Last Week of April, 2010

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

The Short Story:

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

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

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

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

2nd Graders are also making graphs at the NCES site

The Long Story:

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

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

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

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

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

See you in May!

April Proceeds Apace!

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

3rd graders continue with Keyboarding for Kids

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

Kindergarteners "Make a Story" at Kerpoof.com

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

2nd graders finish up My Lemonade Stand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!!!

Marchin' On through 2009!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

February Marches On!

Another big week in the lab, as:

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's all for this week!