We Can Help the Earth!

For an Earth Day project, my primary classes drew pictures in Tuxpaint of what they could do to help the Earth. We put everything together in PhotoStory.

BeeBots

While we have been giving our state assessments, my primary students have been in the gym with Dylan learning basic programming with our five BeeBots. Testing has been underway all week in our elementary lab. So primary classes were moved to our gym, where we had lots of room to use our Beebots. We received our BeeBots by participating in a grant from Wichita State University.

I downloaded and printed BeeBot cards from Sparklebox. We have copies of shapes, colors and the alphabet. We have used the BeeBots before, so students were asked to group the 6in cards together. Then the programmers told their partners where the Beebot would stop. If the programmer was correct, they earned a point. We designated one person in each group to keep a score. The kindergarten/turtles did not keep scores, they just took turns being the programmer.

Students were also asked to lay the alphabet cards down in one line. Then practice their spelling words by using the pause button on the BeeBot to signify a letter selection before moving on to the next selection.

With number cards, student can practice solving math facts. I would suggest using flash cards and asking the programmer to send the Bee-Bot to the correct answer.

Our third grade teacher, Emily Schmidt, uses the Beebots quite a bit in her classroom across the curriculum. She has several resources and video clips of using the beebots on her Weebly page.

BeeBot Resources
Kent ICT
BeeBot Wiki
SparkleBox 1000's of Free printables
Emily Schmidt's BeeBot resources

Our Animal Stories

Primary students recently researched and wrote stories about animals. After typing the stories in Microsoft Word, students illustrated their stories using TuxPaint. I collected all the completed stories into one Microsoft Word document and uploaded into Calameo. Calameo is a website where people can publish and share work.

Calameo was very easy to use and it had several privacy options. I did become frustrated with the site. The students stories and pictures are suppose to be on one page. I have fiddled with the document, put in page breaks but I am still having problems. It might work better to convert your document to pdf format first. I usually use pdfonline, but for some reason I am having problems with receiving my completed document. So, I used Zamzar to convert our word document to a pdf. Once I uploaded the pdf to Calameo then the pictures stayed with the text on our animal stories. Click here to view the publication from the Calameo website.

Last year we did something similar only I borrowed an idea from Tammy Worcester and had the students create a zoo exhibit for their animal.

Punny Valentine

Larry Ferlazzo helped us develop this holiday lesson plan. Larry shared a link on his blog from Mightybooks called Punny Valentine. After playing this talking book for my primary students, they had an opportunity to draw their own Punny Valentine. We used Mixbook to display our cards.

| View Sample Photo Books | Create your own Photo Book

Coming up with a pun was hard for some of my primary students, so we also recorded a Valentine greeting using Audacity. Students that had trouble creating a punny Valentine were just asked to create a Valentine card. I put the cards and the greeting together using Photostory.





5th graders used Comic Life to have a little fun creating Valentine comic strips.

Snowmen at Night

We have been working at learning Microsoft Word basics in my primary classroom over the last two weeks. Students as young as kindergartners are learning many skills including demonstrating how to center, underline and bold the text. When you have a room with 26 students, this does take patience and it is nice to have help. I am thankful for my very patient aid, Dylan. I borrowed an idea from Lisa Harris and Michelle Brown on CAPspace to put some of our skills to use.

I read the book, Snowmen at Night, by Caralyn Buehner to my primary students. Then, students used TuxPaint to illustrate what they would do at night if they were a snowperson. The Turtles (aka kindergarten) did their typing within TuxPaint. The Honeybees and Buffaloes (aka grade 1 and grade 2) imported their picture into Microsoft Word where they were asked to type and center the title of their paper, right align the body of their text, print and save their document. This turned out to be such a cute project that I uploaded the student TuxPaint drawings into MixBook and copied in the text into the book in order to spread a smile or two. This Mixbook project could be a great collaborative project to share and work on with other schools around the world.

| View Sample Photo Books | Create your own Photo Book

I do have some great news that I want to share about Mixbook. After I first discovered Mixbook, I sent an email off letting Mixbook know that I thought they had a terrific product and with a few tweaks could be a wonderful educational tool. You have to know in the back of my mind, I was not really expecting any response. So you can imagine my surprise last year when I received an email from Andrew Lafoon, co-creator and founder of Mixbook. We ended up Skyping and discussing Mixbook. Through our conversion, I discovered that Mixbook had been talking with a few other teachers and was working to develop an educational version.

Over Christmas break, Marcel Sanchez, head of the educational division, contacted me to ask me a few more questions about Mixbook and to give me an update. Last week, I received another Mixbook update via email. Mixbook is just about ready to release their educational version.

Here is a quick overview. Mixbook is looking at charging educators a 1 time fee of $10.00. Mixbook is also looking at giving educators a 20% discount when we publish a hard copy of our books. In fact, the discount for teachers is already in effect. There will also be a wide array tools and features that will help teachers persuade their districts to unblock Mixbook and let the learning begin. When Mixbook comes out with the new educational version, make sure to sign up again if you already have an existing account with them, so you do not miss out. Mixbook is a wonderful tool to aid in digital storytelling and I am impressed that the team at Mixbook took time to speak with this small town tech!

I also read Snowmen at Night to my preschool classes. Then we used Audacity to create a podcast of what they would do if they were snowmen at night. I used podOmatic to host our podcast. I will link the show to this blog, but note that I had problems with the podOmatic player last week when I gave this a try on my Martin Luther King, jr post. The podcasts seem to download okay but I cannot play them from the web. So I hope you are able to view the preschool episode as preschoolers are always so cute to listen to.

Snowmen at Night
by the Preschoolers

Santa Letters

Here is a fun way to personalize letters to Santa.



My primary students (prek-3) started this lesson by drawing pictures in TuxPaint of what they would like to receive from Santa Claus for Christmas. For the younger students, prek-grade 2, I created a postcard template from Microsoft PowerPoint for the students to use. I divided the slide in half by using the line tool. If you would like specific instructions you might check out this book by Tammy Worcester, called 50 Quick and Easy Computer Activities.

I created the stamp by using Stamps.com to create a photo stamp. (Notice as I was typing this entry, that the direct link to the photo stamps was not working. Hopefully, that is only temporary.) Then I took a screen shot of the completed stamp and copied the image into the postcard. I used PowerPoint's crop tool to get rid of the extra stuff around the stamp, then saved the template for student use.

Tuxpaint imagines were inserted into the template. My aid and I helped the younger students type their letters to Santa. (Third grade students did all of this on their own. Second grade students typed the letter to Santa, but had help inserting the image into the template.)

I did combine all the postcards into one PowerPoint before printing. I printed the letters as handouts 2 per page and laminated each post card. Then I made a display in the hallway to hang the postcards. As student's leave for Christmas break, I will give them their Santa letter to take home to their parents as a keepsake.

I wanted to display our letters on my blog. I choose MagToo SlideShow and was really happy with the ease of this application. I saved the PowerPoint presentation in jpeg format. This made it easy to upload each Santa letter. I selected a style, skin and theme. This app was really uncluttered and easy to use. The user can even set the timing of the show and add music. It would be nice if MagToo would offer an education side where students might not be exposed to improper examples. They have a good product.

If I Built a Car

My primary students, (k-2) just finished a digital storytelling project using Photostory. We began our project by reading the children's book, "If I Built a Car," by Chris Van Dusen to the students. Then students were asked to think about what they would add to a car that they had the opportunity to build. Student created their cars by drawing pictures in TuxPaint . Student drawings were imported into PhotoStory and audio was added.