USN Lower School Technology!

Goodbye, Good Parents--Final Blog Post

2010-07-31T08:23:00.000-07:00

Dearest Parents of my dearest Students,

It is with a heavy heart and a firm sense of hope for the future that I bid University School of Nashville goodbye. Last week, I was interviewed for and accepted a position with Metro Nashville Public Schools to join a small team of educators who will craft the new Metro Nashville Virtual School into a model of its kind. Over the coming years, tens of thousands of children who for whatever reason cannot or will not attend a traditional school for a traditional learning experience will have an opportunity to become excited about learning, to learn, and to earn a high school diploma through our efforts.

Accepting the job, the "call" really, was not an easy decision. Most of all I will miss the daily interaction with your children. Over the last decade and a half, they have been at the center of my personal fulfillment, joyfully filling my days with challenges and successes. The announced plan for filling my position is to hire a capable substitute to work in the lab until a capable full-time replacement can be found.

Appropriately, this will be the final post at this blog. Whether my replacement will choose to communicate in this manner is anybody's guess. I plan to leave it up as a resource for her or him and an archive and resource for anyone in the world. That's the way the world works now, and I do hope it's helpful in some way.

If you wish to keep up with our progress in MNPS, I'll be posting, of course at http://scottmerrick.net and I will be setting up new channels of communication on the internet. I'm on Twitter and Facebook as well, and feel free to friend/follow me there.

I wish you and your children all the best, and I leave them in the care of some of the most dedicated and capable educators I know. I'll be around, of course, only not as much. If you are in the neighborhood of the Martin Professional Development Center on Fairfax Avenue, next to Dragon Park, please feel welcome to drop in to say hi.

I just got word from NAIS that I'll still be welcome in their "Teacher of the Future" cohort for the year 2010-2011, so I'll be contributing to the resources there over the coming year as well.

Take care, and as I always told your children, "be good and have fun."

Sincerely,
Scott Merrick
Virtual Learning Curriculum Specialist,
Metro Nashville Public Schools
scott@scottmerrick.net

Last Post for 2009-2010

2010-05-26T11:31:00.000-07:00

It's been a good year, and as I write this we are sneaking up on the last hour of the last full day of the 2009-2010 school year. Since this blog is specifically for communicating what is going on in the computer lab, I'll lay it to rest for the summer with this post. THE SHORT STORY is that we are at each grade level exploring Free Choice Options, as they are amply documented in earlier blog posts. So many class parties and field trips are making class attendance in the lab so hit or miss that I believe that's the best course. The party's over, ya'll.

So what am I up to this summer? What follows should serve to inform:

I am a "Core Volunteer" at the International Society for Technology in Education, having become acquainted with that now 100,000+ member organization the summer of 2000 as I attended my first "National Educational Computing Conference, its annual convention, in Atlanta, Georgia. Since then I've attended nearly every year, presented multiple times for groups as large as 300, and gotten involved in their innovative "virtual environment" community in Second Life. Last year, I was motivated to create an official "Special Interest Group" for Virtual Environments, and that was recognized and instituted (as one of the only 20 SIGS) in October of 2009 with me as the chair, president, leader, or, as I have designated the role, "Poobah." It's fascinating work and it takes up a great deal of my discretionary time, though I am always mindful to keep that work secondary to my work as Technology Coordinator.

That said, I have benefited greatly from interactions with educators of like mind, many of whom believe that the education of the past, while it offers elements we must not discard out of hand, is no longer meaningful and that we we must look to the world of the future, and beyond reform to revolution. "Innovation is hard," says Sir Kenneth Robinson in a Ted.com talk just released this week, "because it means doing something that people don't find very easy for the most part. It means challenging what we take for granted, things that we think are obvious." My work with ISTE led me to Quest Atlantis and Scratch, and to my use of those tools with our kids. Recently, this work along with other contributions resulted in my being honored by the National Association of Independent Schools as a "Teacher of the Future."

This summer I will lead a group of those like-minded educators in activities designed to help others understand the potentials of 3 dimensional virtual environments for learning and teaching. This will take place in Denver, Colorado from June 25 to June 30 at the ISTE 2010 Conference and Exposition. I'll frame that effort with several days before it and a week after with my extended family, vacation with loved ones and fun in Colorado.

I also hope to spend a few days in Boston at the end of July, at the Apple Learning Institute for educators that is part of the Teacher of the Future program award.

Finally, I learned just yesterday that my grant proposal for USN's Quaker Hill professional development grant won me the funding for self-designed travel to "exemplary and comparable schools" to observe K-4 technology program curricula in other locations. Though I am pleased with what I do in the computer lab, I feel that it could be more tightly and intentionally designed and less reliant on my own sometimes whimsical and playful approach to learning. Out of obligation to my students, your children, I am seeking ideas that will inform redesign of our technology curriculum to bring it even more in line with best practices, as demonstrated in programs that profess to "get it." Wish me luck. It's going to take some sorting out. I'll report back in the fall.

A few housekeeping notes:

I have had to remove Boowa and Kwala from the Webliographer. This is a long story but basically the new owner (no longer my friend Jason in Mauritus) refused to respond to my request that they remove inappropriate advertising from the non-login site. I regret this, as the blue bear and his lovely little koala buddy have been staples of my work in the lab for years. I feel it is the appropriate response, though. I'm good with it.
Keyboarding for Kids accounts will remain open all summer. If your child should finish all 64 lessons during the summer, please email me and I'll set up a new account for them so that they can keep up their practice and improve even more. PLEASE make sure that they are practicing with home row key position, using the correct fingers for the correct keys.
Quest Atlantis accounts will also be kept alive during the summer. I'll check in at least weekly. I have some questing to do myself, and it's incumbent upon me to fulfill my duties as mentor all summer long. If you have questions for me, don't hesitate to email. smerrick @ email.usn.org is the address.
1st grade Kerpoof accounts will remain open for rising 2nd graders. The login "Nickname" is the child's first name (duplicates in the grade level have the first two letters of the last name added, as in "SarahJo") and it is capitalized conventionally. The Password is 10r13 for the student in Ms. Roth's class sitting at computer 13 (the 10 is for the year 2010), and the Class Name is K747. I sent home login slips but if you've lost those you can also email me.
If your child is using Google Buzz, I highly encourage you to help them disable it. Go to your gmail "Settings," click on the Buzz tab, and disable Buzz. 'nuff said.
Keep your child's computer use public and monitor the browser history once a week. That works.

Have a safe and fun family summer, ya'll. I'll see you and your wonderful kids in the fall of 2010.

Second Week in May

2010-05-11T11:57:00.001-07:00

With so few school days left, we are scrambling to get every bit of learning value from our time in the lab.

The Short Story:
3rd and 4th graders are taking a 1 minute typing test so that I can gather data about their progress in Keyboarding for Kids.
Kindergarteners are choosing between drawing a picture in Drawing for Children or completing an activity at Kerpoof.
1st graders are choosing from that same set of options with the addition of the Creative Games portion of uptoten.com's Boowa and Kwala premium website.
2nd graders are visiting AuntLee.com for games that help them become more fluent with a computer keyboard.

The Short Story:
3rd and 4th graders are taking a 1 minute typing test so that I can gather data about their progress in Keyboarding for Kids. We do that at a website appropriately named TypingTest.com. Each child repeats the "Tigers in the Wild" 1 minute timed test as many times as we have time for, then I manually take down WordsPerMinute, Number of Errors, and AdjustedScore for entry into a MS Excel spreadsheet that will inform teachers so that they can include each child's progress in the discussions they will hold with parents at the end of the year. The accounts at Keyboarding for Kids will be available to students all summer long, and I HIGHLY suggest parents encourage practice. As I tell the kids, this skill is one that will make their entry into middle school immeasurably easier.

I'm so proud of the 4th grade team for all the support and encouragement they've given their classes this year. Our 4th graders' performance this year by far exceeds that of previous years and we feel like we're making progress in the program. More to come.

Kindergarteners are choosing between drawing a picture in Drawing for Children or completing an activity at Kerpoof. I save them all and I'll create a slideshow for each classroom's webpage as well as printing them for your refrigerators.

Here's one example of each platform's output. First, from Kerpoof.com's "Make a Picture" activity:

and then from Drawing for Children:

1st graders are choosing from that same set of options with the addition of the Creative Games portion of uptoten.com's Boowa and Kwala premium website.

2nd graders (who are not producing PowerPoint "About Me" slideshows in a quick intro to PowerPoint) are visiting the BBC Typing website for computer games they can revisit during the summer to help them begin to easily locate keys on the computer keyboard.

Keyboarding is an essential skill, and these students will begin their formal touch-typing program at the very beginning of the next school year as 3rd graders.

After the Mayday Floods

2010-05-05T10:09:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

I hope you're all safe and well after the recent deluge. I gather that many of our families suffered loss or damage and I'm thankful that no lives have been lost.

I at first was dubious about getting back to school so quickly and I do miss the opportunities to volunteer that are so needed in our community, but after a couple of days with your children just being around them has done so much for my own state of mind and emotions that I am glad we're back at work.

Here's the skimmy on what we are doing:

The Short Story:
3rd graders finish and print their Asia Scrapbook covers
4th graders re-enter Quest Atlantis to make progress before the end of the school year
Kindergarteners revisit Kerpoof to "Make a Doodle"
1st graders revisit Kerpoof to learn more about how to "Make a Movie"
2nd graders make and print a new graph at the NCES Create a Graph site

The Long Story:
3rd graders finish and print their Asia Scrapbook covers from a Microsoft Word template. It's easy to do but getting it done with all 18 students in a class in our allotted 25 minutes is quite fun and chaotic. Here's one example of the results:

4th graders re-enter Quest Atlantis to make progress before the end of the school year. I am introducing the 5th graders to this marvelous, safe, interesting platform this week (re-introducing most of them, as we quested to positive effect for much of last year in their 4th grade) and I'm hoping that our new collaboration with the Middle School will turn into something good for all of us--for the students, the technology team, and the families. Stay tuned!

Kindergarteners revisit Kerpoof to "Make a Doodle." This is Kerpoof's simple but fun painting/drawing tool, and Kindergarteners discover this week how to draw a shape--triangle, square, even star--and as long as they carefully end where they began it, Kerpoof straightens and evens out all the lines to make a "perfect" shape! We're printing these for refrigerators but not saving them.

1st graders revisit Kerpoof to learn more about how to "Make a Movie" there. This is a pretty powerful feature of Kerpoof. I have set the kids up with their own accounts and logins, the benefit of which is that they can save projects and revisit/extend them at future logins. I'm working on a little book with the "Make a Story" feature myself and I'll share it out here when it's complete. It's about an alien who trips over his tongue all the time...

2nd graders make and print a new graph at the NCES Create a Graph site. We did so last week and I'm pleased to see most 2nd graders able to complete the exercise this week, emerging with a graph displaying data taken by quick voice poll on a topic we choose at the moment. Actually, the 2nd grade has split focus to some degree this week, and two classes are involved in other activities--Ms. Pitt's class is finishing "All About Me" style PowerPoints, and Ms. Darr's students enjoy the first third of a movie that Lillian brought in to share. "MicroCosmos" is an absolutely stunning G-rated film distributed by Miramax that makes use of very high tech photography techniques to share the lives of insects in real life. Not an animated movie, you can read more about it and see a trailer at the Miramax MicroCosmos website!

Stay safe!

Slideshow from International Fair

2010-05-03T10:30:00.000-07:00

4th grader Caroline Knowles organized classmates to put up a little display about Quest Atlantis and the Hopi American culture, and her mom cooked corn stew and hominy to serve. A good time was had by all!

USN International Fair

Comments for Mr. Merrick?

2010-05-03T06:00:00.000-07:00

For my students:

Loading...

Last Week of April, 2010

2010-04-27T11:38:00.000-07:00

Time's flying by! Drop in for our annual International Fair from 5:30 pm to 7 pm Friday night, when 4th grader Caroline Knowles, her crew of fellow 4th graders, and I will be sharing Hopi American food, inspired by our Mesa Verde Unit in Quest Atlantis. I'll be sharing Quest Atlantis with interested attendees, too, via my laptop and a dedicated internet connection! Here's a great composite picture of two of my Questers who became virtual twins, dreadlocks and all, in Quest Atlantis!

The Short Story:

3rd Graders are creating Word cover pages for their Asia study scrapbooks

4th Graders are making graphs with the NCES Create-a-graph website

Kindergarters are making special cards with Kerpoof's "Make a Card" feature

1st Graders are looking at tutorials in Kerpoof, especially the "Make a Movie" tutorial

2nd Graders are also making graphs at the NCES site

The Long Story:
3rd Graders are creating Word cover pages for their Asia study scrapbooks by modifying Word Art on a template residing on our network. I created the template to facilitate getting the task done in the brief 30 minutes I have with the kids, and I'll be cleaning up any mis-formatting and printing them all for the students once they are all finished. In the course of the re-formatting, students open a browser and use the safe-search Google field in the Webliographer to find an image they would like to appear on their document's cover, then copy it into a text box on the template. This retains the desired sizing and makes for a good consistent cover page for all the kids' scrapbooks.

4th Graders are making graphs with the NCES Create-a-graph website. This site has been around for maybe a decade, despite the best efforts of the folks at the National Center for Economics Statistics to take it down several years ago. There was such an outcry by educators that they put it back up and it's been up and available ever since. It's easy to see why it was missed: Students can enter data, choose a style of graph, edit many design elements, and preview their work before revising it until they have just what they want. When satisfied, they can print, save, and/or email a copy of their graph to a teacher, themselves, or their favorite computer lab teacher. Here's a sample:

Kindergarters are making special (shhhhh) cards with Kerpoof's "Make a Card" feature. I'll share some of that work when it's the appropriate time to do so. With a certain holiday coming up a week from Sunday, it may be too early :-)

1st Graders are looking at tutorials in Kerpoof, especially the "Make a Movie" tutorial. This is a good introduction to the concept of tutorials, and it gives the students a source of reference once the logins and passwords go home. With luck, they will be able to use these accounts as long as they would like, since I set them up in such a manner that their usernames and passwords can travel with them up the grades through Lower School and beyond. I would really like to see what older kids could do with Kerpoof, and while introducing the Movie making interface to the 1st graders, I am struck by nothing so much as how it's kind of a nice little subtle introduction to programming. You have to see it to understand, and if you'd like to do that, click on over to the Kerpoof Tutorial page and watch Make a Movie Learn how to make a movie using Kerpoof Animation Studio.

2nd Graders are also making graphs at the NCES site. With them, however, I first demonstrate the site and then walk them through the process a step at a time. The biggest challenge is attention span and self-control in whole class, and I welcome the chance to work on that with them. The results are mostly stellar (the example above is actually one emailed me by a 2nd grader!).

See you in May!

April Proceeds Apace!

2010-04-22T05:48:00.000-07:00

We are workingworkingworking in the Lower School Technology for Learning Lab. Here's what we're doing this week:

3rd graders continue with Keyboarding for Kids

4th graders add desktop shortcuts and continue to explore their new mobile netbooks

Kindergarteners "Make a Story" at Kerpoof.com

1st graders login to their new student accounts and Making a Story and saving it online

2nd graders finish up My Lemonade Stand

3rd graders continue with Keyboarding for Kids. Parents, I'm proud of the way many 3rd graders have pursued acquisition of this skill and I want to remind you that the K4K accounts will be "live" online all summer long. A rainy day at the beach? Pop 'em online on the laptop and have them practice for 10 or 15 minutes before they explore the Webliographer for fun, interactive, and educational links!

4th graders add desktop shortcuts and continue to explore their new mobile netbooks. This will be a real boon to our 4th grade writing program. I talked to a colleague of mine at ISTE yesterday whose child will be attending an independent school in Eugene, Oregon next year and one of the things she's most proud of is the mobile laptop cart that even Kindergarteners get to use one day a week. Is this the way of the future for our technology program? It's a possibility, as we continue to do what we've always done at USN--constantly re-evaluate our programs to do the best we can do for our students. Stay tuned! I'll be writing a detailed article about our new resource for the USN enewsletter, so stay tuned for that too!

Kindergarteners are visiting Kerpoof.com again this week to "Make a Story." This clever and powerful online art program is education standards aligned and we will be using it in the lab as just one more way to practice digital graphic literacy and in the process add to our skills banks the problem-solving and self-learning that mastering Kerpoof presents. Here's one of the Kindergartener's pics as an example:

1st graders login to their new student accounts and Making a Story and saving it online. In an upcoming class I'll show them how to open a file, save it on their computer in the My Pictures folder, then how to print that picture. If they are printing at home, do what I do in the lab, set your printer to "Draft" to save color ink!

2nd graders finish up My Lemonade Stand, the computer-resident software that I described in last week's post. This week, many more are muscling through the virtual 30 days of entrepreneurship that the program offers. Our high score for the week is as of Thursday over $3400 dollars. That's pretty good business decision making (and luck) for having started with a seed fund of only $2.00 on day one!

Four more weeks of school. But remember: Lifelong learning never ends, and online learning is ALWAYS available.

Virtual Summer Camp Announced!

2010-04-15T15:51:00.000-07:00

07/19/2010 07/23/2010 $150.00

Description Rising 4th - 8th graders

Instructor: Scott Merrick

8:00 am - 11:30 am

Come explore a virtual recreation of the real life Mesa Verde National Park, and then, time permitting, we'll delve into Quests that students choose from a menu including a NASA mission in outer space, a Frankenstein-like monster mystery, and many more. We will also take some time to learn how to build and create our own virtual art and architecture. Camp to be held in the Lower School computer lab.

Here's a direct link to the registration page!

Week of April 12, 2010

2010-04-14T06:50:00.000-07:00

Hey, all. It's a big week in the Lower School Technology for Learning Lab!

The Short Story:

3rd graders continue making progress in Keyboarding for Kids

4th graders are introduced to our new mobile netbooks lab!

Kindergarteners and 1st graders visit and produce art at Kerpoof

2nd graders create their own business cards using a Microsoft Word template

The Long Story:

3rd graders continue making progress in Keyboarding for Kids as we position them for writing success upon entry into 4th grade next year. The first 3rd grader has FINISHED all 64 lessons in K4K and has started through his second course of it, so it's proven that with diligence and effort, even when that effort is optional, we can do this! Please encourage your child to work and let them do so at home if at all possible. They need simply to visit the Webliographer and click the Keyboarding for Kids image, log in as they would at school, and carry on!

4th graders are introduced to our new mobile netbooks lab! This is a tremendously exciting new development that's been months in the planning and setup, and I'm proud to say that we are rolling (literally) the laptops out to the students this week. We'll talk about care and maintenance, rehearse how to login to the laptops and set up the necessary shortcuts on each child's individualized desktop, how to troubleshoot in case the wireless access is lost, and all manner of new things presented by the Windows 7 operating system and Microsoft Office 2007, which you may know is quite different from the Office 2003 the kids are used to using. Stay tuned for pics and more description of this newest innovation in the lab. By the way, MUCH thanks to Technology Assistant Spencer Engelbert for all his help, and also to the whole tech department...

Kindergarteners and 1st graders visit and produce art at Kerpoof, the immensely rich online drawing, painting, and moviemaking tool. K kids dive into the "Make a Picture" function, producing a printed coloring book sheet with their name on it and customized with a background and images of their own choosing, 1sters produce interesting wordlists and pictures with the "Spell a Picture" interface, printing those out at the end of the session. It's FUN! We'll do more yet at Kerpoof next week, after student accounts are set up with my new free teacher account. This will allow us to save, to customize each child's avatar, and to start building a collection of drawings. I am careful to talk about how this is a "commercial" site and though it offers lots of options without logging in with a paid account, there will be stages along the way where students may want their parents to upgrade. I encourage them to use the site's free parts instead...

2nd Graders create their own business cards using a Microsoft Word template, simply highlighting and typing or pasting clip art into pre-defined fields. I would love for them to be able to create these on their own, free-form, but having them only for 30 minutes limits me to this procedure. It works, but it is really hectic as each child works to complete his or her own single card on an Avery-based template. After the class leaves, I copy that card and paste it into each of the 9 other positions on the page, and I'll do all the printing after all classes have completed the design work. Here's an example of what the final product looks like:

That's it for this week. See you next!

Week of April 5, 2010

2010-04-05T09:20:00.000-07:00

The Short Story:

4th grade-Quest Atlantis

3rd grade-K4K

Kindergarten -Boowa and Kwala MyFirstClicks center number 22, Vegetables and the Garden

1st grade-Fairytales websites on Webliographer

2nd grade-My Lemonade Stand intro (Pitt business cards)

The Long Story:

4th grade-4th graders Quest the light Atlantis! Continuing to move into and along through the winding time-traveling mission of Mesa Verde, we find that we can help Lorisa, the girl who is hiding from wrongly judgmental classmates on a field trip to Mesa Verde National Park by going back and forth into three periods of history and talking to Puebloan culture denizens, all along the way learning more and more about their rich and fascinating culture. I took a few pics of my own as I pursued the mission over the weekend and I'll add a couple here:

In this first one, chestertesterusn, my student avatar, is viewing a video about the Puebloan culture inside the museum. Later on, he'll have the chance to pursue a detailed scavenger hunt by investigating the displays in the museum, like the one at the wall in the right hand side of this picture.

In the second picture, you can see the first questions of the scavenger hunt itself. You'll note that these questions reflect knowledge about details key to understanding this very interesting lost culture. Part of one class session has been dedicated to demonstrating how to facilitate the taking of this little "test" by minimizing the window rather than closing it and reopening it as answers become clear. Stay tuned for more info as more and more Questers progress into this fantastic educational unit!

3rd grade-Keyboarding for Kids proceeds apace. I'm feeling better all the time as at least several students in each classroom pass the 20 lesson mark toward completing the program. Whether any of them will actually finish all 64 lessons before the end of the year (when it is optional, not required) remains to be seen, but I have high hopes that at least a few of them will. Parents, if you have not yet bought into this valuable learning opportunity for your child, help them out by encouraging them to make progress and to make it the right way, with HOME ROW KEY POSITION, ALWAYS!

Kindergarten -K kiddos will visit Boowa and Kwala MyFirstClicks center number 22 this week, "Vegetables and the Garden." This is a review lesson in the 50 lesson continuum that was introduced the second week of school, and the gentle, satire-free activities encourage the use of mouse control, arrow keys, and more for their completion.
1st grade-The 1sters visit Fairy Tales websites on Webliographer. They've been exploring fairy tales in the classroom, but they may not have visited the ubercool Grimm Fairy Tales site or the gently fun Snapdragon version of Goldilocks.

2nd grade-My Lemonade Stand is an out-of-print software version of a classic, but it's so well done that we keep using it year to year. In it, a budding business boy or girl has 30 days to make (or lose) a fortune, beginning with a budget of a mere $2.00 and deciding quantity, price, and whether or not to even sell each day based on the weather "Forcast" (even good game programmers can misspell things--and you'd better bet I point that error out each time I introduce the game). The forecast includes High Temperature, Humidity, and Percent chance of Rain, also all good concepts to reinforce, and a skillful (and lucky) player can amass wealth well into the thousands in the 20 or 30 minutes it can take to work through the 30 days of business. Ms. Pitt's ready to do her class's business cards, so we'll do that this week. More on that project next week, when we'll all get it done...

See you then!

Oh, and here are the K-1st grade Spring pictures I promised last week--all in a slideshow for your joyful Springtime viewing!

Hello, April!

2010-04-01T09:06:00.000-07:00

Be sure to see the previous post (below) for news about Doodle4Google!

The Short Story:
3rd graders--continue progress in Keyboarding for Kids
4th graders--continue progress in the Mesa Verde Mission in Quest Atlantis
Kindergarten and 1st graders--create colorful "Spring" drawings with Drawing for Children
2nd graders--analyze and review "Money" games at Internet4Classrooms

The Long Story:

3rd graders--are setting themselves up for success by diligently working each week in Keyboarding for Kids, and if they show an interest in doing so at home (which many are reporting in lab class) please allow them to practice as often as they can and will. Please also make sure that they are using only home row key position!

4th graders--continue progress in the Mesa Verde Mission in Quest Atlantis, helping Lorisa understand the value of her ancestry and exploring in great detail the rich culture of the Puebloan people. At the end of April, our school will stage an International Fair, an annual celebration of cultural diversity, and Caroline, a 4th grader, has volunteered to organize a group of her classmates to cook and share food from Hopi history. I plan to be there with a poster display and Quest Atlantis running on my laptop connected to a large flat panel monitor, taking advantage of the opportunity to share this amazing, challenging, and fun way to learn. In more Quest Atlantis news, Middle School Technology Coordinator Jake Wilson has decided that QA will benefit his 5th graders. He's signed up for the mandatory 8 hours of online teacher training in April and I'll be going into his classes in a couple of weeks to re-introduce former Questers to Quest Atlantis and to show the new 5th graders how it all works. Amazing!

Kindergarteners and 1st graders--are using Drawing for Children to create fun, fun, fun, little drawings celebrating Spring! I'll pop in an example I shared with them right here, but check back for a long and entertaining slideshow right here next week!

2nd graders--examine the 26 learning games about "Money" at Internet4Classrooms (each spends 10 minutes with the game whose number matches their own computer number, then chooses any of the games with numbers higher than 18 to "test drive") and reassemble to demonstrate the best ones for their classmates. Via this exercise, I'll choose a particular set of games we'll all do on this topic next chance we get. Next week, we'll begin making business cards for their own imaginary businesses in the Business Unit! More on that later...

USN Doodle4Google Announcement!

2010-03-29T16:00:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to everyone who took the time and had the fun of creating a Doodle4Google for our school's participation this year! Our judges, Faculty members Maura Rankin, Elizabeth Coble, Stephen Douglas, Steve Smail, Lee Ann Merrick, and Emily Holt, considered all of these often beautiful and creative submissions in the light of our weighty charge to narrow the over 170 entries down to only 6. These are scanned images, since we had to submit the originals to New York for preliminary judging as the first step in the long process that will decide upon one winner in the end.

I would love to scan them all and share them in a slideshow so that you can see how difficult our young artists made the process for their judges--I may do that!

Meanwhile, here are the Doodles that prevailed. From top to bottom, Maggie Robinson, Evelyn TeSelle, Henry Standard, Samantha Olivares-Mejia, Alex Dano, and Ford Cannon.

And here are the artist's statements:

1) Maggie, 3rd Grade, If I Could Do Anything I Would…
Save the Animals--We should save animals. The puffer fish represents fish people catch and don’t release. The owl's eyes mean we should give a hoot and not hurt animals. People think snakes are dangerous and kill them. People cut trees taking giraffes’ food. Turtles die in fishing nets.

2) Evelyn, 4th Grade, If I could Do Anything I Would …
Educate the World--One of the hardest things a person has to face is making decisions. Any decision you make affects everyone around you, and education gives you the power to choose wisely. If everyone in my generation had a good education, then the future world would be full of good decision makers.

3) Henry, 4th Grade, If I Could Do Anything I Would …
Clean the Ocean-- I like a lot of animals that are being killed and hurt by pollution, littered waters, and oil spills; so for my Google doodle I decided to draw mankind changing that.

4) Samantha, 4th Grade, If I Could Do Anything I Would…
Save the Animals--My doodle for Google is about saving animals. I chose this mainly because I saw dog prints on a goody bag and I thought that would be perfect for the O’s. I just got to work and then there was a dog, spider, snake, tiger and a bird.

5) Alex, 4th Grade, If I Could Do Anything I Would…
Have a Day at the Park—Have a Day at the Park is about going to the park and having a picnic with your friends and family and everybody that you love. When you look at it I want you to think of peace, love, nature, and of course GOOGLE!

6) Ford, 3rd Grade, If I Could Do Anything I Would …
Explore the Oceans--If I could do anything I would explore the oceans, because there are lots of living creatures under the water.

First Week After Spring Break!

2010-03-24T09:54:00.000-07:00

I'm glad to be back with my kiddos, though I did have a fun and relaxing Spring Break. Now, with only 10 weeks or so of school left to go, I'm racing to get goals and instruction finished. Welcome back to you and yours!

The Short Story:
3rd Grade--Keyboarding for Kids
4th Grade--Mesa Verde unit at Quest Atlantis
Kindergarten--Katie's Room
2nd Grade--Virtual-swim.com
1st Grade--Math at Internet4Classrooms

The Long Story:
3rd Grade--Keyboarding for Kids work continues. Typing correctly in home row key position is an invaluable skill and this is the very first year we've instituted K4K for the third graders. I was gratified to receive a compliment from a parent just yesterday, as he mentioned his child's work on the computer at home. If you have any problems installing and running K4K at home, please pop on over to the USN Lower School Webliographer to the Keyboarding topic, where there's a great link to the Ellsworth Publishing website page for "Troubleshooting." You'll be glad you did!

4th Grade--The Mesa Verde Mission at Quest Atlantis continues. This set of missions begins with a missing girl on a field trip. She's hiding from her classmates at the fantastic QA replication of the real life Mesa Verde National Park because she is of Hopi descent and she fears ridicule from her classmates about the primitive culture her ancestors enjoyed 800 years ago. One classmate in particular has been vocal about his low opinion of the "Puebloans," and a conversation with him turns up in the mission's trajectory. There's a detailed "scavenger hunt" which requires the quester to learn a great deal about the Puebloan's life style and culture, then a journey into the past is in the offing. This is a well designed, beautifully illustrated, thought-provoking experience and I'm happy to provide it to our children. More than that, I'm pleased to be learning with them as I pursue the Mesa Verde Mission myself!

Kindergarten--In Katie's Room, located online at the Thomson Online Courses "Growing with Technology" website, early learners get a gentle introduction to the "home row" keys on a computer keyboard. I demo the first activity at the projector-connected computer then I send the kids off to "break the codes" by typing on their keyboards with the correct fingers. There's more at the website, including activities about computer terminology and more, and we will be back.

2nd Grade--Virtual-swim.com is a fantastic website that is subtitled "Aquatic Animation for Analysis and Education" and which allows the user to look in virtual unlimited 3-dimensional ways at a whole host of swim strokes. Lisa Preston, chair of our Physical Education department and a stellar teacher, comes in to demonstrate this website for our second graders toward awakening a visualized understanding of the physical elements of the breaststroke. She's even concocted a little 3 question Google Survey the children can fill out during their lab session to demonstrate understanding of the concepts. Parents may want to visit the site with their children, and I guarantee the visit will be a learning experience.

1st Grade--1st Grade Math at Internet4Classrooms is rich and varied, and though we've found a few of the games' links lead to broken or dysfunctional websites, having 20 or so links to online interactive math practice and drill websites gathered together by topic (fractions, telling time, money and counting, etc.) in one place is very handy. This week the 1st graders visit the site after a brief demo and choose a topic to explore, after a brief demo. It's interesting that most of the children choose to go straight to the ones I've demonstrated, even though they have full reign to go to any of the dozens of games. These resources and those like them are available anywhere with an internet connection and a computer to make it, and options for online lifelong learning will only increase.

Second Week in March, Come On, Spring Break!

2010-03-09T09:52:00.000-08:00

The Short Story:
3rd Graders work in Keyboarding4Kids.
4th Graders are re-entering Quest Atlantis!
Kindergarteners are enjoying an introduction to Stacker Blocks followed by Free Choice Options.
1st Graders revisit the Literacy section of the BBC Bitesize learning website to share a couple of the games before engaging in lab Free Choice.
2nd Graders share their favorites at BBC Bitesize Science full class before they turn to Free Choice Options.

The Long Story:
3rd Graders continue to work in Keyboarding4Kids. I had planned to report progress to their teachers last week but in light of the relatively little time they had to work last week due to the introduction of the Google4Google competition I moved that back a week. Teachers will get a comprehensive report to help them identify students who may need some additional motivation to work, and to identify them early on.
4th Graders are re-entering Quest Atlantis! After an hiatus generated by a couple missteps in online chat, we are re-entering with the goal of completing initial activities and then diving into the Mesa Verde Quest, a series of task performances with an underlying theme of cultural diversity. Here is an online slideshow to give you a taste of how rich this environment is, followed by a statement about the unit from the Teachers' section of the QA website:

Mesa Verde Overview: The Mesa Verde Unit provides students with an opportunity to travel back in time to learn more about the Ancestral Puebloan people who inhabited an area in the American southwest until about 800 years ago. Along the way, they'll learn about the characteristics of a civilization, features of the Ancestral Puebloan culture, and how to balance your cultural heritage with the need to fit in as a teen in today's society.

Students will visit the Spruce Tree House cliff dwelling at a virtual representation of Mesa Verde National Park to witness how this ancient society created their unique arts, beliefs, customs, and lifestyle amidst the harshest of conditions, and they will attempt to determine why these cliff dwellers suddenly left their beautiful stone city. Additionally, students will explore their own heritage and the artifacts that have shaped their OWN story, learning that we all contribute a chapter in the greater human experience.

Kindergarteners get an introduction to StackerBlocks, the wonderful freeware software program we have on all our lab computers. It's a Tetris-like game, with good customization options and I've used it in the lab for years. Spacial literacy skills are hard at play and predicting and manipulating the falling blocks is good practice for those neural muscles. After the introduction, kindergarteners may make their own Free Choice options and many do choose to begin working with Stacker Blocks 3D. It's available at the Webliographer in the Downloads section for download at home, too!

1st Graders get to share favorite BBC Bitesize Literacy games from last week before a quick reminder about Stackerblocks and Free Choice options. I blogged all about my "Free Choice" guidelines back in September (you can read that here).

2nd Graders share their own fave BBC Bitesize Science activities from last week's pair-off exploration, completing the jigsaw activity (where a large set of activities is distributed amongst the group for visiting and then the group reconvenes for sharing), then heads off to Free Choice.

With Kinder, 1, and 2, I am recording just what choices the children make during their Free Choice, and I plan to report the results next week in a spreadsheet created graph. I'll be explaining to the older children just how I came up with the graphs and how to interpret them!

Happy March!

2010-03-02T06:54:00.000-08:00

The Short Story:
Everyone gets a short introduction to Doodle4Google. Entries are to be submitted no later than the end of school Friday, March 26. I'm telling the kids this year to doodle as much as they would like to, but please to only submit final versions they really really think can win the competition. See the winners from last year's Doodle4Google competition!
3rd Graders work in Keyboarding4Kids.
4th Graders may work on Scratch projects or on updating their blogs after visiting last week's posts about Scratch and editing/revising to make them more polished.
Kindergarteners visit the BBC's "Little Critters Activities Centre" for math and reading practice.
1st graders go to the Literacy Section of the BBC Bitesize learning website for all manner of practice with their interactivities.
2nd graders pair up to examine BBC Bitesize Science activities then demo them for the class at the projector.

The Long Story:
Everyone gets a short introduction to Doodle4Google. This huge annual competition nets the winning drawing $15,000 for their efforts, plus $25,000 more in grant funding for a computer lab at their school. LOTS more can be found at the official website. Entries are to be submitted no later than the end of school Friday, March 26. This year, as in past years, our K12 school may submit only 6 entries to the state competition, and I'll put together a panel of volunteer teachers to do the judging for our school. I love the theme this year: "If I could do anything, I would..." Reminder: This is an ENTIRELY optional competition. I tell the children that if they want to do a drawing they certainly may, but they should not submit it (to the basket on my desk) unless they really really feel it could win the national competition. At USN, we're not so much about the concept of competition, but if we look at this as analogous to a sports competition with a nice award for the winner, we're in a healthy mindset to compete on an artistic level.
3rd Graders work in Keyboarding4Kids. Remember that this too is optional (at least for homework). The kids know their login process, "usntigers," "usntigers, "their password" parents check your email for individual password help), and that they are to accomplish three good scores (20 wpm or better, 3 errors or fewer, and then move on to the next line or the next lesson. HOME ROW KEY is the only way to successfully do this work. If you notice your child typing out of that standard touch-typing position, please correct them immediately and monitor that they always work that way--I would rather them not do the program at all than to be doing it incorrectly!
4th Graders may work on Scratch projects or on updating their blogs after visiting last week's posts about Scratch and editing/revising to make them more polished. This gives them a chance to see how easy it is to revise a previously posted blog, and to read the approved comments I've shuttled through the approval process since they made their posts last week. We also discovered today that a digital template of the Google doodle outline can be imported to the Scratch painting platform and that can be used for its design. Fun!
Kindergarteners visit the BBC's "Little Critters Activities Centre" for math and reading practice. Little Critters does a good job of engaging the younger set in very simple "fill in the number sentence" practice with Count Hoot, and the three stories that can be read and clicked through are fun and attention-keeping. The mix of audio narration with the screen-displayed words and actions is hard to beat for immersing young ones in the world of reading and writing.
1st graders go to the Literacy Section of the BBC Bitesize learning website for all manner of practice with their interactivities. There are 9 wonderful activities at the site, and I can attest that they are engaging by the number of chuckles I hear coming from the headphone-outfitted 1st graders!

2nd graders pair up to examine BBC Bitesize Science activities then demo them for the class at the projector. I assign partners by proximity-paired seating and charge them to know the game well enough to explain to the class how it works. I also challenge them to use an outside voice when they explain, and it might take instructions for them to "get mad at me" before many 2nd graders' voices are loud enough to fill the room. By using this "jigsaw" process, all the games get to be explained and we will hopefully build some interest in revisiting BBC Bitesize Science!

Last Full Week of February

2010-02-23T10:31:00.001-08:00

Where does the time go?

Here we are in the last week of February with only two weeks until Spring Break and there's much to do, much to do...

The Short Story:
3rd Graders continue Keyboarding for Kids
4th Graders perform a screengrabbing mashup in their kidblog using Scratch, the PrtScr button, and Microsoft Paint.
Kindergarteners visit PBS's Between the Lions website
1st Graders work on math skills at the BBC Bitesize Math site for their grade level
2nd Graders do the same at their grade level's Bitesize Math site, focusing on Shapes

And then of course, there's
The Long Story:
3rd Graders continue Keyboarding for Kids and I'm proud of the way many of them have waded into the program and are making real progress. "Mileage does vary," though, and as I anticipated many are still struggling into it, some likely developmentally unprepared for either the physical challenges, the regular practice, the understanding of the importance of this skill, or all three. My goal over the month of March is to improve the numbers in all three areas so that our 2010-2011 4th graders have a real jumpstart on their work.
4th Graders perform a screengrabbing mashup in their kidblog using Scratch, the PrtScr button, and Microsoft Paint. This activity is a good example of why a computer lab curriculum needs to be at least to some degree flexible. I came up with its design just yesterday, when I was helping a teacher learn how to do a "screengrab," basically taking a snapshot of a desktop window and creating an edited image of it for a website archive. We've neglected Scratch the past few weeks, concentrating on blogs and blogging, and I wanted to fuel the interest in that program, so 4th grade students

opened Scratch and found a project they'd either created or edited
screen-captured its display with the PrtScr key on their keyboard
opened Paint and edit/pasted their picture then(if needed) with the Select tool, then saved it as a .jpg file in the My Pictures folder
opened Firefox and clicked in the Webliographer to go to the USN4th Kidblogs
created a New Post and uploaded their screengrab into it, resizing as neccessary
wrote a few sentences about their selected project.

Wow. Here are two examples of the products in our password protected Kidblogs, more or less selected randomly:

and

Kindergarteners visit PBS's Between the Lions website where there are great, fun activities ranging from Movie Clips to Stories to Games, all geared to enhance kids' literacy skills. One of my basic intrinsic goals in my work is to expose children to fun ways to learn, to broaden their knowledge and appreciation of just how many ways there are to practice important skills, and to get them in shape to pursue their own means of life-long learning online. "Between the Lions" is one good source for that.

1st Graders work on math skills at the BBC Bitesize Math site for their grade level.

2nd Graders do the same at their grade level's Bitesize Math site, focusing on Shapes.

I may be Bitesize Math's newest big fan. This site holds a wealth of engaging content, and one screengrab of my own (from the 1st grade site) will give you an indication of just how many activities are available at each grade level.

The Middle of February

2010-02-18T09:41:00.000-08:00

The Short Story:

3rd Grade--K4K

4th Grade--Math Options: TimezAttack, Multiflyer, and ArithmAttack

Kindergarten--Starfall-- Learn to Read

1st grade--Starfall-- It's Fun to Read

2nd grade--Funbrain.com's "Changemaker" and e-learningforkids.org's "Money"

The Long Story:

3rd Grade--Third graders continue their orientation to Keyboarding for Kids, the online-accessible touch-typing learning system we are using with them for the very first time this year. It is so important that they are typing through the lessons using "home row key position" so that they can learn to type without looking at their hands, so if your child is working on this at home (and quite a few, to my pleasant surprise, are!) please remind them to use that approach to typing! Finally, I have added the K4K Troubleshooting support page to the Webliographer for those who want their children to work on their typing but may be encountering difficulties connecting to it online.

4th Grade--We have used the computer lab so much this year for writing related work that it struck me that we need to be sure not to overlook some of the other benefits computers and online resources can bring to bear on our learning. Consequently, I offer our 4th graders three options this week (see above, The Short Story, for links). All three take an approach to learning with what is termed "skill and drill" technique--sort of a technology-enhanced flashcardKin approach, and it's been interesting to see the choices the students make. Predictably, the "ArithmAttack" activity is overlooked: It's a simple javascript flashcard interface with timer and a running count of correct answers and incorrect ones. The Multiflyer online activity can win half the students or more--a trip through the Solar System (including the space rock formerly known as the planet Pluto) with energy points earned by entering correct multiplication products. Edging Multiflyer out in most classes is TimezAttack, from BigBrainz.com, a "defeat the troll" 3D interface which has you, the little green alien, working your way through a dark dungeon encountering trolls you must defeat by clobbering them with your multiplication problem answers. The whole educational foundation of this game can be viewed at the BigBrainz website. While you're there, you may see that you can purchase a full version of this program for US$39.95. I want to emphasize that I do NOT recommend people purchase this (or any other program) for their home computers. In TimezAttack's case, the upgrade purchase provides several additional environments for practice of the same skills covered in the basic FREE version. If this is something your family decides is important, by all means, go for it.

Kindergarten--We visited Starfall a few weeks ago, and now I'm taking our Kinderkids back to "up the ante" to the next phase: Learn to Read. It's all part of my plan to get them interested in how to practice the skills their teachers are expecting them to gradually master as they get older, and practice them in a safe, interactive, fun, engaging way. I really like the way that many of Starfall.com's activities culminate in a printable product, but one that is printable in black and white (cost saving) and also usually includes something to be completed by the child in pencil on paper. Most kids either printed from the "Make Your Own Calendar" activity or the "All About Me" one.

1st Grade--Also working at Starfall again, but just like the Kindergarteners, they are moving up a level, and their new level is "It's Fun to Read." At Starfall, it is fun to read, and the reading contains everything from classic poems to brief information about famous painters. It's fun, it's engaging, and it's learning.

2nd Grade--Visited the 2nd Grade Go Here page from the Webliographer and worked out with Funbrain's Changemaker activity and with one of e-learningforkids.org's wonderful games geared to opensourcing online pre-K to adult learning. We'll be exploring e-learningforkids.org's site more often and soon.

Come on last week in February. We're almost ready for March!

One Laptop Per Child Receives 4 USN XO Computers for Haiti

2010-02-10T06:48:00.000-08:00

This post is just to announce that the four XO computers USN purchased in 2008 during the "in kind" purchase program (where we bought 12, received 6 of them, and 6 went to a child in a developing nation) have been shipped to Texas in order to be forwarded to Haiti. My dear son Colin, now a USN 8th grader, took the other 2 to leave with orphans at a friend's orphanage in South Africa last summer, so all have now been put to good use.

Here is the email that I received last month announcing the new initiative (thanks to William Gabella for the heads-up!:

Subject: OLPC for Haiti: XO Laptop Recovery Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:13:22 -0500 (EST)

Dear G1G1er,

At the end of 2007 you participated in the Give One Get One program of One Laptop per Child (OLPC). Thanks to you and others like you, 75,000 laptops went to Rwanda, Ethiopia, Mongolia, Cambodia, Oceania, the West Bank, and Haiti.

An additional 75,000 laptops came into the USA as part of the "get" side of the equation. In some cases those laptops have since been put into closets for one reason or another.

We are gathering additional used XO laptops to send to Haiti. If you or the child to whom you gave the laptop is no longer using it, we appeal again to your generosity and ask you to send it to the address below (even if it is broken).

OLPC FOR HAITI c/o Exel
615 Westport Parkway #500
Grapevine, TX 76051

75% of the schools in Port-au-Prince have been destroyed in the recent earthquake, but by good fortune, none of our Haitian team was hurt. They have spare parts and OLPC technical staff and teachers, and stand prepared to deploy these XOs.

Because of the XO's unique features (sunlight readability, solar powered, water resistant, drop proof), it is also an ideal tool for relief work.

If your XO is in use, please ignore this email. We only want your broken or unused XOs.

Sincerely,

Nicholas Negroponte

And here is the cover letter I included in the box:

University School of Nashville

2000 Edgehill Avenue

Nashville, TN 37212

OLPC FOR HAITI c/o Exel

615 Westport Parkway #500

Grapevine, TX 76051

Dear Folks,

Please accept these four laptops from us for shipment to Haiti. If for some reason you have discontinued this program, please ship them back. Our students can use these, but we have agreed that children and relief workers in Haiti can use them more.

Sincerely,
Scott Merrick

USN Lower School Technology Coordinator

February 8th through 12

2010-02-08T11:47:00.000-08:00

The Short Story:
3rd Graders: Practice for touch-typing success with Keyboarding for Kids
4th Graders: Flex their blogging muscles at kidblog.org with comments
Kindergarteners and 1st Graders tidy up and finish their Valentine cards with Drawing for Children
2nd Graders: Are working at the A+Math "Money Flashcards" experience and then visiting U.S. Mint's official government site, H.I.P, Pocket Change

The Long Story:
3rd Graders have been set up for success at our online Keyboarding for Kids web interface. Unlike the 4th graders, 3rd graders are not required to work at their keyboarding daily, for homework. I still encourage them to practice, now and over the summer and to help them understand the importance of practicing correctly, I'm working with them in February to make progress in the computer lab. In that process, the kids will encounter the small nuances in the program that might frustrate them had they not had that supervised time in-lab. 3rd grade parents, if your child does have problems accessing the site at http://keyboardingonline.com, please let me know via email. I'll try to help. Copious online help is also available at the troubleshooting tips page at Ellsworth Publishing.

4th Graders continue to blog, toward beginning to understand the power of this medium. I will enable comments this week and hopefully we'll move past some of the issues we have previously encountered concerning using the platform at kidblog.org as more of a chat interface than a blogging one!

Kinderkids and 1st graders will finish and print their Valentines from a template they've liberally modified with their own creative approaches to Drawing for Children. Here's a slideshow of our work:

2nd Graders are working for 15 minutes with "how much is it?" money counting flashcards at A+Math and then visiting the wonderful games at the U.S. Mint's official government website. These games are perhaps a bit less flashy than some the children may have encountered online, but they are fun and challenging and some allow for partner play, such as the darts game, and all have some bit of learning built in. Practice with trajectory, acceleration, speed, and timing are all good things!

See you next week! We'll be off Monday for Presidents Day, so enjoy the long weekend with your families!

2010-02-02T07:46:00.001-08:00

The Short Story:
3rd graders are finishing off and printing their Master Artists pictures for their posters
4th graders continue their introduction to blogging by posting about the recent snow day and snowy weekend.
Kindergarteners and 1st graders begin Valentine cards from a template in Drawing for Children
2nd graders visit and email results from Syvum.com's 2nd grade addition word problems

The Long Story:
3rd graders are finishing their quest for pictures by and of their artist so that they may print them for cutting out and pasting onto their hand-made posters for the culmination of the Master Artists Unit. The concept of the Windows clipboard is at once simple and complex, and like so many other no one really gets it until they use it for a while. Use it for a while they are, as they collect as many as a dozen pictures and copy, paste, and resize them to fit no more than 6 to a page for printing. Those who finish delve into Keyboarding for Kids, and I'll have much more to say about that next week.

4th graders are blogging with the closed platform at kidblog.org, and we've had a rocky start. It's a learning curve for me as I introduce the concepts of blogging with a Prezi, a creative new online presentation platform (introducing Prezi in the process). Here's the one I am sharing with them this week:

Blogs for 4th Graders 01-10 on Prezi

Once we've talked about the issues surrounding blogging, shared the "Blogs in Plain English" from Commoncraft.com, viewed some examples of my own blogs and talked about the way some blogs are open and some blogs are closed, we go to it. Our initial introduction was interrupted by the snow day last Friday, and we had a great deal of confusion as kids dived right in and began using the comments feature essentially as a chat platform (I've currently disabled comments altogether until I can ascertain that we have consensus that we will not do so using kidblog.org), but that snow day did give us some fuel for some good blog posts. Here's what the menu for me looks like:

And here are a couple examples from the blog, which no one but the kids, the 4th grade teachers, and Ms. Rankin--who is interested in seeing if this might be the venue for kids to share their summer reading over the summer--can see. I encourage kids to share with parents while they are at computer at home, though. As you will see, we'll use kidblog.com to share opinion and experiences and once comments are enabled I hope to get meaningful dialog going. Ms. Touchstone was observing one class this week and she contributed some language that will help me in this regard, encouragement to the students to write about "small moments." I will be encouraging detail and honesty in these writing efforts. Let's see how we're doing:

From Gracie:

My snow day was awesome! the only part i’m sad about is it isn’t still happening!
we had ice chunk contests, hot chocolate, snowball fights, you name it!
we made huge forts out of sticks, and little ice sculptures to go outside.
I also made a snowball the size of one of those masks we made in kindergarten.
I hope there is another snow day!
P.S. Do you know this is like a record? Two snow days in the same month! I heard people were so shocked that we got one it was in the newspaper but that might just be a rumor…..

From Conner:

Does anybody reading this know what a Tonkinese cat is???
I thought not. a Tonkinese cat is a cross between a Siamese and a Burmese. they are very sweet and loving. nobody really knows about Tonkinese cats, so if you could, tell a friend, or, you could send an email to someone. I happen to have 2 Tonkinese kittens. They are very, very, sweet. I will upload a picture on a future blog, right now i cant figure out how. Please tell someone about Tonkinese cats.

and when I asked in a blog post of my own for students to share their opinions about Scratch, I got some very interesting responses:

From Carolyn:

I really like it, but at first I thought that it wouldn’t be fun just boring programing but now I can do really fun stuff on scratch and it is really awesome so I also do it at home!!!

From Evelyn:

I like it a lot, but i wish it had better instructions. I had to work a while to make a decent project. They should have some more instructions for each little thing so you know how it works and how to use it and stuff. But scratch is really fun!

Some 4th graders have already copied and pasted their Aztec reports into their blog, sharing them with their classmates, and one has proposed to do a weekly weather report. I can't wait to see the possibilities!

Kinder and 1st grade kids are creating Valentines Day cards from a template in Drawing for Children. With Vday on a Sunday this year, a week from Sunday to be specific, we'll print these next week. Watch for them to appear, and make room on your refrigerator doors for these beauties!

2nd grade is visiting 2ndGoHere and choosing one or more sets of 2nd grade math word problems, solving them, getting a "score" and emailing the results to me. This involves copying my email address from the 2ndGoHere page and pasting it into the email form field at the site. It's quite involved, and I've been mostly pleased at the perseverence with which 2nd grade kids can get this done. Ms. Pitt's class didn't do this one this week, rather opting for an introduction to Keyboarding for Kids for her students. More about that next week too!

I'm off to the races! See you next week!

Last Week of January 2010

2010-01-28T18:51:00.000-08:00

The Short Story:

The classes I was able to see this short week did...
3rd grade--searched images for printing and cutting out for posters for their Master Art Unit--copy and paste using Windows clipboard
4th grade--began blogging in a secure, closed platform called "kidblog.org"
Kindergarten--revisited Boowa and Kwala "Special Occasions" page with St. Valentine's Day activity
1st grade--watched a fabulous video about Ezra Jack Keats from YouTube and explored Keats resources on the Webliographer
2nd grade--visited 2ndGoHere! at the Webliographer to do word problems from Syvum.com

The Long Story:

3rd graders continue an internet search and MS Word copy-and-paste extravaganza as they collect images from the internet to print, cut out, and glue onto their posters for their Master Artist Unit report. This unit used to be my favorite when I had my own 3rd grade classroom, and the computer skills this project entails will stand them in good stead for the rest of their school experiences and beyond. Many of the 3rd graders finished their work and were able to login to Keyboarding for Kids, the online typing program that will get them up to speed quickly with regular attention to it. They're just beginning, and my goal with these students is to get them so interested in achieving progress that they will work as often from home as they possibly can.

4th graders embarked on a new adventure (I'm serving them up right and left this year) as they took to kidblog.org for an introduction to blogs and blogging. I'm working on a presentation for them at prezi.com that you can visit here. Check back because it's a work in progress as I tweak out details with the kids. At Kidblog, the students select their usernames and use an assigned password that follows a convention that is fairly easy to remember. With Kidblog, a teacher can set up the blog to be viewable only by students and teachers or make it viewable to anyone who registers for an account. The latter option can open up commenting to a broader audience, but at least at first, we're keeping it locked down. Any 4th grade student or teacher at USN can post, read, and comment at our blog, but no one else can see anything more than the subject lines. I only just discovered this ad-free, secure platform for our kids, and the possibilities are still just potentials, but check out this exchange:

Mr. Merrick's Blog:
Some people are loving it. Some are exploring it more deeply than others, and a few really don’t “get it” or see what it’s worth. I would love to hear your own opinions here. Remember to be appropriate and to use the spellchecker before posting. Don’t be telling me what you think I want to hear. Tell me what you really think and why!

What do you really think of Scratch?
Response from one student:
I like it a lot, but i wish it had better instructions. I had to work a while to make a decent project. They should have some more instructions for each little thing so you know how it works and how to use it and stuff. But scratch is really fun!

We will be continuing to explore blogging for several weeks. Talk to your child about the experience!

Kindergarteners are revisiting Boowa and Kwala and checking out the activities at the "St. Valentine's Day" page at Special Occasions. We'll not really be able to visit those as we get closer to Valentine's Day since we'll be making digital valentine cards with Drawing for Children. More later on that!

1st graders viewed a great video about Ezra Jack Keats at YouTube.com. Normally YouTube is blocked at school, more for the toll it takes on our bandwidth than for other issues it presents. I can override that blocking and did to view:

We also took some time to check out the Keats sites on the Webliographer. Ask your child to take you on a tour!

2nd graders visited 2ndGradeGoHere! at the Webliographer and did math word problem work at the website Syvum.com. We'll expand on this next week, offering a choice of word problem topics from a a substantial set of options, then emailing results to their teachers from the site.

February, here we come!

Week 3 of January, 2010

2010-01-21T06:48:00.000-08:00

The Short Story:
3rd Grade--We're continuing with Keyboarding for Kids, the fantastic online touch-typing program from Ellsworth Publishing, and we're seeking out images for Master Artist reports.
4th Grade--We're continuing with Scratch projects and we'll be blogging about Scratch beginning next week
Kindergarten and 1st--We're doing free draw pictures with Drawing for Children.
2nd Grade--We're engaged in drawing and writing support for in-class story writing projects.

The Long Story:
3rd Grade--Third graders are using their 30 minutes of computer lab time to seek out a favorite image of their artist, then revising a template so that it contains the correct information for a printed cover for their upcoming Master Artist unit reports. This entails some basic Google search strategies: enclosing in quotes, spelling correctly, using the Google "Images" feature; as well a copying and pasting skills in conjunction with the concept of the Windows clipboard function. Graphics manipulation skills such as resizing and maintaining the relationship of height and width (aspect proportion) are called into play, as well as spelling and grammar (capital first and last name of both artist and self) without a great deal of preliminary setup. The template strategy allows fast and clean work; and when 3rd graders are finished and their document saved on the network, they are logging into Keyboarding for Kids. There's not much time to make progress, but the login practice is needed at this stage of the process.

4th Grade--We're still working in Scratch, saving completed projects on the network in the appropriate folder so that I can review and upload to the "USN Tigers Stuff" gallery at the Scratch Wiki. I've found a marvelous secure blogging solution at KidBlog.org and we'll go there next week to begin blogging by commenting on my own blog post, "What do you really think about Scratch?" Watch here for more on that initiative!

Kindergarten and 1st Grades--It's Free Draw time at Drawing for Children, the freeware graphics program that is our program of choice in the computer lab. I'm being selfish here: I want to upgrade the lab bulletin board from the November turkey drawings. Plus, giving students choice is important to the development of their own decision-making skills and allowing them to explore the potentials of D4C is essential to their understanding just how to explore software and online programs. It's all good, and watch for pics here soon.

2nd Grade--Second graders are approaching their story writing projects variously in different classrooms. Ms. Pitt chose to have her kids type up their stories from their hand-done storyboards, a procedure that will take a few class periods (since typing is still tentative at best in 2nd graders) but which I will facilitate as completely and as quickly as possible. Other classrooms are drawing illustrations for their stories, which we'll print out and they can use in their handwritten stories.

In a sidenote. I took a professional day Wednesday this week to attend a full-day professional development workshop at Vanderbilt University which featured Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's keynote address and a score of experts from Microsoft. Between you and me, much of the day flew over my head completely--I am more of an end-user kind of guy than a programmer, but I did get some exercise "liveblogging" and I won a nifty MS Visual Studio backpack at the end of the day raffle. I needed a new backpack, as my old Targus ebag is getting a bit frayed. If you want to check out my work during the morning, go visit scottmerrick.net and play the CoverItLive blog file!

January 11 Week, What Goes On?

2010-01-15T05:37:00.000-08:00

The Short Story:

3rd Grade--Google Image Search for art class image and Keyboarding for Kids
4th Grade--Keyboarding for Kids and Scratch
Kindergarten--Starfall.com "ABC's" -- finishing final letter
1st Grade--Starfall.com "Learning to Read" -- finishing final units beginning with vowel blends
2nd Grade--"Winter in Six Words" for the Winter Wonderland Wiki --Drawing
for Children digit
al drawing

The Long Story:
3rd Grade--Google Image Search for art class image and Keyboarding for Kids. Our Keyboarding for Kids work took a back seat this week in computer lab as students searched for and printed full page versions of one representative piece of art from the artist they've chosen for their Master Artist Unit research topic. These will be laminated by the teacher and taken by the student to Mr. Douglas's art class, where he will proceed with his annual art reproduction project, teaching the kids to transfer/copy images to their own paper via the age-old method of gridding it out and copying grid by grid. We used the doubly safe-search Google search embedded in the Webliographer, illustrating the difference in search results that can be obtained by placing two words, such as an artist's name, in quotation marks as opposed to simply typing them. The quotation marked terms usually return significantly fewer, better targeted results, since you are asking Google to look for
those two words, together, in that particular order. We also navigated the school network 'way down into the folder structure, starting at My Computer and burrowing down to S:\LS\Classes\3 Third Grade\3rdART until we found alphabetized artists' images collected by 3rd graders over the years in this activity. It looks like most of the students were able to do all of this in a rather hectic 30 minute
session, and we'll get the few remaining students up to date by finding images in books, scanning, enlarging, and printing them.

4th Grade--Keyboarding for Kids continues, and we looked together at the Scratch Wiki,, a repository for a growing collection of student work, with its Projects and Galleries, including our own USNTigers Student Stuff one. Students are cautioned to create their own accounts only with their parents' permission and to follow the policy of the website publishers by reporting any content they see might be inappropriate. This is a common means of policing sites that might have tens of thousands of visitors and users per month, and with community compliance, it is quite effective. Still, visiting the site gives us a chance to discuss the concept of "appropriateness," and I encourage students to share work only to the "most appropriate common denominator," which is to say that what may be appropriate in some households may not be in others, and if they even think what they are posting may be offensive in any way, not to do it!

Give this project a look-see!

Kindergarten--Starfall.com "ABC's" -- finishing final letter: The K kids proceeded last week through Starfall ABC's to varying degrees of accomplishment. I remind them that the site is available anytime, anywhere, from any computer with internet access, and this week we all complete the final 10 letters of the alphabet, from Q to Z, to show those who didn't get as far along the variety and the fun of the activities for each letter at Starfall.com.

1st Grade--Starfall.com
"Learning to Read" -- finishing final units beginning with vowel blends: We took a similar approach here to last week's 1st grade beginnings in the more advanced section at Starfall.com. We all completed the final 5 unites, from blended vowels, "Vowel Teams," through "Y as Long E." The room got very quiet as kids worked through these, a sure indication of engagement.

2nd Grade--"Winter in Six Words" for the Winter Wonderland Wiki --Drawing for Children digital drawing: With the exception of Ms. Pitt's class, who were charged with beginning to type storyboarded stories in MS Word and began those quite successfully, 2nd graders finished their "Winter in Six Words" for the Winter Wonderland Wiki. Next week and the following one, I'll be doing voice recordings of their narration on a Voicethread to share with the world! Then we'll post that on the WWWiki.

January Means Winter at USN

2010-01-07T11:16:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year one and all. I hope that you've had a moment to check out the wonderful parents' resource I posted last week. If you haven't yet done so, check it out and bookmark it. Parents often ask me about how best to talk to their kids about internet opportunities and potential pitfalls, and Net Cetera is one great resource for that.

What's going on here?

The Short Story:

3rd Grade--Keyboarding for Kids

4th Grade--K4K and Scratch

Kindergarten--Starfall.com "ABC's"

1st Grade--Starfall.com "Learning to Read"

2nd Grade--"Winter in Six Words" at the Winter Wonderland Wiki

The Long Story:

For the very first time, I'm introducing Keyboarding for Kids to our 3rd graders. It takes a good while to set up new accounts on this online platform, for which the school pays a considerable licensing fee, but Ellsworth Publishing's decision to take away the required textbook and go completely online has made it possible for us to do so (and well worth the time, considering the potential gain for our kids). 3rd grade teachers consulted with one another about homework loads and decided it was best not to require our 3rd graders to go online each school night and practice their typing for 10 minutes--as is the requirement in 4th grade--and I concur with that decision. That said, any work your child does online between now and the end of May, and during the summer for that matter, will incredibly increase their ease of entry into 4th grade and beyond. It's there for them if they want it, and I have to admit I'm very interested to see how many avail themselves of the opportunity we're giving them.

4th graders continue their Scratch explorations, and I'm helping students who may be falling behind in their keyboarding work by asking them to spend the first 15 minutes of their lab time online at K4K. This indicates increased vigilance over past years' practices, and I hope it will reap benefits accordingly. I have reminded the 4th graders that the computer lab is open at 7:30 each day, so if your home computer experiences issues with K4K, please help by trying to get into school early as often as possible. Thanks!

Kindergarteners and 1st graders are exploring the wonderful world of Starfall.com, the younger group by moving through the alphabet at the "ABC's" section and the older working through the fine online phonics activities at the "Learn to Read" units. We're keeping track of progress via a google spreadsheet to make sure the kids know where to pick up when they return to the lab next week.

2nd graders are drawing winter pictures and typing six words on them. Why? For the Winter Wonderland wiki created by California elementary teacher Vicky Sedgewick. We're modifying the requirements for the "Winter in Six Words" activity and will be recording voice to accompany each picture on a Voicethread website by the end of January. Fun! And a step toward understanding and participating in the global dialog that is the internet of the 21st century.

That's it for this week: Stay warm and safe!

Net Cetera

2009-12-31T07:21:00.000-08:00

Hey parents, I'm doing some work over the holidays and just came across this website that I highly recommend you visit and spend some time exploring. Consider it my New Year's gift to you:

On into Winter Break!

2009-12-15T05:55:00.001-08:00

The Short Story:

3rd graders are finishing their "All About Me" PowerPoints
4th graders are revisiting Scratch Cards toward beefing up their skills with Scratch
Kindergärtners are making Drawing for Children holiday "cards"
1st graders also use the new updated Drawing for Children to make and print holiday cards
2nd graders are completing the Medieval "Ghosts in the Castle" online scavenger hunt

The Long one:

3rd graders will share their "All About Me" PowerPoints the week we return after Winter Break, and I'll draw student numbers to determine the order in which we share them. Students will be able to pass with the password "Snarfblatt." That week, I'll choose several to share here at the blog. The kids are having great fun with these and I'm amazed at how much more complete they are than last year's 4th grade work, hopefully an indication that my introduction was a bit more organized and effective!

4th graders are delving more deeply into Scratch, exploring on their own and following up their

initial work on Scratch Cards with lessons I downloaded and printed for them from ScratchEd, a learning network for educators interested in Scratch. I call these cards, letter-sized cardstock lessons, "ScratchBiggies." You may not know what we're talking about, but ask your child what these ScratchBiggies mean:

Making Your Sprite Move
Adding Effects to your Sprite
Create a Comic Strip
Adding Backgrounds, Using Motion, Looks and Control
Using "go to x:__ y:__" to draw shapes
Reacting to the Mouse Pointer...
Sending and Receiving Messages to Change Your Sprite or BackgroundPut the Score on the Stage
Create a Video Game
Use the Paint Editor to Modify Sprites

Kindergarteners and 1st graders are creating fun holiday cards with Drawing for Children on a template I made for just that purpose, it says "Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, and Happy Kwanzaa, Ramadan, Diwali, Chinese New Year, and Feliz Navidad! From:" and they draw and stamp and fill in the rest. Here's a slideshow of them I put at the Elementary Technology Educators network:

Find more videos like this on Elementary Tech Teachers

2nd graders work in pairs to learn from Ghosts in the Castle

2nd graders are exploring the National Geographic interactive Ghosts in the Castle and working

in pairs to tackle a Scavenger Hunt for answers to questions about important concepts related to Medieval castles. I randomly pair the kids and have one "run the pencil" and one "run the computer" as they anticipate information by means of the printed question and work together to capture the answer and record it on their sheet. This has worked better than I had anticipated and gives me the chance to share solid written results with their teachers.

That's about all from here. I wish you and yours a wonderful, safe, family holiday beginning at 11:30 tomorrow!!!

First Week of December, 2009

2009-12-03T12:02:00.000-08:00

For the brief month of classes in December (yay Winter Break and family and rest time!) we plan to stay busy:
For the brief month of classes in December (yay Winter Break and family and rest time!) we plan to stay busy. The Short Story:

Everyone's discussing parts of a computer via a little webpage I created years ago and tweaked for relevance just last week, the "Label a Computer" game
Kinderkids will look at holidays through the lens of Boowa and Kwala
1st and 2nd graders will explore holiday traditions via the Webliographer
3rd graders are finishing up PowerPoints "All About Me" and begin to look at Microsoft Word for creating and editing typed documents and they are also completing a crossword puzzle featuring computer terminology at kubbu.com
4th graders continue in Quest Atlantis (on their own, and for free choice) and also begin work with Scratch, a computer programming tool from the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT

The Long Story:

Kindergarteners by and large don't know the difference between a computer tower and a monitor, nor should we expect them to. However, that shouldn't keep adults from using the correct terminology when talking about computers. Certainly by the end of Lower School, rising 5th graders should have a passing familiarity with terms like "URL" and "RAM." That's why I created a crossword puzzle loaded with computer terminology at www.kubbu.com, and that's why I put a couple of hours into tweaking an old project of mine, "Label a Computer," so that it is now up to date for the lab computers and the hardware our kids K-4 see every week. The resulting webpage jumbles up the labels upon screen refresh, like this:

Then learners can drag the labels to the proper places to demonstrate understanding, like this:

A rudimentary exercise, to be sure, but after we have navigated the page at the Interwrite (Smart) Board together, it gives learners one more experience with the terminology in an intentional, and mildy fun, way.

The crossword puzzle is not for everyone, just for more accomplished readers and writers, which describes most of our 3rd and 4th graders. In our brief morning session, I share the puzzle with 3rd graders, then send them to see how far they can get in the time we have left. I warn them that puzzles with only a few words completed may result in a message from the program like "A Bit Disappointing" (I have a feeling it's a UK-designed site) and let them know the puzzle is there on the internet for them anytime they want a challenge. 2nd graders get the tour of the "Label a Computer" site and are introduced to the crossword only for the sake of conversation (they love the broken-open floppy disk that I share with them) then sent to Label A Computer and raise their hands when complete so I can assess. Kindergarteners and 1st graders get the projector talk and then go do Boowa and Kwala or Sebran.

4th graders get the talk at the projector and I've pleased to have not deemed it necessary for them to perform either the Label exercise or the crossword, though I do intend for them to visit the latter in the Springtime. This week we began working with Scratch, a fabulous computer programming interface from the Lifelong Kindergarten folks at MIT. From work with PowerPoint and Word and Drawing for Children, many of the skills learned with the earlier programs transfer over to Scratch, with the addition of algorithmic thinking. What's that, you ask? It's logical. Algorithmic thinking focuses on the steps to accomplish anything, rather than the facts involved with a task. "If this, then that" is one good example, and this kind of thinking is absolutely essential to computer programming. In the course of working with the Scratch "sprites" to create short animations or rudimentary video games, students begin to think in these terms. The FREE program also downloads to home computers, and I encourage parents to allow their children to install Scratch on their home machines. With the download also come scores of example projects, each of which can be opened, picked apart, and even revised to see how changing different values in the animations or commands in the sequence make the Scratch "project" behave differently. Visit "Why Learn Scratch" for alignments with 21st Century Learning Skills.

My job in this process is really to demo some basic things Scratch can do, to point students to the help files, and to step out of the way. This is a heavily Socratic time of year for me, in that when I hear the question, "How do I...?" my most usual response is "How do you think you should...?" And it works. Stay tuned for some really imaginative and skillful projects posted right here!

Book Buddies in the Computer Lab!

2009-11-22T12:00:00.001-08:00

Ms. Hunt's class came in last Friday to spend some quality time with their Kindergarten Book Buddies from Ms. Reynolds' class. I think this is a nice way for me to give thanks to you all and to wish you all a very very safe and wonderful Thanksgiving!

Cheers, and I'll see you the last day in November!

Into Thanksgiving Week!

2009-11-18T11:10:00.000-08:00

The Short Story:

3rd graders are continuing with their "All About Me" powerpoints.
4th graders continue to forge ahead into Quest Atlantis.
Kinderkids and 1st graders are learning where to visit on their own at Boowa and Kwala.
2nd graders are choosing their two favorite 7th grader illustrations and voting for them on my California colleague's wiki.

The Long Story:

This week 3rd and 4th Graders take a look at a wonderful video my North Carolina learning network friend, Steve Johnson, made about our "digital footprints," the trails we leave behind online over the years. Though we can't see this at school because it is on YouTube, and YouTube is blocked, I emailed Steve and asked permission to show it to my students. In response, he sent me a high definition version with copyrighted music. I am able to share that with my students in the classroom as "Fair Use," but the online version at YouTube uses non-copyrighted open source music. It's still good, and I'm going to embed it here to prove it!

After the movie and a quick discussion about it 3rd graders moved to "right-click/custom animation" in Powerpoint. The kids pick it up quickly and we're sure to see some marveleous work online here before Winter Break. Stay tuned!

The 4th graders moved on into Quest Atlantis, and though none has made it all the way through the preliminary, Council-assigned quests and into the few that I have begun to assign, many are "getting it" in essential ways. Our main problem in the lab is that the client's performance is very erratic in the lab. I'm looking up at my desk at 9 computer numbers, those of the ones students reported today as "frustrating" in their efforts to quest. I've been working madly on optomizing the program on all computers, going to radical measures with Internet Explorer settings in order to do so, upgrading each computer to DirectX10, and generally flitting from computer to computer to try other tweaks every session. I plan to work some on lab computers over Thanksgiving Break, but if it's too frustrating for kids when we return, I will reluctantly move on into another project sooner than the later I had intended to do so. Again, Stay tuned.

Kinder and 1st graders, having spent a couple weeks drawing their hand-traced turkeys, then printing them, this week explore the 63 sets of 5 activities Boowa and Kwala have to offer at their "TV Series" webpage. They have adapted to the user interface of the 20 computer skills lessons at the "My First Clicks" page, and this one works in just the same way, only with the addition of one graphic image mirror of the texual link accessed from an icon at the top of the page. It looks like this:

2nd graders went online this week to vote in my learning network colleague's friendly competion in the vein of "Doodle for Google." See last year's results in our own GoogleDoodle competition. Friend and blogger Karen McMillan took her 7th grade class to a local creek for a field trip. When they returned, she challenged them to create a Google Doodle on the them of their field trip experience. These she scanned and formatted into a slideshow Google Presentation (like a Powerpoint) and put on a wiki at PBworks.com. Are you still with me? Next, Karen created a google form survey with the numbers of the drawings and set it up so that she could ask visitors to the wiki to choose their two favorite doodles. Finally--and this is key--she blogged about it at her "Notes from McTeach" blog and then cast out invitations via her professional learning network (twitter, facebook, etc.) for others to come vote. I learned about it from another learning network friend, Julie LeChance, who tweeted it out to her learning community, to which I belong. After my 1st 2nd graders had voted, I tweeted McTeach, the name Karen goes by on Twitter, that we'd done so and quickly got the reply:
All of this gives me ample opportunity to engage 2nd graders in the way my own life-long learning practice unfolds day by day, and to encourage them to join in with their creative and positive thoughts and opinions. With luck, and with everything above and more working in concert toward understanding, they'll leave Lower School with some similar commitment to learning in their own lives. Though it'll be up to them to figure out how they'll balance which learning opportunities, I hope that my early introduction to some of them will help with that.

'Til next week!

November Goings-on!

2009-11-04T12:02:00.001-08:00

I do find myself posting less here than last year, and I'm not sure that's altogether a bad thing. One of the things we're hearing from teachers and parents is that they feel they're approaching the end of their ability to stay up to speed with all the online information in their lives. The new USN website is fantastic and offers scores of new ways to communicate. Our Lower School newsletters have morphed into Classroom News items on Classroom pages only accessible to parents of teachers and grade level colleague faculty. This is very good in many ways, certainly in its environmental impact (let's see, 352 two-to-four-page newsletters once a week for 40 weeks equals 56,320 pieces of paper every school year, yup, that's a good thing).

Still, it's a lot to maintain, both from the classroom teacher's perspective and from that of a parent. Overnight, it seems, the responsibility for checking in for new communications has been placed on the shoulders of the parent. This is as it should be, and I speak from a parent's point of view. I only wish it were a bit less time consuming!

That said, let's move on to what's happening in the Lower School computer lab, where technology is for learning. The short story:

3rd graders have worked well into Type to Learn 3 and began "All About Me" PowerPoint presentations this week
4th graders headed into the virtual worlds of Quest Atlantis last week, took their typing practice home as daily homework in Keyboarding for Kids, and are learning how to navigate their new 3 dimensional virtual environment
Kinderkids are tracing their hands on the computer monitor and sprucing up imaginative and colorful drawings of turkeys with Drawing for Children
1st graders have met SebranABC and are exercising their analog time-telling skills at the new Internet4Classrooms.com skills page
2nd graders are doing the same activities as their 1st grader counterparts, only delving more deeply into them as befits their growing performance capabilities

The longer story:

PowerPoint is a great starting point for learning presentation software. It's a universal standard, though more and more alternatives are giving it a go for its position. These include GoogleApps Presenter, Voicethread, Animoto, and one of my (very quirky but fun to tackle) favorites, Prezi. I've even seen effective and engaging presentations in Picasa, with slides created by overlaying digital pictures with text in, say, Photoshop or Paint.

Still, PowerPoint is a great starting point. So many of the menu options and the graphical user interface, the GUI, mirror those in Word that learning one helps reinforce skills in the other. In this project, which will take us over the month of November, students create a 5-8 slide presentation on their favorite subject, themselves. I introduce them to the program, make expectations clear, demonstrate a few beginning procedures, like "new slide" and "slide design," then get out of their way, becoming the advisor I like to be as learners learn. Watch for some results here before Winter Break.

I've written extensively here about Quest Atlantis (see earlier posts), and this year I'll expand upon that earlier introduction as my fourth grade learners make their way into the vast and fascinating worlds of QA. Last year was the pioneer year, as the kids and I dived (dove?) into it with a fury, immediately seeing learners from other schools and other countries and chatting with them as they navigated the rather steep learning curve. About a month after we started last year, the QA folks at Indiana University revised the entry path for new users so that when they first come into Atlantis they see no others and can interact with no one except the animated beings who serve as guides. This works famously better, and I'm monitoring student progress already as some figure it all out without any help, while others struggle and collaborate with one another to do so. This is ideal learning territory, of course, and expect posts here specifically about milestones. I'll be assigning quests more prudently this year (last year I ended up with 41 quests for students to choose from, and I am looking for a more manageable, though still individualized, experience for all this year.

Kindergarteners still enjoy Boowa and Kwala, and I'm lingering there this year as they keep track of their own progress by making marks on a spreadsheet displayed upon the Interwrite (Smart) Board. We veer off each class into other activity though, and we're currently working on a project I do annually, using Drawing for Children to create fabulous turkeys to print and take home for Thanksgiving. This week we're beginning them and saving them, and next week we'll learn how to reopen them and continue revising their splendiferous beauty. The week of the 16th, well open them once again and print them to take home. Look for them in backpacks! I'll likely also put some up on the blog in slideshow fashion.

We opened and played SebranABC the past couple weeks, and this week we visited Internet4Classroom.com's fine collection of 25 telling-time interactive sites at the Webliographer's Time and Clocks topic. This proves to be an excellent way to note which children are struggling with analog time telling and advise their teachers accordingly. As always at USN, I note a wide range of abilities in each class. We played "Bang on Time" at the site first, then children could pair up with another to play "Willy the Watchdog," and then explore the other games. Next week we'll play "Telling Time with Word Problems," kind of a 1st grade twist on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire."

I usually pair activities for Kindergarten and 1st graders, and I'm finding this week and last that these particular activities seem very well suited to 2nd graders, so that's what we're doing, moving the time telling into second grade, where it's apparent that work still needs to be done on this important skill. It'll be time well spent. I already see 2nd graders choosing Sebran as a free-choice option, and watching them play its Hangman game reminds me what a valuable game that is for predicting based on knowledge of vowels, consonants, and spelling. In a time when educational games can be huge downloads, I find Sebran's 857 Kb filesize nothing short of endearing!

That's it for this post. More later, of course!!!

Artclectic Week!

2009-10-22T10:52:00.000-07:00

I've not posted the past two weeks for a number of reasons, among which are two short weeks, including Fall Break, and artclectic!

USN's huge annual art show and gallery, a fundraiser for the USN Endowment for Innovative Teaching, has me hog-tied and running mad every year, mostly because the heart of artclectic is my lovely wife, Lee Ann Merrick.

You can read more about artclectic here: http://artclectic.org. If you're reading this today, it's Thursday, October 22, and tonight the whole thing has to be set up and ready for the Patrons Party. Gymnasium becomes art gallery? You won't believe it until you see it, the event that Nashville Parent Magazine called "The Art Event of the Year!"

Things have not gone undone in the lab. This week the 4th graders got that much closer to being inworld in Quest Atlantis, as we rounded up parent permission forms. All other classes got to work with a new Free Choice Option, Sebran 1,2,3, a freeware program that runs the gamut from skill and drill to higher order prediction work in a very fun Hangman game.

I'll beef up this post tomorrow, but I wanted to get it out to you today, and also to invite you to the show tonite (Patrons Party), Friday night (Community Party), and Saturday and Sunday (FREE to the public with so much going on 11-7 Saturday you can make a whole day of it with your family). Come on out!!!

The End of September, October Begins

2009-09-30T07:33:00.001-07:00

Big News! The wonderful Keyboarding for Kids program we've been using for several years has gone GREEN! Now textbook free, our 4th graders begin working this week with its new online interface, which they'll see when they login the usual way. This is a huge improvement in our typing program, and I'm discussing the possibilities with administration and teaching teams, toward potentially initiating it in 3rd grade for the first time beginning after Winter Break. More on all that soon!

This is huge.

The Short Story:

3rd graders continue Type to Learn 3

4th graders meet the new online version of Keyboarding for Kids

Kinderkids meet Drawing for Children

1st graders refresh their Drawing for Children Skills

2nd graders meet Dance Mat Typing

The Long Story:

We move along in Type to Learn 3, and 3rd graders are printing progress charts in part so I can see who may be struggling and in part to give them tangible evidence of their progress to motivate them to make even more of it.

4th graders are getting along faster this year than ever in their Keyboarding for Kids work. This online version seems sleeker, less confusing, and really easy for them to manage. I'll be updating individual students with the program's messaging tool after they move on to doing it at home instead of in the lab.

Kinderkids and 1st graders are all working with Drawing for Children, the freeware graphics program that allows for a lot of creativity and a robust early experience with a computer program's GUI (Graphic User Interface). I'm having the Kindergarteners write their name at least once with a drawing tool, and I'm having 1st graders do so as many times and in as many ways as they can during the half hour. I'm also printing these for them to take home, so watch for this new refrigerator magnet item coming home! If you'd like to fetch the program for your own home computer, visit our Webliographer's Downloads topic and do so!

2nd graders are diving into Dance Mat Typing, a British Broadcasting Company website with a pretty durned good basic introduction to touch-typing. This program has no login, so one's progress isn't recorded, but as long as they remember where they left off, they can move through it and get an early experience with correct technique. Plus, it's FREE: I like that word.

Last Full Week of September

2009-09-23T09:42:00.000-07:00

The Short Story:

3rd graders continue working in Type to Learn 3

4th graders get very familiar with Keyboarding for Kids

Kindergarteners meet Drawing for Children

1st graders refresh their Drawing for Children skills

2nd graders use their new "2ndgradestart" page at the Webliographer

The Long Story:

What's happenin' now:

We're continuing the work begun in September with all grade levels, making sure 4th graders will know what they're doing when they first login to the site at home; instilling first good practice skills for touch-typing with Type to Learn 3 in 3rd grade; and progressing through the 25 lessons at UpToTen.com's "My First Clicks," an early-years computer skills training site I helped design years ago (Kinderkids and 1st graders). In 2nd grade, I responded to Molly Darr's request for her students to view and experience a couple of websites by creating a new portal for them. The "USN2ndgradestart" page is here, and will change as needed week to week (when our work is on the internet), archiving everything at the archive page. This will provide a good running record of our internet work!

I'm also aligning "lessons" in the lab to standards this year, a year-long project that should inform activities in the lab for years to come. This process is informed by the CSTA Model K12 Computer Science curriculum draft and the ISTE NETS-S, both touchstones for standards alignment. Once all that is complete, I'll make it public, since I do believe that we are on this planet to share with one another, toward making the world a better, safer, and more engaging place for all.

Over and out for this week. Stay tuned for more!

Carrying on Through September

2009-09-18T06:11:00.000-07:00

This week we are establishing routines, recording progress, and beginning to branch out to internet work.

The short story:

3--Type to Learn 3 continues

4--Keyboarding for Kids, establishing login and practice skills

K--uptoten.com "My First Clicks" linear progress

1--uptoten.com "My First Clicks" non-linear progress

2--Ancient Civilization related websites on Webliographer

The long story:

3rd graders are working further into Type to Learn 3, the Sunburst software program designed to instill awareness of home-row key position touch typing, and they're doing pretty doggone well. One of my very main goals in Tech Instruction is to help them develop a sense of self-motivation and perseverance, and forging on through the 25 lessons of TTL3 is one way to do it. Like many of the things we do in the lab, we won't get to the end of it. That's the We'll work one or two more weeks in TTL3 then move on into other things.

4th graders are continuing to master the process of connecting to Keyboarding for Kids, our online touch-typing platform that allows them the opportunity to practice their skills daily, as homework, on their home computers. I'll be sending a long note home to accompany the textbooks, which will be coming home the week of Oct. 5, that will explain expectations, serve as a reminder of the procedures for login, and share some important thoughts about parents' role in the process (VERY minimal!).

Kinder and 1st graders are progressing through the MyFirstClicks sets of activities at UpToTen.com. I changed the K-1GoHere! Center Number 2 link so that it now leads to the free (ad-supported) iteration of that wonderful website. This gives us the opportunity to practice working without clicking on ads and shows them what the site will look like if they visit it from home (the Premium@Schools ad-free site is only available in-school). Both grades are notating their own progress at the Interwrite interactive board on a Google spreadsheet as they go. I like this process and will likely extend it to some other activities in other grade levels. For one, it gets the kids out of their seats, and B) it puts more of the responsibility for their own learning in their hands.

2nd graders this week visited sites in the Ancient Civ (shortened because of Webliographer titling length limitations) topic on our Webliographer. Each class is studying a different culture from history--Rome, Persia, Greece, and Egypt. Two teachers this week sent me new links to add to the Webliographer, a wonderful development, and I spent an hour or so adding links to some Persia resources since this is the first year for 2nd graders to explore that culture. Ask your child what we looked at!

That's it for this week. Know that I'm knee-deep in getting 4th graders set up for our Quest Atlantis work this year. After K4K textbooks go home we'll be beginning those adventures!

September 11 Computer Lab Update!

2009-09-11T07:02:00.000-07:00

Hey, all,

I've been working on putting up pictures at all the computer lab pages on myUSN.org this week. To see them, login using your myUSN username and password. I'll put a couple in this post, but there will usually be weekly pics at myUSN.org in slideshow format for your viewing and download, if you see any you wish to keep.

The work this week:

3rd graders are entering Type to Learn 3 this week, and we'll be working in that arena for several weeks, just to give them some fun introductory exercise in using "home row key position."

4th graders embark on Keyboarding for Kids, the online platform we have purchased whichwill gift them daily typing practice for homework, beginning in early October. I have found that working weekly in the lab until we're satisfied everyone is completly comfortable is the way to go, so expect to see them home with explicit instructions and their textbooks by then.

Kindergarteners and 1st graders have been keeping track of their own progress on the Interwrite smartboard on a graph, marking a red X in a spreadsheet by their name to indicate which of the 25 "MyFirstClicks" lessons they have completed.

2nd graders have mostly completed the Learning Center in Type to Learn, Jr., a very fun little keyboarding/typing game that helps introduce the locations of the letters on a computer keyboard, as well as some very basic concepts like the shift key and some punctuation. They all printed their completion certificates and then went on to play each of the three extension games on each of the three levels each is offered.

With several grade levels, I have begun allowing some "Free Choice" time at the end of the period (at the beginning for 3rd graders) and this requires explaining and enforcing clear expectations of the options. In general, all students may use the Webliographer "Free Choice Options" as a jumping off place, and those options are broad. To visit any of them, see that topic on the Webliographer, and here's a list of the sites currently included there:

20 Questions: Play 20 Questions
BBC: BBC - CBBC - Games
Between the Lions: Between the Lions | PBS Kids
Enchanted Learning: Enchanted Learning
Fact Monster Arcade: Fact Monster Arcade
Fact Monster Online: Fact Monster--Online Reference and Games!
FreeRice: FreeRice Game--Feed the Hungry and Build Your Vocabulary!
Funbrain.com:
Great Sites: 700+ Great Sites for Kids and Adults Who Care About Them
Interactive Games!: Oswego County Schools Interactive Learning Games
Invention Playhouse: Lemelson Center Invention at Play--Invention Playhouse
LEGO.com:LEGO.com--The Official Web Site of LEGO
Linerider: Linerider
Linesanta:LineArena - Snowline Line Riding Game
Puzzles.COM: Puzzles for Everyone
SanDiegoZoo: Animals Animals Everywhere!
The Color Test: The Color Test

Students may also utilize any program installed on their computer specifically as a Free Choice Option. These include:

Tangrams
My Lemonade Stand
Stackerblocks3D
and Drawing for Children

and will soon also include a new program I recently discovered called SebranABC, a simple and rich group of beginning literacy and numeracy practice games. See the CNet review for more information about Sebran.

Next week, we'll continue on the path of learning in the Computer Lab, and I hope everyone stays well and will be here to join us! Get those flu shots!!!

Have a great weekend!

The First Full Week of School!

2009-08-25T09:23:00.000-07:00

Classes start for real this week, and USN Lower School students get to their computers after a quick reminder of their responsibilities to use the technology and the hardware responsibly. Our newly revised (down from 629 words long to 194) Technology Responsible Use Policy is pretty clear now, and I'm still inclined to be more specific with the older kids.

There's a new imperative in the Lower School to avoid "whole group instruction," with which I wholly agree, but this particular message is a bit hard to convey in a constructivist manner. That is why I turned to Wordle.net to create a graphical representation of the document for discussion. Here's the wordle I settled on:

Wordle, as you see, is an online service that turns text into tidy and interesting graphic files in which the frequency of the wording is represented by the relative size of the word. In the document above, of course, Technology is the key word. I went back into the site to paste in the former document and this is what I ended up with:

How would you describe the differences in the document, as interpreted by Wordle? This makes for some interesting dialog in the computer lab for the first week of school with 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders after some discussion about logging into computers, and it's to my mind much better than lecture. Next week we're onto touch typing with all three of our school's keyboarding platforms.

Kinderkids and 1st graders this week are jumping into UpToTen.com's great "MyFirstClicks" lessons for fun mousework. We'll be working with those 25 lessons over the next several weeks, with the hope that we'll nearly complete them before moving on to graphical work with Drawing for Children. Stay tuned!!!

Parents, you have this in your Lower School Parents Handbook, but just for a refresher here is
University School of Nashville’s Technology Responsible Use Policy:

Computers, the Internet, selected software, and other devices are provided for students, faculty, and staff by USN for the express purposes of supporting instruction, enhancing learning, and conducting the business of the school. To this end, those granted user privileges are expected to use these resources only for the educational purposes for which they are intended and to treat these resources and all users with respect.

Additionally, users need to understand these are shared resources, and that access for the school community depends on individuals adhering to community standards.
Failure to follow these guidelines may result in consequences ranging from a warning to dismissal, depending on the severity of the infraction, as determined by administration in each division.

If, as a USN technology user, you have any question or doubt about the acceptability of a specific activity in which you plan to engage, it is your responsibility seek approval from a teacher, an administrator, a division-level technology coordinator, or the Director of Technology in advance. Users of the USN network are bound by all local, state, and federal statutes pertaining to the use of the Internet.

USN Responsible Use of Technology

2009-08-24T16:12:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the School Year 2009-2010

2009-08-13T06:46:00.000-07:00

So I'm pretty sure we'll get into the habit of calling it "twenty-ten," and my question is this: When it gets to be the following year will those of us in the South be saying "twenty-leven" or will we revert to "two thousand eleven." Just asking!

Welcome to this promising school year. It's certainly been a lovely summer, and if yours has been as chaotic and packed-full as has mine, I'm betting you and yours are ready for a little structure to return to our lives.

I sure am.

I'll be glad to meet my 64 new Kindergartners and the 18 new students at other grade levels (mostly in grade 1, filling out the difference between the 64 maximum K kids and the 72 maximum at 1st grade), and to re-acquaint myself with those 1st through 4th graders I've worked with in the past. It always amazes me how much they all grow and change over the summer, and I'm excited to see those changes.

We'll be easing slowly into work at the early grade levels, first talking about respecting the equipment, as each machine is shared by at least 19 other students, then working in the newly remodelled UpToTen.com's Premium@School site in scaffolded lessons geared to helping the young master basic skills and fundamental concepts they'll be working with in their classrooms. In 2nd grade, well be very gently introducing touch-typing with Type to Learn, Jr., and then moving on to the BBC's Dancemat Typing. In 3rd grade, we up the ante to Type to Learn 3, and in fourth, we'll be working in Type to Learn 3 for only two weeks then moving right into Keyboarding for Kids, the online typing instruction program they'll be bringing textbooks home to facilitate daily keyboarding practice. Please do not feel that you need to purchase any of these products: We have purchased them at school for use at school! If you wish for your child to do more practice at home, there are myriad links in the Keyboarding topic of our school's Webliographer!

There will be more, much more, for all my students, and here is the place to watch for changes in content and focus. To get an idea of the flow, feel free to view past entries here, accessible from the sidebar to the right. Meanwhile, I look forward to seeing all of you and please don't be a stranger to the Lower School Technology for Learning Lab!!!

Learning Beyond the Classroom!

2009-06-09T04:02:00.000-07:00

So, your child is out for the summer and it's raining cats and dogs or you have a telephone meeting for an hour and you don't want her or him sitting in front of a television passively receiving drivel from its screen. Thanks to my friend Kevin Jarrett, I have something for you.

Better yet, sit down with your child at the computer and explore together! Click the image below!

Please Do Not Use the Scratch Wiki!

2009-05-27T15:32:00.000-07:00

USNers, please do not use the Scratch Wiki until further notice. One of our students uploaded some games and received some comments that were abusive and inappropriate. I am requiring you to avoid the site until this can be sorted out with the Scratch Wiki managers.

Thanks! Please DO continue to play around with Scratch if that interests you!!! Just don't go to the wiki!!!

End of 2008-2009, Have a Great and Safe Summer!

2009-05-26T11:44:00.000-07:00

Parents, I have sooo greatly appreciated the time I was privileged to share with your children this year, and I look forward to 2009-2010 with great anticipation and high hopes for an even better year.

The lab has been abuzz with activity as the 2nd graders pushed to achieve closure on their Powerpoints, the 4th graders put finishing touches on their Memory Books, and 3rd graders worked to make progress in TimesAttack before the two exciting extra environments go away at the end of the month. Kinder and 1st graders spent time with Boowa and Kwala and Drawing for Children, contributing illustrations that may well make it into print form in the future. Here, for example, is one 1st grader's impression of the old guy in the computer lab:

That just about says it all. I've worked over the past several weeks to gift our students with online tools that can enrich their summers, and I've every step of the way encouraged them to get outside and play, to spend time with their families, and to keep technology in its place in their lives: a useful and powerful tool for learning and sharing.

May your families prosper in the coming months and may you continue your own quests for balance and realization.

Cheers!

Scott

Have a Great Summer!

2009-05-23T07:07:00.000-07:00

Countdown to the End of School -- T Minus 7 Days

2009-05-14T10:33:00.000-07:00

I watched a great presentation on Quest Atlantis last Monday night, and I hope readers can suspend disbelief long enough to visit one of my other blogs, Oh!VirtualLearning! to read about it. My friend Jeff Agamenoni in Great Falls, Montana teaches 7th and 8th graders and introduced them to QA this year. His observations filled an hour for a globally situated audience and I'm as proud of him as I can be. This was the first of what I am sure will be many presentations from a dedicated Web 2.0 proponent and a good friend. I'm looking forward to meeting him someday "in real life," though we've had many a Skype conversation and collaborated in virtual worlds many a time.

What's happening in the lab?

My main thrust this last week has been on giving my older kids a set of tools they can use over the summer to continue their online learning adventure. I frequently advise my students that while online learning is not the be-all and end-all, it's a resource that they should keep in mind, that it's important to balance their lives to include a healthy mix of safe online experience with robust exercise, outdoor activity, quiet family time, reading books, playing music, and generally living life. That said:

3rd graders played TimezAttack Online, and I made sure they played via the Web browser, so that progress is saved for them. They can continue to play through the summer, though they may find that their environment choices (levels) have reverted to a total of one choice. The pay version contains all the levels, and we likely won't pursue purchase until the new school year, if at all. Here's what the game's website says about that:

Difference between the base version and the full version
Entertainment. We put ALL the education into our base version so that EVERY child can master multiplication. The full version then adds entertainment--more worlds, characters, and creatures to learn in. So it's worth the investment, but you shouldn't feel any obligation to upgrade if money's tight. The base version works just as well--children just don't keep begging to play it for as long.

4th graders, after completing a quick 1 minute typing speed assessment at typingtest.com, chose their activity this week from a menu of 1)TimezAttack Online, 2) Quest Atlantis, and 3) Scratch. Generally, the winner was number 1, likely because it was the most recently added to the menu--new items are often best sellers :)

Kinderkids are creating a slideshow of thank-you art for Boowa at UpToTen .com, in order to thank site creator Jason Barnard for taking the time to Skype video call last week, singing songs and chatting with all the kindergarteners. Here's the slideshow!

and here's a short Quicktime movie snagged from the events:

1st graders are exploring the Fairy Tales topic in the Webliographer. We don't often use commercial sites in the school lab, but NOGGIN is an unusually rich one, and using it gives me a good opportunity to reinforce our rule/advice to children never to click on advertisements at websites. I share with them that clicking on ads can take them away from the fun to a place where the site only wants to sell them something, and it may be dangerous, leading to spyware and adware. There are four other good links at the Fairy Tales topic, and many web explorers like the GrimmFairyTale site.

2nd graders are working to finish their PowerPoints by the end of school. I'll spend some time after the school year is over organizing all our kids' work into portfolio folders they can carry into their next grade level, so if we don't get finished, the'll have access to their work when they return for 3rd graders.

Finally, I'll mention that I'm deeply involved in an assay of activities that we pursued in the lab this school year, planning to organize them, look for links with classroom units and alignment with new Computer Science department objectives and curricula, and overarching alignment with the National Educational Technology Standards for Students, from an organization I work closely with, the International Society for Technology in Education. It's going to be a full summer for me, and much of my summer effort should substantially improve my students' learning come school year 2009-10!

See you next week, the final full week of the 2008-9 school year!

It's Rainyrainy Outside but Warm and Active Inside!

2009-05-06T06:40:00.000-07:00

Wow. There's a lot going on this week, with Skype video calls planned for Kinderkids, Scratch shareouts with 3rd graders, TimezAttack Online for 4thers, PowerPoints at grade 2, and 1st graders exploring both Tonematrix and jacksonpollock.org.

That pretty much says it all. See you next week.

Just kidding, though I have recently been informed that I write too much here. Do you think so? Please comment below :) In any event I'll start listing the high points at the top of the blog for those who are too busy to get the whole skimmy.

Now: Let's get detailed, in the order the kids come into the lab:

3rd graders have now spent several class periods exploring Scratch in both guided and self-

directed ways, and they've now saved at least one project in a special network folder to share out at the projector with their classmates. This allows for some critique, some dialog, and some applause for the project they've either found or created, and collatoral learning abounds. One of my projects this summer, as I move into my first year of a 10 month contract (as opposed to the 9 month work-year I've enjoyed for the past 13 years) is to link everything in here to ISTE NETS for Students and to look for gaps in my school year where I can nurture the developmentally appropriate skills that help students achieve them. I'll be cross-referencing and utilizing resources at Computer Science Teachers Association as well.

I am filming some of these shareouts, and though I won't reshare all of them with you, I will give you a taste of how it goes, right here. Bear in mind that I have 72 3rd graders and that, despite varying degrees of enthusiasm, I can claim virtually universal engagement with Scratch. My only regret is that we didn't get started earlier in it, and you can bet I'll make some changes to

accomodate that earlier work next year!

Here are the first four videos:

4th graders are enjoying the new full version beta access we've been granted at BigBrainz.com, for their fantastic creation TimezAttack. Earlier in the year we played with the free download version of the program after installing it on our lab machines, and just a couple weeks ago the online version was released. Along with hundreds of other schools all over the country (world?) we were given free access to the online version until the end of this academic year, May 30. After that, we still have access but the game reverts to a free version with only the one environment. Are additional environments important enough to justify a good-sized expenditure of our software budget? I'm leaning on the affirmative side here. From my observations, both

3rd and 4th graders who play this game are more likely to pursue it if they have the goal of accomplishing new levels of environment, and will be more engaged as the program helps them retain automatic recall of the basic multiplication facts. The way the license works is that there is a flat fee for each 3rd grader in the building, then any other student, K12, can take a free ride on the 3rd grade. I can envision it useful for children in other grades who need remediation in their facts retention, plus the program tracks student progress and allows assessment via the teacher interface. Finally, I can see us adding TimezAttack as required homework in 3rd grade, much like we do for Keyboarding for Kids in 4th. This will help prepare them for their future K4K work, as well as help them master their multiplication facts at an earlier age. If it looks like we can migrate it to individuals who require more of a challenge at any earlier grade level, it will be there for them, too! There, I just worked out my purchase request verbiage :)

Kinderkids have a treat this week, a Skype videoconference with one of their favorite online characters, "Boowa," from UpToTen.com. We've been working with site creator Jason Bernard since the site first went live in 2002, and he was kind enough to agree to meet with our kids this week in two sessions, one on Tuesday and one on Wednesday. It worked out great, since the Friday kinderkids were slated to miss computer this week due to K-3 field day anyway! Here is a brief video from the meetup! (I also had Jason connect with 4th graders for a few minutes before the end of their lab time, just as a treat.)

1st graders either connected with Tonematrix, which we visited last week, depending on whether they got to see it last week, or helped create a beautiful digital splatter painting at

jacksonpollock.org. It wouldn't load on our lab computers, likely protected against multiple access from one IP adress, so we created a large version on the Intelliboard. Here's what one of them looked like, after randomly calling kids up to the board for a 10 minute swipe at "artputer."

We also explored "kerpoof," a digital art and media site on our Webliographer. We don't visit many "commercial" sites at school, but this drawing tool, designed by Disney, is really fun and membership is not required to use it.

2nd graders are working with Microsoft Office 2003 PowerPoint to design basic .ppts from their About Me flipbooks created in the classroom as an extension of their Insects unit. PowerPoint may be becoming passe' as cloud computing software like Google Presentations take the forefront of presentation tools, but it's a great place to start! I'll share one of those (in progress, not yet finished!) right now so you can get the gist. I created the template for them, since their keyboarding skills are not yet conducive to getting a task like this accomplished in one class session, but wooo, they're having fun and learning! Slideshare, by the way, doesn't allow for animation to play when it's been flash compressed, but the custom animation is one elementof PowerPoint that many kids are exploring!

Daley1999

View more presentations from Scott Merrick.

Come on, May, We're Ready for Ya

2009-04-28T12:34:00.000-07:00

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!

Last Full Week in April!

2009-04-22T11:50:00.000-07:00

It's hard to believe that next Friday is the first day of May! We're here in Nashville, just putzing along teaching day to day, and we look up and the end of the school year is looming!

This week the 3rd graders and 4th graders are exploring animation in Scratch, starting with the 8th tutorial at learnscratch.org, and some are taking off with their own animations. I have it on good authority that a several 3rd graders are already uploading experimental first projects to the Scratch Wiki. I'll be sharing them out soon, I'm certain.

This Scratch work has been good for us so far. One of its unforeseen benefits has been raising the opportunity to talk with my students about the ways one's family values might differ in the area of violence and video gaming: This issue came to light because there are some very light-weight efforts at shooting games at the Scratch Wiki. None are what I would term "inappropriate," excepting possibly for the most conservative of families. I have the whole range in my class--the kids whose parents are fine with them playing Halo 3 (a very violent alien-fighting 3D shooter) and watching "Family Guy" on tv, the kids who are not allowed to play or watch anything with any hint of violence, and all hues in between. I have at least one 3rd grade family whose kids watch the uber-violent "24" on Fox Network (my dearest friend just had his character killed off, taking a bullet for Jack Bauer, two weeks ago:). I tell them one and all that it's their job to know their parents' positions on this issue and to behave accordingly. So far, all the discussions have been lively and interesting, and I'm pleased to have the opportunity to discuss this important topic.

Kinder and 1st graders are finishing up their "My Family" pictures in Drawing for Children and we'll be sharing those at the end of the day Friday, when they're all complete and I can upload them to picasaweb, Google's excellent picture sharing platform. Know that once a slideshow is displayed here, you can click on it twice to go to picasaweb, where you can view the show larger, look at all the pictures at once, and download your child's picture for printing or even for using as your own computer desktop!

Here are the slideshows from the efforts!

Kindergarten:

and 1st Grade:

2nd graders are meeting up with the fantastic graphing website, CreateAGraph, maintained by an organization called the National Center for Education Statistics. The site hosts a wonderful graphmaking wizard, and just a little familiarity with it should stand our students in good stead for years to come. Of course we will be working in Microsoft Excel by 4th grade, but until then, if they want to play with graphs, this is the site for it!!!

Have a great rest of April and I'll check back in with you next week! Here comes MAY!

We're Really Working Now!

2009-04-16T08:45:00.000-07:00

It's a busy time in the computer lab, with these things going on:

3rd graders are opening Scratch projects that interest them (a great number of projects download with the program and are easily accessible with a few clicks) and are charged with the assignment to find one element of one project that they want to investigate, then to look at the script that makes it work and be ready next week to demonstrate it. This is a purely learner-driven exercise that I hope will result in lively discussion during computer lab next week! Parents, if you haven't downloaded Scratch for your home computers, it's FREE, it's safe, and it's available at MIT's Scratch Wiki!

4th graders are being introduced to online tutorials that demonstrate quite clearly how to use Scratch to create a simple animated story. These are at a site called LearnScratch.org, and are accompanied by download links to the templates they describe. I am already seeing students developing their own self-motivations and exercising wonderful degrees of curiosity about Scratch, and I'm sincerely striving for some great examples of student work in the platform by the end of the school year. How many more weeks?

Speaking of "Time," I'm encouraging Quest Atlantis work go on at the end of lab periods, during inclement weather indoor recesses, and at home, as we venture into Scratch. We have to get started with these things earlier next year! I do want to share one thing here from Quest Atlantis, however. One of the Quests, "What a Novel Idea!" encourages student Questers to create a piece of artwork. Here's the charge:

We are trying to write the events of the recent past so others can learn about Atlantis. Have you read the comic or the novel? Anyway, we would love some illustrations or other art forms that would help others learn about Atlantis and our mission. Would you please help us? The artwork could show what our environment was like prior to the destruction of the Arch of Wisdom, the problems afterwards, our mission, and even how this might relate to similar problems on Earth. Thank you for your aid and support! We are anxious to see what you create.

Further directions tell the student to bring their work to their teacher so he or she can take a digital picture to upload along with the Quest submission. Well, Ruby, one of my lovely 4th grade Questers, brought to me a little foam piece sculpture she'd created for the Quest. Here's a picture of her with the work, and a close-up:

I soooooo look forward to seeing what other students create for future Quests! And I'll add that the writing one gets from invested and guided students in Quest Atlantis continues to improve with time. Acting as a reviewer for their work, I have become much more than a computer teacher: I'm a writing coach and an ethics guide. I absolutely love it...

Kinderkids and 1st graders are repeating their drawing exercise, this time challenged to depict themselves and their families with the tools in Drawing for Children. See last week's post for the finished slideshows from their "How I Spent my Spring Break" work. This kind of work helps kids understand that there is an audience for their work, underscores our increased dedication to refraining from frequent printing of "artputer" work, and hopefully allows parents to celebrate their children's work at home. K and 1 parents, click on the slideshow you're interested in viewing, click again and you'll be transported to picasaweb.google.com, the hosting site for the images, where you can view the slideshows in larger format, view all the pictures on a single screen, find your child's, and download it to your home computer to print and/or use as your new computer desktop image! When the family pictures are finished, I'll process them similarly! Here's one to whet your imagination!

2nd graders this week are creating business cards for today's (and tomorrow's, in some classrooms) annual Market Day, when the malls open in the classroom to celebrate the culmination of the 2nd grade unit on Business. Each student opened the same Word file, a simple template with one sample formatted card, then highlighted each element she or he wished to edit and typed their business information. The resulting card was saved, and I did the grunt work of editing and copying and pasting into the remaining 9 fields in the Avery-style form, then printing each child's on business card template paper. The resulting cards look like this:

and I printed them off, one sheet to each of my 72 2nd graders, and delivered them to their teachers. I wish their business efforts great success!

See ya next week!!!

The K-4 First Weeks of April

2009-04-07T03:17:00.000-07:00

How I Spent My Spring Break by USN Kindergartners!

How I Spent My Spring Break by USN 1st Graders!

Last week March went out like a lamb but this second week of April is amazingly frozen lion-like. Freezing temperatures may greet us in the morning, but inside the computer lab is toasty and thriving.

3rd and 4th graders continue their exploration of Scratch, the fantastic programming-for-kids platform built by the fine folks at MIT's "Lifelong Kindergarten" project. Even as the kids pursue the completion of the dozen or so "Scratch Cards," notating their project on the Google spreadsheet form I whipped up at Google Documents, I note some early projects budding. I'm hoping next week to be able to share a few, as I upload them to the Scratch Wiki galleries in a school account. This week we'll explore one project together at the group projector display before I send the students off for another go at Scratch Card completion. And thanks to the Google Survey spreadsheet, I can remind them what they did last week so they can make good choices about what they dive in this week!

We haven't lost track of Quest Atlantis. Though Scratch is taking the lion's share of the lab time, a clear benefit of QA's online location is that kids can access it from home. I hope that if you haven't downloaded it for a computer to which your child has access, you consider that. There is all manner of information about the program at the Quest Atlantis Parents page!

Kindergarten and 1st graders will be finishing up their dictation to me of "How I Spent My Spring Break" for the blog comment project (I'm doing the typing for them while they finish up their pictures. I put the resulting (separated by grade level) Drawing for Children pictures up top and the comments at the Lower School Lab Blog, where the comments reside. Watch for an announcement of that milestone, as each and every kindergartner and 1st grader joins her or his fellows in sharing. The resulting document is, to say the least, interesting, or will be as I complete compiling the pics into .jpgs from their native .bmp format and uploading them to Picasaweb to create the slideshows!

2nd graders, my last class of each school day, will be making their business cards this week for the Business Unit. Last week they learned how to play "My Lemonade Stand," a remarkably fun and concept-laden 30 day experience selling lemonade, each day making decisions about how much lemonade to make and how much to charge for a cup based on the cost of supplies and the randomizing weather forecast. This is an old game from the days of Windows 98, but it still runs well on our newer Windows XP Pro and I'll keep using it until it fails us. It's to my knowledge no longer available for download, but kids can play it in the lab at free choice options time and I often see a 4th grader or two making that choice when it comes time to choose from the available options at the end of a class.

That's all for now. More later! Oh, if you're looking for the Webliographer on our new website, usn.org, it's not there! I'm working on that and you can expect an announcement soon about the solution. For now, if you're not here to simply click on its link in the sidebar, the link is http://usn.webliographer.com/USN/lower/ and you can always just "google" "usn webliographer." It'll be the first return link.

Positive Feedback from Quest Atlantis

2009-03-30T06:26:00.000-07:00

Hello friends, parents, and students,

While working from home on my Monday Vanderbilt Center for Science Outreach podcast, I received this in my email just a moment ago and I want to share it with you. As you may know, Quest Atlantis is predicated on seven "Social Commitments." It also features chat which is monitored 24/7 for compliance to a contract called the iBurst, whereby our kids promise to behave in many good ways, including being helpful to one another. Here's the email:

Greetings from Quest Atlantis!

I have been reviewing the chat logs and I noticed something that I wanted to bring to your attention.

One of your students really exemplified one of the Social Commitments today. Please see the excerpt from the chat transcripts below.

I just wanted you to be aware of this. Please pass along the Council’s appreciation to your Quester for demonstrating one of the Social Commitments so beautifully.

Have a great day!

Stephanie Scharf, QA Chat Monitor
****************************************************************
CHAT EXCERPT
****************************************************************
On 03/27/2009,

At 05:58:11 PM ghawk20 said, 'how do you run'

At 05:58:28 PM sportsfanaticusn said, 'press the ctrl button'

Way to go, sportsfanaticusn! The more help we can offer to those in need, the more we help the world(s) become a better place!

Back from Spring Break! We Take Off in New Directions!

2009-03-24T12:14:00.000-07:00

I hope everyone had a great Spring Break. My son and I trekked to northern Kentucky to explore Paducah and the wilds of Metropolis, and you can see pics from that at my personal blog at scottmerrick.net.

Here in the lab, I'm taking entry level computer programming to the people. All classes grades 2 through 4 will spend some quality time with the free open sourceware program "Scratch," developed and made available from the fine folks at MIT's "Lifelong Kindergarten" project. This fine little program is very intuitive and easy to learn, and I'm expecting that a good number of kids will take to it like shine on a doorknob, teaching me things about programming as we learn together.

My plan is to spend just two (or three) weeks in the lab working with the program with the second graders. Third graders will get four weeks, then it will revert to a "free choice" option for after other work is done. Fourth graders may well spend the rest of the school year, as I discover projects to help drive them toward their own discoveries and the realizations of their own competencies.

Kinder and 1st grade kiddos will be drawing all week and likely into the next, as we share pictures illustrating something that happened over Spring Break. I have begun posting their words on that topic at the USN LS Edublogs blog and that should fill out nicely by the end of the month. Often there is no classroom assistant or teacher with me for K and 1 these days, as special projects geared to getting things done by the end of the year draw them away from the lab classtime, so it's just little old me calling them up to the teacher 'puter to take dictation. Mark the site though, and visit for fun insights about how our community's families choose to spend their leisure time--and, even more interestingly, how their children perceive those times!

Some kids didn't go anywhere, but their art says they had fun!

Marchin' On through 2009!

2009-03-06T06:04:00.000-08:00

Well, well, well, here we are in March! Where has most of the school year gone!?

It's a good thing we have most of the rest of March, and April, and May to continue working because we are going to need it!

Let's go in order of coming into the lab, starting with our 3rd graders:

We finished up our three weeks in the award-winning program "Timez Attack" this week. I'll be rolling around the room later today on my little office chair, going from computer to computer to computer recording the student progress. My intention is to make a case for purchasing the full-fledged program for next year, so that all the exciting levels of work are unlocked for the students. Should I be successful we'll buy the Timez Attack upgrade and the 3rd and 4th graders (and those 2nd graders who may need extra advanced practice, just another available tool for individualized instruction) will have access to them! I note that several students' parents have already purchased the program for home, and that is heartening--I don't recommend home purchase, partly because I don't want to be viewed as endorsing a commercial product--but those decisions on the part of parents just justify my faith in the program!

4th graders continue questing! I am seeing the overall progress of my little n00bie questers begin to string out in a broader spectrum as some forge forward seemingly voraciously and some still languish in the early stages of introductory missions and quests. I'm getting around to the latter group individually to help them work through those areas where they are confused, and hopefully everyone will be on track soon. However, I have to share that the quality of the questing (in the form of written submitted "Responses" and "Reflections," two required features for quest completion) is VERY encouraging. For example, a recent response from one 4th grader came to me for review and I had to print it out to share with her teacher. I won't name her by name, but when asked to describe a personal occasion where she felt she'd been disrespected, here's what she wrote:

One time someone told me that I needed to dress better. I didn't get very upset,
but I wished that she hadn't said that. I told her that I didn't care what she
thought about my clothes and that she should stop being mean. I wish I hadn't
said that, either. I couldn't agree more with the saying 'treat others the way
you want to be treated.' To me, respect means to make sure that you don't take
anger out on anyone else. It aslo means to have a good attitude about what your
friends do or wear, even if you don't personally like it.

If you look at the goals for this quest, the student did a very good job of addressing them. Yesterday I reviewed and responded to over 25 mission/quest submissions, approving about half and asking others to resubmit after adding detail or correcting grammar or spelling. While I do not require perfection (note the "aslo" in the above submission), I do require attention to both!

Here are the goals, by the way--and please bear in mind this is only one introductory quest in a virtual world rich with opportunities to learn and reflect:

Having Respect
Your goal(s) are to:
Do you feel like there was a time when you felt someone didn't respect you? Was there a time when you didn't respect someone else? Share your views on respect.
Share a time when you were disrespected or you didn't respect someone else.
Then, describe how you would you like others to treat you.
Also, describe what it means to show respect.

I will report that managing this "classroom of 72" is a challenging load for me, as my QA mentor suggested it might be. However, I'm so encouraged by early performance that I persevere! This week one classroom was inworld during the regular 4th grade time and we found that bananausn (one of our quester users from USN) was also online. It turns out she was home with a case of pinkeye and via the magic of our virtual environment, we were all able to chat and explore together! Fun!

Revisit this blog for more on our journey into the fabulous learning experience of Quest Atlantis!

Kindergartners explored Lesson 24 at UpToTen.com (now up to this week, challenging their memory in four fun activities. Two of them are scaled to "Younger Kids" and "Older Kids" and I challenged all our "young kids" to pick the older option and share with me and the teacher assistant (when present) when they were successful. Beaming faces testified to their pride in being just that.

1st and 2nd graders are working at AAAMath.com to drill basic addition facts. It turns interesting and fun (and, yes, maybe a little bit competitive, but in a good way!) when we all go to the 0,1,2 Addition page and click "Give Me Time" to do a 60 second timed drill that allows the user more time as he or she completes the number sentences correctly. I like this drill site because it does not require young children to enter the numbers on the keypad, only to click on the correct answer button. I'm hoping that some of our children who are most in need for retention of addition facts 0-10 will benefit from the experience and re-visit the site frequently!

February is Out Like a Lion

2009-02-27T09:27:00.000-08:00

Hey, all,

We're proceeding apace through Quest Atlantis in 4th grade, and it was gratifying to have a parent slow her vehicle exiting morning hookup, roll down her window and shout "We're LOVING Quest Atlantis! [My son] is obsessed! Thank you for that!" While I'm hoping the obsession comment was a bit of an hyperbole, it does feel good that students are beginning to understand the value of the work, that they enjoy it, and further that many are sharing their enthusiasm with their parents! I've been on a track in QA similar to the one the students are on: Much of it is the process of figuring out how things in an unfamiliar environment work, persevering through new processes, paying attention to the order of things in a new order, and sharing with one another--both questions and insights.

For example, I'm discovering the teacher review and feedback functions are not just limited to reviewing quest submissions, but also consist of working on my own quests and missions, previewing those to understand the progressions themselves, and telegraming and emailing students. Doing so last week, I previewed and eventually assigned the wonderful "Communicating with Technology" mission, with elements helping questers learn and demonstrate learning about several important facets of digital communication, in particular chat, email, and blogging. Here's a composite screengrab from one stage of the mission:

You can get more detail by clicking to enlarge the image, and it will give you some notion of the quality of the content we encounter in our questing. Most children have chosen to pursue commitment missions in one of the seven Social Commitments, which are, again,
social responsibility, compassionate wisdom, creative expression, diversity affirmation,
environmental awareness, healthy communities, and personal agency. Depending on which commitment they choose to pursue first, they're off to fulfill requirements that they illustrate a grasp of its meaning and demonstrate actions in support of it.

Some Quests can be very simple ones, as in the "Draw your own political cartoon" one. Here's an example of one early sumission from one of my students in this Quest:

While its effectiveness as a "political cartoon" might be challenged, it clearly illustrates a beginning understanding of the concept and a creative way to approach the task, short of actually "drawing." It also illustrates some "collatoral learning," project-based learning where the technological skills of search, copy, paste, save, upload and more are practiced in the context of task-based learning. I'm beginning to see more and more of this, and I'm proud of the path my students are beginning to show as they move deeper into the virtual world of Quest Atlantis. Stay tuned! And for some deep reading about my motivations for bringing this work to our students, please read Eat Your Vegetables and Do Your. Homework: A Design-. Based Investigation of Enjoyment and Meaning in Learning, bySasha Barab et al.

3rd graders continue their own path into Timez Attack, the 3dimensional multiplication practice program that offers a fun and amusing way to practice times table. Not only that, but it's design is informed and underscored by best practices in instructional technologies. Rather than launch into my own review let me point you to an objective review at the MathNotations blog that I agree with in every particular! I'll be finishing up next week with them and then moving on to something else new and exciting. Shhhhhhh! It's a secret!

2nd graders worked this week to beat 4th grade teacher Ms. Dent's record on StackerBlocks3D, a tetris clone that is also available for download via the Webliographer's Download topic. I like this game because it is free, opensource, and fully customizable. It also encourages visual pre-planning based on a visual assessment of current spacial environment, fine motor hand-eye coordination, and perseverance. An arcade-like look is popular,

as is the "Bobbles" interface:

No one's beat Ms. Dent's 7264 points yet, and I'm beginning to despair of ever doing so. I'm stubborn, though, so stay tuned here as well.

Kinder and 1st kiddos visited UpToTen.com's http://www.uptoten.com/schools.phtml program online to drop back to Lesson 36, Counting-Part 2, which contains 4 activities designed to help them with numbers, including a very nice Paint by Numbers activity:

By the way, if you are missing some of the multitudes of color-printed work that has been in backpacks in years past, please be aware that we're making a serious effort to print only the most important pieces of our "artputer" work this year. It's all in a hopefully appreciated effort to work toward environmental (and financial) responsibility. I hope you approve! We'll be saving all artwork in a network folder at the end of the year, one which will follow your child through Lower School and perhaps on into Middle School!

February Marches On!

2009-02-21T05:15:00.000-08:00

Another big week in the lab, as:

Kinderkids explored lesson number 43 at UpToTen Premium@Schools, now up to 8,377 schools using it; and I have to brag again about our being school NUMERO UNO! This lesson contains four activities classified as "Advanced Mouse and Keyboard" work and the kids had great fun with them--filling a honeycomb with honey from flowers, helping a mole through a tunnel, mousing Zoombunny up into the air to collect acorns and carrots, and finally using keyboard arrows to play a very serviceable version of the old game Brickmaster called "Breaking Bricks." Click the pic above for a detailed descripton.

1st graders explored the Webliographer for resources I've stored there relating to Weather. Some particularly liked the 15 or 20 word "word searches" while others gravitated to the "Water Goes Around" construct-your-own water cycle activity.

2nd graders visited the Webliographer for Mystery links, and explored especially the Fin, Furr, and Feather Federal Bureau of Investigation.

3rd graders cracked open Timez Attack (free version) to take their little guy through a very very nice 3D environment picking up math facts along the way then demonstrating their retention of them by tossing them at a pretty scary ogre who their math releases from a secret door. When the ogre is conquered by the smarts of the player, he disappears into thin air (not "killed," I emphasize, because the next door will surely see him released again) and another door, containing another math fact, is sought. It's a fun, well conceived and expertly executed game, the free version of which (the only limitation is that there is only one environment option, and more can be purchased at the site; but I don't encourage that--to the maker's credit, new environments are not required for full functionality) is downloadable at the Webliographer's Downloads topic or by visiting the TimezAttack website. Parents, if you wonder about the value of playing games for learning, visit and view the excellent intro video at BigBrains.com.

And, ahem, speaking of games, we (4th graders and I) proceed apace into Quest Atlantis, learning more about the worlds in which we are increasingly engaged. My email 9within QA) to all of the kids this week encouraged them to seek a sense of balance by limiting game play on their own, balancing it with homework, family time, outside play, reading, and other ways to be entertained. Their enthusiasm is sooooo clearly present (I overgeneralize somewhat here--we still have some confusion and mixed reaction and we're working with that) and I'm glad for that, but the last thing anyone wants is for this engaging platform to dominate playtime inordinately. But I will argue to the wall that if there's "screentime" available and there's a choice between a DVR'd episode of iCarly or the Simpsons and Quest Atlanti s and a child chooses the latter, a good choice has been made!

We're beginning to get into some missions and quests now, and in addition to the basic iBurst quest and Shardflower Social Commitments mission, the kids are unlocking some interesting things, such as fighting blights with magical critters and seeking out a playable giant piano to commit to Creativity. I'll soon have samples of writing so that you can begin to truly understand the power of this platform to motivate and inspire. I'm also beginning to take a little video of the action in the lab when the kids are all on at once. It's wild!

That's all for this week!

Quest Atlantis Apace, Math Arcade A-Go-Go, and Valentines Art Amazing

2009-02-12T05:48:00.001-08:00

We are spending this week in various ways, and I'll dive right in, in the order in which the kids come in the lab each day:

3rd graders are finishing up their Master Artist poster projects, and they've been locating images with Google image search, always with the procedure in mind that in the event of inappropriate images they 1) close the window or turn off the monitor and 2) report it to a teacher (me, most likely, but their parents at home if that's where it happens). Copying and pasting seems such a natural concept to us old digital immigrants, and while the myth is that all things computer come naturally to little kids, that's truly just a myth. My 3rd graders, after a few sessions of work with it, do "get" it better than, for example, my mother-in-law [nods to Ann], but it has to be learned, ya'll--it's not breathing, it's a task! They practiced this task with Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word, copying and pasting both text and images. The benefit of pasting an image into Word before printing it is that it can then be easily resized by dragging handles from corners, yet another new skill. Here are a couple of the resulting projects, these from students in Ms. McKay's class!

Once the 3rd graders have mined all they need from the internet, they are returning to Type to Learn 3 for more practice home-row-keying! That will come in handy next month when we foray into computer programming with Scratch.

4th graders are venturing further into Quest Atlantis! The room is both exciting and filled with questions from the questers, and one thing I note is that the din is beginning to subside a bit as confusion yields to early understanding and wonder. NOTE TO PARENTS: If you can't get the software working at home, not to worry! We'll be questing at school for real and soon, pursuing an aspect of one of the 5 Social Commitments that underscore QA. Look for more soon! Meanwhile, here's a picture I snapped at the Ecology World Game Preserve, only one of the amazing wealth of experiences available in this virtual environment:
Kindergartners and 1st graders are designing Valentines with Drawing for Children. They are working from template, adding their name, and exploring the shift and Ctrl keys for modifying the effects of stamps and clipart hearts. Then we print! All the kids love to print; it must be the tactile attraction of paper and physical product, which shows no sign of going away, despite the digital world's offerings. Here are a couple of those, one from K and one from 1st!

2nd graders are working with basic, simple math operations at Funbrain.com's Math Arcade, easily accessible at the Free Choice Options category of the Webliographer. While there's no product to share from this activity, the hopeful expectation is that 2nd graders will become familiar enough with the interface to come and practice their math skills at this fun site, available anywhere, anytime with internet access. There are 22 games in the gameboard-style interface, and the problems can get more challenging depending on the grade level set at the beginning. After each game mastered, a code is issued so that a student can come right back in at that earned level the next time, no user registration required. We went in this week using the code "Cow2," which puts us at Math Basketball. Try it for yourself!

from http://www.funbrain.com/brain/MathBrain/MathBrain.html

We Warm Up in the Lab During the Coldest Week!

2009-02-05T09:46:00.000-08:00

Wow, it's cold out there, but it's warm in the computer lab!

Third graders are practicing their copy and paste skills in Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word as they gather images to adorn their poster creations that will display their learning about their Master Artists. Check back here next week for example pictures! Along the way, they are reminded of the two-step procedure in case inappropriate images or websites greet their searches (1--close it, turn off the monitor if it won't close and 2--tell a grownup) and they are learning about how to resize images in Word, how to relocate a saved document on the network, and how to change the destination printer while printing. Lots of "collateral learning" going on!

Fourth graders continue their tentative explorations into the fun and exciting 3D online world, Quest Atlantis. The excitement in the lab is palpable as they gain control of their QA interface, begin to understand the culture of communication and helpfulness, and learn from early mistakes. I did receive my first (and hopefully last) email from a QA Chat Monitor that one of our students was "spamming," typing gibberish into the chat field repeatedly, and this provided us with a good teachable moment. The student account was not disabled, but should the behavior continue the next incident will lose him/her the privilege of participating in this community "play." The Quest Atlantis founders, by the way, have pursued significant research into the way students learn best, and their game design is solidly rooted in this research. See their philosophy and foundations at QuestAtlantis.org. While I've got you here, though, let me give you a taste of it:

It is generally accepted by educators that learners should participate in domain-related activities, not simply receive the results of someone else’s activities as summarized in tests or as heard in lectures. Underlying the development of QA learning tasks, QA unit plans, and the experience of Quest Atlantis more generally is a participatory framework that emphasizes action and reflection as central components to the learning process. This notion of an active learner engaged in real-world activities is central to the child-centered, experientially-focused, and inquiry-based learning environments promoted in academic research, and is consistent with current frameworks and plans for educational reform.

Kindergarten: It was soooo cold this week that I felt it necessary to take my kindergartners to the beach with Boowa and Kwala! They could practice their mouse and design skills by dressing Kwala up and then printing their masterpiece; they hone their visual skills by picking out pairs of parasols that match; they could work on hand-eye coordination by attaching a crab to their mouse and navigating down a sandy path (in 5 increasingly difficult levels); and they could play Frisbee catch with Boowa (hand-eye work again, but much more challenging than Mr. Crab!).

1st graders worked with a couple online "games" at the BBCKids website, including "Clockwise" and "Matching Time," two exercises geared to practicing concepts relating to time and timetelling. Again, the game design is incrementally levelled, from Level 1's "on the hour" questions to Level 3's "on the five-minutes" ones. We also discussed the meaning of "millenium" and "fortnight," two time-words we don't see so much over here in the New World. Nashville makes use of the latter concept in its "Fortnightly" social dance school, and I was pleased to see that some of our kids are already familiar with the term precisely because they attend their dance classes every two weeks!

2nd graders also forayed into math, visiting Funbrain.com for some rousing sessions of "Math Baseball," either on the "Easy" or the "Medium" levels. Easy is single digit, but it can be challenging as well if students try to see how many "runs" they can bat in how fast. My students' Easy level record as of this typing is 76 runs and more than one student has batted in more than 35 at the Medium (double digit) level. Using sites like Funbrain's Math Baseball, students can challenge themselves and differentiate their very own instruction. As I told my students, they are going to have to learn their math facts, and if they can be having fun while doing it, more's the better. After completing Math Baseball, they were able to visit the Funbrain Math Arcade, an interesting set of math games set up for delivery on a boardgame-like table. My favorite was the Pig Toss, I have to admit. In it, estimation and spatial skills are challenged as some of my hillbilly relatives jump as high as the user sets them to onto a seesaw with a pig at the other end, then the pig flies as far as the user sets it. It's estimate, revise, estimate revise, until the game is finally won and the next game can be played. It's none other than Math Basketball! Yay!

from http://funbrain.com

Two Weeks' Worth of Catching Up!

2009-01-27T09:45:00.000-08:00

Howdy,

Sorry I'm a bit behind. I'm busy on so many fronts I can't believe the time is flying so fast!

This morning (Tuesday, January 27th) marked the first 4th graders' (Ms. Hunt's class) entrance into Quest Atlantis. My goal this week is just to hand out the usernames and passwords I've set up for the kids and to have them log in and begin to become comfortable with the user interface. Though the initial distribution process (handing out slips of paper to the kids with the information printed from a spreadsheet) was a bit clunky, we got in, and we didn't crash the internet connection! Yay! I did meet our network administrator in the hallway afterward and he said there was some slowing down, and we'll be testing over this week to see if I need to perhaps stagger the logins during that period more than I did today.

The kids did GREAT! I asked them to find me at the clocktower and they did, then they moved about the OTAK island exploring and laughing. The excitement in our lab was palpable. This is looking good, very good, and look for ongoing communication about the process. Here's a picture of some of our virtual citizens in their "n00bie" shorts and teeshirts:

The kindergarteners this week are exploring Boowa and Kwala's Lesson number 40, having experienced number 39, The Alphabet. Lesson 40, Simple Drawing, Construction, and Creation, which has several very interesting creative tools, including my favorite, "My Funny Mygummy Whatsit Line Machine," which has the subhead, "Draw Lines. There's no point. But it's fun." And it is! Think of it as a mashup between an etcha-sketch and an arrow-maze game. I have several pictures I'll share out here:

3rd graders are reinforcing their Google-search, copy, paste-into-a-Word-document, and save skills by looking on the Web for more pictures they think they might want to cut out for use in their poster creations for their Master Artist report. While it's true we could be doing some of this in totally digital ways, I honor the 3rd grade team's creative design process and I'm looking forward to seeing the final results of their careful planning. Is it more important for a 3rd grader to create a PowerPoint than to crawl around on a floor with posterboard and a gluestick to arrange a presentation? Not so much, I think, especially if the 3rd grader isn't yet accomplished at the latter. It's all of a piece, one supporting the other.

2nd graders last week worked with Stackerblocks 3D and Tangrams to bolster their geometrical facility manipulating geometrical forms with purpose. Both these programs are available, by the way, for free download at the Webliographer's Download topic page, so if you'd like some fun geometrical diversions for yourself or your child, go have at it! Let your child help you trick out Stackerblocks for cool looks, then work in friendly competition for high scores. I'm still not sure how 4th grade teacher Ms. Dent has racked up a score of over 7000 points on the teacher machine, but that's the score I'm trying to beat!

This week, 2nd graders are visiting a cool new site I found in response to an email from Ms. Meeks last week, which said,

just a thought...
My class has been talking a lot about storybook
illustrations and how illustrators act like a camera and zoom in
and out to add variety to the pages. We have talked about cropping close ups
as well. Any programs the kids can use in class Tuesday to practice zooming,
cropping, etc.??
Kathryn
I asked about on my PLN (Personal Learning Network) and one of my tweets (on Twitter.com) suggested PhotoOp, from NGAKids.gov (the National Gallery of Art's website) and wow! is it great or what!? It's so much fun and so laden with value that I added a new topic to the Webliographer, "Graphics and Graphic Design," which I'll be fleshing out over time. Go play yourself: The concepts are appropriate for any grade level or age level and it's never too late (or too soon) to learn!

There: lots of words and pictures! Have a great week and we'll see you all at Parent Teacher conferences Thursday or Friday!

QA Username Form!

2009-01-14T06:09:00.000-08:00

Fourth graders who are about to enter Quest Atlantis:

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Quest Atlantis Legend Intro--Day 1

2009-01-13T07:00:00.000-08:00

Thanks to parents who have sent in Quest Atlantis permission forms. This is a wonderful opportunity for our fourth graders and I hope that a vast majority of parents will enable their children to participate! Please remember: I need BOTH the signed participation consent form AND the initialed research permission release before we can get started into QA.

The "How We Spent our Winter Break" blog comment project currently has 108 comments, grades K-2 and 4 (3rd graders are spending their lab sessions entering into research for their fabulous Master Artists unit) and can be accessed at Edublogs and/or by visiting the Webliographer and clicking on the temporary "Winter Blog Comments" link near the top of the page.

K and 1st graders will be Drawing for Children this week and printing, and the only requirement for their drawing to be printed is that they have their name on it, though I'm hoping for some Winter Break pictures from the batch to share out at the edublogs blog!

How We Spent Our Winter Break, 2008-9!

2009-01-06T06:53:00.000-08:00

4th Graders:

Visit the USN LS Student Blog to make your comments about Winter Break! We'll be getting into Quest Atlantis starting next week!

Happy Holidays and See You Next Year!

2008-12-18T11:00:00.000-08:00

As the New Year marches toward us, I want to thank the parents of my students, all 372 of them (not to mention those who've outdistanced the Lower School and who are moving through middle and high school, for a total of around a thousand), for sharing your children with me. I am privileged to help guide some of the brightest, most creative, and cutest young people on the face of the planet. I hope that I am helping them to know that although the world can be a scary place, we will make it through this together by caring and kindness, coupled with mutual respect for one another.

It's a media shareout BONANZA!

This week, at least until my lab projector decided to go on the permanent fritz (a new one has been ordered), the 4th graders shared their "All About Me" PowerPoints, and I'm going to put one of them up here to share, with the student's name withheld. It's illustrative of the efforts, though, and I'll qualify by adding that though they are all the same, they're all so different that it's a joy to watch each and every one of them.

AllAboutMeExample1

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: elementary usn)

AllAboutMeExample2

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: usn university school of nas...)

AllAboutMeExample3

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: elementary 4th)

The K and 1 kiddies finished their pics for Boowa and I mailed a large zipped folder off to the site's creator, Jason Barnard, in Mauritius. We're crossing our fingers and hoping some show up soon at the gallery at http://boowakwala.com! Meanwhile, here's the unedited collection!

Second Graders visited websites in the Webliographer designed to help them practice basic time-telling strategies. Their favorites, by report, are "Snapdragon" and "Stop the Clock."

Have a safe, fun-filled, family-full holiday break and we'll see ya next year!!!

Last Full Week Before Winter Holidays!

2008-12-10T07:25:00.000-08:00

We're achieving closure here in the Lower School Technology for Learning lab, on a number of fronts!

4th graders are charged with finishing their Powerpoint presentations, each entitled "All About Me," for shareout next week. We'll be displaying them next week on the big screen at the front of the lab, and from what I've already seen it's going to be a reallllly big show!

3rd graders get another session practicing their basic multiplication math facts with Multiflyer, where their mission is to save the solar system from doom arising from a planetary alignment that only happens once every ~82,000 earth years. The year is 3074, and danger is imminent. Along the route they gather data and struggle to maintain their Warp Speed health by solving simple "times" problems FAST. Next week we'll go into its "Practice Mode" for brief timed sessions that will result in printed performance reports, which I'll share with the classroom teachers. The report notes areas of mastery and areas where further work might be helpful.

Kindergarteners and 1st graders are finishing the drawings we'll send to Boowa at UpToTen.com, with the hope that some of their drawings will be featured in Boowa and Kwala's gallery. The number of schools using the "UpToTen Premium @ Schools" free account (which I helped design years ago) is nearly 8000 now, which means that a picture in the gallery is likely to be viewed by tens of thousands of children all around the globe. That's a nicely sized audience! I received an email from a Kindergartener's mom last week that warmed my heart: Her son had been drawing on the computer with our freeware software, "Drawing for Children," and she wanted me to see the drawing of Boowa and Kwala that he'd produced at home. Yay! Here it is:
2nd graders spent good time at the LearningPlanet Kids' Site for grade levels 1-3. There is a little group of games there, and they could make a choice from the menu and play any one of these (screengrab from http://www.learningplanet.com/stu/kids2.asp):

I particularly love The Counting Game, an interface that allows for counting incrementally, by 1's of course, but also by 2's, 3's, 4's, etc., even by 2's in odd numbers. Very good practice for children seeking to gain instant recall of basic math facts.

As we steer into the holidays, don't forget to make time for closeness and relaxation. We'll be firing up the gas logs in the family room fireplace for quiet reading times at least daily!

Cheers!
Scott

Happy December 2008! Fun, Games, and Learning

2008-12-03T11:12:00.000-08:00

As we sneak into the last days of 2008 (can you believe it?), several grades "work" with "play."

It's long been understood that learning can be enhanced with the thoughtfully applied use of well-designed game technologies. Anyone who has never had an extended conversation with a child immersed in Pokemon game culture, for example, should rush out and do so a.s.a.p.: No one is assigning children homework in understanding the particular attack power or defensive worth of any given character card. No one is quizzing them. No one is making them take notes. But I can recall sitting through conversations with my 9 year old (now nearly 13 and more interested in guitar tablature then trading card games) that absolutely floored me with his (self-)learned expertise.

There is a stunning paper, one that's been around for quite some time, actually, called "Eat Your Vegetables and Do Your Homework: A Design-Based Investigation of Enjoyment and Meaning in Learning," by Barab, Arici, and Jackson at Indiana University, that was a groundbreaking treatise, raising the questions like "How does school learning become tinged with a negative connootation? What occurs to shift the perspective from 'learning as play' to 'learning as work?' Is it possible to reconnect the two and do so even in the context of schools?"

These are significant questions, especially when considering that the total number of graduating Bachelors of Science candidates in Science and Engineering in all of the United States hovers around 450,000 graduates. Compare that with around 1,100,000 users of Runescape, a popular computer game, and over 10,000,000 World of Warcraft players. It's all about the scope, according to Merrilea Mayo, Director, Future of Learning Initiatives, at the Kauffman Foundation. Serious game design holds serious potentials for the future of learning. (Click image for full-size graph)

All that said, I'm announcing this week that I'm crafting our 4th grade students' entry into Quest Atlantis, a virtual world environment designed by the aforesaid Dr. Barab and teams of educators from across the globe, and based out of Indiana University. I'm so impressed by what I've learned so far about QA, as I will henceforth call it, that I've spent the equivalent of two working days in professional development training and countless hours researching, discussing, and planning in order to bring this opportunity to my students. I'll be sending home consent letters next week and hoping they all return by the beginning of January, when we'll ease on into the world and begin Questing! More on that later!

The 3rd graders began working in a game this week as well. It's called "Multiflyer" and it is an online game dedicated to reinforcing basic math fact skills. A complex backstory immerses the player in the mission of "obtaining coordinates" for the next planet in the solar system by solving multiplication problems at the "easy," "medium," or "hard" level (player-chosen) and stops along the way present facts about the solar system. I have also been looking into a math-facts game software called "TimezAttack," and it's in the testing stages in the lab. Look for more on that later as well.

2nd graders this week went into funbrain.com for a tic-tac-toe game involving multi-digit addition and subtraction, and they will be playing "Math Mayhem" next week. This online game requires quick entry of basic addition problem solutions and allows players to compete against others in distant locations. It's safe, compelling, and fun. I just played against six others and my "Scotty" only came in second. Was there another teacher online? A college student looking to best little kids? It doesn't matter: I had fun and I got practice with my facts that was certainly much more friendly to my spirit than sitting at a table with a stack of flash cards might be.

It's certainly not boring in the lab these days...

Kinder and 1st graders are creating pictures for me to deliver to Boowa (actually to my friend Jason, the creator and owner of UpToTen.com), so that they might have a chance of being displayed in January's online art gallery. We're using Drawing for Children and the students have a choice of creating a picture "of" Boowa and Kwala or one just "for" them. I believe in choice. Here is an example of each:

Talkin' Turkey!

2008-11-20T13:45:00.000-08:00

Turkeys created with a sort-of-new twist on an old activity. Instead of outlining one's hand on a piece of paper and creating from the resulting line-drawing a turkey for Thanksgiving, my Kindergarteners and 1st graders outlined their hands using the freeware Drawing for Children, then decorated their turkeys, sometimes lavishly, with tools the software program has to offer. The downside of D4Children is that it creates HUGE bitmap files, so I stored them locally and ran around the room when they were done moving them over to a network folder, then quickly pulled that folder to my own computer and deleted it from the network. I then resized the pics, used Photoshop image processing to convert them to small .jpg files, and uploaded the whole kit and kaboodle to Picasaweb Albums (by Google). What you see above is the result.

Departing from the standard "save it, don't print it" green philosophy of the lab, we also printed these for each child and sent them home. I can only imagine Nashville's fridges covered with turkeys for the holidays!

My 4th graders are polishing "All About Me" Powerpoints (we'll finish working the week after Thanksgiving break and start to share them out in class!) and 3rd graders plowing through Type to Learn 3, which we will leave behind as a scheduled lab activity soon. Second graders visited Nova's Trebuchet online and worked on destroying Medieval castles, then chatted with National Geographic's "Ghosts in the Castle" denizens.

I hope that everyone enjoys our pictures and appreciates the wide range of creative approaches to the exercise. We'll see you at Parents' and Granparents' Days and I wish you a happy Thanksgiving!

Foggy, Chilly, and Stimulating

2008-11-13T07:10:00.000-08:00

Hey, all,

This week in the lab we're power-moving through Powerpoints in the 4th grade. The "All About Me" powerpoint. Last week I introduced "Custom Animation" and this week in the wholeclass intoduction I emphasized the little-used feature called "Help." How many of you actually use F1 or Help when you want to do something you don't know how to do? I thought so--not many.

In the lab, I encourage my students to help one another, one reason why this room may be more chatty than other classrooms in the Lower School. They'll certainly need to know how to collaborate and learn from one another if they are to succeed in the 21st century workplace. They also need to begin to learn that just because an adult is in the room it doesn't mean that all knowledge comes from him, or from her. They need to start questioning, nurturing their inquisitiveness and exploring natures. By and large, gauging from the energetic chat I'm hearing, it's happenin' in the lab!

3rd graders are working through Type to Learn 3 and the big news for them is that I'm trialing out the new release from Sunburst, Type to Learn 4! This is a completely new build and I'm very excited about the possibility of making it available to our kids, not only in Lower School but schoolwide, K12. Also, it will provide a fun alternative to Keyboarding for Kids, especially those who have finished all the lessons later in the year.

Kinderkids and 1st graders are printing turkeys they made last week, or just beginning to work on ones they will print and bring home next week. We do this using a new twist on the old activity where a child places a hand on a piece of paper and traces it, then adds beak, legs and feet, and a wattle to create a fanciful drawing. The difference in the lab is that the child holds a hand up on the monitor screen, traces it into our freeware Drawing for Children program, and adds details and flourishes using the computer. The results are stellar! I'm going to put a slideshow of many of them, both K and 1, right here on Friday.

2nd graders continue their own pursuit of keyboarding skills with Type to Learn 3. We'll keep working through the year, intermittantly, on this to take advantage of their enthusiasm to learn, though we'll break out into other technology skills as curricula demands. For instance, this week and next we'll work with Nova's great online trebuchet. What's that? Ask your 2nd grader, and next week I'll post an answer!

That's it for the week, and for now I'm prepping for a talk to the Vanderbilt Web developers next Friday, all about Web development in Virtual Worlds. It's never boring in my neck of the woods!

Easing into November!

2008-11-06T08:02:00.000-08:00

Hey, all,

I didn't post last week due to my being out with a pulled lower back last Thursday and Friday, so I have some catching up to do!

Here's the quicklist:

3, Type to Learn 3
4, Keyboarding for Kids last week, then Powerpoint "All About Me" introduction
K, Drawing turkeys with Drawing for Children
1, Drawing even more turkey-looking turkeys with Drawing for Children
2, Creating and printing custom letter-writing stationery using Paint and Word and then continuing Type to Learn 3

Here's the detail:

3rd graders are progressing through Type to Learn 3, the animated software program (25 lessons and hundreds of activities) that helps them begin to learn touch typing.

In 4th grade, we're finally to the point where kids are doing more or less daily keyboarding practice with Keyboarding for Kids and we can now move on to other skills and challenges. To start with, I'm introducing Microsoft Powerpoint in a very basic way, drawing comparisons with the interface in Word, which they have already been using, and showing them a few beginning tricks--how to create a new slide, apply a slide design to one or all slides, and how to edit text. We'll deal with custom animation and more advanced options later, but for now the fun part is that each child is off on a 5 slide slideshow called "All About Me." Now there's a topic of interest! Each slideshow will have a title slide and a "The End" slide and at least 3 but not more than 5 slides about them, their likes, dislikes (kind ones only!) and more. We'll allow the learning to gestate and by the couple of weeks approaching Winter Break we'll share out. You're going to like these!!!

Kinder kids traced their hands on the monitor (no mean feat) and tricked out some turkeys with Drawing for Children. Wow! I'm going to add a slideshow right here before I post:

1st graders are doing the same activity, only with more detail and both grades created this week, saved the files, and will go find them next week to reopen and improve before saving again and printing. Neat!

2nd graders finished up stationery personally designed with Paint, inserted into a single page in Word, then formatted for filling the paper and washing out contrast and brightness before printing. The result is a nice abstract background of their own design for hand-writing letters. Several are already writing them in class. Yay!

The Thanksgiving season brings us Grandparents' Day every year, and this year is no exception, with music teacher Doni Princehorn working like crazy with all grades levels and with the PE department to make us a beautiful show. The link for reservations is at http://usn.org/gpday so go fill it out and come join us!

artclectic 2008 Slideshows!!!

2008-10-27T04:23:00.001-07:00

Hey, all,

artclectic 2008 has come and gone, and I saw so many of you there that I might easily believe we saw 100% attendance from our families. However, I was listening to my young charges as we talked about USN's wonderful, fabulous, beautiful annual art show during classes last week, so I'm sharing the ~1000 pictures I took to chronicle this year's event here. I put them all up in my Google picasaweb albums for easy viewing by students, families, artists, and art lovers all over the world. Play each slideshow to view, and if you see a picture you want to save, just click on the slideshow image again to visit the album proper. Then click "View Album" and find your pic, and follow the googleintuitive directions to save it to your hard drive.

I did not get to "loadout" on Sunday, and I'm looking forward to my photomentor Kimberly Manz's sets from that day. I'll add another show or a link to her (admittedly much more professional) work just as soon as I get it!

Feel free to leave your comments or questions at the bottom of this post!

Slideshow 1, artclectic2008 setup and Patrons Party:

Slideshow 2, artclectic2008 setup and Education Day:

Slideshow 3, artclectic2008 Community Party:

Slideshow 4, artclectic2008 Saturday:

Slideshow 5, artclectic Sunday:

October artclectic week!

2008-10-21T09:25:00.000-07:00

artclectic, USN's spectacular annual art show and sale, is close to my heart, since my dear wife Lee Ann, USN Arts Coordinator, is the prime mover of the event. It's HUGE, with dozens and dozens of dedicated parent volunteers working for weeks before the event. See artclectic.org for more information, and I most of all want to encourage everyone to come and see this year's offerings, work by 52 artists, 22 of them completely new to the show, from 10 states (including Hawaii!).

Details are at the artclectic website.

This week in the lab I'm sharing parts of the video I made, "artclectic, selected art from selected artists," with my own original (excepting one "traditional) instrumental recordings. It's around 30 minutes long and I'm pretty happy with it. If you have a fast internet connection, feel free to download and view it from USN, where I'm storing a "smaller" version of it for website publication. The larger version does more justice to the art, but if you want to spend a pleasant half hour with some stellar art in the privacy of your home, have at it. It's a ~154 Mb .wmv file, so it may be a long download for you! I hope to put it up at YouTube later in the week. At the same location is a smaller movie about the whole event that I put together last year, using podcast safe music from magnatune.com.

It's the last week for Keyboarding for Kids in the computer lab for 4th graders, and the 3rd graders are moving well into Type to Learn 3, honing those beginning skills that they'll need to be refining over the next few years. Kindergarteners are starting to draw digitally, taking first tentative steps into the world of freeware program Drawing for Children. This program is free for download, and you can find it by visiting the Downloads section of our Webliographer. After a very brief introduction at the projector screen, the K-kiddos are asked to go open the program, choose a tool, and write their name at least once, raising their hand when finished. The teacher assistant or I then save the file locally and reset the page so the more fun work of exploring the tools can begin. Each week over the next several I'll share one or two important tools or skills with D4C and then set them about discovering new ones on their own. Ah, Guided Discovery Learning. I love my job.

1st graders will be diving back into Drawing for Children for the first time this year, and I differentiate for them this week by having them draw their names as many times, and in as many colors, with as many tools, as they can. The results, even this early in the week, are heartening. Here are a couple:

Second graders are creating abstract illustrations in Paint, then saving them in their "My Documents/My Pictures" folders so they can find them when we go back in and paste them into Word next week, resize them to fit the whole page, and format the images to washout in order to make personal stationery for their letter writing unit. It's interesting how engaging this can be, and how successful otherwise sometimes behavior- or focus-challenged kids can be when faced with a computer-enabled creative task. Here's one second grader's work, 20 minutes in a program he'd never used before. Don't you think it'll make a nice stationery design?:

The Week Before Fall Break!

2008-10-10T13:42:00.000-07:00

It's been a good, solid week here in the computer lab, with my big project being gettin' the 72 Keyboarding for Kids textbooks for 4th graders purchased up to par, editing the instructions and the parent letter to be sent home with each one, and labeling each one appropriately in an effort to reduce the number of replacement textbooks we'll have to buy for students in 4th grade next year. All done, the books went home yesterday. I gather that the typing practice homework will not start showing up until next week, but I'm cheered that quite a few 4th graders have made it a point to let me know they've logged in successfully from their home computers.

I'm very serious about what I say in the letter. Do not by any stretch of the imagination make this assignment a new point of conflict or stress in your homes. It's supposed to be good practice, first and foremost, and if a few lessons get missed I'm okay with that (though Ms. Marler may not be!) :).

I took a brief jaunt in to history with K and 1st graders this week, sharing how 'way back in 1999 the wonderful UpToTen.com website began by releasing a single online chapter of the book, "Around the World in 12 Songs with Boowa and Kwala," and I set them onto exploring the marvelous online offerings that have been built by this creative husband and wife team and their creative staff since then. There are hours of safe, kind, gentle learning experiences at the site--not a whit of sarcasm or meanness to be had; and I'm proud to have helped contribute to the fact that there are now (as of this writing) 7551 schools around the world using the resources to help children play and learn on the computer. Funny, when I logged in with the Kindergarteners this morning, there were 7550 schools. We're proud to have been school number 1 in their baby steps to success and service.

2nd and 3rd graders either began or continued their journey into touch-typing with Type to Learn 3, and as I've mentioned I'm resolved to stay with it, with them, for a good bit before moving onto other skills and other programs and online resources. It's that important.

Next week, I'll be away in New Orleans for the Internet2 fall meeting, where I've been invited to speak on a panel about Virtual Environments. There's complete info about that at the News site for the Vanderbilt Center for Science Outreach. Stellar sub Ellen Hicks will be here on Tuesday and Wednesday, then we're off to Fall Break! That said, you probably won't hear from me here next week. If you're missing the stream of consciousness feel free to google my name :)

Cheers, and thanks again for sharing your wonderful children with me!

Parent Teacher Conference Week, a short 'un

2008-10-02T03:50:00.000-07:00

Greetings, all,

This week is a landmark one, and I'll finish landmarking it next week, since this one is a short one. We're out after half-day Thursday and then off Friday. Classroom teachers will be holding parent-teacher conferences during the "off" times and they are looking forward to seeing everyone to talk with you about your wonderful children.

What's the landmark? For the very first time I'm introducing 2nd graders to touch-typing, for real, with Type to Learn 3. This is a fun, challenging but not too-much-so, animated computer program designed to instill home-row-key typing skills in its users. We'll be spending considerable time this year in the computer lab working through its 25 lessons, or as far as we can go with it before other imperatives in the lab force us to move on and relegate its lessons to the realm of "free choice options." By the way, I also added several new links in the Webliographer's "Keyboarding" topic section, to online practice websites, and we'll explore those intentionally as the weeks go on, giving 2nd and 3rd graders resources that they can use anytime, anywhere, to practice their touch typing.

This decision is largely one based on the broad progress in our children's writing output brought about by last year's writing initiatives in the lower school. I believe that as children are writing more they should have the option of typing and if they are typing any significant amount they should begin learning correct (efficient) keyboarding skills so that they don't develop the incorrect (inefficient) ones that they may be forced to "unlearn" to improve upon. So right now, with 4th graders knee-deep into Keyboarding for Kids, and 2nd graders joining 3rd graders in Type to Learn 3, we are all about typing in the Lower School Technology for Learning lab.

All, that is, except the Kindergarten and 1st graders, who are all about K-1 Go Here, the little portal I long ago designed for those whippersnappers at our Webliographer. These young folks began to explore the other three "centers" at the portal this week, including Li'l Fingers Storybooks, PBSKids Between the Lions, and one of my very favorites, Boobah. We'll look more closely at those three kid-friendly sites over the next couple of weeks before jumping into computer-facilitated art, or "artputer."

That's all this week, excepting for a couple of pictures I'd like to share in a slideshow. Note the glee on the faces of the Kindergarteners who explored the completely wordless (all image and sound) Boobah, especially the one child who discovered that one of the characters he could play with on using his mouse was a ringer for his father, so he made all the characters on the screen into his dad! Also note the seriousness in the eyes of the 2nd graders. That's a good thing (though they're having fun, too, especially with the "Key Figures" in history that they are rewarded with during one of Type to Learn 3's activities.

Keyboarding Continues, with Some Additions!

2008-09-25T10:20:00.000-07:00

We're working well through our scaffolded touch-typing program in the Lower School Technology for Learning lab. I want to take this news-light opportunity to mention a couple of things that have me working for our students outside of school hours.

The first is a PBS documentary you probably haven't seen, since WNPT, our local public television station, chose to run it at a 3:00 a.m. time slot. Actually, if you have an interest in education, you may have DVR'd it. Good for you if you did.

Here's a trailer for the film:

The special was a documentary on the state of American public schools called "Where We Stand: America's Schools in the 21st Century." And if you didn't see it, there's still a way. Visit the NPT website and search for it, or here, here's a direct link to the show's site, where you can watch the entire show in 5 segments, watch only the segments that most interest you, and also read and view additional material not included in the scheduled broadcast. My own participation in this was through the online virtual environment Second Life, as moderator of a discussion about the show during a special get-together at SL's ISTE Island, the "inworld" home of the International Society for Technology in Education, an 85,000 member-strong organization of which I'm proud to be a member. You can read more about ISTE's work in Second Life here.

There were 20 or 30 educators in at the four separate campfires where we talked about this sometimes alarming documentary. Attendance at my campfire, co-moderated by WLRN San Antonio's Education Director Malinda McCormick, was light, but we did have a nice chat with friend and leading tech innovator Kathy Schrock. We moved to the other voice campfire (two of the meeting groups were using voice chat only) to join 8 or 10 folks engaged in a lively conversation.

The video documentary increased my already intense concern for the future of our children, but it also made me truly thankful for the company I keep at University School of Nashville, especially that of your children.

If you watched it, feel free to comment here.

The second outside project has more impact here at school, and it's another 3-D virtual environment called Quest Atlantis. Sometime over the next couple of months, I hope to break it out here at USN for our 4th graders, and in order to do that I've committed to at least 2 hours in the evening, once a week, for the month of September, for online training facilitated by a wonderful teacher in Australia named Bronwyn Stuckey. She's a member of the faculty at Indiana University, the home of QA, and she's gently leading 15 American teachers through the training, all of us present in the environment synchronously. One of the things I'm learning, along with the remarkable underlying threads of social commitment and kindness and helpfulness that drive the program, is just how to introduce the project not just to my students but also to their parents. So stay tuned for your own learning. Meanwhile, if you want to do some preview, check out http://questatlantis.org .

Lifelong learning: We start 'em early and if we're lucky we work to keep up with them!

Cheers to all.

Carrying on into the year

2008-09-22T03:59:00.000-07:00

Monday of the third week in September, I didn't post last week since we were very busy pulling deeper into every arena of work, and it still continues this week in the same tracks. Read back last post for details.

The sole change of course is that I have my 2nd graders working in Dance Mat Typing, a bbc.co.uk site that does a fun job of introducing the concept of touch typing in home row key position. Little hands are challenged to begin and stay in that position every time they type, and this is really my first year of beginning the concept a bit more deeply than Type to Learn, Jr., which simply introduces the keys and requests that children use either the right hand or left to type simple combinations of keys.

We'll continue the work at all grade levels next week, the K-1 working through the 200 activities in UpToTen.com's Premium@Schools site for one more week before moving on to other things, the 4th graders getting completely comfortable with Keyboarding for Kids, and the 3rd graders working through Type to Learn 3.

I want to announce that I'm working two hours, one night each week, taking the required teacher training for Quest Atlantis, a very promising 3Dinternet virtual environment where students embark on teacher (and self-) guided "quests" rooted in a curriculum of Social Commitment. Much more on that later, as I determine how best to pilot the program with my 4th graders later on in the year. If you want to read ahead feel free to visit Quest Atlantis's website. Otherwise, stay tuned here. This is going to be good:).

The computer lab this year is much remodeled. I'll do a whole post about that soon. Meanwhile, here's a little slideshow of 2nd graders and a sneak peak at the "new" computer lab:

Keyboarding and Learning Keys

2008-09-10T07:53:00.000-07:00

We have a new tool in the lab! Everybody is learning about our new microphone-enabled headsets, Labsonic LS-5750s. We selected these for durability and performance and in order to begin working some with voice and audio this year. The new rule in the lab is that the boom mic stays up "like a bug's antenna" when we're not actively using them for recording. Hopefully, that will minimize the germ-passing. We'll clean them before each use as well.

We're moving into serious work in the computer lab (although "serious work" may look different in here than in some other classrooms), with activities this week as follows, in order of appearance each day in the lab.

3--learning to turn on computers as they begin coming in early next week, and how to login to the computer correctly. Then continuing in Type to Learn 3, with a goal to make it as far into the program as we can before moving on to other tech tools and skills.
4--continuing with Keyboarding for Kids. Progress is good as students get completely comfortable with logging in, achieving 3 good scores in each line, then moving to the next line or lesson. In a few weeks, textbooks will be sent home and the students will be assigned daily keyboarding homework. More on that later, but let me make my first iteration of the most important thing about keyboarding homework: This must NOT add stress to your homework at home routine. It should be fun and a nice break from paperwork. The sooner this skill is learned, and learned well, the better served your child will be.
K--continue into and through the 200 activites at UpToTen.com Premium@Schools "lessons," really fun, gentle, Flash activities with a theme of kindness. There is nothing not to like about Boowa and Kwala, and I'm taking pics of the Kindergarteners hard at "work" to prove it. Look for those here as soon as I have all classes photographed :)
1--continuing the same as the K kids, only at a pace more brisk. They know what they're doing, and I believe we'll make it all the way through the 50 lessons within a very few class sessions. Above and beyond this being every child's chance to see every available activity (in the lessons, at least--uptoten.com currently boasts 1254 "games" and 7,289 teachers logging in to use them). USN was school number 1, by the way :)
2--finishing Type to Learn, Jr., all 3 keyboarding games at all 3 levels each. Those who get finished will visit bbc.com's excellent "Dance Mat Typing" to begin understanding what "home row key" typing is all about, with the help of the site's resident Scottish billy-goat. This also gets them into using the Webliographer for the first time this year. If you don't have that site bookmarked, do so now from the link in the sidebar. It's a wealth of resources for both you and your child, and for the world's children as well.

That's all for now. Here are the Kindergarten pics! I'm posting with only my first two classes, but I'll add the rest later this week, so check back!

Cheerio!

Labor Day Week! Labors of Love!

2008-09-03T08:36:00.000-07:00

We are in the midst of our 3rd week of school, and a fun and productive one it is. 3rd graders begin their journey with Type to Learn 3 (link provided for informational purposes--please do NOT purchase the program), and we'll stick to it for several weeks while introducing the concept of Free Choice Options in the computer lab beginning next week. I'm very big on "Free Choice" within parameters: The kids already know that our responsibility here leads us to make all computer use choices within the Acceptable Use Policy, which allows for uses which are "in support of education and research and consistent with the educational objectives of the school."

4th graders continue on their own journey into Keyboarding for Kids (link provided for informational purposes--please do NOT purchase the program), the Ellsworth Publishing Company online platform for learning touch-typing. They are so enthusiastic about this that I hope to support that enthusiasm well into their self-motivated experiences with this very simple repetitive practice tool. I'm very proud of their work so far!

Kindergartners venture into the UpToTen.com Premium@Schools lessons to begin giving me the opportunity to guide them in their mouse use. It's interesting to me the ways different children approach the tool, and just when I think I've seen every way to hold a mouse, some new little one gives me a new one. Gently guiding them to grip that huge device (in their little hands) is what I do, and it usually results in more efficient and effective computer users. We'll have more opportunities to monitor and guide when we get into Drawing for Children and ArtRage, but for now, we're working linearly straight thru as many of the 200 activities (in 50 lessons) as I can help them negotiate in the next few weeks.

1st graders are doing the same, moving straight through the Premium@Schools lessons. I'm looking at how much more comfortable they are with the task(s) and feeling pretty good about our work together last year. Soon I'll introduce "Free Choice Options" to them, and I'll be watching to see their preferences and to examine why they make the choices that they make.

2nd graders are continuing with Type to Learn, Jr (link provided for informational purposes--please do NOT purchase the program). This simple program encourages students to begin learning where keys are on the keyboard, and further to begin poising both hands over the keyboard while they find them and type them, so that right-hand keys are struck with the right hand and left-hand with the left. They are excited to be playing the three games in the program, and I trust this gentle introduction to set some personal knowledge they'll call on soon. Most current research agrees that 2nd grade is too soon to actually teach touch-typing, for a number of reasons, but I like this little brush with its concepts at this time in the students' development paths.

By the way, if you haven't seen it yet, do check out the "All Grade Levels" page we set up for newsletters and such as we move toward a complete remake of USN's website this October. And I will, by the way, be out this weekend, down to Tampa, Florida for the Second Life Education Community Conference, where I'll be networking with others toward understanding and purposing 3-Dimensional internet tools for our children's future. More on that later, and you can keep up by watching the Second Life Education Blog at http://sl-educationblog.org, to which I'm a frequent contributing author. It's a different world, ya'll; one that I consider important as it develops popularity and adoption by schools and universities.

That's all for this week! Have a great one!

The First Full Week!

2008-08-26T11:10:00.001-07:00

Well it's really Tuesday and I've really just said "see ya next week" to my first class of 2nd graders to login to Type to Learn, Jr. toward embarking on a long relationship with touch typing. It's a very gentle introduction, and today's class went very well. I have no doubt the classes the rest of this week will follow suit.

First graders, for whom this is the first week of full days, came in and got the much abbreviated AUP talk I wrote about last week. It's of crucial importance to me that we have a beginning of the year dialog about the right choices in computer use, and the rules that make our network safe and reliable for all of us. We had that talk, and next week, it's Boowa and Kwala here we come!

Kindergarteners got a sorting out onto their assigned computer number seating places, a 3 sentence version of the AUP, a dismantling of a computer mouse, and a short preview of uptoten.com, where we'll go first thing next week. The free-to-schools version of the site is wonderful, safe, exciting, and rife with kindness as its driving theme. Years ago, I helped work up (with the creator of the website) the schools version of the site, which offers 50 lessons with 4 activities each in a scaffolded introduction to computer skills, from mouse floatover to higher-level thinking activities. Well, most everything is higher-level than mouse floatover, isn't it! I'm proud to lay claim to USN's being school number 1 of the now 7169 participating schools all around the world.

Fourth graders got the sermon about the value of keyboarding and the dangers of going about the learning half-heartedly and logged into the Keyboarding Online website to continue their own journey in touch typing. It's a proven learning platform, and the children will reap from it what their drive and determination sows. I'll be sending home a note about the program when, in three or four weeks, all students are comfortable enough with expectations and process to send home textbooks so they can practice every day. It'll be soooooo good for them to improve typing skills, and so supportive of the dynamic 4th grade team's writing programs.

Third graders were treated to a more detailed version of the AUP, since they did not come in last week, the exception being Ms. Bryant's class, which I wanted to "AUP" last week due to my upcoming absence on Sept. 5th. I'll be in Tampa for the Second Life Community Conference, as a representative of the International Society for Technology in Education, ISTE, and helping deliver sessions into that virtual world via streaming video.

That's the haps for this week, ya'll. It's such a joy to see your children's bright and eager faces and to reacquaint myself with their individual personalities. A term my retired colleague Kathy Woods used to use (in another context) applies: It's almost "an embarrassment of riches!" See the slideshow below for an example--more will be added over the coming week!

Welcome!

2008-08-18T14:52:00.000-07:00

I'm VERY excited to see your children this week, mostly up and down the halls, as K and 1st grade won't be coming in since their first week is half-days; and 3rd, their computer time being the very first thing in the day, will wait until next week to begin stopping in. I'll see the 2nd grades and the 4th grades, though (assuming their teachers want to bring them by) and this is the week we won't be getting to computers, but rather spending time talking with one another about how computers should, and must, be used in our school setting.

There's a very formal, legalistic document that everyone should know about, since by coming to USN everyone agrees to abide by it. It's called the "Acceptable Use Policy," and I don't know of a computer-using school that doesn't have some version of it. From the very youngest to my old 4th graders, we'll talk about AUP at the beginning of every school year. I'll scale it down for all the kids, since it's really no fun to read, presenting some with pictures, some with a Powerpoint, and playing the grand old game "Concentration" with others.

We'll also talk about the basics in the lab--where everyone sits, how everyone enters the room, and take a good look at how I've completely remodeled the computer lab, having taken advantage of the carpet replacement to move things around. Drop by a bit later in the school year to see: I've cleared the front third of the room for floor seating, moved my desk up front, and rearranged computer tables from their longstanding positions around the rooms perimeter to three pods of six computers, and I think everyone's really going to like it!

Welcome, welcome, and welcome! All 352 of our friends!!!

Hello Friends and Colleagues, 2008-9!

2008-08-10T09:49:00.000-07:00

We're gearing up for a wonderful school year, and I've spruced up the USN Lower School Webliographer to suit the brightest year yet, the academic year 2008-9! Working mostly from home, excepting for the times I need to drive into campus to attend technical training meetings for our new Student Information System, I'm setting up the new system with the help of the new classlists, the new room numbers, and some new teachers! I'm not sure that you know that 3rd grade teacher Lara Webb (about to have her first child) will be replaced for this school year by the marvelous Kari Bryant, and that our Allison Dent will be starting the year but will take off around 4 weeks into it to have her second child. Michelle Moseley moves into the 2nd grade team to replace California-bound Katie Lang, and the wonderful Betsy Hoffman returns to 1st grade to fill Michelle's spot.

We welcome some new families into the community, especially those new to Kindergarten; and also one new 4th grader, two new 3rd graders, 2 new 2nd graders, and 9 new 1st graders! Thanks to new carpet and paint in the Lower School wing over the summer, the computer lab layout has been completely rethought and redone, exchanging the years-old seating plan for one with three pods of 6 students and opening up the room with more floor seating for demonstration sessions and clear lines of visibility from each seated station. I taught 7 teachers a week-long class in the revamped lab this summer and I was extremely pleased with the way the new plan made it easy to see and work with them.

I am soooo looking forward to the school year. See you soon!!!

Ms. Loftis's End of Year Powerpoint! Happy SUMMER!

2008-05-22T13:10:00.000-07:00

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Doodle4Google Finalists and Online Vote!

2008-05-12T10:49:00.000-07:00

Well, we didn't place in the finals (from a quick scan, it looks like Tennessee students didn't make the regional cut either!), but we had a great time doodling4google anyway. There must have been tens of thousands of entries, and I'm proud of ours in any event!

Visit the finalists announcement page and then click "Vote" to pick your favorites from the very fine work of America's K-12 "top doodlers."

Week 2 of May We're Exploring!

2008-05-07T10:11:00.000-07:00

We're explorin' things this week, the 3rd graders visiting Dancemat Typing to begin thinking about learning to keyboard, the 4th seeing advanced features of Photostory3 for Windows, the Kinder and 1st visiting a new Center Number 1 at the K1 Go Here! page (PBS's "Between the Lions") and Boowa and Kwala's games about going to bed alone, and the 2nd graders opening PowerPoint for the first time to create digital versions of their insect flip-books either about their insects or about themselves (in the manner of their insect flip-books). It's never boring in this room!

I'll be compiling a selection of the K-1 Drawing for Children pictures the kids did last week for two slideshows, one for each incoming grade level. Incoming K-1 kiddos will be greeted with visual notes about the best things in either grade--I think that will be a pretty nice welcome gift from their "slightly elders" next year!

Response to a Parent re Internet Safety

2008-05-06T03:42:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd reproduce this email discussion to share it out. I hope it helps any concerned parent make informed decisions to help keep their children safe online. I've edited out personally identifying information. The original query was:

A USN parent writes:
Hi Scott,

My daughter is in first grade, and she has become quite a computer savvy girl. Luckily, she has a knows-enough-to-be-dangerous mom to keep track of what she's doing online. However, with the introduction of "googling" in her computer vernacular and straying from the icons I set up on the desktop for her favorite sites, I am now realizing how unprepared I am with no filters in place. Do you have any thoughts on good programs that are good, user friendly and don't bog down your PC (mine is 4-years old)? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

Best,
a concerned parent

My response, later the same day, was:

Dear Concerned Parent,

I spent some time today asking around and some time online to reply to you in an informed way and here's what I've come up with.

First, my first bit of advice to parents is to make sure any internet-connected computer is in a visible, public space in the family space. All families' homes vary in their layouts and such, but I really feel this is an important strategy for safety. Our technology team approach to responsible online behavior is not to use filters but rather to monitor and to train intently about what to do if inappropriate material is accidentally accessed (close the browser and tell a grown-up). Part of this approach comes from the knowledge that we can't teach students to make responsible choices if we take inappropriate options away from them.

I am proud to say that in 9 years of working in the lab, we've only had 3 instances of intentional misuse of web browsers. Those were noted and appropriate consequences were applied. With our guidance, there are very very rare instances of that kind of thing in the Middle and High schools. When I approached our HS Tech Coordinator about your query, her response can be summed up by her comment that "I really think the days of filters are numbered, because there are computers everywhere. We should be modeling and teaching responsible and safe behavior..."

That said, I put the question of which filter is best to my professional learning network on Twitter and I'm pasting in the responses I got within 5 minutes.

montgorp @scottmerrick The best filter in MHO.. a caring parent who will spend time with their child and model safe online behaviour

montgorp @scottmerrick The other thing that I always metnion is the location of the computer. Can parents readily see what kids are accessing?

julener @scottmerrick cybersitter

bruingeek @scottmerrick I would recommend www.NetNanny.com It costs about $40

montgorp @scottmerrick At home with our 5 year old , we use Macs and the Mac Browser comes with good parent controls.

montgorp's comment reminds me that we did have Cybersitter in the school for several years when I first started working in the computer lab. It worked pretty well, but we increasingly were faced with issues of its blocking appropriate sites that its filter algorithms pegged as inappropriate.

One other very good thing is that if you use Firefox for your browser (free download) you can add plugins to block popups, block ads, and you can go into your settings and block specific sites that may come to your attention as you continue to engage in monitoring your child's online experience and talking with her about it. With your child's help, you can set up a bookmark for our "Webliographer" at http://usn.webliographer.com/USN/lower as a start page for her whenever she gets online. These nearly 1000 links are regularly monitored and the page is the Lower School lab online start page.

I hope this helps.

Perhaps it's time for another parent evening here at school. Those are always fruitful, but getting everyone a time to meet this time of year is very difficult!

Thanks for asking, and if there's anything else I can do, just let me know.

Scott

Rolling into May!

2008-04-30T08:33:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's hard to believe that May is just around the next midnight! We'll be off into our summer worlds in no time. Still, we're hard at work in the Technology for Learning Lab.

Third graders are doing differing things in the lab this week according to the needs of their teachers' classrooms. Ms. McKay's class started exploring the Japan Study links on our Webliographer and Ms. Blankenships students continued searching and copying/pasting/printing pictures to cut out for their Thailand reports. Ms. Anitra's young'uns will do the webliographer work for their China studies and Ms. Webb's will follow suit for India.

Fourth graders are pulling digital photos from the network folder their teachers have saved them in, into brief Photostory3 for Windows "photostories," fun movies made from still pictures. In the course of that they're learning a bit about picture and video formats and learning a valuable tool they can use this summer to make fun movies from their vacation pictures.

Kinders and 1sters are drawing in Drawing for Children, the freeware of choice for the lab, illustrating a favorite activity in Kindergarten or 1st grade from a list we have brainstormed on the Smartboard. I hope to compile welcome shows for next year's entering K and 1 students from these: Maybe I'll use Photostory!

2nd graders are also exploring the webliographer, but they are taking the lab time to explore the dozens of good links we have compiled over the years in the "Insects" topic. Ask them to tell you some things they found! We'll share these out next week--nothing helps learning quite so powerfully as teaching and sharing about something.

FYI the date for us to hear about State and Regional winners from the Doodle4Google competition is May 12. I'll have a report right here just as soon as we do...

More "Ultracompact" News

2008-04-25T03:40:00.000-07:00

The XO take-home project has generated a lot of interest in the category of computers that's come to be called "ultracompact." While the XO is not available for purchase inside the US (save for large district wide initiatives like Birminghams) there is a race to market that may benefit consumers, especially parents who might like their children to have their own computer (how to put a price tag on keeping them off the one you need for work from home?).

From Engadget.com this morning I found an info packed listing of already (or soon-to-be) available ultracompacts. I hope that if you're looking for one this helps you find the one that is right for your child or yourself.