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

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!

Come on, May, We're Ready for Ya

Well, more or less ready!

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

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

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

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

2nd graders are exploring Insects resources on the Webliographer!

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

Last Full Week in April!

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!

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!!!

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

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!