I Can Symbaloo Too!

So after my plea for help yesterday, Mrs. Kennedy reminded me that I read about Symbaloo from Wiggins World. I try to have 2 days a week where students go to the computers just to work on science or social studies concepts. I use webquests, powerpoints, interactive flipcharts, and bookmark a few sites. I love the idea of Symbaloo because my school system ghosts our computers every night so if I bookmark sites the day before, the links are most likely gone the next day. With Symbaloo, my links are safe! Yeaaaay!


I made my first Symbaloo on heat (Ga. 3rd grade material). I can't wait to use it in the classroom!

You Tube: You Scare Me

The world is a crazy place, and You Tube seems to be a smorgasbord for craziness. It's a great educational tool, but you have to be very careful when using it in the classroom. Case in point, I wanted to use this short video about Susan B. Anthony in social studies, but notice the sidebar...."I need to poop". I have a feeling that my entire social studies class would have ended with every single student exchanging bathroom jokes, and very few able to talk about the amazing work of Susan B. Anthony.

This is where Quietube comes in. <<Sidenote: Didn't even notice the comment in the You Tube comment box above!  Sheesh! >>>  Quietube is free, and really easy to use, especially on Mozilla Firefox. You simply go to quietube.com....the screen looks like this:
































You follow the directions and drag the quietube button up to your toolbar (favorites bar on Firefox) and viola!  Now, when you are on You Tube and want to use a video in class, you simply click your Quietube button you saved on your favorites toolbar and it magically transforms it to something like this:
That's it.  No comments. No side bar naughtiness.  The links can still be used in slideshows and interactive whiteboard files too....and blogs! Here's the link to the video in the post, check it out!

Hispanic Heritage

I love learning more about different cultures, and I especially love seeing my Hispanic students beam as we highlight their heritage during September. I found an interactive concentration game that reviews Spanish vocabulary on Scholastic. It's an easy, fun way to help those students who have struggled to learn English get to shine with proficiency at using their Spanish language!

Keeping it positive, digital style

 My school has an adopted Positive Behavior Support system called Trojan GOLD. GOLD is an acronym for Give respect, Own your behavior, Listen and learn, and Do your best. We have little paper tickets we give out when we see students demonstrating Trojan GOLD behavior. The data on discipline referrals shows this system is working well at my school, and it works very well in my classroom too.

I came across ClassDojo from Kleisnpiration and have been using for a few weeks now. My students love it! Check this out:

 

This are the student avatars. You can run the program from your computer, your interactive whiteboard, or even link up your phone. I found enough "monsters" to give each student their own monster. 

These are the behaviors you are tracking. As you can see, you decide what behaviors to track, and you choose an avatar to symbolize each behavior. You can track positive only, or positive and negative. When you award a student a point, you will hear a "ping", but only if you want. Sound is optional too.  

As far as the negative sound, I've seriously thought about creating an extra make believe student to give negative behaviors too on occasion, just so the kids can hear the "buzzer" sound. I gave a negative before a few times this year and every child in the class was frozen for a split second and then worked at a level of diligence I've never seen. It was amazing, and kinda funny.

 Another great aspect is the data break down. This is my class's weekly report card. It lets me and the students see where we are and what we need to work on. We looked at this yesterday and my students wanted to set a goal of having "more helping others' and no "talking". Me too kids, meeee tooooo! ;)

 You can also look at each individual student (and print for conferences).

If you aren't fond of the monsters, you can change the avatar. I changed mine Friday afternoon to our school mascot. I don't know how the students will react, but I just wanted to try something new.

 As I mentioned before, you can use your phone too. I do this...a lot. I have classdojo running, but minimized on my Promethean board. I give points on my phone, and the "ping" is heard through my classroom speakers and it's an audible reminder and helps students refocus. I give points in the hall, the cafeteria, etc. I still carry around the paper Trojan GOLD tickets to give out to other classes or if my battery is dead (it is a droid after all).  At the end of the day, we open up Classdojo and if a child has 2 points, they get 2 paper tickets to add to their "bank". They save them up and exchange them for tangible and intangible rewards. Up until this point it's kind of a mystery who has been getting the points, because they are only hearing the ping. This helps me so much! It helps me distribute more evenly, make sure those sweet little babies who never make a peep are never left out, and it helps me make sure I'm not over-rewarding my high flyers for every good decision they make, which was happening when I was just giving paper tickets.

I hope you try Class Dojo. I've gotten personal responses to emails from the owners and they are super guys who really "get" teachers and our needs. Let me know if you do, and how you are using it!

Interactive Story Map

I found a great resource to share! ReadWriteThink.org has a great set of student interactives, including graphic organizers such as story maps.






Each map gives prompts to help students be more descriptive, and the maps can be customized to include setting, character, conflict, &/or resolution. That is a great option for differing groupings on the same book.

To explore the interactives on this site go to ReadWriteThink and click on "Classroom Resources" on the tab at the top. There is a lot of great resources there, including this and other "Student Interactives".

If you are already familiar with this site, how do you use it in your classroom? I think I'm in love!

I made a glog!

In my search to teach Greece and the roots of democracy this week during social studies, I needed a way to show a few pictures and an audio file of some traditional greek music. I came upon glogster and had my first glog finished in 5 minutes. Easy Peasy!

While I was there, I searched for other topics appropriate for my grade level and found some really neat stuff!

Birth of America: united_states | Glogster EDU - 21st century multimedia tool for educators, teachers and students

Time Management: It's for me as much as it is for them!

 Third grade is so much faster paced that I imagined. My day flies by and if I don't watch it...I get wrapped up in one mini-lesson, or one coaching session, and BOOM! I'm off schedule. I've taken to using Online Stopwatch to help me stay on schedule, and to give the children a visual to know how much time they have left before we transition to our next segment of our day. I use it on my Promethean board, but even if you only had a computer screen, you can adjust the size to fill the screen, and adjust the volume to be loud enough for the class to hear well enough to transition.

Check out the super cool visuals this site offers:

Analog Clock: The time is set automatically, and you set the green hand to be the "stop" time. An alarm will sound when time is up.

We are the BOMB: The fuse burns down then BOOM!

The hand moves and lets students see how much time we've used, and how much we have left. 

Simple digital count down.

 

My favorite: the sand timer. I use a chime at the end, and it's a soothing way to transition.

 Customizable!

The best part is all of this is customizable. You can pick if you want to countdown, or maybe you want to count UP, to track stamina. You can customize the sound of each alarm also.