My third graders recently participated in a travel buddy project with Rowland NormentElementary School in North Carolina. This was our first travel buddy and I think the students really enjoyed the activity.
Students took Dino, their travel buddy, home each evening along with a school camera. Students were asked to take pictures and journal about their evening with Dino. We shared our Dino adventures on our blog, "Dino Visits Burrton".
I did try to use a variety of slide show applications to share the photographs that students took of Dino to expose myself to some apps and to give teachers an idea of what each had to offer. Animoto is still one of my favorites. Magtoo has many options to choose from when creating a slideshop. It unfortunately may have content on the website that is not child friendly. Voicethread would be a terrific option for a project like this. Easy to use and highly recommend. I struggle using VT in my district. There is something with our firewall that is not allowing my mic to connect to VT.
If you are unfamilar with Travel Buddies. Make sure and check out this informative post on travel buddies by Dyane Smokorowski (Smoke). Mrs. Smoke even included websites to look for travel buddy partners.
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.
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.
This lesson plan originated from Michelle Brown of Jefferson Elementary in New York. I made contact with Michelle after Lisa Harris, Micro-Computer Specialist and AV Coordinator at Jefferson Elementary, posted a project request on CAPSpace.
After reading "The Mitten" by Jan Brett, primary students at Burrton Elementary drew pictures in TuxPaint. (I allowed the Turtles, our kindergarten, to use the stamps on TuxPaint. The first and second graders had to draw a picture of what animal was hiding in their mitten.) Using Microsoft Word, we imported the completed picture into a mitten template. Then the students typed three clues about what was hiding in their mitten. We printed the mittens, cut them apart and glued one end together.
The Turtles (aka kindergarters) printed their animal, cut out the animal, and took turns putting their animal between two large gloves that I brought from home. I filmed each student sharing what was hiding in the gloves.
On Friday, January 30th, we used our Polycom system to talk with the first graders at Jefferson Elementary in New York. The first graders from both schools took turns reading their clues and guessing what was hiding in the mittens. Afterwards, we spent about 15 minutes allowing the students to ask each other questions. Visiting with students in another region of the United States was great learning opportunity and a lot of fun.
During our Polycom session, I filmed and took pictures. However, I later discovered that the way I had my camera hooked up, it caused a lot of static. I had the Honeybees (grade 1) and Buffaloes (grade 2) read their clues to me during computers on Monday while I filmed once again. Windows Movie Maker was used to edit our movie. The mitten movie was then published on TeacherTube. (I put all the primary students into one movie.)
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.
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.
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.
I am a Technology Integration Specialist (TIS) for a school district in Missouri. I have been a TIS for about 7 years now and continue to enjoy learning new ways to use technology to teach children.
My third graders recently participated in a travel buddy project with 
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