Screencasting

Screencasting and screencasting tools have become very popular with teachers recently due to a rise in flipped classrooms and blended learning scenarios.  Although teacher-created screencasts have tremendous value, a student-created screencast is personally my favorite way to utilize this tool. Students can create screencasts to demonstrate their learning.  They  demonstrate their understanding of a topic by combining annotations, images and voice comments. Here are some screencast projects created by our fifth graders to demonstrate their understanding of cause and effect.  Thank you Mrs. Adametz for sharing!





 Some classroom assignments where you might find screencasting useful:

• science lab results

• report on research

• solve and explain math problems
• compare and contrast 
• oral descriptions
• how-to tutorials
• oral reading
• story retells

These screencast projects were made using the free version of Educreations.  What tools do you use to screencast?  Please share your ideas in the comments section below.

An Interview- Paul Elliott

I had the great honor of being able to interview teacher, Paul Elliott this morning.  Paul is the Gifted/Enrichment teacher in our elementary building at South Side Area School District.  Paul graciously agreed to talk with me about how he utilizes a wiki in his classroom.  Paul is quite knowledgeable about how wikis can and should work, but doesn't lose sight of the fact that a wiki is simply a tool and it's use should be balanced with other appropriate tools- both digital and analog. Our recorded conversation is linked below.  Please note that the conclusion of our conversation is not included because my recording device ran out of space, however, the recorded exchange is full of best practices and some excellent thoughts for using this tool in your own classroom.  I am also including links for Paul's wiki page and for pages of some of his students so that you might check these out yourself.  Thank you Paul for sharing!  I enjoyed our conversation and learned a great deal as well.



http://explore.sswiki.com/

http://joslyt.sswiki.com/

http://adapav.sswiki.com/

Please add to the conversation by sharing your experiences with wikis for teaching and learning in the comments below.

Two Time-Saving Tools For Your Classroom

This week, Beth Skibinski, one of our first grade teachers asked me to check out an app called Tiny Scanner.  I instantly fell in love with this app!  This is an easy to use scanner for your smartphone. Of course, a scanner for your phone is an awesome idea for so many non-school reasons, but as a classroom tool it can potentially eliminate your need to visit the copy room.  What teacher can't appreciate that?  With this app, you can scan non-digital content wherever you are and share it with your students digitally.  Don't redo all of those old pre-digital units that you spent so much time to build!  If you are using Google Classroom, as our district does, just attach your scanned pdf to your assignment.  Your students can access the document, open and complete it using an annotation tool such as Notability.  After previewing the lite version of this tool, I almost immediately upgraded to the pro version so that I would have more sharing options (Google Drive, Dropbox etc.). Thank you Beth for sharing.

Tiny Scanner Pro

Kristen Woodling, one of our Special Ed. teachers, shared another easy-to-use tech integration idea.  She and her team are using the Chirp app to help students who have difficulty transferring information from the board.  During morning routine, students are asked to edit a sentence from the board.  One student takes a photo of the sentence on his or her iPad, then "chirps" it to all of the other students in the class.  Learners then have the sentence on their own device, right in front of them to reference.  Thank you Kristen for a simple and thoughtful solution to a long-time classroom challenge.

Chirp app for iPhone

If you use a smartphone scanner  that you like, please share it with us in the comments below.  I would also love to hear about additional pdf annotation tools that our students with laptops can take advantage of.  Thanks for reading!  Thanks for sharing! 

Making The Most Of IXL

A good majority of our staff is now using the IXL tool for math and language arts support and practice.  This will be the first in a series of posts to show you how to make the most of this tool.

Some Valuable Reasons To Use IXL?

• Common Core aligned practice and review
• allows for vertical alignment between grade levels
• easy to use reports that track student progress
• efficient tool for collecting SLO data

Having your class use IXL is a great first step, but the real power of the tool is in the data that it provides for the teacher.  IXL generates various, easy-to-read reports and graphs that support and inform your teaching. You can find detailed directions on the IXL site here.  However, I have tried to streamline this process even further for those of you just getting started with pulling reports.    

3 Easy Clicks To Access A Report:

• After logging into your teacher account,  click on Reports.

• Find the Performance tab along left side of screen, click on it.

• Tap on Recent Skills.

• You are now able to both view and print reports of all of the recent skills that your students have practiced.

**As an additional tool, to help you organize,  IXL provides these handy printable grade progress charts.

I hope these tips will help you get started.  If you would like to see a specific area of IXL covered in an upcoming post, please leave your idea in the comments section below.

Provide Audio Options for Students to "Show What They Know"

Headphone & Laptop #3 by Jeshu John via DesignersPics.com

In the article The Smart Way to Use IPads in the Classroom (Lisa Guernsey, 2013)  Sam Ross, a second grade teacher talks about the power of adding audio components to our students' assignments and projects. "Children are being able to show what's in their minds by adding oral explanation".  "That's off-the-charts amazing."  He explains that this is particularly effective for students who may not like to speak up in class.

Our third grade classrooms are using Voice Record Pro to practice their reading fluency.  They record themselves reading an assigned passage,  Then they share these recordings with their teacher via Google Drive.  Click here for a student instruction page to use with your class.

Some of our middle school students have created a Voki to share what they learned about their personality types.  See an example project here.

Here are a few additional tools to add audio and voice to your projects and activities:

Educreations
Vocaroo
Book Creator
Notability
VoiceThread
Audioboom


Do you use audio tools in your class creations and projects?  Please share some of your ideas, resources or thoughts in the comments below.

Coordinate Geometry With Some Hi-Tech Tools

 Mrs. O'Connors' math classes have been working on coordinate geometry for the past two weeks.  As a culminating project in this unit, Mrs. O'Connor challenged her fifth grade students to create a plot map of some prominent landmarks in their hometown. This was an interdisciplinary project that included critical reading strategies, accurate writing and grammar skills in addition to complex problem solving.  Over the course of the week, the students used Notability and Google Classroom to complete and turn in these projects on their iPads.   Here are a few example projects shared below:

How Do Your Students Use Word Clouds?

The fifth graders in our building along with their teachers, Mrs. Adametz and Mrs. Veze, created some pretty impressive word clouds this week.  They built these clouds based on the inner character traits that they observe in one other.  Not only was this an introductory lesson on character traits, but it was also an engaging back-to-school community building activity. The students used the web tool Taxedo to create their clouds but there are many word cloud creation tools available for teachers and students besides this particular one.

  

If you want to try a similar project on the iPad, Word Clouds by abcya is a free and easy to use tool.  When combined with PicCollage, any number of photo options are available.  Below is a character traits word cloud example using those two applications.

Word Clouds can be used in so many different ways.  Try them for:

• synonyms
• antonyms
• main idea
• activate prior knowledge
• exit ticket
• adjectives

How do you use word clouds in your classroom?  Please share in the comments below.