Come on, May, We're Ready for Ya

Well, more or less ready!

It has begun: Here it is Tuesday afternoon of the week as I begin this week's blog post and two classes were out today for two different field trips, and a third was late coming in for the same reason. Good, I say! The more we can get out of these doors the better. The best part is that I get to help celebrate these travels online, and we are using Voicethread to do that!

Voicethread is one of the Web 2.0 tools that I think has a unique enough design to be both useful and lasting. We experimented with it in one fourth grade class last year, creating a fun little voicethread about one room's Ellis Island Day. This year, all 3rd and 4th graders will participate in some form or fashion. The 3rd graders are sharing pictures they took, themselves, with digital cameras snugged into heavy polyethylene camera bags during their individual classroom's canoe journey down a section of the Harpeth River, and the 4th graders will comment on pictures from their own field trips to Cedars of Lebanon State Park. When they're done, look for them here!

3rd and 4th graders are also splitting some time off into further Quest Atlantis questing and into Scratch exploration, saving interesting projects they've modified into a new folder on the school network to share at the projector. I snapped some short video this week and they'll be here soon, too. Meanwhile, some of the kids, with parental permission, are establishing accounts at the Scratch Wiki. Want to see some things a 10 year old can accomplish with this tool? Check out the usntigers stuff" gallery. Here's one example from that gallery!

Kinderkids and 1st graders are having a blast at a site called aMLaboratory Tonematrix, a wonderful site that allows one to create looping music simply by clicking on blocks. After a quick demonstration at the smartboard, some classes (using my number cards to randomize the order in which children were called up) added to a piece by adding two or three blocks as they went to their own computers to make their own creations. This made for a series of really good "Musicputer" classes, were we were able to SEE the relationship between tone, pitch, and silence over time. Check out aMLaboratory yourself. It's nothing short of magical.

2nd graders are exploring Insects resources on the Webliographer!

and some classes are beginning basic PowerPoint work, turning their classroom-created insect flipbooks into digital stories with that great tool. The products of those efforts will be shared here, too, so check back!