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.

Itouches and the Water Cycle

iTouches for Science

Eager Faces

When the large Net Book cart arrived in my class, the students' wide eyes were eager to see what the "Power-to-Learn-Grant Santa" brought us this fine September day. It sat in our room for 10 minutes as I tried to carry on with my lesson. However, the students' mind were all focused on looking and exploring with the devices inside. I too couldn't help the temptation of the cart so I gave in.
I took one out and the room was filled with ooohhh and ahhhh. However, we had no luck logging in with a student account or even a teacher account. You could almost hear the hearts breaking when they were not able to use them. Jeanette emailed the "Powers That Be" and the three gentlemen appeared to fix the log in problem.
Finally, the students were able to log in. Students navigated the Library Resources page to Discovery Education. Students viewed video segments of the Moon Phases and answered journal questions over the material. Every student was motivated to learn about the moon THAT day. Nice!

First Day of the Net books!

We can touch our iPod Touches!

Today my student's were able to finally use their iPod Touches. Students were beyond thrilled to finally get to touch the iPod Touch. I loaded Dictionary.com and Math Fact Lite  (both free apps) so students could learn how to type on it. I only had 3 iPod Touches not synced, but it was success.  One student said, "Wow, this is the BEST day of my life!" and many thanked me for "winning" all of the cool iPod Touches.

Students were able to access the time difference in LA compared to Houston. I picture an elapsed time lesson in the future using the clock feature! We compared the weather we were experiencing this morning to the weather in Los Angeles. This will definitely make my temperature lesson in science and math more engaging this year. 

My students will be familiarizing themselves with the Dells next week. 

Technology learning curve

I am quickly learning more and more about Macs and now Netbooks. Our iPod Touches arrived a few weeks ago and after a few late nights at school all of the devices have now been registered and synced. :)  Some of the challenges I faced were a weak wi-fi signal. It was taking over 15 minutes pages to load, so I shut down my computer and tried again. No luck I still had Internet connectivity issues, so I called it a night and went home. A few days later I was able to finish syncing the first 20 iPod Touches and went much smoother....I guess the planets were aligned just right so I was able to sync without problems. Yesterday I was determined to finish syncing the last 2 iPod Touches! iPod Touch #21 wasn't being recognized by my computer and the screen has frozen with the silver Apple trademark. I went to Apple.com and tried to search for some possible troubleshooting tips. I tried them without any luck. I submitted a Tech Ticket and today thanks to Karen Justl we were able to fix the iPod Touch. Yay! 

Our Dell netbooks arrived yesterday, unfortunately, no one could log in (students or teachers). I was very grateful for the computer techs coming out quickly to solve the problem!  

I think we are finally up and ready to go!