Learning Beyond the Classroom!

So, your child is out for the summer and it's raining cats and dogs or you have a telephone meeting for an hour and you don't want her or him sitting in front of a television passively receiving drivel from its screen. Thanks to my friend Kevin Jarrett, I have something for you.

Better yet, sit down with your child at the computer and explore together! Click the image below!

">

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

We are spending this week in various ways, and I'll dive right in, in the order in which the kids come in the lab each day:

3rd graders are finishing up their Master Artist poster projects, and they've been locating images with Google image search, always with the procedure in mind that in the event of inappropriate images they 1) close the window or turn off the monitor and 2) report it to a teacher (me, most likely, but their parents at home if that's where it happens). Copying and pasting seems such a natural concept to us old digital immigrants, and while the myth is that all things computer come naturally to little kids, that's truly just a myth. My 3rd graders, after a few sessions of work with it, do "get" it better than, for example, my mother-in-law [nods to Ann], but it has to be learned, ya'll--it's not breathing, it's a task! They practiced this task with Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word, copying and pasting both text and images. The benefit of pasting an image into Word before printing it is that it can then be easily resized by dragging handles from corners, yet another new skill. Here are a couple of the resulting projects, these from students in Ms. McKay's class!

Once the 3rd graders have mined all they need from the internet, they are returning to Type to Learn 3 for more practice home-row-keying! That will come in handy next month when we foray into computer programming with Scratch.

4th graders are venturing further into Quest Atlantis! The room is both exciting and filled with questions from the questers, and one thing I note is that the din is beginning to subside a bit as confusion yields to early understanding and wonder. NOTE TO PARENTS: If you can't get the software working at home, not to worry! We'll be questing at school for real and soon, pursuing an aspect of one of the 5 Social Commitments that underscore QA. Look for more soon! Meanwhile, here's a picture I snapped at the Ecology World Game Preserve, only one of the amazing wealth of experiences available in this virtual environment:
Kindergartners and 1st graders are designing Valentines with Drawing for Children. They are working from template, adding their name, and exploring the shift and Ctrl keys for modifying the effects of stamps and clipart hearts. Then we print! All the kids love to print; it must be the tactile attraction of paper and physical product, which shows no sign of going away, despite the digital world's offerings. Here are a couple of those, one from K and one from 1st!

2nd graders are working with basic, simple math operations at Funbrain.com's Math Arcade, easily accessible at the Free Choice Options category of the Webliographer. While there's no product to share from this activity, the hopeful expectation is that 2nd graders will become familiar enough with the interface to come and practice their math skills at this fun site, available anywhere, anytime with internet access. There are 22 games in the gameboard-style interface, and the problems can get more challenging depending on the grade level set at the beginning. After each game mastered, a code is issued so that a student can come right back in at that earned level the next time, no user registration required. We went in this week using the code "Cow2," which puts us at Math Basketball. Try it for yourself!

from http://www.funbrain.com/brain/MathBrain/MathBrain.html

Happy December 2008! Fun, Games, and Learning

As we sneak into the last days of 2008 (can you believe it?), several grades "work" with "play."

It's long been understood that learning can be enhanced with the thoughtfully applied use of well-designed game technologies. Anyone who has never had an extended conversation with a child immersed in Pokemon game culture, for example, should rush out and do so a.s.a.p.: No one is assigning children homework in understanding the particular attack power or defensive worth of any given character card. No one is quizzing them. No one is making them take notes. But I can recall sitting through conversations with my 9 year old (now nearly 13 and more interested in guitar tablature then trading card games) that absolutely floored me with his (self-)learned expertise.

There is a stunning paper, one that's been around for quite some time, actually, called "Eat Your Vegetables and Do Your Homework: A Design-Based Investigation of Enjoyment and Meaning in Learning," by Barab, Arici, and Jackson at Indiana University, that was a groundbreaking treatise, raising the questions like "How does school learning become tinged with a negative connootation? What occurs to shift the perspective from 'learning as play' to 'learning as work?' Is it possible to reconnect the two and do so even in the context of schools?"

These are significant questions, especially when considering that the total number of graduating Bachelors of Science candidates in Science and Engineering in all of the United States hovers around 450,000 graduates. Compare that with around 1,100,000 users of Runescape, a popular computer game, and over 10,000,000 World of Warcraft players. It's all about the scope, according to Merrilea Mayo, Director, Future of Learning Initiatives, at the Kauffman Foundation. Serious game design holds serious potentials for the future of learning. (Click image for full-size graph)

All that said, I'm announcing this week that I'm crafting our 4th grade students' entry into Quest Atlantis, a virtual world environment designed by the aforesaid Dr. Barab and teams of educators from across the globe, and based out of Indiana University. I'm so impressed by what I've learned so far about QA, as I will henceforth call it, that I've spent the equivalent of two working days in professional development training and countless hours researching, discussing, and planning in order to bring this opportunity to my students. I'll be sending home consent letters next week and hoping they all return by the beginning of January, when we'll ease on into the world and begin Questing! More on that later!

The 3rd graders began working in a game this week as well. It's called "Multiflyer" and it is an online game dedicated to reinforcing basic math fact skills. A complex backstory immerses the player in the mission of "obtaining coordinates" for the next planet in the solar system by solving multiplication problems at the "easy," "medium," or "hard" level (player-chosen) and stops along the way present facts about the solar system. I have also been looking into a math-facts game software called "TimezAttack," and it's in the testing stages in the lab. Look for more on that later as well.

2nd graders this week went into funbrain.com for a tic-tac-toe game involving multi-digit addition and subtraction, and they will be playing "Math Mayhem" next week. This online game requires quick entry of basic addition problem solutions and allows players to compete against others in distant locations. It's safe, compelling, and fun. I just played against six others and my "Scotty" only came in second. Was there another teacher online? A college student looking to best little kids? It doesn't matter: I had fun and I got practice with my facts that was certainly much more friendly to my spirit than sitting at a table with a stack of flash cards might be.

It's certainly not boring in the lab these days...

Kinder and 1st graders are creating pictures for me to deliver to Boowa (actually to my friend Jason, the creator and owner of UpToTen.com), so that they might have a chance of being displayed in January's online art gallery. We're using Drawing for Children and the students have a choice of creating a picture "of" Boowa and Kwala or one just "for" them. I believe in choice. Here is an example of each:

Foggy, Chilly, and Stimulating

Hey, all,

This week in the lab we're power-moving through Powerpoints in the 4th grade. The "All About Me" powerpoint. Last week I introduced "Custom Animation" and this week in the wholeclass intoduction I emphasized the little-used feature called "Help." How many of you actually use F1 or Help when you want to do something you don't know how to do? I thought so--not many.

In the lab, I encourage my students to help one another, one reason why this room may be more chatty than other classrooms in the Lower School. They'll certainly need to know how to collaborate and learn from one another if they are to succeed in the 21st century workplace. They also need to begin to learn that just because an adult is in the room it doesn't mean that all knowledge comes from him, or from her. They need to start questioning, nurturing their inquisitiveness and exploring natures. By and large, gauging from the energetic chat I'm hearing, it's happenin' in the lab!

3rd graders are working through Type to Learn 3 and the big news for them is that I'm trialing out the new release from Sunburst, Type to Learn 4! This is a completely new build and I'm very excited about the possibility of making it available to our kids, not only in Lower School but schoolwide, K12. Also, it will provide a fun alternative to Keyboarding for Kids, especially those who have finished all the lessons later in the year.

Kinderkids and 1st graders are printing turkeys they made last week, or just beginning to work on ones they will print and bring home next week. We do this using a new twist on the old activity where a child places a hand on a piece of paper and traces it, then adds beak, legs and feet, and a wattle to create a fanciful drawing. The difference in the lab is that the child holds a hand up on the monitor screen, traces it into our freeware Drawing for Children program, and adds details and flourishes using the computer. The results are stellar! I'm going to put a slideshow of many of them, both K and 1, right here on Friday.

2nd graders continue their own pursuit of keyboarding skills with Type to Learn 3. We'll keep working through the year, intermittantly, on this to take advantage of their enthusiasm to learn, though we'll break out into other technology skills as curricula demands. For instance, this week and next we'll work with Nova's great online trebuchet. What's that? Ask your 2nd grader, and next week I'll post an answer!

That's it for the week, and for now I'm prepping for a talk to the Vanderbilt Web developers next Friday, all about Web development in Virtual Worlds. It's never boring in my neck of the woods!

Welcome!

I'm VERY excited to see your children this week, mostly up and down the halls, as K and 1st grade won't be coming in since their first week is half-days; and 3rd, their computer time being the very first thing in the day, will wait until next week to begin stopping in. I'll see the 2nd grades and the 4th grades, though (assuming their teachers want to bring them by) and this is the week we won't be getting to computers, but rather spending time talking with one another about how computers should, and must, be used in our school setting.

There's a very formal, legalistic document that everyone should know about, since by coming to USN everyone agrees to abide by it. It's called the "Acceptable Use Policy," and I don't know of a computer-using school that doesn't have some version of it. From the very youngest to my old 4th graders, we'll talk about AUP at the beginning of every school year. I'll scale it down for all the kids, since it's really no fun to read, presenting some with pictures, some with a Powerpoint, and playing the grand old game "Concentration" with others.

We'll also talk about the basics in the lab--where everyone sits, how everyone enters the room, and take a good look at how I've completely remodeled the computer lab, having taken advantage of the carpet replacement to move things around. Drop by a bit later in the school year to see: I've cleared the front third of the room for floor seating, moved my desk up front, and rearranged computer tables from their longstanding positions around the rooms perimeter to three pods of six computers, and I think everyone's really going to like it!

Welcome, welcome, and welcome! All 352 of our friends!!!

Earth Day Week--Opportunities to Teach and Learn

This week as we roll over the middle of April Hill, looking ahead into May Valley, I'm pleased to treat our Lower School Students to a plethora of ways to look at the way we are treating our planet. I discovered the fantastic "Story of Stuff" website yesterday and almost scrapped everything to share that with the kids, but after my second viewing of the 20 minute film I decided that it might be better shared with older kids, and certainly with friends and family who are adults. Hey, you're probably an adult! Get yourself a cup of free market coffee and watch The Story of Stuff.

Here's the breakdown of activities in the lab, in the order of the daily classes:

• 3rd and 4th graders get a brief intro to the concept of hyperlinking, with asides about Wikipedia and Google, necessary for the activity to follow. Then they go to their computer stations and click through the network folder path to the document I prepared for them to 1) find and add at least three bulleted lines of linked resources, and 2) link at least three times within the text of the document. They're also working (see pic above!) on Word documents their teachers are calling "4th Grade Memoirs." It's never boring in here!
  
• Kindergarteners visit Boowa and Kwala and help them clean up litter in a badly messed up river, sorting the appropriate materials into their appropriate containers. This is fun, as is the section's song, "Superheroes of the World."
  
• 1st graders are watching Magic School Bus's "Recycling" video, served up on our internal Safari Media server. It's heartening to hear them singing the theme song and bursting into rhythmical clapping at the right times, and in the right time!
• 2nd graders visit the Webliographer to play the Great Green Earth game, hosted by the Union of Concerned Scientists. It's a java-based game that offers them a thought-provoking series of multiple choice questions to answer, geared to help them increase awareness of the impact their own choices can make on our planet. Did you know that burning a gallon of gasoline releases around 20 pounds of carbon monoxide gas into our atmosphere, far more than the weight of the original liquid? I didn't, but I do now!

As we move through May, I'll be helping my students get ready to move on up into their next year of learning (and teaching). Be sure to follow along!

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

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

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

More later!!!

Internet Safety Presentation by Mark Ahlness

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

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 :)

Everybody's Typing!

The keyboard retains center stage this week, as we continue our introduction of Keyboarding for Kids (I call it "K4K") with the 4th graders. 3rd and 2nd graders continue work with Type to Learn 3 and we are using the freeware "Drawing for Children" program to do some very light work in that area with the Kindergarten and 1st graders.

This is a fun new activity for the 1st graders, using the "draw text" feature to fill a page with one's own name--in as many sizes, colors, styles, fonts, and directions as we can manage in the two class periods we have to work on the project. I'll have a fun slideshow featuring some of the children's efforts here soon!

The Kinderkids are working into much of the same content but at a much more gentle pace. So far they've worked up to typing their own names three times on a page but in different colors. We'll take a break from that path next week and do a serious Boowa and Kwala lesson on "Click, Drag, and Drop!"

On the K4K topic, we'll continue using the program in the lab for at least two more weeks before sending home textbooks and adding daily practice to the homework list. There'll be more on tha tas we get closer to sending them home.

Happy Fall, Happy Fingers

We're typing apace in the Lower School lab, with 2nd and 3rd graders working on Type to Learn 3 and the 4th graders beginning their Keyboarding for Kids adventure. There'll be much more on "K4K" in coming weeks, but suffice it to say that we're gearing up for keyboarding homework! The chance to work every day, even if only for 15 or 20 minutes, is something not every elementary school child has, and for those kids who take it seriously, it's an opportunity that will change their academic lives for the better.

We're even typing in K and 1 this week, as we use the freeware "Drawing for Children" program to learn about fonts, font styles, colors, and sizes in 1st grade and simply learn how to use the ABC typing tool in K to type our names. The Kindergarten children are simply typing their names, just once, but the 1st graders are typing in as many sizes, fonts, and colors as they can do in their computer lab period. Next week we'll practice locating a file with Drawing for Children's "file open" function and we'll add even more instances of their names as time will allow. I think we'll end up with a really nice bulletin board out of the deal, don't you???

On the personal side, I put my son Colin on the bus this morning to travel to Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina where he'll engage in team building fun with his 6th grade peers for three nights in the woods. Wow. I couldn't help thinking how this must be the definition of ambivalence: We want them to grow up, but we don't want them to grow out of the best moments of childhood, and, hence, away. My HS senior daughter is in a country music video (for like a second and a half, but if you're watching for her you can see her pretty sunglassed self) that sums it up: Kenny Chesney's "Don't Blink," it'll be gone before you know it.

Week of September 17

A good, solid week of work, with some "lagniappe" windfall software coming our way from that little island in the Indian Ocean, Mauritius.

First of all, the fourth, third, and second grades are all in various stages of working in Type to Learn 3, Sunburst's stellar little introductory keyboarding program. This is the first year I've introduced conventional keyboarding to second graders, and that's a bit of an experiment, though I'm encouraged so far by the children's enthusiasm and focus. It seems that there are always a few kids who just don't seem to be able to internalize a "desire to acquire" typing skills, but I understand the developmental readiness of our students varies in this arena just as it does in all others, academic and physical.

Next week, the 4th graders leave TTL3 behind in their introductory exploration of Keyboarding Online, or Keyboarding for Kids. I'll have a great deal more to say about this work beginning next week.

In the K-1 arena, we began exploring a different set of skills, diving into the software program "Around the World with Twelve Songs" from our buddies Boowa and Kwala. I received this site-license version of the software from my friend Jason Barnard, the UpToTen.com co-creator and the voice behind the big blue dog Boowa. It seems an attendee of a teacher workshop I gave in Atlanta last November purchased 25 school site licenses of the program from UpToTen and Jason thought to himself, "I should send one to Scott" for helping design his world-popular UpToTenPremium at School program. Very nice of him!

The program leads children through the website's first online book, which details the adventures of our favorite cartoon pair from the day Boowa discovered Kwala on the beach, lost and confused, and set off with her to find her family. The neat addition of a gentle British-accented reading voice and highlighted text as the syllables are read is an important one. As a child hears words spoken while reading the text simultaneously, phonemes come alive in recognition memory, and reading skill is gently enhanced.

I don't detail the program here in order to encourage its purchase by any of my families: Your child has access to it here at school, and in fact we will have it on the K and 1st grade classroom computers as well as in the lab, by the end of next week. For those reading this blog from other locations (see our "Clustrmaps" Visitor Locations map in the sidebar!) I say "go for it!" It's a very sweet and engaging and pedagogically valid early reader software. It has the MisterMerrick Seal-of-Approval!

No pics this week: I'm finishing up work on the new 2nd grade projector laptop/projector cart. By next year, every classroom in the school will have its own ceiling mounted projector for technology-enabled presentations and lessons; and we're making strides this year by positioning two such carts on each floor, with ceiling-mounted projectors in every 4th grade room already!

Cheers, and have a happy and safe fun weekend,

mistermerrick

Week 2.0!

Into the second week in our new lab, I'm going to take a little movie of Ms. Anitra's 3rd graders working on Type to Learn 3 to share here. The 4th graders are also diving into TTL3, toward our implementation of this year's Keyboarding for Kids program in a couple of weeks. Here's the little 3rd grade movie:




The Kinder and 1st gradekins are working in Boowa and Kwala, the wee folk logging onto the website for the very first time, after a little demo of how a mouse works, the introduction of some new terms (mouse, icon, desktop, and my favorite--Maximize!) and the 1st graders for the most part returning to the site and running through the four activities of Lesson 37 before digging deeper.

2nd graders are delving into Type to Learn, Jr., a very gentle introduction into the way they should begin to learn to type.

FlipVideo Hits Classrooms!

Watch for more video from our Lower School, after Technology Director Kathy Wieczerza put one FlipVideo camera device in the hands of each grade level, K-4 during our final day of start-of-the-year teacher inservice on Tuesday. These handy little devices record internet-ready video at the touch of a button, store 30 minutes of video instantly uploadable to one's computer via the flip-out USB plug, and host the imaging software on the device, so there's no software to load on your computer, PC or Mac. Best of all, they can be bought for about 90 dollars at Costco and other local outlets, a much better price than the 139 dollars they retail for at the company's website.

If you're a teacher, the fine folks at FlipVideo offer a 10 dollar rebate per unit on purchases of 3 or more at a time. Wow.

USN Outdoor Education teacher Cynthia Lee took a Flip on a summer Kindergarten trip to Wyoming and recorded some funny footage at Yellowstone Park. It's hosted on TeacherTube, a sort of a YouTube for educators and students...

Here it is:

End of January, Cold Outside but Warming Up in the Lab!

4th graders get PowerPoint guidance from Ms. Noel

Hey, all,

I was out away from school the week of Jan. 15 and so "in the weeds" (a restaurant worker's term for so busy one can't see what to do next) when I returned back to school that I just didn't get to post last week. The reason I was out was that my family and I moved from our Green Hills home of 13 years to a new residence out in West Meade. We love our new home but downsizing by half has been a challenge of logistics, decision-making, and my lower back. We're hoooooooome now!

In the lab, we're doing some interesting things. My lists of grades often work from 3rd down to 2nd in the order I see the kids, but here's one from Kindergarten up, just for fun.

Kinderkids finished up their Boowa pictures with Drawing for Children last week and after such hard work I treated them to a new website at Center Number 4 of K-1 Go Here! It's "Boohbah," a wonderul "right-brain" experience of sound and color where there are virtually no direct instructions or examples to guide the visitor, just things to click on that do have results, though the results may not be "logical." It's interesting to me to watch how different children react to something so "out of the box" and to watch them invariably warm to the idea of exploration for its own sake. While it may look, at first glance, like fluff, the site (an offshoot of a successful British television show) is the result of come careful thinking on the part of its creator, Ann Wood, also the creator of Teletubbies. Hmmmm... See the Wikipedia entry on Boohbah here.

1st graders explored base 10 concepts at BT Bear's site last week and this week viewed a great Schlessinger Media film via our Safari Montage media server. Part of the "Earth Science in Action" series and 25 minutes long, "The Water Cycle" took up most of their computer time but they didn't want to stop it before seeing the whole thing. They were especially intrigued by a demonstration of an experiment to help understand the concept of an Artesian well, a well that needs no pump due to pressure on the groundwater that produces it. After a brief chat about the water cycle most of the classes were able to spend a few minutes at Boohbah.

2nd graders began looking at the Iditarod Trail Race this week, getting a little introduction via a video at my fellow podcaster Scott Sloan's project, iditarodpodcast.com. This is Scott's 2nd year to manage this seasonal podcast and he looks positioned to really deliver some content this year over his Alaska Podshow and the special Iditarod Podcast. With any luck we'll be able to chat with him via a Skype videoconference next week. More on that later! I still have other friends in Alaska, too. A little known fact is that my Alaskan folk band, the Last Frontier Band, was the official Iditarod Trail band in 1978-9, and we performed numerous benefit concerts to support the Trail Committee. It tickles me that the impetus to study the race came from the teachers and I'm very happy to be able to help enrich the students' experience with my own.

3rd graders are exercising copy and paste skills with Word, Internet Exporer and Google, as they populate a Word document with images found on the Internet in order to print a couple pages of images to scissors up and use in their hand-written artist reports. Next week we'll create title pages for those reports using a Word template.

4th graders are in the lab every available moment as they work on their Aztec PowerPoints and Aztec newspapers. Last week I introduced them to the PowerPoint tutorials available on the USN Lower School Webliographer. These are looking great and you may expect to see them on the 4th grade website soon!

That's all for now!