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