Texas Hero Animotos

Every year students research one of the Texas Revolution heroes. This year students are in the process of creating either an Animoto or Glogster. It takes a less time for students to complete the project and they love the end product! More project examples will be posted as they finish.

Return to Glogster

We have been studying colonization to Texas. As a way of trying to help students remember the famous people and vocabulary students made a Glogster. The technical difficulties we had at the beginning of the year have been resolved. Every now and then something weird happens when using Glogster. One student dragged an image onto his wall and for some reason he had an abundant supply of arrows. It was almost like the drag a copy action in Inspire. Students did ask if they could make an Animoto instead.... I told them for our next project they can make an Animoto.

Students will be researching a famous Texan who fought in the Texas Revolution or was one of the famous Old Three Hundred. Students will then create an Animoto--they are excited to get an opportunity to use Animoto again. One thing I really like about Animoto is that it can be done so quickly Glogster are more time intensive and take several days to complete depending upon how fancy the Glog is. I find it interesting that students prefer Animoto over Glogster-- it must be the music video feel to it.

Animoto Fun

Annie and I attended Region IV's Technology Conference last week. Animoto and Wordle were the two most popular web 2.0 tools that it seems like everyone was talking about! While I have used Wordle before I didn't realize how much more you can do with it. My students used it at the beginning of the year to introduce themselves and they loved it. This is something we will continue to use throughout the year.

My students have never made an Animoto, however, they have seen an Animoto that I created to introduce the Texas Regions. While at the conference we attended a workshop on book trailers. I loved this idea! I adapted it to fit our time frame and a week later I had my first book trailer published! It worked out really well because my reading groups are in the process of finishing their books. Within each reading group students work with a partner to create a book trailer for their reading group book. I was able to find some book trailers for us to consume. We analyzed and critiqued them the new few days. By this time they could not wait to get started!
Students planned what images they would search for and what they would say. They were limited in what they could say so they had to learn to be concise.

The first group finished and they were even shocked at how quickly it took. It took all of 10 minutes to import the pictures, add text, and choose the music. I limited their music choices to classical only. There are some inappropriate lyrics under Hip Hop. As soon as they finished they asked when they could make another one. What a great way to demonstrate their understanding of the book and what they felt was important to share to the reader as well as images that were key to the book.

All of the book trailers will be posted on our classroom blog, but I'll post a few here as well.

Our Classes Tracking Our Thinking

What a great day! Our classes got together for the first time today. We were able to encourage our kiddos to socially read a nonfiction article while tracking our thinking. We decided that next time to fish bowl the lesson to get a more rich response to the text.