TRIG: Classroom Readiness T3 January - March 2014

I teach alternative ed, grades 7-12, all subjects using Edgenuity.  We (my partner teacher and I) created a Weebly site to help our students prepare for the ACT.  We thought it was an awesome idea to get them off Edgenuity for a bit and using Weebly while familiarizing themselves with questions from ACT.  Well, the students who cared about their ACT score did the majority of the assignments, the students who could care less about the ACT found it long and pointless and they did little to complete the work.  We even offered credit for completing it and very few actually did.

http://fultonactprep.weebly.com/

Next year, we will use this site for ACT Prep but we will have to possibly shorten the lessons a bit as soem students found it to overwhelming to have to stay on track in their classes AND do this prep work.  We may have to work on Math, then on Reading, then on English instead of all at once in a weekly format like this year.

I teach fifth grade and recently we completed our unit on informational texts. This is a MASIA unit that our district has adopted as part of our full writing curriculum. This year I decided to incorporate a technology piece. The final project was for the students to build an informational book on an American Colonist they were studying in Social Studies. Students spent many days researching their colonist. Students also studied many different types of informational texts to use as models for their own works. Students wrote three different chapters on their colonist as well as an introduction, table of contents, glossary, and title page. Students also were asked to write an "About the Author" page. Students used pre-made templates built on Microsoft Word. Students worked on developing their typings skills as well as finding pictures, writing captions, and developing references to works used to build their works.

Students worked hard writing their informational text. They went through the their writing process of peer revising, editing, and meeting with the teacher before moving on to publishing. After using the template students proceeded to find visuals such as pictures and maps to use with their information.

Once the project was complete I surveyed the students about the lesson. More enjoyed the publishing of their works and finding the different visuals as well as changing the fonts. Some students felt that the templates were easy to use, but others would have liked to develop their pages on their own. Something to think about for next year.

I would like to incorporate the use of Wordle in my preschool classroom.  This would be a great tool to introduce them to for brainstorming ideas we gather from text.  We will be looking at Dr. Seuss this week, so we could gather words or ideas we see often in his stories.  We could put our ideas into Wordle for them to see what some important words or ideas are. 

I haven't used this yet, but I would like to try it over the next week.  This will depend on the availability of technology.  I am limited on technology in my room, so I'm not sure how successful this will be.

I will be receiving an IPAD for my classroom sometime this month (hopefully).  I would like to get the Story Panda App and have my students use it to create different story elements to create individual stories.  We could also use these stories to form opinions and write stories on them.  The students could use kidinspiration for them to come up with opinions and the reason why each student has his/her strong opinion.  

I use Google Drive all the time in my classes.  It is super easy to take a photo from my phone, send it to my drive, and then open the photo onto my smartboard.  The whole process takes seconds.  People rave about Apple products, but a phone or tablet running Android as just as many great features.  
For example, if I want to use a section of a student's writing as an example, snap a shot and throw it onto the board.  If we take notes on the whiteboard that I want to reference the next day, a simple picture and to the Drive it goes.