lastly the groups will share with each other why they feel these places are important part of St. Augustine. Once all the important locations are chosen, groups will draw slips with these locations. They will chose the most important facts or aspect to include on their posters.

7.    Making Connections – The students have been studying Florida history including it’s explores. They have now begun studying the actual construction of the fort as well as the history of the city. Students will be able to follow up their learning when we take a class field trip to St. Augustine at the end of March.

8.    Create/Produce – They will present their individual Glogster posters to the class and give an oral presentation on what they learned. This will include images, videos and facts on the different aspects of St Augustine.

9.    Assessment –

·      The class will complete a peer review in which the students will score each presentation using a set rubric.

·      The class will revisit the posters after the trip to St. Augustine and the students will evaluate how helpful the information was.

·      They will also decide what facts or information could be added to improve posters.

10. Reflection –

o   1) After we visit and tour St. Augustine we will have a class discussion on what they learned, how the Glogster posters helped them, and what information could be added to the poster to make them better for next year students.

o   (2) This activity did not go as planned this week. As discussed before my student’s are taking the FCAT on Tuesday and so I had revamp my plans. I did introduce the idea to the class. However I was only able to implement it with two students. I followed the plan on a much smaller scale. Instead of choosing individual location they pick locations base out of some library books I checked out. They collected different facts and created very different presentations. They were very excited about the web 2.0 tool and shared it with the class, and the are now very eager to get to use it…after Tuesday! I plan to go back and attempt this again. One of my students commented that he was “so excited to have found something better than power point,” he said his mom would by “super excited about something new” to do his projects on. I look forward to my second time around. I will keep you posted!

PE5_Spelling City

 Wow! Check out all the different educational games you can play. I can fill in the blanks. Not only does this check my understanding of the word, but it reads it a loud so that I can hear what it sounds like, great for auditory learners.

 On Spelling City I have a ton of options. Check out the long list of games and activities I could choose from. The students would have a options in choosing how they will practice their spelling words.

 This was my daughters favorite game. I game of hangman, between cat and mouse. I have never seen her so motivate to study her spelling words. These games are great  motivators.

 Lastly I found that it is a great site for practicing handwriting at any level. It also allows you to print worksheets to use with your students. I love this option. I am so excited to implement this in my classroom!

PE4_Spelling City

I had heard people at other schools mention this web 2.0 tool, that they use with their students, but I hadn't had a chance to go check it out. Now that I look at it, I am thinking "boy what have I been missing?" This is amazing for spelling homework. It is meaningful, fun, and completely related to my weeks lessons. I pick the spelling words I choose the activities and I can even print out worksheets.

It was so easy, you just click on the register button, fill in your information, there is even a place to find your school so that your students can search the site base on their school. Then log in a get to work! You can start adding your spelling words and be ready to start instantly. 

 My favorite part of this site so far was it's user friendliness. It also has a great selection of tutorial videos that walk you through several steps in getting you ready to use it in your classroom. The site is free, and you have access to most of their information. There is a premium account that you can upgrade to and I found it to be reasonably priced at a little over $50/30 students for the year. I can't wait to get started!

PE3_iMovie

PE3_iMovie

Lynda.com iMovie Essential Training

I enjoyed my iMovie Essential Training, through Lynda.com. I loved the platform they offered. It was very user friendly, reminded me of the Full Sail Dashboard. The clips were well organized and extremely informative. I could follow along easily and was pleasantly surprised with “eye” icon that let me know which tutorials I had already watched.

After watching all the tutorials I feel more confident using iMovie. I have a better understanding of the tools that are available to me. Which tools I need to familiarize myself with and make sort cuts for myself, as well as which ones I would like to get better acquainted with that I won’t be using on a day-to-day basis, such as the green screen.

One of the tool I will be using more often is the mapping tool. I love the visual of placing people at the locations and watching the travel line as we reach the next destination.

I enjoyed working on Lynda.com and can’t wait to see all the other software they make tutorials for. I can see this is the start of a great “friendship” with Lynda.

PE2_iMovie

Key Word Marker

This is like the Dewey Decimal system for libraries. The keyword tool allows you to mark your video with heading that let you know who or what is in the video. You can mark them with names or themes, such as Family or Daniela, and then search the clips with those key words. 

You can pull up all the clips that have Daniela in them or eliminate the clips which are associated with that tag. It’s like a short cut reference to who and what you want in the video. Makes editing easy and allows you to make tailored or individual moves out of long events.

 This is a great idea. I especially like that you can make the tags a short cut, in which you the select a clip press the number that is correlated to that tag and the clip is marked. This tool is great for keeping track of family videos and vacations.

PE1_iMovie

iMovie: Ducking

I love Lynda.com. This site has made learning iMovie a breeze.

I am so glad they took time to introduce ducking. I have needed this several times for other projects and not known it existed. Ducking is when you have added music to your clips, but then need the music to fade back so that you can hear the person talking. iMovie has thought of everything. You choose the section you would like to use, go to your edit screen click the ducking box and viola …your video now had a seamless transition between the music and the original sound. 

BP7_Glogster One Minute Video

If you have trouble viewing click here

Glogster

BP4_Glogster

This Web 2.0 tool is amazing! GLOGSTER!!! I am always looking for a new an exciting way to get my class engaged in creating book reports. I come up with all sorts of ideas on what they can do to make it fun. We create posters, cereal boxes, power points, we even make character reports out of potatoes…but with Glogster they can create a poster that is a multi-media presentation. We were studying a non-fiction story this week about the Saguaro Cactus in the southwest United States. I created a poster to illustrate this plant. I was able to pull up pictures I had found on the internet that showed vivid pictures of this enormous cactus and the animals that inhabit them. On my poster I was able to embed a YouTube video that showed a person standing next to the spiny giant. This gave the students a better understanding of how tall this plant grows to be. I was able to add text and facts about the cactus that we could then go over in class. The students loved to see my work and were eager to know about the website.

            The best part was how simple this site was to use. It was extremely user friendly and I even let my students play with the site. They thought it was pretty cool too. Glogster is free to join all you need to do is sign up. There is “premium” package that allows you to manage your students and their accounts. This would be a great way to have your students do research and put together a presentation that is not only informative, visually engaging for the other students and great for the environment. The students could build a library of projects that they could look back at over the years instead of throwing the away once the project was sent 

home.

Here is an example of my work!

Setting up my theme and title

Adding an image

Finding a video

Adding a sticky note.

Final Product 

BP6_Link to Lori's Blog

Please follow my link to Lori's blog to learn more about Go!Animate! a neat 2.0 tool.

Dancing For Strangers: BP2_Go!Animate Web 2.0 Tool: "@font-face { font-family: 'Arial'; }@font-face { font-family: 'Cambria'; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0...."

Bp5_Link to Alicia's Blog

Please follow my link to Alicia's blog about Kideos a great web 2.0 tool...

planting seeds: BP2_Kideos: "@font-face { font-family: 'Cambria'; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: ..."

BP2_Game Classroom

I didn’t realize that there was a world of web 2.0 tools at my fingertips that could be so useful. After looking at some of the tools available online for communication, social networking and such, I decided to narrow my search to meet one simple objective, a fun way to reinforce math = MATH GAMES. In my classroom this is the area in which my students are struggling. They seem unmotivated to study and since one concept builds on the next, this makes introducing new materials much more difficult. The web 2.0 tool I found was Game Classroom; this was developed to help address the needs of parents and educators around the globe. They found that both parents and educators were frustrated with how boring learning had become for their students.  While navigating their site I found myself playing the games and having fun.  I played several math games that touched on probability, estimation, multiplication/division, and addition/subtraction. These games had higher level thinking skills and required students to focus. I could use this kind of application in my classroom to reinforce skills. I could set up a game of the week that could be part of our center rotation for students to play when they competed their class works. It would also be ideal to assign for homework, for those students that have computers at home. There is a fee to become a member of the site, however I found that you do have access to several well-designed games without signing up. Overall, I found both the math games and language arts games were educational, challenging, and more importantly for the student... FUN!

Multiplication

Grammar

Estimation

more grammar

BP3_Google Screen Shots

BP1_Welcome to my blog

Welcome to my new blog. I am not new to blogging I currently have a classroom blog. I teach 4th grade and use my blog as way to motivate my kids to write. They answer discussion question about our weekly story or novels as homework assignments. I am hoping to use this tool to help motive them to write out and show their work when working through math word problems.The kids seem to really enjoy blogging as part of their homework assignments, it has been a great motivator. A lot of my students rush home to get it done and post to my blog before I leave school for the day. I hope to show the same kind of enthusiasm for math blogging. Let the journey begin...