Student Blogging

Recently, I announced that I will be presenting at the European Council of International Schools’ (ECIS) Technology conference. My presentation will be called Using Technology to Create Community. I will be sharing websites that can be used to create community and I have a special way I’d like to get all of the teachers in the “blogosphere” and beyond to truly show those at the conference what a global community can do for teachers and students. I’ll have more details on this February 27th. In the meantime, each week, I will be sharing with you all some of the websites I will be discussing in my presentation.

This week’s website is timely for me, because my students just started using it this week.  It is called edublogs.org and it allows my students (grades 2 - 4) to write their own blog post and comment on each others posts in a simple, safe way.

Now, I’m a cheap teacher, so I helped my students each sign up for individual free accounts, but there are fee based teacher programs that allow for simpler monitoring of your students and higher connectivity levels.  For my class, it works just as well for me to keep a copy of everyone’s passwords and monitor the blogs individually.

Edublogs runs on the same online formatting as a Wordpress blog, which is very simple to set up, design and post to.  There are many free themes for students to choose from (and plenty more available if you are willing to pay for an upgraded membership.)  The students can write posts, add pictures, click publish and their work is out on the internet and ready for the world to read.

My students are writing their blog posts at home - one blog post a week, and then posting two comments on their friends’ blogs.  We’ve been posting comments on each other’s storybirds for awhile, so my students are pretty good at leaving comments.  They love reading each other’s work, and are starting to suggest topics to each other, both in their comments and in class.  I love that homework becomes a group activity, instead of an isolated practice.  However, since I have varying levels of technology knowledge in my class, I was sure to provide as much assistance as possible by:

1. Modeling the entire process for the entire class using our projector.

2.  Providing my students with a cheat sheet full of screen shots to help guide them at home.  (If you’d like a copy, feel free to download it free from Google Docs.)

3.  Being available on Edmodo on the first night of posting and commenting, so that I could quickly respond to questions.

The coolest part of having programs where they can read each other’s work at home is that the classroom naturally flows into their home lives and their home lives naturally flow into the classroom.  This community building helps our class discussions to focus on topics that are interesting to the students, which of course means that students learn and remember more.

How have you used student blogging in your classroom?

TESOL Teaching Tip #44 - Do You Call it a Basket, a Buggy, a Cart or a Trolley?

As a teacher at an International School, many of my students are English Language Learners. Even my native English speakers are living in a non-English speaking country. Due to my unique teaching position, I have had some readers ask for tips on teaching English Language Learners. Here is this week’s Tuesday TESOL Teaching Tip:

ELL Teaching Tip #44: Teach Dialectal Words

On the playground today, one of my students was pushing the plastic shopping cart around telling the other students to “Move, move, the trolley’s coming through!” Another student, who is just learning English, quickly responded with “It’s not a trolley, it’s a cart!”  This quickly proceeded into an argument which I got to break up.  It was a great teaching moment though, as we got to discuss how different regions had different words for the same item.  This got me thinking about how we teach homonyms regularly, but rarely talk about how regional dialects can also affect language.  So my ELL Tip for this week is to help your students explore dialectal differences in language.
My hypothesis is that the main reason most teachers don’t teach dialectal differences is that many of us, as adults, are not aware of the differences unless they have lived in or been exposed to different dialects of English.  So, here are some websites to help you familiarize yourself with some dialects of English:
British English vs. American English
Australian English vs. American English
South African English Regionalism
Regionalism in American English
Choose a few key regional vocabulary differences and talk about these differences with your students.  If you start by introducing your students to just a few differences, it will open their mind to the idea of one item having many words to describe it.  Then, as words come up in books or movies, you can come back to this point regularly.  It also helps to read books with your class where regional dialects come up.  (This is a great time to talk about author’s voice too.)
I personally speak with a Northern US regional dialect, what dialect of English do you speak with?




Do you enjoy the weekly TESOL Teaching Tips? Would you like to view an hour long presentation on this topic? I recently presented on Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners at the Everything’s Intermediate Expo. Now you can grab the presentation for just $3.95 from Teacher’s Notebook.


Find more TESOL Teaching Tips here, and come back every Tuesday for a new tip!

Calendar Book Updates

This year is my first time teaching British math standards, and wowzers are they more intense!  Our adopted program – Abacus Evolve, moves at a quick pace, but it cycles around so that my students get to come back to the key concepts multiple times.  As a supplement, my students also use my Problem Solving Path Program and Calendar Books with a review of number sense concepts, to give my students a nice, well rounded program.  However, none of my current calendar levels were really intense enough for my 4th graders (Year 5 UK) in this program, so I added two additional levels, which added concepts like doubling and halving numbers, multiplying and dividing by 10 and 100, and working on elapsed time.

                        

These new levels have really helped my students continue on with their math standards by practicing these in our daily review during calendar math.  I uploaded these two new levels into my existing calendar math book program, so if you’ve already purchased it, stop by my Teachers Pay Teachers store to download the newest updates.  If you haven’t grabbed these yet, there are now 2 more levels at the exact same price!

Teaching Economics with PlayDough

My class is studying Africa.  We have talked about the geography of the continent, the history of the continent, the landforms of the continent, the animals and plants of the continent, the arts of the continent and the economic factors of the continent.  Of all of these concepts, economic factors were the hardest for my students to understand.  In an effort to help my students understand some of the basic concepts of economics, we played a game this week called Snakes and Donuts.  (I cannot claim this idea, I picked it up from a county workshop a long time ago.)  Here’s how you play:
1.)  You will need:  playdough - the more colors of playdough you can use, the better the game goes, unshaprened pencils or markers and a timer.
2.)  Students will play in multiple rounds. Each round will have different rules. Play each round as many times as possible before moving on to the next round.
3.)  During each round, students will use the playdough to create snakes – which must be as long as the unsharpened pencil or markers, and donuts – which is a complete snake wrapped around to make a circle.


4.)  You can change rounds as quickly or as slowly as possible.  You can play all on one day, or play one round a day, depending on your schedule.
5.)  After students get the general concept, you can introduce different point values for different size snakes and donuts, or different colors of playdough.  My students then moved on to a 2 minute round – 1 minute of trading and 1 minute of creating.  Students can also play rounds where they work in pairs or groups.

6.)  After each round, stop to talk about student and teacher observations.  This is the time to introduce that economic vocabulary:  natural resources, human resources, trade policies, supply and demand, value etc.

For some suggested rounds, download my Snakes and Donuts Instruction sheet from Google Docs for free.

ISM Spotlight–Making Eric Carle letters

This year I am the luckiest teacher in the world.  I get to teach at the best school ever – International School of Morocco, with some of the best, most creative, teachers ever.  Each time I walk into someone else’s classroom, I get inspired and we just seem to spiral great teaching ideas off of each other.  It’s a wonderful place to teach, and since we are all collaborating, it’s a wonderful place for our kids to learn – a teacher’s dream, right?  I have tried and tried to convince the other teachers to create blogs of their own to spotlight and share some of their amazing ideas, but everyone is super busy.  Instead, they have each agreed to let me spotlight some of their ideas right here on Raki’s Rad Resources.  So, each Friday night, I will be posting an ISM Spotlight. 

This week, we are spotlighting Jen Kadiri, our Pre-K teacher.  Jen teaches the 3 year old class, and does the most amazingly cute, hands-on art projects.  I don’t know how she got brave enough to use paint, collage, and glitter with three year olds, but the results are amazing and the topics she covers amaze me regularly.

Pre-K has been working on recognizing colors and the letters in their first name.  Ms. Kadiri read Eric Carle’s book Brown Bear Brown Bear to the students, and then they created Eric Carle letters for the first letters of their name and the letters of our school – ISM.  She says that she was inspired by a blog post at the Imagination Tree, which she found on Pinterest.  Here’s what they did:

1.)  They painted on tissue paper with paintbrushes, bristle blocks, legos and their fingers.  (Finger painting with 3 year olds – I told you she’s brave!)  After the paper dried, the kids cut the paper into small “collage size” pieces. 

 

2.)  Ms. Kadiri created cutouts of the letters in the students names, and the letters that represent our school – ISM.

 

3.)  The kids glued their collage size pieces all over their letters.

4.)  Ms. Kadiri went back and trimmed off the excess of the tissue paper to great easy to read letters.

 

5.)  The kids spent a lot of time identifying which letters belong to which kids, and then coming up with other words that also had those letters in them.  For example, Robert’s R could also stand for the pet rabbits that the students visit during recess.

 

Update:  Mrs. Kadiri’s class had a lot of extra paper left over, so Mrs. Kadiri turned it into a sorting exercise.  The students sorted all of the paper into color piles.  Then, Mrs. Kadiri drew out the Rooster from   Rooster’s Off to See the World, which they had just read.  With the students telling her what colors they saw in the rooster on the cover, she shaded the right colors into the drawing.  The kids then matched their carefully sorted piles onto the drawing.  Here’s their finished product, it’s quite amazing!

 

Come back next Friday to find out what the other ISM teachers are up to.

7 FREE iPad Apps to Use as a Ticket Out the Door

Today, I have a the honor of being the January Featured Teacher at Angela Watson’s blog: The Cornerstone with my post on making every moment a learning moment.  Stop by her blog for five specific ideas and here’s one more that I just started doing this week.

Using a learning ticket out the door has been around for awhile, but this week, I’ve started using my iPad to help take the prep work out of the ticket process.  One of my complaints about many iPad apps is that they are just big quizzes.  However, since that is exactly what I need for a quick ticket out the door, I finally put two and two together this week and started standing at the door with my iPad instead of a set of index cards with questions.  We have been using a Math Fact App called Flash to Pass this week.  Each student answers one question and we try to get through all of the questions before the timer goes off.  Here are 6 more iPad apps you could use as a ticket out the door:

1.)  Telling Time Free is one of my students’ favorite apps.  It gives an image of an analogue clock and then challenges them to create the matching time on a digital clock.

2.) iLearn Continents and Oceans is an app my kids have played to learn their continents and oceans.  It has a great quiz section that works fabulously as a ticket out the door.  iLearn also has apps for specific areas in the world, but those aren’t free – , so I haven’t tried them out personally.

3.) Action Words is an app I use frequently with my English Language Learners (ESL students).  It shows them four pictures and says an action word.  Students choose the picture which identifies the word.  I love it because there are action words beyond stand, sit, and jump, things like stretching, pointing, praying and exercising.


4.)  My Math App is similar to Flash to Pass.  It allows students to work through randomly generated math facts in any of the four operations.

5.)  Comparative Adjectives is similar to the Action Words app, but it works on things like larger than, more colorful than etc.  Again, this app is wonderful for my English Language Learners (ESL students).

6.)  Grammaroppolis has great quizzes to work on different types of nouns and this site makes a great ticket out the door.  There are other parts of speech available in Grammaroppolis, but they cost money – .

What app could you use for an iPad Ticket Out the Door?

Create Critical Thinking with Storybirds

Last week, I announced that I will be presenting at the European Council of International Schools’ (ECIS) Technology conference. My presentation will be called Using Technology to Create Community. I will be sharing websites that can be used to create community and I have a special way I’d like to get all of the teachers in the “blogosphere” and beyond to truly show those at the conference what a global community can do for teachers and students. I’ll have more details on this February 27th. In the meantime, each week, I will be sharing with you all some of the websites I will be discussing in my presentation.

 

This week’s website is Storybird.  Storybird is a way for students to make and create online storybooks.  The website provides you with many art collections to choose from for your illustrations and with a template for students to write their stories on.  Students can write on a topic of their choosing, or they can write on an assigned topic.  My students have one assignment each week, and I assign it to them right through storybird.  Their directions are inside our class’ section of the website and all of their stories are then grouped together.

When students finish, they can publish their stories, adding them to the wider Storybird community collection, and giving them a URL link that they can share with family and friends.  Here’s how I use storybird to create community for my students:

1.)  Students are encouraged to share their stories with their own family and friends, and links to their weekly stories are published in our e-newsletter.  This allows parents to read not only their own children’s stories, but also the stories of other students in the class.

2.)  My students are required to leave at least two comments each week on stories written by their classmates.  In their comments, they are asked to leave a glow (something they liked a lot) and a grow (something they think their friend can improve upon).  Not only does this build community by exposing students to each other’s ideas and asking them to build a dialogue with their classmates, but it also builds critical thinking skills as we regularly discuss what makes a quality, constructive criticism comment.

3.)  I encourage my students to also read stories that were created by other students around the world by reading stories from the storybird gallery.  They are also allowed to leave comments on these stories.

In addition to being community building, Storybird is also just a great way to get my kids excited about writing.  It works for so many grade levels that I can’t see Storybird being anything but an improvement to each and every classroom.  Oh yeah, the first 60 student accounts are free too!

 

For more websites you can use in your classroom, check out my book Websites for the Elementary Classroom or come back weekly for my Wednesday Website Suggestions.

Five Things to Consider When Contacting Parents

In the next few months, we will have some awesome guest blog posts for you.  I have added 6 hours a week of French lessons to my load, and so I will be less present than normal in an effort to take the time to master this important learning.  In an effort to help me out, I have had some amazing bloggers agree to guest blog for s here on Raki’s Rad Resources.  Today our guest blogger is Mary Baur from Artistry for Education.  She has some great tips for how to make parent – teacher interaction easier.  After you check out her tips, be sure to stop by and check out her blog – Artistry for Education.

 

 

I’m Mary Bauer from Artistry of Education. I have been teaching for twenty-two years in a diverse community, and I have had my share of conflicts with parents. I want to share a few things I have learned to help these relationships go more smoothly.

Be proactive. I start with a parent information form the first week of school. At the top is this sentence: “I believe that a parent is a child’s first and best teacher.” It sets the tone for the year.

Be positive. All families advocate for their children. They just may not approach us in the way we like at the times we like. All families want their students to be successful. We may define success in different ways. Someone who doesn’t seem to cooperate is probably just afraid.

Be predictable. When I transferred to the school where I teach now, I earned the reputation of working well with parents. “You answer our emails,” one parent shared with me. I make it a personal goal to respond to a parent within twenty-four hours. I make sure I am on time to parent meetings. I want parents to know they can trust me with their children. If I put off contacting the parent, the problem generally grows worse.

Be professional. It’s tempting to gossip in the staff lounge and speculate about family backgrounds. The more parents know they can trust me to keep their concerns private, the more they are willing to share with me information that will help me teach their child.

On the other hand, talking with the student’s previous teacher can give you good information to help you this year. Make sure this conversation is private and based on direct observations of the child and parent conferences.

Be prudent. I have had five or so parents in my career that made me uneasy for one reason or another. It is wise to invite another staff member to attend these conferences. Another person can be a buffer in a potential conflict or a neutral witness to what I share with the parent. If you do this, let the parents know who will be attending the conference so they don’t feel cornered.

The other side of this is inviting the parent to bring in someone he or she feels comfortable with. It is tough to receive difficult information without a support system.

While my career is certainly not conflict-free, I can see how the time I invest in communicating with parents helps everyone involved.

 

Mary Baur is a third generation public school teacher who has been in education since 1987. She has taught elementary students full time for the last 20 years. She is also a freelance curriculum writer.

Building Classroom Community with Edmodo

I am so excited to announce that I have been selected as a presenter at the European Council of International Schools’ (ECIS) Technology conference.  My presentation will be called Using Technology to Create Community.  I will be talking about creating community on three levels:

Level 1 – Inside your classroom

Level 2 – Within your school and/or district

Level 3 – Connecting with a global community

 

My presentation date is March 15th, and right before the event, I have a special way I’d like to get all of the teachers in the “blogosphere” and beyond to truly show those at the conference what a global community can do for teachers and students.  I’ll have more details on this February 27th.  In the meantime, each week, I will be sharing with you all some of the websites I will be discussing in my presentation.  All of the websites allow students to build community through their interactive properties.  I would love any feedback you could give me on these sites including ways you have used them, ways you’d like to use them, issues you have had or that you see as a possibility in using these sites, how each site might work at different ages etc.

 

The first website I am going to discuss is Edmodo.  Many teachers that I know use Edmodo for secondary students (middle and high school).  However, at the school where I teach (International School of Morocco), we are using Edmodo with students as young as first grade.  Edmodo is basically an online classroom.  The kids think of it as “Facebook for School”.  You can post discussion questions, quizzes, polls and activities.  Students can respond to your questions, complete confidential quizzes or work through activities.  When students take quizzes, you get instant results, including graphs breaking down which questions were the most missed by your students.  I generally use quizzes for homework, so when I walk in the next morning, I know exactly where to start my lesson, because the data is right in front of me.

The reason I love Edmodo so much is because it allows me to continue interacting with my students after the day is over, without much effort on my part.  All of my students’ homework is posted on Edmodo.  Thanks to their amazing scheduling system, I create it all on Sunday and the posts go out each day as scheduled.  My students respond to posts or take quizzes to complete their homework and I get an e-mail when they do their homework.  Thanks to my outlook folders, these e-mails are sent to a specific folder and I know right away if anyone is stuck or needs help etc. 

Edmodo creates class community by taking things that were once individual activities and presenting them to the group for open response.  For example, instead of a reading log, each night my students post a response to the question “What are you reading tonight?  What is it about?  What text connections have you made with your reading.”  All of the students answer on the same post, so they can see how their answers are similar or different to their classmates.  They also can (and do) respond to their classmates, letting them know if they have read the same book or had a similar connection.

You can also create small groups within Edmodo and thereby differentiation is much easier.  As a teacher of a multi-age class, this make sending the right information to the right students easy as pie.

Another great feature of Edmodo is the ability to upload documents and websites.  You can make these available to the entire class, a small group or specific students.  Gone are the days when students can forget their homework or lose the project sheet, that information is now available to them on any computer or iPad they have access to.  My parents love it because if someone is sick or traveling, there’s no need to come to the school for homework – everything they need is on Edmodo.

Yes, Edmodo even has an iPad app, which has proved extremely useful for my students when it was time for internet research.  All I had to do was create an activity with the project sheet (if you upload it in google docs they can type right on it), and the websites I wanted them to use for their research (with a kid-friendly search engine thrown in for websites outside the realm of the assigned sites.)  Then, my students could grab the iPad in the classroom, hop on one of the computers in the lab or log in on their laptops at home and voila they had all of the information to do their research projects.

 

In addition to creating community for my class, Edmodo also provides me with a community of educators.  There are many forums that allow me to post questions, collaborate with other teachers and network within a community of caring educators.  If you’re on Edmodo, please feel free to connect with me there.  I’d also love it if you leave a comment here about how you use Edmodo in your classroom.

 

For more websites you can use in your classroom, check out my book Websites for the Elementary Classroom or come back weekly for my Wednesday Website Suggestions.