Week of April 12, 2010

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!

One Laptop Per Child Receives 4 USN XO Computers for Haiti

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

January 11 Week, What Goes On?

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

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!

September 11 Computer Lab Update!

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!

Welcome to the School Year 2009-2010

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!!!

The K-4 First Weeks of April

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.

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

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

Talkin' Turkey!

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!

artclectic 2008 Slideshows!!!

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!

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?:

Parent Teacher Conference Week, a short 'un

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!

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

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

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!

The First Full Week!

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!

Hello Friends and Colleagues, 2008-9!

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!!!

Graphs, Folk Tales, Business Cards, Base Ten, and Podcasts--What do they have in common?

They are all pursuits of the students these past couple weeks in the Lower School computer lab, that's what! I'll have pictures soon, but I wanted to get my "digital newsletter out--I'll add them later.

The third and fourth graders have been working with Excel graphing in their lab sessions, turning meaningful data (how many traveled, and where, over Spring Break; and what times we go to bed on school nights and non-school nights) into graphs and then manipulating the design factors to their liking. Kindergarteners and 1st graders did some Drawing for Children last week, creating Spring pictures and then visited a wonderful Folk Tales website this week. 1st graders worked with Base Ten skill-practice from the Webliographer, and Second graders have spent the past two weeks working with a template in Microsoft Word to create business cards for their group created businesses. I hope that many of you parents will be coming to their Business Day on Monday--check the 2nd grade newsletter for more information!

More later!!!

doodle4google!

Last week we looked at the doodle4google competition, a fantastic opportunity for U.S. K-12 students to "mod out" the Google logo and win a $10,000 college scholarship. All the details are here at the program website. The theme? The wide-open "What if...?"

Each registered school in the nation may submit only 6 entries in the competition, and those must be sent in by April 12. After that, the selection process pace quickens (through state, regional, and finalist levels--somewhat like American Idol runs down to its final contestants: there'll actually be a 3 day period of public voting) until its culmination on May 22, when the national winning doodle will be featured as Google's website logo for a period of 24 hours. Regional and finalist contestants will win a trip to the Googleplex, a sprawling headquarters of the corporation, to be in attendance for the award ceremonies the day before.

At USN, we'll be accepting googledoodles in any medium (the final 6 must be physically mailed via "snailmail" bearing the alphanumeric keys issued by Google) until March 31 at 3 pm. Then an independent jury will choose the USN entries. Since there are four levels--K-3, 4-6, 7-9, and 10-12--from which the final four national finalists will be chosen, it makes sense to send at least one entry from each of the grade level groups, then the other two will be selected across the board from the ones the jury feels have the best chance of winning. it should be fun!

If you want to download the templates to print out for your child to sketch or complete, visit the "Forms" page at Google.

Internet Safety Presentation by Mark Ahlness

From technology savvy educator Mark Ahlness, a 3rd grade classroom teacher from Seattle, Washington, I offer a brief video from TeacherTube. It's repurposed from a presentation he gave for 3rd grade families in late 2006. Enjoy, and please feel free to comment here (once you've viewed the video just click "Comment" below the video -- if you don't want to use an "identity" just post anonymously and add your name to the text!) :