November 2015: Teaching with Comics

Greetings! I am in the midst of a fun project creating comics with my 4th grade students in the Media Center using Comic Life. If you haven't used Comic Life but have wondered how you could incorporate a project using this tool in your classroom, Richard Byrne's blog "Free Technology for Teachers" has a post from 2014 that lists 5 great ideas for incorporating comics into your lessons. We are lucky to have Comic Life, but there are some other free comic-creation tools available that he lists in his post as well. If you are looking to try something new, take a look at his ideas! Rosanne

October 2015: Teacher Tech by Alice Keeler

I checked out Alice Keeler's Teacher Tech website after Justine Thain recommended it this week and agree with her statement that it offers all of the information that you would ever want to know about Google Classroom. There is LOTS of info - but the blogpost links on specific Google classroom topics are organized in a list, so it is very easy to find information on the topic you need. For instance, I clicked on “Who Deleted Student Answers” to read some tips on sharing collaborative assignments with students and how to best avoid having students delete others work or their own work, a topic a staff member and I were just discussing this week. There’s also a link to “10 Things to Start With in a Google Classroom”, for those who are getting ready to give Classroom a try with their students. Rosanne

June 2015: StudyDog - Best Free Podcasts for the Car

Greetings!  Summer is here and many of us are looking for ways to help our kids (or students) get through those long summer car rides.  Podcasts can be an alternative to hours of music or video games, and StudyDog has a list of suggested podcasts that can help.  On it's blogpost "Make Driving Fun and Educational: The Best Free Podcasts for the Car",  you can find podcasts that feature literature,  math, science, and social studies.  In Media Center this year,  after they created their own book review podcasts,  the fifth graders explored other podcasts, including "Elmo's Adventures in Spending, Sharing, and Saving" as well as "The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd".  They couldn't get enough of the latter.  If you have a chance, check out the world of podcasts this summer and perhaps find ones to share with your students next year!

Rosanne

May 2015: Kahoot

Greetings!  Interested in a tool that stimulates collaboration and social learning, requires zero setup time or player accounts, and that works on any device with an internet connection?   Check out Kahoot.  One of the presenters at the NH School Library Media Association conference I recently attended used it to have attendees play an icebreaker game.  We only had to access the Kahoot website, enter in the game code he gave us, and then answer the multiple choice questions as he made them available to us.  The results were shown in real-time, listing everyone in order of how successfully they answered the questions and how quickly they answered them.  If you are looking for a fun way to review curriculum in your classroom, this could be an idea for you!

Rosanne

February 2015: Scholastic.com - Top Teaching Blog

Greetings!  This month's website of the month is Scholastic's Top Teaching blog (http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/teaching-ideas) , a blog recommended by our own Mr. Harrises.

As the blog states, it is a place to find "exciting lesson ideas, classroom strategies, book lists, videos, and reproducibles in a daily blog by teachers".   What's nice is that it is searchable, so if you don't have time to browse through all of the many posts, you can search for a specific topic and see if they offer any resources.  Contributor posts from the past few months include ideas for using graphic organizers for opinion writing (including downloadable forms),  "Snowy Science" experiments to try with students, and ideas for enhancing classroom photos using some free online tools.  Take a look and hopefully you will find something useful to use with your classroom!

Rosanne 

January 2015: PBS Learning Media

PBS LearningMedia (http://www.pbslearningmedia.org) is a repository of digital teaching materials, offering free videos, interactive games, images, and lesson plans for K-12 teachers.  It can be used as a quick resource for adding content to a lesson, or you can register for a free account and use their Lesson Builder/Quiz Maker tools or create a Storyboard for students to explore.  The website makes it easy to browse by standards, grade level, or subject to find content for your lessons and with PBS as the sponsor, you can be confident of the quality of what you will find.  A quick search for 3rd-5th grade science resources netted a 3 minute video on hydroelectric power and the Hoover dam, an interactive website on coral reef connections, and a short plant experiment (Leaf Me Alone).

Check it out!

Rosanne