New Teacher Boot Camp Week 2 - Using VoiceThread Editor's note: See the full archive of the five-week boot camp. Week 2: Using Voicethread in the Classroom Welcome to our second week of New Teacher Boot Camp! Today we're going to be exploring VoiceThread. About VoiceThread VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slideshow that allows students to comment on images, documents, and video through text, video, and audio files. p> Introducing Megan Palevich Megan Palevich is curriculum specialist and 8th grade language arts teacher in Chester County, PA. Before reading on, please take a look at this example of a VoiceThread from Megan's eighth grade class based on the novel The Red Kayak, by Priscilla Cummings. Megan Palevich, Curriculum Specialist and 8th Grade Language Arts, on Using VoiceThread This year I used Voicethread as an alternative way to discuss literature. Instead of a traditional read and respond or read and discuss, VoiceThread could offer my students the opportunity to listen and reflect through text, audio, or video.
Continuing to Learn with the iPad- Storytelling In an attempt to document the trials and errors of using a classroom set of 20 iPads in our K-8 school, I am adding a new post to the collection of iPads in the Classroom: 5th Grade- Storykit- Creating a story in Hebrew One of the Hebrew teachers approached me with an interest in having her students create a story book in the target language on the iPads. We chose to test the free app Storykit with this project. Students read a poem by Leah Goldberg called: (That’s Not Me). We had the Hebrew letters added to the iPad keyboard by going into: Settings> General> Keyboard> International Keyboards>Add New Keyboard> Choose Hebrew Once the International keyboard is added, a globe appears on your keyboard. Once the storyboards were finished, students were ready to work with the iPads. I showed students how to go to Microsoft Office ClipArt, search for images and download or take a screenshot and edit the image. Students also used each other to stage scenes from their story to take a photo. Like this:
Peg it up, Move it Around, Get it Done. Reflect, Refresh, Recharge:Architects of Summer Although I don't recall school being particularly stressful when I was a child (no high-stakes anything back then), I can readily call up the delicious feeling of summer. It was a spacious time—an opportunity to do nearly anything. As kids, we reinvented ourselves daily. I remember fireflies and kites and sandwiches on the beach and books and pick-up sticks and popsicles from the corner store. We got shoe boxes from our parents and made a string-drawn trolley-like thing from them. After supper, we gathered on the corner, readied our shoe-box trollies for a parade, and walked around the block several times with the seriousness and dignity our work suggested. I can summon the sounds, sights, and smells of those evening parades in a way that evokes a kind of joy and unencumbered tranquility that we should wish for all kids. I like to go back to that summer place in my mind for many reasons. Adulthood is a different season of life, one anchored in and fashioned by responsibility.
How should we use technology in assessment? I'm looking for brain-storming ideas. You can either share ideas you've tried, or just half-baked ideas that you think would be interesting. Let's make sure not to bash each other in this post, our objective is to think of as many ways as possible to use technology as a tool in assessment. I'll give 10 ways to start the ball rolling. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Stixy: For Flexible Online Creation Collaboration and Sharing Reflect, Refresh, Recharge:Take Time for Yourself—and for Learning I'm no longer in the classroom, yet I still have to remember to take my time eating lunch. Too often, I race through it, thinking I have to pick up students from the cafeteria, return parent phone calls, review test data, and quickly cue up three interactive whiteboard activities for this afternoon's lesson on oxidation. As I concentrate today on having a more leisurely lunch, I slowly chew my food and think relaxed thoughts. As we move into summer vacation this year, let's pause for a moment and imagine the possibilities for recharging our personal and professional batteries. Many of us have family duties each summer: We must find suitable summer activities for our children, paint the house, pull out the tree stump in the front yard, move older children into college dorms, serve as head timer at summer swim meets, or attend to aging parents. In the midst of all that, however, might there be opportunities to reinvigorate our personal and teacher selves? The best teachers remain dynamic.
Tune-Ups and Teachable Moments - Finding Common Ground Children are not supposed to be perfect all the time. Adults certainly aren't! When I was in seventh grade I had to go to the principal's office. My early teenage brain had gotten the best of me and I was rude to a teacher, which is something that did not please my mom and I heard about it when I got home. The middle school principal was eight feet tall. The classroom where I made my grave mistake was on the second floor of Queensbury Middle School and the principal's office was on the first floor. The principal talked at me for about five minutes, which seemed like an hour, and I left his office vowing never to get in trouble again. As an elementary school principal, it's interesting to me that students may leave my office feeling the same way that I did in seventh grade. Many parents get embarrassed when their child gets sent to the office, which is human nature. The Principal's Office The principal's office has changed. A typical administrative goal every year is to be visible.
Why Science Teachers Should Write This article, reprinted with permission, appears as part of the “Why I Write” celebration, sponsored by the National Writing Project, and taking place this week across the nation. Science and math educator Marsha Ratzel, who writes regularly for PLP’s Voices from the Learning Revolution group blog, was one of several teachers asked to submit essays for the NWP project. In her piece, Marsha explains why it’s so important that students write as a way to learn science—and why science teachers should write as well. Science needs people who can explain what they’re thinking so that the rest of us can understand the world. That’s one of the reasons students write in my science classes. As students start to strain to learn about science, their work revolves around trying to express what they know, what they don’t know, and asking questions. First, it requires them to create word pictures of what they imagine is going on within the science phenomenon they’re studying. About the author
Students Who Challenge Us:Eight Things Skilled Teachers Think, Say, and Do Among the many challenges teachers face, often the most difficult is how to engage students who seem unreachable, who resist learning activities, or who disrupt them for others. This is also one of the challenges that skilled teachers have some control over. In my nine years of teaching high school, I've found that one of the best approaches to engaging challenging students is to develop their intrinsic motivation. The root of intrinsic is the Latin intrinsecus, a combination of two words meaning within and alongside. It's likely that our students are intrinsically motivated—just motivated to follow their own interests, not to do what we want them to do. Teachers' challenge is to work alongside our students, to know their interests and goals, and to develop trusting relationships that help students connect their learning to their goals in a way that motivates from within. How can teachers do this? What Skilled Teachers Can Think 1. 2. Which mind-set we hold makes a tremendous difference.
Rubrics for Assessment | Classroom activities: Assessment and Technology 13 Popular Sites To Download Free eBooks For Your iPad iPad – One of the Apple’s most revolutionary masterpiece is a great gadget when its comes to give a truly amazing multimedia experience. You can watch movies, listen music, play games, check e-mails, video chat with friends and family, chatting and much more. But, you know there are many iPad consumers all over the world using iPad as an reading device. The main reason behind using iPad as an reading device is because of its great high-resolution, LED-backlit screen that makes the text brighter and crisp. Another advantages of iPad as an e-reader is its capability of support various formats such as ePubs, PDFs, Kindle and many more. Even you have the option to flip the pages with the swipe of your fingers giving you a real experience of reading paper books. If you are fan of reading books, I am sure you must be looking for eBooks on the Internet to keep your iPad library full with your favorite eBooks. Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter for recent updates. 1.
Seven Bridges of Königsberg Map of Königsberg in Euler's time showing the actual layout of the seven bridges, highlighting the river Pregel and the bridges The Seven Bridges of Königsberg is a historically notable problem in mathematics. Its negative resolution by Leonhard Euler in 1735 laid the foundations of graph theory and prefigured the idea of topology. The city of Königsberg in Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia) was set on both sides of the Pregel River, and included two large islands which were connected to each other and the mainland by seven bridges. The problem was to find a walk through the city that would cross each bridge once and only once. The islands could not be reached by any route other than the bridges, and every bridge must have been crossed completely every time; one could not walk halfway onto the bridge and then turn around and later cross the other half from the other side. Euler's analysis[edit] Euler's work was presented to the St. Significance in the history of mathematics[edit]