If you could peek into the past while simultaneously looking into the future perhaps you'd meet a wee pilgrim working hard on his or her iPad. Happy Thanksgiving from Bridge Point Elementary and Ms. Hester's Kindergarten class!
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Each Friday our school fills with the sweet voices of 752 students directed by our fabulous music teachers. It's an amazing experience to behold, enjoy!
November's Life Skill of the Month is Citizenship. Bridge Point 3rd graders created this video to help students know how to be a good citizen. If you get "caught" showing citizenship, you will get a flag to put on our Life Skills board.
Live from New York it's...Professor Poppick! Streaming in from SUNY Purchase College in New York, Professor Dan Poppick popped in to have a conversation with Mr. Root and Ms. Cowan's 4th graders about writing poetry. Students were able to ask questions about the writing process and learned that it can take 10 minutes to five years to write a poem! Professor Poppick read aloud, with great gusto, Wallace Stevens' poem, A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts. When a 4th grader inquired, What's the best way to come up with an idea for a poem? His answer was, "Just empty your head and let the ideas stream in..."
A new iPad roll out procedure this year left Kindergartners and First graders with the daunting task of setting up their own iPads and installing Apps with their own Apple IDs for the first time. Not a problem – our fabulous 5th graders came to the rescue. Giving up some of their own recess time, they worked in assembly line fashion to get their younger school mates up and running like they were on a mission (in fact, here's an example of one of their missions: Mission 1). As the year progresses even our littlest ones will become iPad experts. Way to be awesome!
Bridge Point transformed our old "Macbook" lab into a new collaborative learning, teaching and meeting place. BPE staff voted to have it called the Think Tank. With the idea of movement, learning styles and how the environment affects learning, all teachers have the opportunity to utilize this new space. Take a look at how the Think Tank turned out!
Bridge Point is getting ready for Science Day by launching our annual Science Day Logo Contest. Check this video out, we can't wait to see your designs!
![]() This school year we are welcoming a new Tech, Mr. Tim Fuller. He has an an Associate's degree from A.C.C. in Local Area Network Administration and has worked in computer networking and I.T. for about 15 years. He's married with 3 beautiful children, all girls, aged 13, 4 and 2 months. His last job was overseeing the VoIP conversion at U.T. and he currently lives in Pflugerville but has been in Austin since the late 80's. His hobbies include wake boarding, golf, riding my motorcycle, and taking his oldest daughter to her basketball games and practices. We feel so lucky to have such an experienced, kind and conscientious "tech guy" to help us with all our technology challenges! Welcome to Bridge Point, Mr. Fuller! This school year, Eanes ISD is embarking on a new, even more personalized level of customized education. Our elementary students have been using iPads successfully in their classrooms since November of 2012. In the past, student iPads would be delivered to classrooms with a standard set of iPad apps. Customizing delivery of updates and new apps to those iPads was a cumbersome and laborious process. Sometimes, even student iPads were erased in the process. With Apple's new Apple ID for Students Under 13 program, schools can, with parent consent, utilize Apple IDs for kids in kindergarten on up. As with any new endeavor, there will be learning and teachable moments all along the way. But in the meantime, we look forward to this more efficient way of syncing apps with student learning in the classroom.
![]() Apple IDs for students under 13 are restricted in the following ways:
Troubleshooting![]()
Our Principal, Mr. Wirht, made a big splash today as he took the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge! Surrounded by a cheering crowd of our very own Bridge Point teachers and staff, he let Ms. Root and Ms. Saikin pour ice water all over his head in support of fighting Lou Gehrig's Disease. Watch to see who he challenges next!![]() Every year, our fourth graders participate in the Wax Museum project. Students research a famous person that has made a positive difference in the world, write a speech, dress up as that person and stand frozen as if they were wax statues. This year students added another visual and informative element with trifolds. The trifolds displayed interesting facts, pictures, poems, and quotes about their famous person. 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 various classes used the apps FaceTalk, 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. Students created Trading Cards for their famous person using the Trading Cards App. The 4th graders also created iMovie trailers to get students excited to come “see” their famous person at the Wax Museum. Great work 4th grade! ![]() First graders in Ms. Tremel's class took a walk through history and emerged as published writers of their very own hardbound book all about famous citizens. Their beautiful book is a result of a biography genre study. Ms. Tremel’s first grade class learned that biography books are nonfiction and have identifiable features. Each student read a picture book biography with a family member, recorded notes, and sited where facts were located in their books using colorful flags and a guiding worksheet. They studied other biographies in class and noticed that this genre usually includes a Table of Contents, chapter titles and subtitles, real photos and paintings, captions, labels, timelines, maps with keys, bolded vocabulary, and a Glossary. ![]() Using their notes, students summarized the life of their famous citizen on the word processing app Pages. They also learned editing techniques, like capitalization, spellcheck, bolding text, aligning text, inserting graphics, adding captions, and saving text. Fourth graders from Mrs. Schatz’s class swooped in as peer mentors to help their first grade friends create timelines from their notes on a mind-mapping app called Popplet. Then students learned how to use the Map app to locate Austin, Texas and the birthplace of their famous citizen. They connected these two points on their maps and were amazed to see the distance in miles and in hours. The timelines and maps were saved to their camera rolls and uploaded into their saved work on Pages where they learned to layer images with text. ![]() Meanwhile, teaming up with Ms. Lee, the art teacher, students learned how to draw portraits while referencing pictures they had saved on their iPad camera rolls. They used pencils, Sharpies, crayons and watercolors to create portrait masterpieces of their famous citizens. All student work was uploaded to Student Treasures Online Publishing site to create this incredible printed bound collection of biographies. What an amazing journey these first graders undertook! You, too, can join us on a walk through history through the point of view of a first grader by taking a look at the PDF version of their book or ordering a hardbound copy for yourself. Go to the Student Treasures website, use the PIN 5053136 and enter the teacher's name as Tremel. Absolutely amazing work!
Bridge Point's May Madness is MADDER than ever this year! Ms. Rose and Ms. Dean (BPE's CRAZY PE teachers) and our Specials Teachers kicked off today's field day MADNESS event by dancing around as Minions to Happy by Pharrell Williams. Be sure to check out the Leader of the Minions dance moves!
![]() Today's hAPPy Friday comes from Debbie Smith at Eanes Elementary. Timeline is an easy to use app that helps students organize events using labels and photos. Click here for the App Integration Snapshot.
Direct from the innovative minds of our magically talented music teachers, Ms. Hatch and Ms. Revering, we celebrated Earth Day this morning at Bridge Point Elementary. The performers included two talented 4th grade boys on drums and guitar, and a sweet singing and stomping crew of 120 Kindergartners and 140 4th graders sporting instruments made out of recycled items! Happy Earth Day, ya'll!
![]() The Trading Cards app is a great FREE app for the iPad. Student can create cards to help them study, summarize books, follow characters in a book study, and so much more. Check out the App Integration Snapshot for more great ideas and quick video tutorial to get you started. hAPPy Friday! ![]() Students in Mr. Root's 4th grade interact with geography in science, social studies and language arts using the website, Scribble Maps. Scribble Maps is an iPad friendly website that works a lot like Google Earth or Google Maps. You can draw by hand, create labels, place markers, circles or boxes and even add images. Scribble Maps can be used in all different ways to represent content knowledge and information through geography. And, it works GREAT on the Smartboard! Want to learn more? Check out this guide to using Scribble Maps in the classroom written by Taylor, a 4th grader in Mr. Root's class. Thanks, Taylor!! ![]() This week's hAPPy Friday is brought to you by Jolie Jennings, Ed Tech at Cedar Creek Elementary. The Weebly app works in conjunction with the Weebly website creation tool to edit blog pages from the iPad. Weebly is a great way to get kids blogging with Weebly student accounts. It's great for writing blog posts from the perspective of someone living in the past, blogging reading responses, and publishing projects on explorers. To learn more, check out the App Integration Snapshot created by Ms. Jennings!
Well, it's that time of year again! Gather all your kids who turn five before September 1, 2014 and tell them to head on over to register for Kindergarten at our beautiful school! Want to see just how awesome Kindergarten is a Bridge Point? View our our teacher and student created Kinder Round Up video for 2014 featuring these songs: Everything is Awesome by Tegan, Sara and The Lonely Island, Best Day of My Life by American Authors, We're Going to be Friends by Jack Johnson and Count on Me by Bruno Mars. Kindergarten at Bridge Point is Awesome!
Merging Texas History, Language Arts, pictures and videos, Ms. Cook's 4th graders created living historical poetry that literally pops off the page! Using the Pages App, students authored poems based on historical events. They then took photos collected by Ms. Cook, and created a visual poem with the iMovie App, adding their voice and music. To top that off, her students used a printed picture to trigger an Aura using the Aurasma app that made their visual poem pop right off of the page. Texas History has never been so very magical!
![]() In an effort to better protect our students from inappropriate content we are now requiring ALL devices connected to our network to utilize the EISD SSL decryption certificate. This allows the district to better filter both content and enforce safe search browsing. If you are visiting our schools and want to use your own device, please follow the directions posted here: http://www.eanesisd.net/cert
Super readers have Super Powers! First graders in Ms. Guthrie's class honed their Reading Super Powers in class today. Using Reading Street's leveled readers, iFiles, and the Explain Everything app, students practiced pacing, self-correction, using context clues, decoding skills, and reading with expression. To do this, students opened a PDF version of a leveled reader in Explain Everything and used the pointer tool (there are several options including a Light Saber!) to track what they were reading (see student directions). Students were able to record and listen to themselves reading. They could then apply their Reading Super Powers to become more fluent readers. Ms. Guthrie can now listen with her students to set individual goals, students can work in partners to review each other's reading powers and students can load the book a second time to re-record so they can hear their super reading powers improve! Go Super Readers!
Letters lurk everywhere! Kindergartners in Ms. Krost, Ms. Plevich and Miss Hester's classes have alphabet book fever! Inspired by the original BPE ABC book project, these 5 and 6 year olds studied the genre of ABC books and noted how authors use text, font, color, alliteration, quotation marks and big vocabulary to write an ABC book. Using their iPads to capture hidden letters, our students hunted down very sneaky letters hiding in the halls, walls, and play spaces of Bridge Point. Check out their adventures by viewing the Animoto Videos and see their photos and writing in their beautiful ABC books below!
![]() This week's hAPPy Friday App SnAPPshot is Videolicious. Videolicious is a free iOS app for creating videos on the go. The concept behind Videolicious is similar to that used by services like Animoto. With Videolicious on your iPhone or iPad, you can mix together images, video clips, music and your voice to create a short video. Check out the App Integration Snapshot for a quick how-to. Thanks Margie Brown! |
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