Last Full Week in April!

It's hard to believe that next Friday is the first day of May! We're here in Nashville, just putzing along teaching day to day, and we look up and the end of the school year is looming!

This week the 3rd graders and 4th graders are exploring animation in Scratch, starting with the 8th tutorial at learnscratch.org, and some are taking off with their own animations. I have it on good authority that a several 3rd graders are already uploading experimental first projects to the Scratch Wiki. I'll be sharing them out soon, I'm certain.

This Scratch work has been good for us so far. One of its unforeseen benefits has been raising the opportunity to talk with my students about the ways one's family values might differ in the area of violence and video gaming: This issue came to light because there are some very light-weight efforts at shooting games at the Scratch Wiki. None are what I would term "inappropriate," excepting possibly for the most conservative of families. I have the whole range in my class--the kids whose parents are fine with them playing Halo 3 (a very violent alien-fighting 3D shooter) and watching "Family Guy" on tv, the kids who are not allowed to play or watch anything with any hint of violence, and all hues in between. I have at least one 3rd grade family whose kids watch the uber-violent "24" on Fox Network (my dearest friend just had his character killed off, taking a bullet for Jack Bauer, two weeks ago:). I tell them one and all that it's their job to know their parents' positions on this issue and to behave accordingly. So far, all the discussions have been lively and interesting, and I'm pleased to have the opportunity to discuss this important topic.

Kinder and 1st graders are finishing up their "My Family" pictures in Drawing for Children and we'll be sharing those at the end of the day Friday, when they're all complete and I can upload them to picasaweb, Google's excellent picture sharing platform. Know that once a slideshow is displayed here, you can click on it twice to go to picasaweb, where you can view the show larger, look at all the pictures at once, and download your child's picture for printing or even for using as your own computer desktop!

Here are the slideshows from the efforts!

Kindergarten:


and 1st Grade:

2nd graders are meeting up with the fantastic graphing website, CreateAGraph, maintained by an organization called the National Center for Education Statistics. The site hosts a wonderful graphmaking wizard, and just a little familiarity with it should stand our students in good stead for years to come. Of course we will be working in Microsoft Excel by 4th grade, but until then, if they want to play with graphs, this is the site for it!!!

Have a great rest of April and I'll check back in with you next week! Here comes MAY!

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!!!