Consuming Podcasts

Students dove into iTunes! Today, we discovered podcasting. My goal is for them to actually make podcasts based on Time for Kids and/or National Geographic for Kids articles they have read in the past.
For now, they are listening to different types of podcasts and taking notes how successful podcasts are run. We have decided to make a class running list of the top podcasts we like.

Bookr, ABCya!, and Flickr

This week I will be introducing my students to Bookr and the website ABCya! I discovered ABCya! from Tammy Worcester's weekly tip. It's an awesome website with tons of possibilties. I love the Word Cloud...it's just like Wordle only you can save the image as a jpg and they seem to have more possibilities with text direction. While you don't get as many font choices there are still plenty to choose from and since of the font names on Wordle were not appropriate for elementary. Word Cloud is perfect!!

I hope to post links to my student's bookr's in the coming weeks. I will also be introducing my students to some of the Big Lab Tools ...which they can use for the T.E.E. project.

Earth Day at Terrace

Our students have been very busy working on their T.E.E. projects. We are taking a 2-week break from meeting together since we are going to be testing this week and we are working on other projects.

A pair of students brought awareness to energy conservation to our school on Earth Day. Our entire school went black for 5 minutes. Since we are an open concept school teachers could turn on a lamp or just half-lights depending on where they were in the building. Since Annie and I are in temporary buildings we didn't get the really effect, but I did peek down the hall and saw nothing but blackness. Wow!

Our paper retrievers continue their daily paper runs. I know our garbage can is a lot less full these days.

We are also collecting Capri Sun pouches. At first I was worried that we wouldn't collect the miniumum number required by Terracycle (100), but as of Friday, April 23rd we have collected 155 pouches!! We have made more signs to post around the school and hopefully our announcement made it in time to for our school newsletter.

Plan B

Animoto is such a fabulous resource!! A FREE resource that apparently many, many other people are taking advantage of just like us. As our students begin preparing for their T.E.E. presentations some are wanting to create an Animoto. Well...in theory that's a great idea and it USED to be really fast...not so much now. Pictures are taking a really long time to load. One of my students found all the pictures she needed so she was ready to go. She spent over 30 minutes waiting for her 6 pictures to load. She tried another computer...she tried doing it in the afternoon instead of in the morning. Other students experienced the same thing.I thought it might be a SBISD server issue, however, another said that she tried using Animoto at home with the same result...the slow uploading.

It's time for plan B....iMovie or Photostory. Our music teacher is an Apple expert at our campus, so she is going to teach Annie and I how to create an iMovie using pictures. I have only used iMovie with video. Unfortunately we aren't going to meet until Monday, so today Annie and I should our classes how to create a photostory. I still remember when photostory was the fun and new tool! Many students created projects during our library time...not so much anymore. No one knew how to use it. There were no problems loading and there are plenty of free music choices for our students to choose from.

Problems with Signal

Working on Terrace Environmental Expo

T.E.E. - Planning

Our classes have official started planning for the T.E.E. (Terrace Environmental Expo) The T.E.E. will be May 18. We will have students presenting information in the library part of the day and again in the evening from 6-7pm for their parents and other community members. Each student has a T.E.E. project folder where they are taking their notes & writing reflections and setting goals for the next meeting. Students were also given a calendar with 3 important dates - their planning deadline, project deadline, and the T.E.E. Annie and I realized we needed to teach our students the steps in which you complete such a big project and we wanted to them to use their time efficiently so we gave them calendars.

We have been conferencing with students to help focus their ideas/passions. Time for Kids and National Geographic Explorer are wonderful resources of information and have really opened our eyes to problems of the world. Students have become so passionate about parrots and other endangered animals. During one class discussion about the California Condor my students couldn't believe everyone didn't care about saving them. I told them a lot of people just aren't aware this is a problem. Awareness is key to making change!

We laid out the expectations for T.E.E. and the process leading up to it, then posed the question to students "What are your passionate about? How are you going to share with others your passion?" We brainstormed a list of conservation topics, gave each student a netbook or iTouch, and they were off. Students discussed the list of topics with their partner did some research and came up with a topic. Students have made plans to bring awareness to their topic during the specific day(s) in April to the rest of the school. We spent last week gathering supplies, making posters, and getting boxes ready. Some students will start their projects this week others in the coming weeks.

Check back for pictures!