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!
0 Comments
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! |
Archives
May 2018
Categories |