Be Kind People Project 1st Place Winner!

Congratulations Liam!

Earlier this year the class completed a Social Studies unit about Kindness and at the end of the unit, the entire class entered the Be Kind People Project Creative Expression Contest to demonstrate what he or she had learned. I am thrilled and honored to announce we had a first place winner in the technology category!

Part of Liam's prize included a Skype for the whole class with Akellz from the Be Kind Crew.

Akellz was a ton of fun and lead the class through the Be Kind Pledge. He discussed every word in the pledge, what it meant and why it was important. Then he had the kids partner up and create a kindness handshake.

The kids loved being out of their seats singing, dancing, cheering and clapping! Below is a little snippet from our Skype.

Create Your Own Spelling List

We are down to only a few more spelling lists and tests for this school year! This week instead of our usual pre-assessment to determine which list students will study for the week, students came up with their own spelling lists.

Students broke into small groups and scoured the dictionary looking for words they thought would be appropriate. They added the words to a shared Google doc. When all groups finished we reviewed the lists to make sure we didn't have any duplicates, words we had already studied this year or words deemed to be "too easy" or "too difficult."

Not surprisingly, none of the words were determined to be too difficult because this is a group that likes a challenge! Students took a survey after this activity and almost unanimously students said they were excited to have some ownership of the list and they hoped they would be able to challenge their classmates with the words they chose. 

Project Based Learning and the Scholastic Book Fair

My class turned the school book fair into a Project Based Learning opportunity. We decided our driving question would be, how can we increase attendance at the school book fair? We began this project last October and students have been working in small groups on different parts of the project at various points throughout the school year.

First, we took a vote via Google forms to decide what method or project would be best to answer our driving questions. Creating a commercial won almost unanimously!

The next step was for a small group to work collaboratively writing a commercial script using Google docs. After doing some research, the students found a similar project I did with a class several years ago, took that existing script and revised it. I was impressed by the editing and revision skills of this group.

At the fall book fair, we took some video footage. I worked with another small group using iMovie to edit the footage to create a promo about the book fair. Students took turns reading the script and we added that as a voiceover. Our finished project is below. We hope to see you at the book fair!

Mystery Money Eggs

This week we combined a few math lessons to learn about money, calculating sums, calculating differences and data analysis via Google sheets. To kick off this lesson, each student received a Mystery Money Egg, opened it, and added up the contents. 

When they were finished with their calculations, they scanned the enclosed QR Code to see if the total they had calculated matched the amount listed on the QR code. None of the QR Codes matched the totals! The next step was for students to figure out the difference between the total listed on the QR Code and the actual total. 

Then students found a partner with the same color egg and combined their totals. They also worked together to add the totals listed on their two QR Codes and found the difference between their combined money totals and the two QR Codes. 

Next, students returned to their original seats and accessed their pvLearners accounts. They learned to create a Google sheet and created a spreadsheet detailing their egg contents. The next step was to share the digital spreadsheet with their Mystery Money Egg partner and me. Partners added another page to their spreadsheet to record the data from the combined eggs. 

Students enjoyed the "mystery" aspect of this lesson and were able to practice somewhat basic math skills and combine them with higher level data tracking and analytics. The Mystery Money Eggs incorporated The Four C's, as students were required to communicate, collaborate and think critically throughout the lesson. The creativity integration came when creating the spreadsheet, as students had choices of fonts, backgrounds, colors, cell size, etc.  

The rubric was reviewed at the beginning and throughout the lesson, so students had a clear understanding of the purpose and how they would be graded. 

Analogies and Vocabulary With the Stick Around App

We have been preparing all week for our final meet in the 2014-15 WordMasters Challenge competition scheduled for next week. The WordMasters Challenge is a vocabulary competition based on completing analogies. Analogies involve higher order thinking skills which is based on logic and reason. We have been working on analogies and higher level thinking all year.

We decided to try something new to prepare for the meet! Students worked collaboratively and chose sixteen words expected to be part the WordMasters Challenge. They looked up the definitions of the words and created a puzzle using an iPad app called Stick Around to learn the meanings of their words. 

The first step of this project was watching a few tutorials to learn how to create the puzzle using the Stick Around App, then students started exploring and creating. 

As a class we tweeted the app creator, Tony Vincent and the app itself and a few students were really excited when we got retweeted right away! 

The goal of the student created puzzles was to drag the correct definition to the vocabulary word. Then, students were able to self-check their answers to see if they were correct and fix any errors if necessary. 

 Students enjoyed creating the puzzle but LOVED playing puzzles created by other teams. 

The Stick Around app was a really fun way for us to prepare for our final WordMasters meet. 

The WordMasters Challenge is a cumulative competition so scores from this last meet will be added to previous scores to determine our final winners! It has been a tight competition so this last meet will be critical. Keep studying and practicing! 

Mystery Book Club via Skype

We have participated in quite a few Mystery Skypes this year and my class loves them! Almost all of our Mystery Skypes have been geography based, guessing the location of the other class by asking them yes or no questions. However, last week we branched out and did a Mystery Book Club via Skype.

It was very challenging! While there are only 50 possible states to choose from, there are literally millions of books! Although my class consists of voracious readers, we have not read every single book ever published, so we had to use our research, problem solving and deductive reasoning skills to solve the mystery.

Clues that helped us guess the books the other class presented us included author information, award information, publication date and genre. When students realized they were not going to be able to effortlessly figure out the book title, they quickly took to the Internet and started researching. Students also formed great follow up questions to help them figure out the book title.

My students really enjoyed this new challenge and I was impressed by their research and presentation skills.

Digital Learning Day

Friday was Digital Learning Day, a day for students and educators across North America to celebrate digital learning! 

We completed a Pi Day cyberhunt, several students worked on an ongoing coding project and several others continued a collaborative data analytics project using Google apps. 

In preparation for Digital Learning Day, every student chose one digital project they had completed this year and linked it to a QR Code. We printed and hung all our QR Codes in the hallway as did other classes all over the school. 

We took some time touring the school and scanning codes to see what other classes have been learning this year. We will continue doing this on Monday. 

Homophones, QR Codes and Valentine's Day

Each year my class creates an interactive, 21st century Valentine card and this year was no exception!

Everyone worked with a partner using the free iPad app, Split Lens 2 to create a twin image of themselves. 

Students had a lot of fun getting creative with poses and props!

Students added a filter and text and emailed the image to themselves.

Then, they took their cloned image and uploaded it to Canva. They created a digital Valentine card using their cool double image. They saved and exported their Canva image and imported it into Google slides. Students made the slide public and created a QR Code leading to it. 

 Using Google docs, students inserted the QR Code and some text to print and physically glue to the front of their handmade Valentine card. 

We have been learning about homophones this week so I encouraged a pun using the word "two" since we had created a double image. 

Happy Valentine's Day!

App Smashing on the 100th Day of School

We celebrated the 100th day of school with App Smashing!

We started with the AgingBooth iPad app and took pictures of ourselves. 

We used the AgingBooth app to transform our current image into what we image we might look like at 100 years old. 

The results were pretty funny!

After saving our elderly images to the camera roll, students then moved on to the PicCollage app. They imported their AgingBooth image (this is where the SMASH comes in) to create a cool poster of themselves at age 100.

When the collage was completed, students then imported that image into their Google drive. They made the link to the image public, took that public link and went to goo.gl to shorten it and create a QR Code. They took the QR Code image and inserted it on a Google slide, with instructions to scan.

 Finally, we took turns scanning all the QR Codes to see what our friends 

will look like in 90+ years. 

App Smashing projects are a lot of fun because they really allow students to be creative and reduces the limitations of just a single app. The use of multiple apps is a higher order thinking skill because students must follow quite a few directions and complete many steps before they are able to finalize their project. 

Importing a piece of the project from the iPad to a computer, adds another challenging layer and it is amazing to watch how easily students are able to switch back and forth between devices and apply so many skills to one project. 

My class had a great time with this project and I heard more than one student say they were going to save the image and check back when they were 100 to see how accurate AgingBooth is.