Week of April 5, 2010

The Short Story:

4th grade-Quest Atlantis

3rd grade-K4K

Kindergarten -Boowa and Kwala MyFirstClicks center number 22, Vegetables and the Garden

1st grade-Fairytales websites on Webliographer

2nd grade-My Lemonade Stand intro (Pitt business cards)

The Long Story:

4th grade-4th graders Quest the light Atlantis! Continuing to move into and along through the winding time-traveling mission of Mesa Verde, we find that we can help Lorisa, the girl who is hiding from wrongly judgmental classmates on a field trip to Mesa Verde National Park by going back and forth into three periods of history and talking to Puebloan culture denizens, all along the way learning more and more about their rich and fascinating culture. I took a few pics of my own as I pursued the mission over the weekend and I'll add a couple here:

In this first one, chestertesterusn, my student avatar, is viewing a video about the Puebloan culture inside the museum. Later on, he'll have the chance to pursue a detailed scavenger hunt by investigating the displays in the museum, like the one at the wall in the right hand side of this picture.

In the second picture, you can see the first questions of the scavenger hunt itself. You'll note that these questions reflect knowledge about details key to understanding this very interesting lost culture. Part of one class session has been dedicated to demonstrating how to facilitate the taking of this little "test" by minimizing the window rather than closing it and reopening it as answers become clear. Stay tuned for more info as more and more Questers progress into this fantastic educational unit!

3rd grade-Keyboarding for Kids proceeds apace. I'm feeling better all the time as at least several students in each classroom pass the 20 lesson mark toward completing the program. Whether any of them will actually finish all 64 lessons before the end of the year (when it is optional, not required) remains to be seen, but I have high hopes that at least a few of them will. Parents, if you have not yet bought into this valuable learning opportunity for your child, help them out by encouraging them to make progress and to make it the right way, with HOME ROW KEY POSITION, ALWAYS!

Kindergarten -K kiddos will visit Boowa and Kwala MyFirstClicks center number 22 this week, "Vegetables and the Garden." This is a review lesson in the 50 lesson continuum that was introduced the second week of school, and the gentle, satire-free activities encourage the use of mouse control, arrow keys, and more for their completion.

1st grade-The 1sters visit Fairy Tales websites on Webliographer. They've been exploring fairy tales in the classroom, but they may not have visited the ubercool Grimm Fairy Tales site or the gently fun Snapdragon version of Goldilocks.

2nd grade-My Lemonade Stand is an out-of-print software version of a classic, but it's so well done that we keep using it year to year. In it, a budding business boy or girl has 30 days to make (or lose) a fortune, beginning with a budget of a mere $2.00 and deciding quantity, price, and whether or not to even sell each day based on the weather "Forcast" (even good game programmers can misspell things--and you'd better bet I point that error out each time I introduce the game). The forecast includes High Temperature, Humidity, and Percent chance of Rain, also all good concepts to reinforce, and a skillful (and lucky) player can amass wealth well into the thousands in the 20 or 30 minutes it can take to work through the 30 days of business. Ms. Pitt's ready to do her class's business cards, so we'll do that this week. More on that project next week, when we'll all get it done...

See you then!

Oh, and here are the K-1st grade Spring pictures I promised last week--all in a slideshow for your joyful Springtime viewing!

November Goings-on!

I do find myself posting less here than last year, and I'm not sure that's altogether a bad thing. One of the things we're hearing from teachers and parents is that they feel they're approaching the end of their ability to stay up to speed with all the online information in their lives. The new USN website is fantastic and offers scores of new ways to communicate. Our Lower School newsletters have morphed into Classroom News items on Classroom pages only accessible to parents of teachers and grade level colleague faculty. This is very good in many ways, certainly in its environmental impact (let's see, 352 two-to-four-page newsletters once a week for 40 weeks equals 56,320 pieces of paper every school year, yup, that's a good thing).

Still, it's a lot to maintain, both from the classroom teacher's perspective and from that of a parent. Overnight, it seems, the responsibility for checking in for new communications has been placed on the shoulders of the parent. This is as it should be, and I speak from a parent's point of view. I only wish it were a bit less time consuming!

That said, let's move on to what's happening in the Lower School computer lab, where technology is for learning. The short story:

• 3rd graders have worked well into Type to Learn 3 and began "All About Me" PowerPoint presentations this week
• 4th graders headed into the virtual worlds of Quest Atlantis last week, took their typing practice home as daily homework in Keyboarding for Kids, and are learning how to navigate their new 3 dimensional virtual environment
• Kinderkids are tracing their hands on the computer monitor and sprucing up imaginative and colorful drawings of turkeys with Drawing for Children
• 1st graders have met SebranABC and are exercising their analog time-telling skills at the new Internet4Classrooms.com skills page
• 2nd graders are doing the same activities as their 1st grader counterparts, only delving more deeply into them as befits their growing performance capabilities

The longer story:

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PowerPoint is a great starting point for learning presentation software. It's a universal standard, though more and more alternatives are giving it a go for its position. These include GoogleApps Presenter, Voicethread, Animoto, and one of my (very quirky but fun to tackle) favorites, Prezi. I've even seen effective and engaging presentations in Picasa, with slides created by overlaying digital pictures with text in, say, Photoshop or Paint.

Still, PowerPoint is a great starting point. So many of the menu options and the graphical user interface, the GUI, mirror those in Word that learning one helps reinforce skills in the other. In this project, which will take us over the month of November, students create a 5-8 slide presentation on their favorite subject, themselves. I introduce them to the program, make expectations clear, demonstrate a few beginning procedures, like "new slide" and "slide design," then get out of their way, becoming the advisor I like to be as learners learn. Watch for some results here before Winter Break.

4

I've written extensively here about Quest Atlantis (see earlier posts), and this year I'll expand upon that earlier introduction as my fourth grade learners make their way into the vast and fascinating worlds of QA. Last year was the pioneer year, as the kids and I dived (dove?) into it with a fury, immediately seeing learners from other schools and other countries and chatting with them as they navigated the rather steep learning curve. About a month after we started last year, the QA folks at Indiana University revised the entry path for new users so that when they first come into Atlantis they see no others and can interact with no one except the animated beings who serve as guides. This works famously better, and I'm monitoring student progress already as some figure it all out without any help, while others struggle and collaborate with one another to do so. This is ideal learning territory, of course, and expect posts here specifically about milestones. I'll be assigning quests more prudently this year (last year I ended up with 41 quests for students to choose from, and I am looking for a more manageable, though still individualized, experience for all this year.

Kindergarteners still enjoy Boowa and Kwala, and I'm lingering there this year as they keep track of their own progress by making marks on a spreadsheet displayed upon the Interwrite (Smart) Board. We veer off each class into other activity though, and we're currently working on a project I do annually, using Drawing for Children to create fabulous turkeys to print and take home for Thanksgiving. This week we're beginning them and saving them, and next week we'll learn how to reopen them and continue revising their splendiferous beauty. The week of the 16th, well open them once again and print them to take home. Look for them in backpacks! I'll likely also put some up on the blog in slideshow fashion.

1

We opened and played SebranABC the past couple weeks, and this week we visited Internet4Classroom.com's fine collection of 25 telling-time interactive sites at the Webliographer's Time and Clocks topic. This proves to be an excellent way to note which children are struggling with analog time telling and advise their teachers accordingly. As always at USN, I note a wide range of abilities in each class. We played "Bang on Time" at the site first, then children could pair up with another to play "Willy the Watchdog," and then explore the other games. Next week we'll play "Telling Time with Word Problems," kind of a 1st grade twist on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire."

2

I usually pair activities for Kindergarten and 1st graders, and I'm finding this week and last that these particular activities seem very well suited to 2nd graders, so that's what we're doing, moving the time telling into second grade, where it's apparent that work still needs to be done on this important skill. It'll be time well spent. I already see 2nd graders choosing Sebran as a free-choice option, and watching them play its Hangman game reminds me what a valuable game that is for predicting based on knowledge of vowels, consonants, and spelling. In a time when educational games can be huge downloads, I find Sebran's 857 Kb filesize nothing short of endearing!

That's it for this post. More later, of course!!!

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.