Second Week in March, Come On, Spring Break!

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!

The End of September, October Begins

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.

Carrying on Through September

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!

The First Full Week of School!

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.

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!

It's Rainyrainy Outside but Warm and Active Inside!

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.

February is Out Like a Lion

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!

We Warm Up in the Lab During the Coldest Week!

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!

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!

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:

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!!!

Week 2 of May We're Exploring!

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!

April Roaring In, Lionlike!

Good. Some rain, some cool weather--makes me look for that welcome lamb at the end of the month. I can't believe there are only seven more weeks in the school year, and we plan to make best use of every day here in the Lower School computer lab.

First, my apologies for dragging my virtual feet on posting here. With the XO laptop sign-out program and doodle4google both happening in ways that needed some extra public-relations work, I didn't want to cloud up the top of the blog with new posts. Now we'll get back on track with weekly posts. The in-school "d4g" program deadline is now passed, and the jury are about their work selecting which six worthy submissions will head out of USN toward Google's judges by the 12th of April. This time of year it's hard to get 4 teachers in one room at one time that hasn't been scheduled all along, but we're using the neat little tool 'doodle.ch' to agree on meeting times.

Here's what's been going on in the lab, just to catch up:

We spent much of last week working on graphing at the NCES "Kidszone" Create-a-graph website. This is a great free online tool, and I wanted its gentle introduction to graphing K-4--with the exception of 2nd grade--(the littlest kids entered birth-month data with tally marks on the smartboard and visited UpToTen.com while I created a pie graph for them to see when it was time to go, and the 3rd and 4th graders entered their data and then made their own graphs, finishing up by emailing them to their teachers).

2nd graders, embarking on a study of business and businesses, got an introduction to the fine little freeware program "My Lemonade Stand," once available from its designer in the UK but now incorporated into a rather costly package of educational software (we're using the freeware version I got long ago). In it, students have 30 days to build a $2.00 virtual bank into as much profit as they can by selling lemonade. Factors to consider include the weather forecast, cost to make a single glass, how many to produce for sale, and what to charge for a single glass. Any of these can make a business work or not, and in the course of playing students begin to see how complex running any business can be.

This week we're moving the graphing work, grades 3 and 4, to Microsoft Excel, first creating a simple pie graph with information about Spring Break travel, then learning how to manipulate the graphic elements to make for a more interesting result. 2nd graders will have another go at making their fortunes with lemonade, and K and 1st graders will be drawing and printing pictures on the theme of springtime with Drawing for Children. They so love to print their drawings and I find I need to humor that desire at least occasionally!

Lastly, I should report a fabulous conference workshop experience last Friday at the Tennessee Ass'n of Independent Schools Technology Institute in Memphis. I was lucky enough to help with famed edublogger Will Richardson's three presentations, one on Weblogs in Schools; one on Podcasts, Vodcasts and Screencasts; and one on RSS. If you want to learn more about any of these, a great place to start would be by treating yourself to his keynote address from Friday, or to one of the three sessions I archived for him at my http://ustream.tv/scottmerrick video repository. It's all described at scottmerrick.net.

I'm sealin' this post but I may be back! One of the beauties of blogging is the ease of editing!

By the way, you might notice the clustrmap in the sidebar looks a little sparse. That's only because clustrmap archives visits and starts over after it's been runnin' on a site for a year. Since this post is otherwise graphic-less, here's what last year's map looks like! It's not exactly the announcement of a franchise, but more an opportunity to thank those of you who find this blog worthwhile! THANK YOU!!!

Sharing Out Powerpoints and Drawing for Children

This week our 4th graders are sharing their "All About Me" powerpoints, gathering at the carpet beneath the projector screen and taking turns using the wireless mouse to move through their presentations. This gives us time to discuss how different effects were achieved and why certain design elements were incorporated, providing the reflection piece that caps off a good discovery learning experience. These are WONDERFUL, and I may select one or two to share here, though I will not be creating an online celebration of these due to their very personal nature. They will, instead, reside in the 4th graders' personal portfolios, which will follow them up into 5th grade and beyond, moving from the 4th grade portfolio network folder to their new home in that grade level's folder.

3rd graders finish their "copy and paste" extravaganza, searching with the Webliographer's Google safe-search feature for images by and of their artist that they can later cut with their skissors (sic) and use in their hand-written Master Artist Unit reports. We're working with two windows open at a time, Word and Firefox or Internet Explorer, and maximizing and minimizing them as we need to search, copy, paste, resize, name and save, and finally print their two or three page word documents containing at least four images.

2nd graders are beginning a geometry unit so we are diving into Stacker Blocks, a freeware Tetris-like game that exercises flipping, rotating, predicting, and manipulating positive and negative space to keep playing as long as we can. The play becomes good-naturedly competive the moment the hi-score feature is noticed, and we'll see names bumped off the top-ten scores for the rest of the year, as well as students challenging themselves to appear there. Stacker Blocks is available for free download in the "Downloads" section of the Webliographer. Be warned: it's a fun game that you'll need to apply your "balancing your life and your time" skills to!

K and 1st graders are working with Drawing for Children (also available for download at the same site) to create and print fun Valentine hearts pictures. I'll share some of those here when we have finished, and I'm seeing that the activity will take many of our students more than one class period, which is good, since the holiday is at the end of next week. I've had one student already tell me that she's creating all of her valentines cards (we have a class policy that if you exchange one at school you need to have one for every student in the class) with Drawing for Children, using the freeware she and her parents installed on their home computer. Yay! One word of caution for those of you who do so--"D4K" creates HUGE .bmp files as its default format, so you might want to limit the number of saved images, or better yet, open them all occasionally with a graphics program and export them as .jpg files, then delete the bitmaps. Geek talk, but if you apply that strategy you'll save quite a bit of storage space on your home computer--which is of course in a family room if it has access to the internet, right?

Pics to come :)

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 :)