This morning I tweeted that I was planning to have my students email Santa. My wonderful twitter network came up with two other sites that would have allowed me to do the same thing. In case you haven’t yet written to the jolly fellow, there is still time to get an answer before school is out if you use a digital format instead of pencil and paper. Here are some options:
Northpole – I like this one because many of my students can’t yet write in a way that is readable, but they can all click beside which gift they would like. It allows other comments to Santa for those who can write. Replies come in a couple of days.
Email Santa – This has drop down menus for many of the letter’s components as well as some pictures to choose from. It also allows written comments and sends an immediate answer.
Canada Post – This site has only fill in boxes for your name, email address and your letter. If it is like the letters sent via the post office, a volunteer responds individually to each email.
Sympatico – This isn’t really a letter, but you can use it to create a video message to a child from Santa. I tried it out by making one for my eighteen year old daughter. Kids would love it, but it’s not really appropriate for the classroom and is better sent by a parent or other relative. You might need to be Canadian for this, as you need to give a postal code.
Do you know of another option? Please leave it in a comment.
The slides for a recent presentation I did for Dean Shareski’s class at the University of Regina are below. Frankly, thinking of five myths was the hardest part for me. What other myths should I have included?
Like most of the teachers in North America, I’ve recently been through another round of report cards and parent/teacher/student conferences. I’ve had a classroom blog for several years, but this year I am making more of an effort to use each student’s blog as an online portfolio, with examples of the students’ work from all subject areas.
As part of the process, each student looked at their blog with me and chose three “articles” that they felt represented their best work and wished to share with their parents. We had recently made recordings with Vocaroo of each child reading a book that they had practiced to share, so that was a popular choice. Aside from that choice the students, without exception, chose to show articles that contained images and proceeded to tell their parents (with my support) what they had done well in creating the image in terms of their use of colour, space, details, shapes etc. I don’t think this is just because they do not yet write well–actually some of them do write well for this point in the school year.
This further reinforced my conviction that my students are more visually oriented every year. They come to me with five or six years of viewing TV, video, games and various online sites behind them. Their brain is wired to view images. I’m glad that my province has included viewing as one of the six strands of our language arts curriculum. In fact, we are supposed to be giving viewing the same amount of teaching time as we do reading and writing, the traditional text-based mediums.
What does this mean for me as a teacher who is helping them to create an online portfolio of their work? Certainly I need to give them lots of opportunities to express themselves through visual means (representing, another great strand of our language arts curriculum). Students learn uniquely through the creation of digital media. I’m also more convinced than ever of my need to systematically teach them the age-appropriate strategies they need to become effective viewers and contributors in this digital age.
Recently I blogged about my top ten list of tools for primary classes. Shortly after that, I received a couple of emails from Tikatok, which was on my list, about changes in their policies, so I have replaced that choice.
While I still like the fact that Tikatok allows you to have your book printed, their stories can no longer be viewed when embedded into a blog (unless you are logged in), and they now do not allow children to use the site without sending a signed permission form to their offices.
I am planning to use Storybird with my students instead. Storybird allows embeds. Instead of students drawing their own pictures, they can choose from pre-made illustrations in different artistic styles. The benefit to using these would be to force students to focus on their writing–including editing.
Amanda Marrinan, who has used Storybird to publish her student’s work, says, “Anything that keeps my kids so engaged that they don’t want to go home, even on a Friday, has to be good.” Anything that helps students to be better writers has to be good.
Last week, in celebration of Media Literacy Week, I was (via Skype) part of an event held in Winnipeg and organized by ManAce. The organizers planned a packed evening, beginning with four presenters from different parts of Canada who worked with a wide variety of students (I was the token primary representative) and followed by a panel discussion. Each of the four initial presenters had five minutes to present their point of view, followed by questions.
Because I wanted to include student voices in my presentation, I used a video for part of what I wanted to say. In making the video, I was inspired by the great video that the organizers of the event had made–it started me thinking about what media literacy looks like in a primary classroom.
Through the magic of Slideshare, my video is part of my slides below. Can primary students be media literate? You betcha!
Yes, it has indeed been a long time since I posted on this blog.
Recently, I did two presentations at our provincial Early Childhood Education Council’s annual convention.This is a decidedly non-tech convention (I was apparently the only presenter who needed internet access) attended mainly by K to 2 teachers.
My first presentation was the Top Ten Free Technology Tools for Young Learners. Choosing ten tools turned out to be more difficult than I had expected. The top few were no brainers to me, but after that, choosing tools that I thought these teachers might use was harder than I had expected. There are just so many that are possible to use. I did get lots of questions on Twitter when I posted this link, asking why I had not included Voicethread in the list. I do think Voicethread is a great tool, and I admire the work other teachers have done, but it has not worked well for me, so I didn’t think it was fair to include it. The wonderful Amanda Marrinan got up at 3:30 in the morning to Skype in to my session and wowed the attendees with her lovely Aussie accent and passion.
My other presentation, Login for Literacy, was on a topic near and dear to my heart–using technology to support learning in the six strands of our provincial language arts curriculum. The wiki also includes a few math links as I wanted the attendees to see the potential there as well. Wendy Goodwin graciously shared via Skype about the reader’s theatre we have done between classes using Skype, and some of the other things she has been doing with her teachers.
Several teachers who chose another session popped in to ask me for a copy of my handout, and were surprised to receive a url instead. It was a weird feeling to be the only person at the conference checking things on her laptop, but definitely good to be reminded that most of the world does not work the way I do.
Are you an innovative teacher? Would you like to have a chance to talk to and learn with other innovative teachers from around the world? Are you a Canadian teacher? Did you answer “yes” to all three of those questions? Have I got an opportunity for you!
Microsoft Canada has announced the 2009 Microsoft Canada Innovative Teacher Awards. I was part of this in program in 2006; fabulous is the only word to describe the experience I had. As one of the innovative teachers, I was flown to Philadelphia and Siam Riep, Cambodia where I stayed in five star hotels (who knew there were hotels where people came in and turned down your bed for you in the evening). While there, I had the opportunity to network with other teachers from all areas of the world. It was truly the trip of a lifetime.
This year, interested teachers have until May 8, 2009 to submit their application for a project using MARVIN, Zune, OneNote or Learning Essentials. Eight Canadian projects will be chosen by May 15, and provided with access to the tool they have chosen to use for their project. These teachers will then have until October 1st, 2009 to develop their project and use it with their students. Four of these teachers will be chosen to compete in the Microsoft Worldwide Innovative Teachers Forum in Salvador, Brazil, November 3-6, 2009.
Don’t just think about it, do it! There is no website available with information about this, but as a former winner, I HAVE THE INFORMATION. If you, or someone know, is interested in participating in this tremendous opportunity, just email me, (Cassidy.kathy@prairiesouth.ca) and I will forward the email I received to you.
Good luck. I can’t wait to hear what innovative things teachers have done.
I’ve done several sessions to introduce teachers to blogging in the past, and have usually walked away wondering how many were going to keep it up. Beyond the technical aspects (which are huge issues if you’re not yet sure how to do basic things such as copy and paste) there is always the worry that teachers will not see the potential, but will just see it as “one more thing” to be added to their already busy day. At a fairly recent session that I did, I guessed that only about one third of the participants would actually follow up on the work we did together.
Yesterday I did a daylong session about using blogging to meet your curriculum with about fifty K–2 teachers. This session was the brainchild of Donna Desroche and JoAnne Kasper, and involved teachers from almost all of the schools in their division. It was one of the most enjoyable sessions I have ever done. I loved it because I went away feeling like all of the participants there would actually use what they had learned. I think it worked well for several reasons:
Preparation – All of the teachers came with a Classblogmeister blog already set up. We didn’t need to take time to go over basics, but could instead focus on making it work in the classroom.
Time – The teachers had a whole day of release time to learn about, talk about and feel comfortable with their blogs.
Ownership – We spent some time talking about how to customize their blog and then let them have time to add widgets, change templates and make their blog their own. I don’t see this as peripheral. I think this is an important step in ownership for teachers as well as students.
Curriculum Connection – As you can see from the wiki that I used, we also spent some time talking about specific ways they could use their blog to connect their students with our Saskatchewan curriculum. When I showed them how to embed a video, and some examples of curriculum-related videos that they could use, I could see their eyes light up.
Ongoing Support – At the end of the day, Donna asked them to talk in groups about ways that they felt they could use the blog in their classroom, and then asked them to email both herself and JoAnne to let her know their thoughts about the day and what further support they needed to help implement their goal for their blog. Some of them took the opportunity to find other classes to connect with and begin a blogging buddy exchange.
Well done, JoAnne and Donna. You’ve created a great model that’s worth following. I can’t wait to see the great stuff the teachers and their students will do.
I’m currently at the iT summit in Saskatoon. Yesterday I did a presentation called Just Point and Shoot: Using Video to Capture Learning. My emphasis was on the capturing, not on a polished final product. I find that I am using video more and more to help my students share their learning. The students love using video because even those who do not yet write well can explain and demonstrate their learning and there is then the opportunity to watch themselves over and over again. I love it because this watching reinforces the concept that they need to learn. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth at least a million.
The wiki for my presentation includes the slide deck I used. Because the presentation was coming up, I decided to stretch myself and learn a bit about video editing. With thanks to Dean Shareski for showing me the basics, here is my first attempt at an edited video. I used it at the end of my presentation.
I’m always looking—looking for new tools that will help primary children to improve their communication skills.So when a few people in my Twitter network tweeted about a tool called Vocaroo, I knew it was a keeper.
Vocaroo’s website says, “Vocaroo is a shiny new service for sending voice messages across the interwebs.”It allows you to record your voice, play it back to listen, and then provides you with a url or the html to embed an icon into a webpage or blog.
I have had my students do podcasting before using Audacity, and then uploaded the mp3’s to space on our school board’s server, but although I was unable to edit the recording, using Vocaroo was much easier and less time consuming.
Since reading fluency is one of the objectives in our language arts curriculum, I decided to start there.In my class we call fluency “reading smoothly”. Last week I had my students each write about their reading and then we recorded each of them reading a couple of pages and posted it in the article.One of my students wrote, “I can read smoovly. And dis is what it meeings it meeings you dot stop you dis ceep on going. “ Translation: “I can read smoothly. And this is what it means. It means you don’t stop you just keep on going.”Having a recording of their voices gave my students the opportunity to hear what they sound like when they are reading—to hear whether their reading really is smooth or not.
Vocaroo’s FAQ says that you can record as long as you want, but we found that it would only record for about 15 seconds.This may have been because the computer, because I tried it again tonight and was able to easily get 30 seconds of recording.
It is difficult for many primary students to express themselves using text, but most are comfortable using their voice.I think this tool will have to stay in my teaching aresenal.
Note: I CANNOT get a Vocaroo icon to embed in this blogpost, but you can see one here.
This morning I tweeted that I was planning to have my students email Santa. My wonderful twitter network came up with two other sites that would have allowed me to do the same thing. In case you haven’t yet written to the jolly fellow, there is still time to get an answer before school is out if you use a digital format instead of pencil and paper. Here are some options:
Like most of the teachers in North America, I’ve recently been through another round of report cards and parent/teacher/student conferences. I’ve had a 
Are you an innovative teacher? Would you like to have a chance to talk to and learn with other innovative teachers from around the world? Are you a Canadian teacher? Did you answer “yes” to all three of those questions? Have I got an opportunity for you!
I’ve done several sessions to introduce teachers to blogging in the past, and have usually walked away wondering how many were going to keep it up. Beyond the technical aspects (which are huge issues if you’re not yet sure how to do basic things such as copy and paste) there is always the worry that teachers will not see the potential, but will just see it as “one more thing” to be added to their already busy day. At a fairly recent session that I did, I guessed that only about one third of the participants would actually follow up on the work we did together.
I’m always looking—looking for new tools that will help primary children to improve their communication skills.