Every year, our fourth graders participate in the Wax Museum project. Students research a famous person, write a speech, dress up as that person and stand outside frozen as if they were wax statues. Other students from our school are invited to meander through the Wax Museum and trigger the statues to come to life. Once triggered, the student wax statues begin spouting his or her biographical information. To practice for this event, students in Ms. Steimle's and Ms. Rollins' classes used the apps FaceTalk, Morfo, and Mad Lips to help students memorize and listen to their speeches. After using the apps to create videos, students could listen to the speeches over and over again, make corrections, and re-record as needed to help them prepare for the live event. Great work 4th grade!
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Even though it was close to the end of the school year, our Kinders weren't slowing down one bit! In Ms. King's class, students conducted an internet research project about insects. To present their final research project, students were given the choice to use Popplet, Scribble Press or Story Kit. They were engaged in their work and excited to make their own choice! The results were an awesome array of projects. Down the hall, Ms. Skonieczny's class were busy as bees writing too! Her students planned their stories on paper and then transferred them to Scribble Press. I helped initially to introduce the Kinders to Scribble Press but when we were confronted with the problem of how to delete speech bubbles, I told them I'd been working with 1st and 2nd graders to try to figure that out and we hadn't yet. Well, lo and behold, a Kindergartner figured it out and we all took some time to let him show us how. When in doubt, ask a 5 year old! Check out more Kinder Scribbles on Ms. Skonieczny's Scribble Press Shelf. How to delete the speech bubble brought to you by a 5 year old As with any new implementation, vital to its success is the ability to reflect, adapt and grow. BPE teachers were recently provided that opportunity. They responded to questions and ideas on their iPads while enjoying a Hat Creek burger on Tuesday. They shared with us their enthusiasm of extending their instruction to a more diverse level which created a sense of investment in the LEAP initiative and strengthened a growth mindset. They shared with us the importance of stricter monitoring, the anticipation that children will behave like the curious beings they are and the success fostered by having a school wide standard of expectation for all students. Most importantly they noted the advantage of allowing students to express their knowledge in a way that is most meaningful to them, the value of having the right tool for those ever-present teachable moments and the increased engagement of students in their own learning. With their input, we have what we need to continue growing this endeavor.
Even though the school year was coming to an end, Eanes ISD teachers got ready for a new adventure for the 2013-14 school year! It was the second to last week before school ended and teachers from Cedar Creek, Forest Trail, and Bridge Point Elementary met up to learn about Macbooks and the Mountain Lion operating system. These teachers will be piloting Macbooks as teacher presentation stations in their classrooms next year. We were once a Mac district but have been heavily PC since 2002. Watch out folks, the Mac is back!
Fifth Grade students took the lead on this project. After their unit study in Mythology, they were challenged to write their own myths to explain current day social or natural phenomenon. Students voted to determine which 3 myths would make the best screen plays. Groups were formed. Plots were thickened. Costumes were gathered. Sets were created. Students used a combination of set design and green screen imagery to create videos on their iPads to tell their stories. Once the videos were completed, video and images were uploaded to our network servers to facilitate team access. Then the iMagic began. Using our Macbook lab and iMovie 11, students edited video filmed on their iPads, over-layed green screen footage, cropped images, added background music and ....Voila! Watch out Cannes, our kids are going to give you a run for your money! Now screening Water, Santa S. Clausberg is Coming to Town and How the Tooth Fairy Came to Be. Above is a trailer compiling some highlights of the Myths created by our students. Because we have some students in these groups who wish not to be published, their teacher has posted the videos on a password protected page with parent permission. Want to know how to password protect a page on your Weebly website? Check out this handout so you can try it too! Bridge Point has been the proud host to visitors from school districts throughout Texas interested in an iPad implementation. Most recently, Fort Bend ISD and Temple ISD came to marvel at our program. What a treat view ourselves through the eyes of others! On our walkabout with out-of-district teachers, principals, specialists and trainers we saw students engaged in activities from building fractions in Kindergarten to mental math using decimals in 4th grade. On our tour, one class of 3rd graders worked on research while another 3rd grade class focused on how to understand inferences. Second graders used QR codes to review math skills on a differentiated color-coded QR path. First graders reviewed math skills and practiced clock skills with QR codes. Our visitors poked and prodded, asked and noted, saw and savored. We are proud to share our success and our lessons learned so that others may grow with us. It really takes an iVillage to educate our kids!
Second graders in Ms. Mills and Ms. Rojas classes were all a flutter this week as the witnessed the live metamorphosis of their classroom caterpillars. As the caterpillars went through the journey to become butterflies, the second graders used their cameras and Keynote to digitally chronicle the caterpillar's life cycle. To keep things hopping in Ms. Mills' class, one student per day was designated to use the Chirp App to send out the picture to her classmates. Chirp is a great way to share pictures, links, and notes through sound waves. In fact, when students needed to spell chrysalis, Ms. Mills used Chirp to send it as a note to the class and her students copied and pasted it right into their journals!
In Ms. Koller's class, photos and research data were organized into a slide show to demonstrate their experience and knowledge of the life cycle of the butterfly. To engage more active listening during each second grader's presentation, the audience was encouraged to share a positive thought on their iPads using Glow Draw or Draw Free. When the presenter was finished, his or her classmates held up a garden of compliments, helping our young scientists to blossom. Way to GROW second graders! She's going to want to COLLABORATE! Inspired by delightful children's books like If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and Green Eggs and Ham, 8th graders in Ms. Fiske's American History class spun creative tales starring historical events they had studied throughout the school year. But they craved something more for their stories. They needed to reach outside of their school and collaborate. That's when they found us! Using Google Docs, the 8th grade teams made lists of illustrations they needed for their books and shared those lists with our teachers. Our students, without meeting the 8th graders, got to work on the illustrations. A week or so later, the 8th graders actually showed up at our door! Our drawings were ready and teams were built. The older kids led the way and in small groups all over the hallways and even inside closets, worked to narrate the 8th grade stories using the Book Creator App. As a result, we were able to create a wonderful series of ePubs all about American History! Way to go teams!
Happy birthday to the most interesting Principal in the world!Morning assembly was lots of fun this morning when it was announced that Mr. Wirht was turning 60 tomorrow! A few staff members had great fun making him this video and our students enjoyed singing Happy Birthday to him, not once, but TWICE at morning assembly. Happy Birthday Mr. Wirht!
Recently, Ms. Rollins used the online assessment tool, Infuse Learning to check for understanding in her science class. Her students answered review questions about their weather unit, and Ms. Rollins received feedback from every student in her class instantly. No more waiting to grade papers! Minutes after the assessment, Ms. Rollins had data for differentiation and lesson planning. Now that's magical!
Infuse Learning is a free online resource that works much like Socrative; however, it does not require an app! Some of its benefits are: instant multi-language translation, images can be added to questions, students can respond in a "draw mode", and students have the ability to listen to the questions independently via Infuse Learning's ability to embed text to speech technology. For more information about infusing magic into your assessments, create an account on Infuse Learning http://www.infuselearning.com and check out these online tutorials. Keep Instruction Simple, Safe and Focused on LearningSIMPLE: A terrific way to create a visual springboard for elementary research projects is to use the free iPad friendly bookmarking site, Symbaloo. Because elementary students are still learning to decompose text and need help verifying the accuracy of websites, designing this kind of tool really helps kids focus on their research topics. As lovely as Google is, it's search strength can be really overwhelming for kids (and adults too!). Google provides extensive lesson plans on how to help people search better. For a quicker overview, check out this simple poster on how to conduct Google searches.
SAFE: Another way to help students narrow their search is to use kid friendly search engines like Kid Rex. Kid Rex helps filter out non-educational content using Google Custom Search and Safesearch technologies. FOCUSED: When sharing YouTube videos, try using SafeShare.TV, it's a great way to get rid of all the distracting related videos and comments that can drown your instructional purpose. SIMPLE, SAFE & FOCUSED: Check out BPE's great examples of creating resources for kids, research and instructional videos using Symbaloo: Egyptian Webquest, Learning Songs, Favorite sites for 4th grade 1 & 2, 3rd grade Penguin research, and BPE Student Resources. HOW TO SYMBALOO: User Guide, Symbaloo, SymbalooEDU 1st graders in Ms. Guthrie's and Ms. Tremel's classes were really busy last week sowing the seeds of change! They changed up their "old school" science journal to create a "new school" style of chronicling the growth of their grass seeds. They observed, measured, photographed and wrote their observations day by day using the Scribble Press app. These talented 1st graders even figured out how to add a second picture onto their page as well as how to use the forward facing camera to capture a picture of the roots from a different perspective! Great thinking! To add detail, the first graders used the bubble captions and other Scribble Press drawing tools. Sharing their work was easy because the final books are shared with families via a shared URL, a private student login, PDF or ePub. Way to sow the seeds of change!
Ms. Mills' 2nd grade class invited me in to do a quick Popplet lesson so they could change the way they would present their research project on the Presidents of the United States. Ms. Mills chose a student to "drive" the iPad as I taught the lesson. This is a great way to empower a student to be the teacher and role model for the class. Students did their research on their iPad, used a guiding worksheet to collect their information, and added Popples of information about their President. They really loved finding pictures to add relevant visuals to their facts. When they finished their Presidential Popplet, they emailed the Popplets to their teacher. Check out Ms. Mills website for her post on our email lesson. Way to go 2nd graders!
After reading Matt Gomez's post about his Kindergartners, Tic, Tac, Toe and Twitter, BPE decided to challenge another school to a friendly tournament of Tic, Tac, Toe. We used the Google Doc that was posted on Mr. Gomez's site and ran it inside of a Google Hangout. Within the Hangout, we had a live camera and sound feed between the teams. Each side could hear and learn from the other side's discussion. Every child was so engaged in the process and it was amazing to listen to them explain and discuss with each other the best moves. Ms. Champion's Kindergarten from Eanes Elementary and Ms. King's Kindergarten class from Bridge Point had an awesome time discussing strategies, scheming about the placement of their X's and O's and learning about teamwork. We played 3 rounds and even though BPE won two rounds and EE tied us for one round, everyone in kindergarten was a winner today! Let us know if your school wants to play! See our game from Eanes Elementary's point-of-view on the Eagles' Educational Tech Blog! 4/26/13 Ms. Skonieczny's class from Bridge Point and Ms. Carpenter's class from Eanes dueled also! This time BPE's team had a dog on it! Take a look at Eanes Elementary's post about our game! 5/2/13 Ms. Tremel's first grade from BPE and Ms. Wolff's first grade from EE took the Tic Tac Toe challenge too! Their team work and focus on strategies was really amazing. These first graders really used their noodles today! A few things we did differently: We numbered the squares on the Tic Tac Toe grid 1-9 so kids could easily communicate where they wanted to place their piece. The students discussed in small groups which space they would move into and why. The student who was chosen to move the piece looked to their class to vote silently by holding up the number of the spot they thought would be the best choice. We also worked with students to start thinking about more than one move at a time so they could really think critically together and see where the game could lead their team step-by-step. In anticipation of a new student arriving from California, 2nd graders in Ms. Koller's class decided to make a 2nd grade writing TEK* come alive in their classroom. First, they created a "sloppy copy" handwritten letter to their new friend. Then they typed the letter, revised it, and added a picture from their iPads using the Pages App. Each child then sent their letter to our student shared network drive via the Pages WebDav feature. Ms. Koller emailed them to the new family welcoming them to Bridge Point. What a friendly way to start a day at a new school. Way to go 2nd graders!!
*(14) Writing/purposes. The student writes for a variety of audiences and purposes, and in various forms. The student is expected to: (D) write in different forms for different purposes such as lists to record, letters to invite or thank, and stories or poems to entertain. Trailers are great ways to get audiences excited about upcoming events, movies and books, but how about creating hype for your lesson?! Ms. Lee, one of BPE's awesome art teachers decided to do just that! She created this iMovie trailer to prepare her students for an upcoming lesson on contour lines. After she played the trailer, kids were totally hyped to draw using contour lines! Who wouldn't want to draw a shoe after that kind of intro!
Combining a science, language arts, and a Texas history lesson, kindergartners in Ms. Skonieczny's class went on and iHunt for Bluebonnets today. They carefully iHugged their iPads and headed outside with their iPads to take pictures of the state flower of Texas. One student exclaimed as he iHugged his iPad, "This is my favorite day, I get to take my own pictures!" They all marched outside to find a patch of Bluebonnets to photograph. Each child took 5 photos and returned to the classroom to learn how to create Popplets about their Bluebonnet photo. Way to go kindergartners!
Inspired by Ms. Iles' QR hunt and Ewan McIntosh's Google Vs Non-Googleable lesson style that encourages kids to construct their own knowledge to make learning "stick", Ms. Cimino created a lesson about renewable and non-renewable resources. In the slideshow above, you will see the steps she took to facilitate her lesson as her third grade students used their analytical and critical thinking skills to construct meaning for themselves. This lesson truly embodies my favorite quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin, Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, INVOLVE me and I will learn. Awesome brain work, Ms. Cimino's class!
Want to use Post-It notes on the computer? Check out Lisa Johnson's share of how to print on Post-Its through your printer! Get the templates: mini, large, standard. After a much awaited "iPatience", the last two Kindergartens at Bridge Point received their 1:1 iPads. Our Kinders were using a shared iPad model for some time prior to this event, however, they were way excited to get them truly personalized. We worked with Ms. King and Ms. Skonieczny's classes on April 3rd to FINALLY bring L.E.A.P into their classrooms. We had already covered the basic gestures, iPad parts and how to open and close apps. Since these two classes were so very advanced, we added a few extra lessons for this rollout. For these two classes we added how to search for apps so they can get focused for the lesson much faster (and it's a great way to practice sounding out words!). And because these two classes were already masters at uploading files through iFiles to our student shared servers, we taught them how to RENAME files in iFiles too! A simple LONG PRESS or a PRESS and HOLD on the file in iFiles will give you a menu that includes renaming files. WAY TO GO KINDERGARTNERS! Of course these Kinders were raring to go and they dove right into a science lesson using Popplet. Applying the Kindergarten Science TEK Matter is described in terms of its physical properties, including relative size and mass, shape, color, and texture, Kinders took a picture of a rock and created a Popplet that described the physical properties of their rock. Sure beats making 22 AIMS printed packets!! This iPad lesson really "ROCKS"!
Washington-on-the-Brazos is a famous place in regards to the history of Texas. The Texas Declaration of Independence from Mexico was signed here on March 2, 1836. On Wednesday, March 27th, our 4th graders ventured off to the birthplace of Texas to explore in a more hands-on approach to learning about Texas history. This year was a little different because the 4th graders got to take their iPads. Our students were excited to use the Texas 1836 augmented reality app that was designed around the Washington-on-the-Brazos site, however, it seems the app needs a little more tweaking before it becomes 100% interactive. Students were able to take pictures, videos and notes on their iPads. Below are a few quotes sent to me via email from 4th graders: Bringing our iPads was helpful because we took pictures of all the activities we did. But, the app Texas 1836 didn't work as we expected it to. But, the iPads were still very helpful! We hope we get to bring our iPads on more field trips! Thanks for letting us bring them! Inspired by an idea from Flapjack Education, students in Ms. Iles' room really kept learning in motion today. Using QR codes and jumbo plastic eggs, students moved about the classroom reviewing their addition, subtraction, and money counting skills using their own iPads. Ms. Iles created several QR codes with questions and answers using http://qrcode.kaywa.com, printed them out and put them inside numbered eggs. She introduced the lesson explaining how to access the egg's math problem by scanning it with QRafter. Using the student worksheet she created, she modeled how to write the problem and check the answer. If the student were to get a different answer, the student would simply mark through it and add the scanned answer. She asked her class why they would do that and a little girl answered, "Because we learn from our mistakes!!" How true! The eggs were placed randomly around the classroom and the students were dismissed by table to start at an egg of their choice. It took a few minutes to get used to the process of scanning, writing and recording, but after a few minutes, the first graders got the hang of it! These kids were motivated to practice math for sure! How many kids have you taught who are disappointed to NOT finish a math worksheet review? Get the answer sheet here. Thanks for sharing your activity with us Ms. Iles! A few tips:
Ms. Iles has done it again! Try out her WRITE THE ROOM idea! For Daily 5 Word Work, students scan a sight word, read it to themselves and draw a picture of the word, great idea! Students in Ms. Van Zandt's class used their iPads to show their understanding of the Solar System for the Science TEK (8D) "Identify the planets in Earth's solar system and their position in relation to the Sun". This class really worked together as a team to learn! Ms. Van Zandt worked with her kids on how to search on Google. Often adding the terms, "for kids" after what they intend to search helps kids find kid-friendly websites to use for research projects. They then used paper notes or in one case of one crafty 3rd grader, her Notes App, to make notes for their projects. If they had a question about Keynote or Animoto, they simply took their iPad to a classmate for a quick tutorial and voila! they were in business. See a few examples below. Way to go third graders!
Ms. Iles' first grade class worked really hard to create their own Scribble Press books about themselves for Open House. Using the Scribble Press app, each student used the
All About Me template to create a story about themselves. I stopped into Ms. Iles' room while they were working and was very impressed by these first graders! I started to help and soon discovered there were already a few experts in the class! With Scribble Press' great user interface, these first graders and their teacher really found their way around by exploring on their own. If we got stuck, we would find a 6 or 7 year old to help us! We were able to publish their books online to Ms. Iles' Scribble Press bookshelf and we even got one printed! The first graders were so impressed how a story could jump out of an iPad and become a wonderful, touchable, readable book to keep forever! Read their stories online, print them to PDF, or download them as EPubs. Learn more about the Scribble Press app and Group Accounts. Click picture to download the Digital Parent Series flyer. Join EISD and guest speaker Reggie Cajayon, Coordinator – Teen School Safety Alliance at Texas State University for information on Internet Safety & Cyberbullying Prevention Location: Hill Country Middle School Cafeteria Time: 6:30PM-8:00PM Date: March 25, 2013 Parents and kids of all ages welcome! This event will also be available on the web at: http://new.livestream.com/eanesisd Ms. Coolman, our awesome librarian worked to help a group of BPE students to publish their own very own ePub books with their original writing, illustrations and even narration!! Check the books out and even download them to your iPad!!
Library News: March 2013 Two students at Bridge Point, Meghan and Lauren, have published three e-books on the ePub Bud website which are available to upload to your iPads. (A fourth is on the way!) If you open each link below on your iPad (using Safari), it will automatically take you to the ePub site. Choose "Download eBook" and you will receive a link to add each book to your iBooks library. The books include audio of the authors reading their stories and are great fun - enjoy! The 70's Dance Party #1 The 70's Dance Party #2 The 70's Dance Party #3 |
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