A Reflective Journey Through...
Sorry to have gone a bit out of order, but I have been saving this module for last! This topic is the first one that caught my eye and the one that has peaked my curiosity the most, so I am thrilled to make it my tenth and final lesson!
A couple of years ago, I learned about Kahoot during a professional development day and was so excited to incorporate it into my units as a fun, motivating way to review content. Since then, I have used it for library lessons with students, have shown teachers how to use it in their classrooms, have used it as a fun send-off in a retirement party, and have had fourth graders create their own Kahoots (within my account, to be safe). I loved using Kahoot in every one of these situations, but I started to feel a little Kahoot-ed out. I was very much ready to learn about some new tools to mix into the curriculum, and this lesson was just what I needed! As I read through the lesson's resources, I found several tools that I will use throughout the future. I am looking forward to having my oldest students create Jeopardy-like quizzes in Flippity like Ms. Khan did to help students review content and to then have different classes play each other's games. I already know a few teachers who will be excited to collaborate with me on that project to reinforce social studies and science concepts, although it would work well with library-specific units too. I will also use Flippity's Random Name PIcker, Crossword and Word Search creators, Bingo creator, and Mad Lib creator. I am amazed by how easy it is to create all of these things from a Google spreadsheet- Just awesome! I loved learning about Quizizz in this lesson too. While it is very similar to Kahoot, here are a few of the major differences I learned from Tony Vincent's post and video demonstration:
While Flippity and Quizizz are both incredible, the review game site that I am most excited to use in class is Quizlet! I love it because it can transform games like a Dewey Decimal Memory game that I've had students do in pairs with printed cards over the years into such an exciting, motivating, team-building experience, especially if I use the Quizlet Live feature. As I have learned about Flippity, Quizizz and Quizlet through several articles and videos this morning, I have bookmarked all three in a "Motivational Teaching Tools" folder within my Chrome bookmark bar for easy access. Because there were even more tools that grabbed my attention in this lesson, here are a few others that I've added to the folder as well:
Polly, I will never be able to thank you enough for all of the fantastic lessons you've created and for all of the resources you have shared in this course!!! It is the most valuable professional development course I have ever taken in my thirteen years as an educator because of the breadth and depth of topics and because of the freedom given to each participant that enabled us to select the lessons that best meet our goals and needs. As a result of this course, I have many outstanding new tools and ideas for updating current units as well as for developing new ones over the summer. I am both energized and inspired! Thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I am forever grateful!
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The tutorials in this lesson were excellent! Although I have used our school's green screen for a few projects in the past, I really enjoyed thinking about new ways to use green screen technology for both videos and photos and to take the time to learn some advanced skills and techniques.
This spring, the third grade teachers at my school and I decided to use the Green Screen by Do Ink app to enable students to create fun, expressive commercials persuading viewers to visit either China or Ghana. Since students had studied both countries in their classrooms, they used their notes to develop enthusiastic paragraphs about famous foods, festivals/celebrations, and attractions. Using a model I wrote about England and the templates the teachers and I created for China and Ghana, students worked on one paragraph of their commercial during each library class. In the classroom, each student then drew a background featuring an attraction within his/her chosen country. Finally, we were ready to practice and film using the Do Ink app! While filming this month, I asked our district's technology specialist to show me some tricks for adjusting the camera angle, cropping students' legs within the camera view, folding the green screen over part of a student, draping it over a table, etc. to make it look like students were standing behind the Great Wall, sitting in a boat, or placed wherever else they wanted to be within their backgrounds. Since we had five classes of students to film, he filmed some of the videos in the classrooms while I filmed in the library. Here are the final videos we created for one of our five classes! Strangely, until watching the tutorials in this lesson, I had never considered using the green screen app for photos (as opposed to videos). I'm not sure why that never occured to me, but I am so grateful for the idea now! Over the past month, I have been trying to take photos of each of my 27 classes for a library trivia challenge for next Tuesday's Open House. For the trivia challenge, my idea was to have a photo of each class posing with their best thinking faces, a question regarding libraries or books underneath (something that the class has learned in the library this year), and then a QR code that families scan to hear the class saying the answer. This was a great idea until week after week I was missing students in a few of the classes and was therefore having trouble taking whole-class photos. The tutorials in this lesson gave me a solution: I could take a class photo without the absent students, then take absent students' individual photos in front of the green screen, remove the green background, and add them into the class photo afterwards. Here is an example of one of those classes. The student on the far right in the back row is the one who I was able to add in later. It's not perfect, but I'm well on my way to learning some new photo editing techniques. So cool! Although I had used the green screen for filming projects in the past, learning these advanced techniques for both photos and videos has given me the confidence to use the green screen in even more innovative ways throughout the future! Thanks again for the inspiration! This lesson was so much fun, and I can absolutely see how Bitmojis make lessons more engaging!!!
The "Using Bitmoji in Your Classroom" article inspired me to create my own Bitmoji and to search for variations that would help me welcome students into the library, teach them to pay attention to key points, engage them in debates and discussions, refocus them as needed, and encourage them. Although it's fairly quick to search for relevant Bitmojis for lessons, I started a collection of favorites within a Google Drive folder to provide me with fast access to the ones I will use most in class. While I am just getting started with Bitmojis in an educational setting, I have bookmarked the instructions for Bitmoji stickers and making Bitmoji comics within Google Slides for the future! "Search Smarter: 30+ Google Search Tricks You Might Not Already Know" had so many time-saving tips!!! Here are a few that will I will use throughout the future:
I love the "Advanced Google Search Cheat Sheet" too! I just realized that Tip Calculator is another Google search bar function- Very useful! This function will even total your bill (including the tip) and split the total among the number of people paying. It doesn't get easier than that! Exploring the Wayback Machine was another eye-opening exercise within this lesson. I like how this site can be used in Digital Citizenship lessons to show students that nothing is truly erased on the Web. I was also excited to find archives of games that I used in previous years to teach students alphabetizing skills. My students' favorite Toon University games, like this "Alphabetizing Through the Third Letter" one, are now accessible again despite the disappearance of their original websites. Although I was fascinated with several of the audio tools in this lesson, I enjoyed learning about Flipgrid the most. I have several students who are shy in large-group settings, and this is the perfect way to hear their voices, thoughts and reflections! The immigration example was fantastic, as it helped me think of exciting ways that I could use this tool with students throughout the future. Students could use Flipgrid to speak from the perspective of an American colonist or King George during the American Revolution, to reflect on their creations before leaving Makerspace centers, to give short book talks that their classmates can access anytime they're looking for new ideas, to share their opinions on Newbery or Caldecott winners, and so much more!
I was also intrigued by the Google Docs "Voice Typing" feature, which I used to compose this paragraph. I'm very impressed with the accurate voice recognition! I was able to go back and capitalize certain words through voice commands, and the tool recognized my requests for most punctuation. I did, however, have to manually insert the following items:
As Google's Voice Typing feature becomes even more robust, I can see it becoming a wonderful option for students who struggle with typing and getting their ideas down. Finally, I'm excited to use audio QR codes! I love the idea of attaching them to book posters so that anyone who scans them can hear students' book talks. Audio QR codes will also make a great addition to Open House. I plan to take a photo of each K-4 class holding a trivia question related to something they've learned in library this year and then paste a QR code, generated with Audioboom or QR Stuff, next to the class photo. When parents scan the QR code, they will be able to hear the class saying the answer to the trivia question (or see the class saying the answer in a quick video, if I can pull that off instead!). As always, thank you for the creative and energizing ideas! The "Is Google Knowledge?" video embedded within Monica Fuglei's "Content Curation: Tools and Strategies for Teachers" article was fascinating! I love the the Lego metaphor, as it demonstrates how single facts or ideas (a single Lego piece) mean nothing until joined together with other facts and ideas to create knowledge ("the 5,922-piece Lego Taj Mahal"). The need to sort and filter all of the information that bombards us and to take the time to see how the various pieces of information fit together in a way that's personally meaningful definitely makes the case for the importance of curation!
For my curation activity today, I tried to think of a problem I've had lately that could be solved by gathering and organizing ideas. As I'm working on book orders this weekend, I decided that it will be a time-saver throughout the future to organize the different sources I use to find new books into one quick, easy-to-consult format. Finding the right curation tool turned out to be the tricky part. This process started with a few sad minutes mourning the loss of Jog the Web, which used to be my favorite curation tool for organizing websites because instead of having to click on one site at a time all the way down a list or throughout a bookmarked folder, you would simply press an arrow to flip from one site to the next (much like we flip through Google Slides). After trying to make sense of how something as useful as Jog the Web could really be gone, I started delving into new curation tools and was delighted to discover that Diigo, one of the tools presented in this Cool Tools lesson, had a "Play as Webslides" feature! To investigate this feature, I signed up for the free version of Diigo. Unfortunately, I am not able to find the "Play as Webslides" option (as featured in some online tutorials) in my free account. I'm not sure if that's because it's only included in the paid accounts or if the feature is in the useful tools graveyard along with Jog the Web. While I continue my search for a free curation tool with this capability, here is the "Books- New Releases" list I created within Diigo to help me keep up with book orders throughout the future: https://www.diigo.com/outliner/f4jk29/Books--New-Releases?key=rzmz13n0if . It is nice to have the sites together in one place, but flipping easily from one to the next would make the process much more seamless, especially as I continue to add more sites throughout the future! I have always loved Animoto, but lately I've felt as though I'm overusing that site and am ready for new ideas. After using Animoto for book trailer projects with students, to share author visit photos with parents and sponsors of the visits, to capture photos of various units in class, and even to make lesson introductions more engaging, I was elated to be able to learn some of the "Explainer Tools" in this lesson!
Recently, my students were captivated by a Grace Hopper video we watched in class in conjunction with the book Grace Hopper: Queen of Computer Code by Laurie Wallmark. As we watched the video, I remember wishing I could draw so that I could create movies like that one. I love how tools like Powtoon and Moovly make that dream a reality! After playing with Moovly a bit, I was able to create an author visit announcement. With the free trial, I am not able to download my video, and it is not currently playing through its gallery link, so here is a rough version in the meantime so that you can see it (I am able to access the real one in my dashboard anytime by logging into my Moovly account). This first attempt is far from fancy, but it gave me the confidence I need to delve more into both Moovly and Powtoon throughout the future as I expand my repertoire of teaching tools! I took the leap and finally joined Twitter! After several hashtag searches, here are a few of the feeds I’m most excited about following:
-Colby Sharp @colbysharp: Love, love, love his enthusiasm as a teacher and reader! I always show his "Mr. Sharp LOVES Reading" video to my students when I promote Jennifer Holm's Babymouse series, and it’s great to be able to see Mr. Sharp's other recommendations and ideas. -Melissa Taylor @ImaginationSoup: Awesome children’s book lists on a variety of topics -Nerdy Book Club @nerdybookclub: So many incredible discussions of children’s literature and how it can be used to open minds and change lives! I also loved exploring Paper.li, as the newspaper format is very reader-friendly! To keep up with children's literature news, I used #kidlit to create this paper: https://paper.li/tag/kidlit#/. I'm thrilled to continue to add new feeds to my Twitter account and to use Twitter as an outstanding source of daily professional development! On a personal note, I had no idea that Amazon Prime has free unlimited photo storage! My husband and I will both be able to free up so much space on our phones. We’re very grateful for that tip! As an educator, I love the idea of book spine poetry and envision my older students (fourth graders) creating some really cool poems. That’s definitely an activity I’ll be sharing with teachers as I help support their poetry units. Here is an elementary library example I created: I also enjoyed using Pixabay for the first time to find some beautiful photos for our upcoming China unit. I have been using our paid Britannica Images database but like to have additional resources on hand as well. Here is a stunning image of the Great Wall of China from Pixabay: Although the Pixabay website says, “No attribution required,” a lack of citation under the photo above feels very strange to me and will take some getting used to!
One additional idea inspired by this Photo Fun lesson is using the “I Spy” game as a creative way for students to show their knowledge at the end of a unit. Students could draw major objects or landmarks from a unit on American symbols, country studies, etc. or could find copyright-friendly images, then could write their own clues to attach to a portion of each image to share their knowledge with others in a fun, engaging way. My name is Kaye, and this is my tenth year as a K-4 Library Media Specialist in Manlius, NY. I enrolled in this program to discover many new tools to share with both students and colleagues.
I enjoyed the "Learning about Schoolwide WordPress Blogs with Andrea Hernandez" video, especially the idea of having students create their own commenting guidelines. What an outstanding way for students to learn how to be responsible, respectful digital citizens! I have also bookmarked the 100 Word Challenge as an inspirational tool to share with students who are interested in writing for a much larger audience. Over the years, I've found that blogs are wonderful for library collection development. I have loved reading about new books through various educators' blog entries. Jen Vincent's "Teach Mentor Texts" has always been one of my favorites for finding excellent books for teachers' units! |
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