SMARTBoard Blog

Here is a great link for those of you that use the SMARTBoard: "Teachers Love SMARTBoards"

This is a great blog for teachers who like to use the SMARTBoard in their classrooms or would like ideas, lessons, or resources to help them get started.

Holiday Links

Recently, my posts have been more philosophical in nature, but sometimes it is nice to just share fun links with each other. And, since it is the time of year to give, here are my three favorite sites for the season:

1. Make Your Own Snowflake - This site allows you to cut-out a snowflake online. Then, you can save your snowflake to have on your computer or print at a later time. I have done this site with my own 3 and 5 year old boys and then we cut-out real paper snowflakes together. This is a site that kids and adults can enjoy!

Link: http://snowflakes.lookandfeel.com/

2. Elf Snowball Fight - This site is from the Elf movie with Will Ferrell and Bob Newhart. You can throw snowballs at any of the elves, but be careful not to hit Santa! Again, a nice activity for everyone of all ages!

Link: http://www.elfmovie.com/swf/snowball_fight/index.html


3. Elf Yourself - or someone you know! This is a cute site for adults that allows you to turn yourself, or someone you know, into an elf. You can upload as many as four faces, record voices and send your dancing elves to all of your friends! Moms and Dads can have fun with the whole family choosing pics of each other and watching the end result. Here is my family doin' a dance!

Link: http://www.elfyourself.com/

So...hope you enjoy some of my favorite holiday sites this year! If you have any, I'd love to see them!

Is it Better to Give or Receive?

Wow! Where does the time go! Here we are nearing the end of the first trimester already and it seems as though the year had just started a few days ago!

With the holidays approaching, I have been thinking about the theme of giving. Surely, regardless of the holidays we celebrate, there is an exchange of gifts. Some small and some large. There are gifts that we give that are lavishly expensive, while others come with no monetary cost but are invaluable to those that receive them.

So, at this time of year, I would like to invite you to participate in a virtual, online Pollyanna (of sorts) Traditional Pollyanna gift exchanges would require names to be placed in a hat and drawn at random. Then, you would give a gift to the person listed on the piece of paper you blindly chose. Usually there is a set maximum value placed on what you will spend and it would culminate with all getting together to exchange the gifts.

For our Pollyanna, I say we do this:

1. Everybody's name is in the hat, but instead of choosing one name, you choose everyone's name.

2. The gift that you give should cost you no more than $0

3. Instead of one day to exchange our gifts, we can give our gifts any day between now and our holiday break.

4. The meeting place: you guessed it....right here!

So, what gifts can we give to each other? Well....it's up to you. Maybe you could share a strategy that has worked for you in your classroom with a subject area. Maybe you share a story of encouragement...a success for you or someone you know. As teachers in a learning community, we all have gifts to share. The most valuable gifts we have to offer do not have a price tag, but may be just the right gift for all us...invaluable to others.

So...what gift can you give with us this season? I am eagerly anticipating 'opening them up.'

Planting a Seed

Hey there fifth grade! I wanted to thank all of you for the well received session this morning about technology integration. There was a very positive feeling in the room and I was encouraged that all of you came in this morning with an open mind to learn something new. The sharing and collaborating that took place between buildings was impressive, to say the least.

Today's session, though, in my mind was simply planting the seed. The hope is that you were inspired by something you saw or heard and it is only the beginning of what will grow in your own classroom. Please, feel free to contact me (or your technology teacher, for help and support with whatever you decide to do. I will be posting resources and ideas on this blog and mine as the next few weeks move along. My hope is that they will support you, as well.

I look forward to working with you again soon...

The Power of Collaboration and Writing

Okay, I had been modeling lessons on raising the quality of narrative writing using thoughtshots, explode the moment, snapshots, etc. The children had been writing in their notebooks and practicing the techniques and still the pieces were lifeless and NOT what we were hoping to see. Help! What am I supposed to do? Who does a coach go to for coaching? A colleague, another teacher, someone willing to look at student work and see the work with fresh eyes. After we both looked at the work, separately and then together, we came up with a reteaching plan. We wrote our own narrative, re-emphasized the qualities of a good narrative to the group, and had the children locate those qualities in our writing. (One young man questioned my So what? I loved it because it allowed me to ask the kids what they thought it was and gave me a chance to hear ways to revise - which I started to do with them!)
This lesson allowed the students to revisit and relearn, and led to small group instruction around the "story arc"(Les. 11) and "angling the story" (Les. 11). Students began revising by cutting out what was not needed, adding important details, locating the heart of their story, re-planning using a story arc, or examining closely what they had written. The students now have a better reason to add specific details and content. I couldn't have done this without my friend!

Non-Fiction and Reader's Handbook

I am shaking my fist at Outlook and Blogger right now since I have no way to send or upload large files. Here is my attempt around the obstacles.

http://jfranzen.edublogs.org/teachers/non-fiction-preview-2/

Hopefully this works. Click on the link and then click on Non-fiction Preview and it should download.

I have taken transparencies from the Reader's Handbook and scanned them into a SmartNotebook format. This allows you to use the Smartboard and write on the pages and it will automatically save your work. (very similar to an overhead but it's on the computer and I think it is a bit easier to work on and revisit) The scanned transparencies can be a little blurry depending on the size of the projection so it is helpful to have a hard copy available for anything that you might not be able to read.

I have also taken a few lessons from Fletcher and Portalupi and scanned them into SmartNotebook as well if anyone is interested.

Lurking?

There are now many teachers who are members of this blog site, yet most are playing the Lurch role! You always have permission to lurk, but we need to interact too! So, I'm going to get things rolling with a question, and I hope you will decide to contribute a thought, idea or resource to keep the conversation going. All you have to do is click the "comment" link at the bottom-right area below this post. Here we go....

What would you identify as one of your strongest "professional learning moments"? This may have happened in-school, or out-of-school. Please take a moment and write a short comment to share your story.

One moment that comes to mind for me was reading the metaphor of the digital immigrant and digital native set forth by author Marc Prensky. It helped me realize how wide the gap between school and life has become for our students, and heightened my sense of urgency to bridge this gap.