5th graders in Ms. Hughes’s class are creating newspapers as part of a class assignment. Ms. Hughes wanted students to have options in choosing a template so that students didn’t have to create one on their own. Fellow ITRT, Karen Hues shared this link with me that contains a wide selection of newspaper templates which students can make a copy of and use in their Google Drive: https://wghstechwizard.weebly.com/blog/google-docs-newspaper-templates
I dropped the link into the school’s server shortcuts folder. After students logged into their Drive accounts, they accessed the link and selected the template they wanted to use. After they made a copy of the newspaper template, they dragged it into the shared folder we created in their Drive so their teacher would have access to their finished product.
Newspaper Templates
Cells with ClassFlow
The students in Mrs. Elsea’s 5th grade class used ClassFlow to review the parts of plant and animal cells. ClassFlow is similar to Nearpod in that I can send my slides to the students computer and receive student feedback. We began with a Bill Nye video. The video opened on all student laptops so they could use their headphones and listen to the short clip.
Next I shared information slides with the students about the parts of a cell. After each cell part, students had to determine if this cell part was found in both the plant and animal cells. If the organelle was only found in one type of cell, they used the text response to explain.
The students really enjoyed the diagram activity in which they labeled the diagram to show where the different parts of the plant and animal cell were located.
We ended this lesson with a matching activity with the cell vocabulary.
Throughout the lesson, I used the polling and text features to get student’s feedback on how well they liked this lesson in ClassFlow. If you are interested in trying this lesson with your class, create a free account on classflow.com and then click on this link to add the lesson to your resources.
Guess the Main Idea
Mrs. Reed and Mrs. Gerrard’s 1st graders have been practicing with main idea. Today they used Seesaw to draw pictures that would give clues to the main idea. They also recorded their voice to accompany their drawings and asked their classmates to guess their main idea.
The finished pictures and recordings were uploaded to the student folder in Seesaw.
Then the students looked and listened to the clues their classmates had posted and used the comment feature to guess the main idea of their picture.
Lunch Waste Data Collection
The students in Mrs. Wilson’s class have noticed that quite a bit of unopened food items are being thrown away at lunch. Students collected data on the iPads by observing what items were thrown away during lunch and tallying them on a template in Seesaw. After tallying, students recorded their voice explaining what they observed during their time in the cafeteria.
Next the students looked through all of their classmates tally sheets and added up the amount of each item that was thrown out during lunch. They used Google Sheets to enter the data and create a bar graph. The finished bar graphs were saved as images and uploaded to Seesaw.
Animal Books in Book Creator
The students in Mr. Jones’s 1st grade class at Greenwood conducted research on an animal of their choice using books from the library and PebbleGo. Today they published the information they found by writing a book in Book Creator. Using the app on the iPads students typed their information and added pictures/illustrations to their story. Next they used the voice recording feature to read the text on each page.
The finished stories were exported as a video file and transferred to the teacher computer using SendAnywhere. Take a look at couple of their finished stories.
Butterfly Life Cycle with WeVideo
The 3rd grade students have been learning about life cycles. In extended day at Glen Lea, Fair Oaks, and Montrose students learned how to make their own movie using pictures from Britannica Image Quest and adding a voice over. They first selected pictures to show the different stages of the butterfly life cycle. Then they uploaded the images into WeVideo and recorded their voice explaining the life cycle. Take a look at this finished movie.
Phases of the Moon in Scratch
Mrs. Baum’s 4th grade science students have been learning about the phases of the moon. We began by looking at a document that showed the phases of the moon for January 2018. Students referred back to this page while they coded their projects.
To demonstrate their understanding, students created an animation in Scratch to label the moon phases. They started by finding a picture of the moon phases in Britannica Image Quest. They upload that image as a background in Scratch. Next students selected a sprite and programmed their character to glide to each phase of the moon and use the say block to identify each moon phase.
Take a look at this finished work sample!
1st Grade Animated Services
First graders at Holladay Elementary have been learning about goods and services (SOL1.7), so today, students in Ms. Wimmer’s class created animated services with ABCYa! Animate. First, we discussed the differences between goods and services and identified various jobs that provide services (fireman, policeman, doctor, nurse, dentist, teacher, barber, plumber, etc). The students chose a service they wanted to animate, and we headed over to ABCYa! Animate to draw a picture of a big head. We wanted it to be big so we could show the mouth moving. I explained that they could add a hat to show the uniform, but I don’t think anyone did that. Next, we used the Copy Cat button to make a copy of the face. We deleted the mouth (with the X tool) and drew another mouth in a different shape to make it look like it was talking. I showed them various mouth shapes for making different sounds (Oh, EE, L, F, Th, etc). We noticed that in some mouth shapes you can see the teeth or tongue. After making a couple of additional copies of the face with different mouth shapes, we pressed the Loop button (so it repeated) and exported it as an animated GIF. Now it was time to add the voice. We used Vocaroo to make an mp3 recording of the students explaining the services. Then we posted our animations and recordings on a Padlet. I combined them all into a video that you can see here. Later, I realized it might be easier to upload the animated GIFs to WeVideo and record a voiceover there. I’ll try that in another lesson!
3rd Grade Life Cycle Movies
Third graders at Holladay Elementary have been studying animal life cycles (SOL3.8b), so today students in Ms. Haley’s class researched an animal life cycle of their choice and created a video about it. I asked them to pick an animal they were curious about. To help spark their curiosity, I asked questions like: Do sharks lay eggs? What does a baby firefly look like? Do jellyfish go through metamorphosis? Once they had their ideas I gave them a few minutes to research online. We discussed reliable and unreliable websites: encyclopedias, museums, and science websites would be reliable, whereas a personal website or blog would be less reliable. I also explained how to tell the difference between real photos and fake photos. A real photo will have several examples that look similar. For example we did a search for “jellyfish eggs” (they don’t lay eggs) and found an image of a fried egg jellyfish (which isn’t quite what we were looking for, but it’s an actual thing). A better search phrase would be “life cycle of a jellyfish” (we discovered that its life cycle is quite complicated). After the students gathered their facts and photos, we logged into WeVideo with their Google accounts. We switched to Storyboard mode, which is simpler, by clicking the three lines at the top left. I demonstrated how to import their photos with the green cloud icon, and we changed the title of our video. Next, the students recorded an introduction using the webcam feature. We dragged our photos from the media folder down into the timeline and recorded a voiceover. Finally we selected a theme with music, turned down the volume of the music so it didn’t drown out our voiceovers, and published our videos. You can see them all here.
Northeast FlipGrid
The students in Mrs. Elsea’s 5th grade class have been studying the Northeast Region in Social Studies. Today she asked them to share their ideas as to why the Northeast region is so densely populated. Flipgrid allows students to record a quick video to explain their thoughts about a topic. After they record, they can take a picture and decorate with stickers. The students loved this resource! Check out their flipgrid board.
