Mrs. Foster and Her Awesome 4th Graders!!!

The following are videos produced by Mrs. Foster and her 4th grade students to show how they learned by using technology this school year! Enjoy!

SMART Board

Computer Lab and Media Center

Clickers and Webcam

Chalkboard and Spelling Aces

Living History Day Video

Living History Day Pictures

Here are some pictures from our wonderful Living History Day for our 4th Graders here in North Platte, NE. They all had an opportunity to spend the day at Buffalo Bill’s Scout’s Rest Ranch and visit the local historical museum and exhibits. Enjoy!

Teach Programming K-12+ for FREE!!!

Carnegie Mellon University offers a FREE programming language along with teaching tools called Alice:

“Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience.”

“Alice is a teaching tool designed as a revolutionary approach to teaching and learning introductory programming concepts. The Alice team has developed instructional materials to support students and teachers in using this new approach. Resources include textbooks, lessons, sample syllabuses, test banks, and more. Other authors have generously joined our efforts, creating additional textbooks.”

There are separate programs geared toward college, high school, and middle school students and can be downloaded for your use today! Another FREE good programming opportunity for younger students can be found via MIT’s Scratch. With these offerings combined a school district can offer programming opportunities K-12 at minimal cost!!!

First Grade Slideshows (2/15 Updated final drafts!!!)

Kidspiration Resources

Kidspiration is a wonderful program that boosts kids creativity! Here are some resources that can help you get started once you have the program (You can download a free trial from the Kidspiration site)!

Atomic Learning Tutorials

Mac

Kidspiration

Kidspiration 2

Windows

Kidspiration

Kidspiration 2

Osgood Elementary Music

Osgood Elementary Christmas Concert 3rd-5th Grades

Early Childhood Links

Early Childhood Resources PBWiki Page

Early Childhood Resources Wikispaces Page

Some Videos

Video blocked!?!  Try this link!!!

NPHS Mixed Choir “Amazing Grace” (10/16/2007)

Great Platte River Road Archway Slideshow (11/2/2007)

Making Corn Husk Dolls 4th Grade Field Trip (11/2/2007)

Native American Pictographs Podcast (11/2/2007)

Native American Sign Language and Pictographs (View at TeacherTube)

Cornucopia

I have been involved in a “cornucopia” of events, tasks, meetings, trainings, and decisions over the past few days. Monday consisted of virtual mentor training with administrators in the district and CPS clicker system training for staff at one of our middle schools. I have been piecing together technology “equipment” orders in between solving multimedia issues, and we trained for deploying parent portal access to our web-based student management system to be done next week during the middle and elementary schools’ parent teacher conferences. I visited a second grade classroom and observed a lesson that was facilitated with clickers. I “fixed” a SMART Board today, and had many wonderful, thoughtful, and vital discussions about the future of education and technology’s role in the process. There are so many things that happen during each week and it is exciting to be a part of it all. Tomorrow I have the pleasure of travelling with two fourth grade classes on a field trip as their podcaster. I plan to use Gcast, iTalk devices with iPods, and of course we will piece together video clips for a future final product. Maybe a “cornucopia” isn’t the proper term to use for all of this, but hey, ’tis the season, and I am thankful for all of these opportunities. Peace!

NPPSD Embedding Technology

Blogging Showcase

Here are some bloggers from my district. Each in their own way are using blogging as a tool to help their students. Enjoy!

mallberr’s weblog

Madmathteacher’s Blog

Lori Brouillette’s Weblog

Bulldogs

Irish Principal Blog

8 Blue

Smart Tools for Smart Kids

Today I had the opportunity to be part of a SMART Board training with two of the elementary schools in my district. I am continually uplifted by the dedication and willingness to learn and share that the teachers and administrators exhibit.

After I went over some basics of using the SMART Board we split into five groups and spent a lot of time gaining hands on experience. Each school had their experts that really know their stuff, and the SMART resources that were shared are great tools. I also shared several online activities that I have collected over time that work well with interactive SMART Boards (See my wikis!!!).

The following are links to some of the resources we tapped into today:

SMART Board 2 Minute Video Tutorials

SMART Education Resources (Grade level lessons & more!!!)

SMART Board Training Printable Materials

Revisiting Sir Ken Robinson…

I keep coming back to Sir Ken Robinson’s speech “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”  I watched it again and share it here:

Tux Typing & Tux Math

Open source typing and math programs (FREE)!!!

Tux Typing

Tux Math

Plus, find loads more educational open source software at School Forge!!!