Voicethread Apace!

Hi! If you're here looking for the amazing USN Lower School winter break blog project it's detailed in a previous post, just below this one! Or click here to go directly to the blog!

Adding to the Web 2.0 tools exploration we have begun in the Lower School Technology for Learning computer lab, Mrs. Hunt's 4th graders logged into Voicethread today, to a "voicethread" created from pics taken by Mrs. Hunt during December's Ellis Island Immigration simulation day. The day was undoubtedly memorable for the students, but I wanted to spread the experience to the world by utilizing this wonderful Web 2.0 tool. I had set up the thread several weeks ago, but Winter Break intervened and there were other things on our plate, so on Tuesday of this week, we ventured forth.

The best part of the experience today for me was the enthusiasm for communication the students showed. They were obviously proud and excited to share, and they also took to heart my caveats about appropriateness and kindness in their text posts.

Some discovered the doodling feature of the site, circling people in the picture they were commenting about, or drawing arrows to indicate the object of their post. These youngsters are truly learning to help one another, and questions and answers flew about the room: "How do I...?" "How did you...? "Can you....?"

Voicethread has now offered upgraded accounts to educators for free, with a one-time 10 dollar verification fee. I did that today, and now my "status" is verified as "Educator." NEAT!

Worried about internet safety? So am I. Take a look at this article at eSchool News, a valued resource for learning about current developments in educational technoloogy. The article is entitled, CoSN to school leaders: 'Think before you ban' When it comes to Web 2.0 technologies, educators should find a balance that allows for creativity, collaboration, and safety

It's all about the balance, I firmly believe, and I believe that helping our children learn how to balance their interests and their lives with the growing availability of online interests and tools will be a key component of tech education for a long while to come. Stay tuned whilst we begin!

Here's the voicethread. Do check back because it will continue to grow as we add voice over the weeks to come!

Blogging K-4!

Okay, well, it's not actually blogging, or is it? After all, early participation in today's "Read/Write Web" by contributing to a blog with comments is a nice start!

All Lower School kids, K-4, are working this week and next on a little project dear to my heart, posting their own words about how they spent their Winter Break. This is something I've been doing with 4th graders, then 4th and 3rd graders, since 2006, and this year I decided to go comprehensive with it.

We're using edublogs.org for this, and you can watch the comments amass at the USN Lower School Student Blog. When we deem it done, I'll send out an open invite to parents so you can all share in the shareshare!

Don't know what a "blog" is? Read more about how blogs can be used in teaching at edublogs.org!

Powerpoint and Time!

Yep, it's that time again, 3rd and 4th graders are crafting "All About Me" powerpoints and in doing so discovering some of the power that Powerpoint brings to the desktop. I will be featuring just 2 or 3 mini-lesson type tips and tricks at the outset of each session during this little "unit" (this week it was the "views," normal, slidesorter, and slideshow from current slide) and the outcome will be a 5 slide (minimum) shareable slideset from each child. The final week before Winter holidays, we'll be randomly sharing these at the projector and discussing the tools used and the tricks learned.

This year I'm adding some direct instruction showcasing the Help (F1) function on Powerpoint. It's just remarkable that many of us (myself included!!!) haven't spent any time at all using Office Help. Did you know that the Help "Table of Contents" includes topics like "12 simple rules for working with color" and "Unconventional tips for eliminating the fear of public speaking?" Other Office applications, and indeed most software programs, contain Help features that teams of dedicated people put a lot of thought and work into. Try this? Go into Word or Powerpoint and spend 10 minutes in its Help table of contents. Complain personally to me if you didn't learn at least one new useful or valuable thing!

1st and 2nd graders are working with analog and digital time-telling, accessing one of the currently nine URLs in the "Time and Clocks" topic on our webliographer. These options represent a wide range of skill-level practice, from simply moving numbers to their proper places on a clock face to playing "Stop the Clock" to match sets of five digital times to their correct matching analog displays in the shortest amount of time possible.

Kindergartners are either checking out the Winter holiday offerings at boowakwala.com or creating and printing holiday drawings with Drawing for Children, at the teacher's discretion. The Boowa and Kwala Premium@School offers 25 separate song and game possibilities relating to the Winter holidays. And Drawing for Chil'ren is full of stamps whose appearance can be customized for creating pleasing patterns and magnificant montages.

Ms. Blankenship's 3rd graders are working in Word to create beautiful original poetry, and the fourth grade classes are utilizing their Writing Process blocks for their own formal verse endeavors. Never a dull moment!

Have a great week and stay warm and safe!

Goodbye, November!

Thanksgiving break was a nice respite for the Merricks and I hope it was for you and yours as well. 4th graders are back and working on Keyboarding for Kids as often as they can, developing ever more fluent keyboarding skills with every effort. In computer class, both 3rd and 4th grades are starting to work in Powerpoint, each student creating a slide presentation named "All About Me," or some variant of that, and using it as a discovery learning foundation, around which they will explore as much of what the program can do as time and guidance will allow. I tell them, and it's true, that every time I sit down with the program with discovery in mind I learn something more about it, and as I watch these initial explorations I am encouraged by the discussion and interaction I see going on as they share their discoveries with fellow classmates. Watch for examples of their work here by the start of the new year.

K, 1, and 2 are in Boowa and Kwala this week. I rarely take the 2nd graders there but having introduced the Premium@School lesson 31 to K and lessons 31 and 32 to 1, I wanted to see how facile the 2nd graders would be in locating the solutions to the "Spot the Differences" puzzles presented in the uptoten.com pages lesson 32 presents. They're HARD! But fun, and this sort of activity allows children to exercise discriminatory skills while also helping one another. The lab is abuzz with chat while they find up to 20 differences in very detailed drawings. The younger kids have every bit as much fun with the less detailed, but animated, sets in lesson 31. As a reminder, these Premium@School lessons are only available to students from school machines, not from home, since it's a password protected service offered by the fine folks at uptoten.com. It is quite possible to purchase a premium account for your child but I encourage children to enjoy the free version of the website at home and save the premium fun for our "@School" work.

Have a wonderful start to your December and we'll look for you here next week! I may need to get a picture or two today or tomorrow to put up here for you. The collaboration in the lab is at a peak this week!

Free Choices Thanksgiving Break Week!

The bar graph above illustrates (in order of their appearance in the lab) self-reported free choices exercised by my students in the Lower School Technology for Learning Lab this morning. It's the one day of classes this week, and as such I'm offering the full class session for free choice, as long as each time a student makes a selection it's noted on the board.

The graph was created in Google Documents, which we'll be using soon in the upper grades!

Everyone have a safe and fun and thankful break!

K4K Texbooks Coming Home for 4th Graders

Hey, there, ya'll,

Just to let you know that though the official assignments to do daily Keyboarding for Kids practice (let's not call it, shudder, "homework") won't start until next week, I have sent home the textbooks with students today. There are two (sorry) full-page letters going home with them. My main message for everyone is this: In no way should this practice routine become a source of family stress or conflict.

I think I have done as much as any teacher could do to drive home to the students the messages that

1) this skill is one that is literally necessary in the 21st century, not only for the workplace but also for schoolwork

and 2) the students have a responsibility to themselves to see that they learn it

andand 3) there is no way to learn it besides practice, in home-row key position, regularly.

Should there be connectivity issues or scheduling conflicts at home, the 4th grade team and I are absolutely committed to helping your child find the time to work at school. In my never-to-be-humble opinion, the best prescription for success is regular work in the comfort of home; but the operable word is "regular."

Please read the long letters, help me charge your child with the responsiblity to practice, and keep a good thought. In case for some reason you do not receive the letters, here is the personal one from me, and here is the form letter Ellsworth Publishing makes available to their teachers/schools. This, by the way, is their reworking of a letter home that I originally wrote and shared with them. More later on the week. Just wanted to get this out today :)

Everybody's Typing!

The keyboard retains center stage this week, as we continue our introduction of Keyboarding for Kids (I call it "K4K") with the 4th graders. 3rd and 2nd graders continue work with Type to Learn 3 and we are using the freeware "Drawing for Children" program to do some very light work in that area with the Kindergarten and 1st graders.

This is a fun new activity for the 1st graders, using the "draw text" feature to fill a page with one's own name--in as many sizes, colors, styles, fonts, and directions as we can manage in the two class periods we have to work on the project. I'll have a fun slideshow featuring some of the children's efforts here soon!

The Kinderkids are working into much of the same content but at a much more gentle pace. So far they've worked up to typing their own names three times on a page but in different colors. We'll take a break from that path next week and do a serious Boowa and Kwala lesson on "Click, Drag, and Drop!"

On the K4K topic, we'll continue using the program in the lab for at least two more weeks before sending home textbooks and adding daily practice to the homework list. There'll be more on tha tas we get closer to sending them home.

Happy Fall, Happy Fingers

We're typing apace in the Lower School lab, with 2nd and 3rd graders working on Type to Learn 3 and the 4th graders beginning their Keyboarding for Kids adventure. There'll be much more on "K4K" in coming weeks, but suffice it to say that we're gearing up for keyboarding homework! The chance to work every day, even if only for 15 or 20 minutes, is something not every elementary school child has, and for those kids who take it seriously, it's an opportunity that will change their academic lives for the better.

We're even typing in K and 1 this week, as we use the freeware "Drawing for Children" program to learn about fonts, font styles, colors, and sizes in 1st grade and simply learn how to use the ABC typing tool in K to type our names. The Kindergarten children are simply typing their names, just once, but the 1st graders are typing in as many sizes, fonts, and colors as they can do in their computer lab period. Next week we'll practice locating a file with Drawing for Children's "file open" function and we'll add even more instances of their names as time will allow. I think we'll end up with a really nice bulletin board out of the deal, don't you???

On the personal side, I put my son Colin on the bus this morning to travel to Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina where he'll engage in team building fun with his 6th grade peers for three nights in the woods. Wow. I couldn't help thinking how this must be the definition of ambivalence: We want them to grow up, but we don't want them to grow out of the best moments of childhood, and, hence, away. My HS senior daughter is in a country music video (for like a second and a half, but if you're watching for her you can see her pretty sunglassed self) that sums it up: Kenny Chesney's "Don't Blink," it'll be gone before you know it.

Week of September 17

A good, solid week of work, with some "lagniappe" windfall software coming our way from that little island in the Indian Ocean, Mauritius.

First of all, the fourth, third, and second grades are all in various stages of working in Type to Learn 3, Sunburst's stellar little introductory keyboarding program. This is the first year I've introduced conventional keyboarding to second graders, and that's a bit of an experiment, though I'm encouraged so far by the children's enthusiasm and focus. It seems that there are always a few kids who just don't seem to be able to internalize a "desire to acquire" typing skills, but I understand the developmental readiness of our students varies in this arena just as it does in all others, academic and physical.

Next week, the 4th graders leave TTL3 behind in their introductory exploration of Keyboarding Online, or Keyboarding for Kids. I'll have a great deal more to say about this work beginning next week.

In the K-1 arena, we began exploring a different set of skills, diving into the software program "Around the World with Twelve Songs" from our buddies Boowa and Kwala. I received this site-license version of the software from my friend Jason Barnard, the UpToTen.com co-creator and the voice behind the big blue dog Boowa. It seems an attendee of a teacher workshop I gave in Atlanta last November purchased 25 school site licenses of the program from UpToTen and Jason thought to himself, "I should send one to Scott" for helping design his world-popular UpToTenPremium at School program. Very nice of him!

The program leads children through the website's first online book, which details the adventures of our favorite cartoon pair from the day Boowa discovered Kwala on the beach, lost and confused, and set off with her to find her family. The neat addition of a gentle British-accented reading voice and highlighted text as the syllables are read is an important one. As a child hears words spoken while reading the text simultaneously, phonemes come alive in recognition memory, and reading skill is gently enhanced.

I don't detail the program here in order to encourage its purchase by any of my families: Your child has access to it here at school, and in fact we will have it on the K and 1st grade classroom computers as well as in the lab, by the end of next week. For those reading this blog from other locations (see our "Clustrmaps" Visitor Locations map in the sidebar!) I say "go for it!" It's a very sweet and engaging and pedagogically valid early reader software. It has the MisterMerrick Seal-of-Approval!

No pics this week: I'm finishing up work on the new 2nd grade projector laptop/projector cart. By next year, every classroom in the school will have its own ceiling mounted projector for technology-enabled presentations and lessons; and we're making strides this year by positioning two such carts on each floor, with ceiling-mounted projectors in every 4th grade room already!

Cheers, and have a happy and safe fun weekend,

mistermerrick

Week 2.0!

Into the second week in our new lab, I'm going to take a little movie of Ms. Anitra's 3rd graders working on Type to Learn 3 to share here. The 4th graders are also diving into TTL3, toward our implementation of this year's Keyboarding for Kids program in a couple of weeks. Here's the little 3rd grade movie:




The Kinder and 1st gradekins are working in Boowa and Kwala, the wee folk logging onto the website for the very first time, after a little demo of how a mouse works, the introduction of some new terms (mouse, icon, desktop, and my favorite--Maximize!) and the 1st graders for the most part returning to the site and running through the four activities of Lesson 37 before digging deeper.

2nd graders are delving into Type to Learn, Jr., a very gentle introduction into the way they should begin to learn to type.

FlipVideo Hits Classrooms!

Watch for more video from our Lower School, after Technology Director Kathy Wieczerza put one FlipVideo camera device in the hands of each grade level, K-4 during our final day of start-of-the-year teacher inservice on Tuesday. These handy little devices record internet-ready video at the touch of a button, store 30 minutes of video instantly uploadable to one's computer via the flip-out USB plug, and host the imaging software on the device, so there's no software to load on your computer, PC or Mac. Best of all, they can be bought for about 90 dollars at Costco and other local outlets, a much better price than the 139 dollars they retail for at the company's website.

If you're a teacher, the fine folks at FlipVideo offer a 10 dollar rebate per unit on purchases of 3 or more at a time. Wow.

USN Outdoor Education teacher Cynthia Lee took a Flip on a summer Kindergarten trip to Wyoming and recorded some funny footage at Yellowstone Park. It's hosted on TeacherTube, a sort of a YouTube for educators and students...

Here it is:

End of January, Cold Outside but Warming Up in the Lab!

4th graders get PowerPoint guidance from Ms. Noel

Hey, all,

I was out away from school the week of Jan. 15 and so "in the weeds" (a restaurant worker's term for so busy one can't see what to do next) when I returned back to school that I just didn't get to post last week. The reason I was out was that my family and I moved from our Green Hills home of 13 years to a new residence out in West Meade. We love our new home but downsizing by half has been a challenge of logistics, decision-making, and my lower back. We're hoooooooome now!

In the lab, we're doing some interesting things. My lists of grades often work from 3rd down to 2nd in the order I see the kids, but here's one from Kindergarten up, just for fun.

Kinderkids finished up their Boowa pictures with Drawing for Children last week and after such hard work I treated them to a new website at Center Number 4 of K-1 Go Here! It's "Boohbah," a wonderul "right-brain" experience of sound and color where there are virtually no direct instructions or examples to guide the visitor, just things to click on that do have results, though the results may not be "logical." It's interesting to me to watch how different children react to something so "out of the box" and to watch them invariably warm to the idea of exploration for its own sake. While it may look, at first glance, like fluff, the site (an offshoot of a successful British television show) is the result of come careful thinking on the part of its creator, Ann Wood, also the creator of Teletubbies. Hmmmm... See the Wikipedia entry on Boohbah here.

1st graders explored base 10 concepts at BT Bear's site last week and this week viewed a great Schlessinger Media film via our Safari Montage media server. Part of the "Earth Science in Action" series and 25 minutes long, "The Water Cycle" took up most of their computer time but they didn't want to stop it before seeing the whole thing. They were especially intrigued by a demonstration of an experiment to help understand the concept of an Artesian well, a well that needs no pump due to pressure on the groundwater that produces it. After a brief chat about the water cycle most of the classes were able to spend a few minutes at Boohbah.

2nd graders began looking at the Iditarod Trail Race this week, getting a little introduction via a video at my fellow podcaster Scott Sloan's project, iditarodpodcast.com. This is Scott's 2nd year to manage this seasonal podcast and he looks positioned to really deliver some content this year over his Alaska Podshow and the special Iditarod Podcast. With any luck we'll be able to chat with him via a Skype videoconference next week. More on that later! I still have other friends in Alaska, too. A little known fact is that my Alaskan folk band, the Last Frontier Band, was the official Iditarod Trail band in 1978-9, and we performed numerous benefit concerts to support the Trail Committee. It tickles me that the impetus to study the race came from the teachers and I'm very happy to be able to help enrich the students' experience with my own.

3rd graders are exercising copy and paste skills with Word, Internet Exporer and Google, as they populate a Word document with images found on the Internet in order to print a couple pages of images to scissors up and use in their hand-written artist reports. Next week we'll create title pages for those reports using a Word template.

4th graders are in the lab every available moment as they work on their Aztec PowerPoints and Aztec newspapers. Last week I introduced them to the PowerPoint tutorials available on the USN Lower School Webliographer. These are looking great and you may expect to see them on the 4th grade website soon!

That's all for now!