Staying busy!

Wow. We are sooooooooooooo busy in the computer lab. Let's do this post starting with the first class in, every morning, the 3rd grade.

3rd graders watched a 6 minute segment on the geography of Asia and the Pacific from our online educational movie source, United Streaming. Before watching the movie, however, we used the smartboard to work through the "K" and "W" sections of a "KWL" (what we Know about the topic, what we Want to learn, and what we Learned). KWL is a classic classroom tool many teachers utilize in the classroom with chartpaper, but the beauty of using the smartboard is that the resulting document can easily be saved and captured. View the one created by one classroom by clicking here. And see Mr. Amore completing his class's KWL here. After the video we completed the Learned section and did a little keyboarding with TypetoLearn3 or Keyboarding for Kids.

4th graders watched a 20 minute movie from unitedstreaming.com about immigration, a Chinese immigrant's description of what the term means, scripted in the form of letters to his grandaughter who is immigrating. A wonderful watch, it is filled with photos and video examples from the periods described. We did a modified KWL by viewing the movie and then recording comments and things learned on a blank document on the smartboard. Then it was off to keyboarding practice.

Kindergarteners follow the 4the graders into the lab, and this week I introduced to them (and to the 1st graders who would come in a bit later) a "new" website I discovered this past week on an educator's discussion board at edtechtalk.com. It's now "Center Number 4" at my K1 Go Here! K-1 portal site. Brimming with fun, sound, developmentally scaled activities relating to reading and writing, we'll be visiting this site often. I was very pleased when one Kindergartener shared that she already visited the site often on her home computer! Before sending the classes off to their computers to explore on their own (discovery is good!) we helped clean up the Earth, getting ready for upcoming Earth Day, April 22, at starfall.com's fabulous site. There's a very quick little .wmv movie file of that set of experiences here (firebug users might need to open with Internet Explorer.

1st graders did all of the above and starting on Tuesday we also visited the Elephant Sanctuary website, in response to their wonderful in-school experiences with a representative from that fine institution.

2nd graders are creating business cards using an Avery template in Microsoft Word. I hope that you all will enjoy these during the classroom business day! I was listening to a podcast last week from Connect-Learning and heard a teacher interviewed who praised one of her at-risk HS students for creating his own business card; and I'm pleased that our 2nd graders have had that experience early. The "peripheral learning" that happens is a good foundation for future work.

Shewwww! Long post. 'Til next time!

Scott