New Library Books!!....Gifts Of The Season Or Anytime!!

No matter what time of year, Oak Hills students love it when we display our new books!  Each year, after our October Scholastic Book Fair, we set to work preparing the books for our students.  There are so many steps to get these books ready for the shelves!!  Our wonderful clerk, Mrs. Eklund, dutifully barcodes and covers them, and generally works hard until finally they are ready!  

This week we put the books on display so that all of our students could see them before we begin checking them out.  They swarm around the books with enthusiasm, waiting for their turn to read their newest adventure!! 

Sharing With Our Lakeville Board of Education, Superintendent and Cabinet!

SHARING!  We are all taught to share our toys when we are little.  Now, sharing our work, our play and ourselves has a whole new meaning.

Since I began blogging, I have gained an understanding of why digital "sharing" is so important! (and a little bit addicting!) Although the Oxford Word of 2013 is "selfie", someone should name SHARING as the digital icon and concept of the decade!  Although sharing is not a new idea, it has taken on a whole new meaning with social media.  Now our greatest concern is that our students are "over sharing"!!  But as much negative press as digital sharing seems to get in the media - depicting students glued to their devices, heads down, posting images of everything, Vining, Snapchatting, Twittering...every thought making it's way to an audience...there truly is a decidedly up side that I have now tasted myself.

Sharing pushes us all to be more creative, more engaged and more diligent!  As a teacher, I have always known that publishing student work makes them "care" more about the outcome, but even I continue to be pleasantly surprised to see just how engaged students are when they know they may reach an audience beyond their own family.  The biggest "AHA!"moment for me has been that I am not immune to this same effect.  I get so excited to share the latest thing that I am doing with my students.  As I plan lessons for my students, I am always thinking about how excited I am to share with everyone!  And I take a great many more pictures than I used to!!

As for the very real concerns about student sharing, it gives us, educators and parents, a great opportunity to teach them from an early age to be thoughtful content creators...and hopefully future thoughtful social media users.

Last week, Mr. Labatte asked me to share my blog with the Lakeville Board of Education, Superintendent, Dr. Snyder and Cabinet.  It was fun!  I loved having an opportunity to show off what our Oak Hills students can do and to share their creativity and their good ole fashion hard work.  They have become digital natives right before my eyes and I am happy to share it with parents and readers!  Thank you to Mr. Labatte, the Board of Education, Superintendent and Cabinet for letting me SHARE!!!  (And thank you Mr. Skelly for sharing the image that you took with your iPad while I was presenting!!:)

                      

Book Talks with the Tellagami App

I have admitted to being more than a little addicted to finding new Web 2.0 sites and iPad Apps to use with students!  So when I read about the free iPad app Tellagami in Richard Byrne's blog Free Tech for Teachers, I was desperate to try it!!   I invited two of my 5th grade students to try it so I could use their videos as an example for book talks with all of my students.  They did a great job!

It was great getting a chance to try it with students!  I learned that it is better not to hold the mic of the iPad too close, but otherwise it went really well.  Look for more Tellagami's with students in a future blog post!

1st Graders Are Thankful For Our Thanksgiving Books And So Much More!!

Thanksgiving is on the way and our first graders are thankful for so many things.  I shared with students our library's wonderful Thanksgiving books.  We read several including one of my Thanksgiving favorites, Thanksgiving Cats, a whimsical rhyming story about farmer cats preparing for Thanksgiving.  It was written by Jean Marzollo, better known for her I Spy Books of Pictures and Riddles.  Students were thankful for Mrs. Marzollo's wonderful ability to rhyme!

After reading a few more Thanksgiving books, first graders wanted to share what they were thankful for this Thanksgiving season!!

To help them share, I thought of one of my new favorite websites, Padlet.com.  I am really thankful I found this one!!  I used this site to share last week's Mixed-Up Class projects.  What I love about Padlet is that every student can write on the same online "wall" simultaneously!  

This week I asked each student to write one or more things that they were thankful for on a Thanksgiving Padlet.  While they were writing, students were able to see and read what their classmates were writing.  They sparked ideas for each other and helped each other with spelling.  This also gave students an opportunity to practice their basic word processing and keyboarding skills - capitalizing (shift key), deleting, spacing and the return key.  Students didn't care so much about that, they just loved being able to share.  Check out our wall of thankfulness from all the 1st grade classes!

Created with Padlet

Great Graphic Resource For Teachers...

As a relative newcomer to Twitter, I am still discovering some of it's benefits and fun.  This weekend I read this tweet.

I LOVE finding new iPad and Web 2.0 resources to use with my students, so this graphic fed my addiction!!  It sparked ideas for future lessons, and validated others lessons I have already taught.  Thank you Twitter and Mark Garrison.

It reminds me of Kathy Schrock's Bloomin Apps and the Edutopia article by Diane Darrow.  I wrote about it in 2012 - Bloom's Taxonomy and iPad Apps

2nd Graders Learn to Google Search - Not As Easy As It Looks Folks!!

I was really excited to begin this week.  I had planned some really great lessons for students at every grade level and I was ready to get started...or so I thought.  To be fair, all of the lessons did go really well, but my 2nd graders through me for a loop.  I began on Monday with the expectation that I would have 2nd graders search Google images for book covers of the books that they have fond memories of reading.  My plan was, and still is, to have each student create a reading timeline called My Life As A Reader. Sounds great, right?  (Look for 2nd grade timelines in a future blog post!)  I was expecting to cover the topic of copyright and acceptible use of images.  I knew that my second graders would need help with spelling but what I underestimated was that they would run into trouble performing their Google searches.  They didn't know how to get the search engine to do what they wanted it to do.  So I did what most teachers do with they miscalculate how much their students know...I quickly changed the lesson into a Google Search lesson!

Google Searching 101!

We covered...

- search terms and the need to put the word "book" behind each search.

- clicking on "Images" rather than clicking on web links.

- using the return key to perform the search after the search term was typed in.  

- looking for Google's attempt to correct spelling.

- looking for a thumbnail images versus the original.  How to return to the thumbnail search.

In addition, they learned how to create a desktop folder to organize the images that they would be finding.  

All in all it was very successful!  Once they understood how to perform their searches, they did a wonderful job.

          

           

                   

                

3rd Graders Learn The Power Of Google Documents

This week 3rd grade students began working on writing letters.  This is an activity that I have been doing for many years because it gives me an opportunity to teach so many word processing skills while giving students an opportunity to write a letter to their family, friends and even Santa, if they wish.  I give them the choice to make the letter a holiday themed letter, end of the year letter, or just a simple "hi, how ya doin" letter.  This year, I moved the letter to the cloud, the Google cloud that is.  

Students began by linking to a letter template that I created in my Google Drive account.  They then copied the letter template, renamed it and saved it to their Google Drive account.  At one point during the transfer, students were able to see that they were all connected to the letter in my Google Drive.  They thought that was really cool!

Once the letter was in their own Google Drive, they began personalizing it.  Because the letter was in Google Drive, I had the opportunity to add messages in the margins as reminders to students.

In the coming weeks, students will finish writing and editing their letter.  When they are finished, they will be left with a letter that they will be proud to send!