It was all hands on deck in the Elementary School this afternoon as we tried to make 1000 paper cranes as a symbol of peace, health and happiness for the people of Japan. Over the past week and a half, the ES, MS & HS have been running various fundraisers to raise money for those living in the devastated by earthquake and tsunami parts of Northern Japan. Here’s one Grade 3′s class effort, folding as many paper cranes as we could in an hour.
The power of your personal network really shines through when you share. 
Today I shared 10 minutes of my time by skyping into @jasongraham99′s staff meeting in Jakarta, and sharing “3 apps and a tip” for the iPad. I have to say it was pretty hard to narrow the choice down to only 3 apps (so during the “tip” I managed to sneak in another app!).
By using the document camera, the iPad and the share screen function of the Skype (for Mac), I was able to demo the apps and the tips really clearly.
So what did I share?
App 1: Idea Sketch FREE
- fantastic for brainstorming, can email ideas, save to photos. It lets you easily draw a diagram – mind map, concept map, or flow chart – and convert it to a text outline, and vice versa.
App 2: Chicktionary FREE
-excellent vocabulary/spelling “game” – remember when the teacher put up a word on the board & you had to see how many words you could make from the letters – well this is it iPad style and it’s one of my FAVOURITES!
App 3: Talking Tom FREE
-demo-ed how you can video “Talking Tom” - great for students who are learning English or any other language for that matter, great for reluctant speakers (remember using “puppets”?) who don’t like to talk to “others” but for some reason they love to talk to Tom! The video could easily be a record of oral progress! (Once you get over the initial giggles of course!)
Tip: Install iBooks and get the iPad User Guide as a free download because it’s got a tonne of tips in there! (see how I sneakily got that extra app in there!!)
Here’s an extra link – just for you dear reader(s) – download this awesome FREE PDF from makeuseof.com with a wealth of tips & tricks for the iPad.
I did show how you can tap a word in iBooks and you can instantly look up the meaning of that word, and I did show how to do a screenshot of anything on the iPad by holding down the home button and the power button at the same time (& the images automatically ends up in photos) so I guess that I snuck in 2 extra tips as well!! My mother always told me I was not a very good counter!
What would you share if @jasongraham99 asked you to skype into his next staff meeting?
So I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few days about blogging – or my LACK of it – and wondering why there’s a LACK of it, ways that I can change this slack LACK-of-blogging habit, I have so easily fallen into, and involving myself in lots and lots of looking at how my favourite bloggers appear to be so prolific!
And I know what it is …….. when I’m excited about something ……. I want to share it! So here’s something that I’m very excited about! I’ve been working with Grades 2 and 3 recently, using Compfight to find creative commons images for their poetry – and teaching them about attribution at the same time. Yes, these gorgeous little 8/9 year olds know the word attribution and they know it means giving credit to someone whose work you’ve used. Bless their hearts, they’ve followed cheat sheets, ask questions and really tried hard to search on compfight, download images to the desktop, rename files, copy URLs, copy Usernames or Real Names and paste them on the last slide of their powerpoints!
In Grade 5, there’s image searching going on for presentations for the Sustainability unit and of course there’s a tonne of blogging going in this grade, as well as Grade 4 & two classes in Grade 3, so I’m always reminding everyone about Creative Commons & Attribution – making tutorials, creating cheat sheets and writing blog posts on embedding and attributing correctly. All while, mainly using compfight – I do love this site very much – I really do. (And it’s still a great site if you need to download the image files for use in offline presentation such as powerpoint/keynote etc)
But now, tonight, through twitter (thanks to the fabulous Ms Tara aka @bookchica retweeting @colingally) I’ve gone to Technology Coach heaven – and compfight has been toppled! (well for embedding creative commons images & attribution in a blog post!)
For bloggers, it’s SO simple, so easy and only 4 steps from finding a creative commons image to embedding it in a post for your blog!!
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Step 4
Unbelievably easy and PERFECT for little bloggers! Wylio – you rock!!
Of course, in this ever changing world of technology – Wylio has changed slightly since I first posted about it!
Due to it’s growing popularity ….. Wylio now requires you to create a free account & login to use. You can use your google account if you have one!
My advice, for classroom teachers would be to create a class google account for Wylio – one email address, one password – for the whole class to remember.
(A class google account can come in handy for all kinds of other things in the classroom – another blog post for later).
Thanks Alan Levine (aka: Cogdog) sharing Pummelvision – a super easy way to showcase your flickr photos with a few clicks. Here’s my latest 2000 photos ………..
Best purchase after three glorious weeks back in my home country – this book (and it’s accompanying CD)!
If you loved Pete the Cat, then you will just love this gorgeous book by this clever New Zealand guy: Chris Smith!
You can listen to Craig sing his way through the story here:
I only bought one copy and I’m wishing I’d bought one more for my fabulous colleague, Miss Tara – our Learning Hub Librarian Extraordinaire! Thank goodness it’s available through Amazon!!
She’s just spend all morning reading it to the Kinders and Grade 1! It was great when I walked into the Hub later in the morning and two little Kinders rushed up and said that they LOVED the Wonky Donkey book I’d bought – especially the part where he farts!” Made my day – hope the Wonky Donkey makes yours!
When my good friend Melanie Holtsman from Chets Creek Elementary asked me if I could help connect her with some teachers here at ISB, to record questions for one of the co-authors, Ruth Ayres, of a new book out called, Day by Day: Refining Writing Workshop Through 180 Days of Reflective Practice, how could I resist?
Skype enables us to experience such great learning opportunities and it was a lot of fun connecting people across the world. On top of that, we also got some answers & tips to some questions that we have about the Writer’s Workshop model. ISB is not as far along in their workshop model journey as Chets Creek Elementary, so it was great to hear questions that Chets Creek Elementary teachers had for Ruth Ayres.
Here’s the video Melanie created of all our questions and Ruth’s answers for us. I’m sure that you’ll get something out of it, especially if your school uses the Writer’s Workshop model.
A Conversation with Ruth Ayres from Melanie Holtsman on Vimeo.
As we prepare to pilot iPads in our lower grades next semester, the wonderful Ms Cofino posted a link to this great iPad video. Merry Christmas everyone!
We’re trying to encourage our students to use their blogs to write reflectively, as we lean more and more towards using the blogging platform as a suitable “container” for ePortfolios. Below is a post that we’re sharing with our G4 and G5 student bloggers. I’d like to adapt it for our G3 student bloggers as well. What do you think? What’s missing?
Not sure what to write for a reflection post? Here’s a few questions you could ask yourself to help you get started! Some are more suited to Writer’s Workshop or Reader’s Workshop reflections. Some are suitable for Science, Social Studies or Math reflections. Choose the ones that work best for what you would like to say about your learning.
Instead of a question, you could try some of these sentence starters
Or you could try this: (adapted from Service Learning)
What?
—What happened?
—What did you observe?
So What?
—Did you learn a new skill or clarify an interest?
—Did you hear, smell, or feel anything that surprised you?
—How is your experience different from what you expected?
—What impacts the way you view the situation/experience? (What lens are you viewing from?)
—What did you like/dislike about the experience?
Now What?
—What seem to be the root causes of the issues you experienced? OR
—What seem to be the root causes of the issue addressed in this project/learning?
—What other work are you doing help address the difficulties you experienced? OR
—What other work is currently happening to address the issue?
—What learning occurred for you in this experience?
—How can you apply this learning?
—What would you like to learn more about, related to this project/piece of learning?
—What follow-up is needed to address any challenges or difficulties you had with this project/learning?
—What information can you share with your peers/teachers/family?
—If you could do the project/learning again, what would you do differently?
REMEMBER
These questions/sentence starters are just a guide to help you get started.
Reflection Image: 
Some rights reserved by David July
Ever had those resource DVDs that you wish you didn’t have to locate, carry around with you and insert into your drive when you want to use the resources?? Or do you have to share a resource DVD with teachers/colleagues in your team or division?
Today I learnt, from my support staff in EdTech, how to copy a resource DVD so I no longer needed to have the actual disc with me!
Here’s how to do it in 3 easy steps: (Mac instructions – if you’re a PC user & know how to do this on a PC, please leave a comment!)
Step 1:
Step 2:
Step 3:
Now you have a .dmg file on your computer that will “mount” just like an app when you click on it! Awesome ay!!
In case you missed it, my presentation for the Kicking it up a Notch strand of the K-12 Online Conference 2010, went “live” tonight. You can watch it here, or head on over the K-12 Online Conference Ning & watch it there. There’s a discussion forum available too, where you can leave comments, thoughts and questions if you want. The resources mentioned in the presentation can be found at the Learning Highway wiki.
It was fun making the presentation, and I learnt a lot more about iMovie 09 than I ever thought I could. I didn’t like iMovie 09 much when it was first released, but now I’m feeling a lot more comfortable with it and I like it’s features. I especially enjoyed getting the hang of the “picture inside a picture” feature!
