Class Collaboration with Google Presentations

A few weeks ago I attended a tech inservice at school on advanced google apps and learned about Google presentations.  I had the idea that it only contained the common features: text, images, background color, font, sizes, etc. which we already have in our labs’ software (Hyperstudio and Keynote). However, it was nice to discover it can be a useful tool to create collaborative presentations with students.

What makes google presentation a great collaborative tool is that it can be shared and edited by any user even though the editors do not own a google account.  Anyone who clicks on the link may edit the slides. Since my students do not have gmail accounts, this was a terrific opportunity for them to work on a common presentation contributing with their own slides.

The lesson was an introduction to computer parts during our third grade tech class. Kids watched the video “The Magic School Bus Gets Programmed” and paid close attention to all computer parts that were mentioned. Right after the video came a short discussion about those parts. Students then got together in teams of two and worked on a slide using a link I had posted in my schoolworld website. This is the way the slides looked when students saw it first:

When I was creating the document, I set the privacy settings so that anyone with the link could access the presentation and anyone could edit it.

Each slide needed to include: name of computer part, image, description and function. In a few minutes, each group finished their slide and were able to present it within a single presentation right after.

It has been easy and fun to work with google presentations. Normally, students would have worked with separate slides, dragged them into a drop-box, and I would have had to put them together in one presentation.   Using this feature, the presentation was ready as soon as the slides were completed and the students were able to present it in that same period.

Several learnings took place in this collaborative assignment. On one hand, students learned from each other as each team presented their slide.  On the other hand, kids also learned that online web2.0 tools can help them work “together” without having to be in a same physical space.


We did have one little problem to troubleshoot.  To my surprise, the presentation's saving mode initially did not work and students were not being able to save their changes.  Since I had used my  school's google account to create those documents, I tried switching to my personal gmail account, created new presentations, copied the same settings listed above, and then fortunately, everything worked perfectly well!  

If you would like to share your experience using any other collaborative tools in class, please post a comment. I would love reading about it!

Third Graders Searching the Web

At this time of the year, third grade students are working on an exciting non-fiction writing unit in which they do research using the school’s library books. The difference this year is that Internet research is now included in the project.  This gave us, tech teachers, a great opportunity to teach a lesson on safe and useful web searches. In past years, they had only done research using specific websites, so this was actually the first time they were instructed to surf the Internet looking for useful information. Research topics ranged from certain sports to animals, biographies, world cities, space, and even current events.

The tech team came up with the following six different options for students’ research. The options, listed below, were also posted on the Schoolworld website.

Google – Basic Results

http://www.google.com

Students who used Google were initially sent to the Spanish version of the website, probably because it detected the IP address coming from Mexico.  Since we wanted the students to work and look for information in English, we asked them to click on the bottom link:google.com in English. This way, all text and buttons were in English and needed no translation.

The lesson taught students how to use two Google Search features: Safe-search and Basic Reading Level. Third graders followed the next steps to set these up.

Safe Search in Google

Students entered http://www.google.com and clicked on the top-right-side button: Search Settings. A new page appeared and they clicked on the option: Use Strict Filtering under the section SafeSearch Filtering. Then, at the bottom, they clicked on the Save Preferencesbutton.

Basic Reading Level. Students went back to http://www.google.com and clicked on the middle right-side option: Advanced Search. They scrolled down and found the section: Reading level. In there, they selected: show only basic results and then clicked on the button:Advanced Search. Students were then given results they could really understand, but still had the option to move to intermediate and advanced levels if necessary.

Students loved using Google. In most cases, it gave them a variety of websites to research at their own reading level.

Twurdy

http://www.twurdy.com

Twurdy was another favorite.  The results of the search were displayed with different background colors so that students could identify the reading level.  Light backgrounds were the easiest to read and dark backgrounds, the hardest.

Boolify

http://www.boolify.org

Boolify was quite popular. Students took its puzzle pieces and filled them in with keywords.  The search engine would give results depending on the ANDs and NOTs they used. This was a great opportunity for them to visually understand how Boolean operators such as AND, OR, and NOT work.

Quintura Kids

http://quinturakids.com/

Quintura kids was another websearch engine that helped students in more specific searches. Students would type the keyword in the boxprovided, and the site would then display a word cloud with words related to their search.  By clicking on any of those words, the search changed and different results appeared.

Kidrex

http://www.kidrex.org/

Kidrex was also a good option. Most of the results that were displayed were at their grade level.

Sweet Search

http://www.sweetsearch.com/

Sweet search has a special section for elementary students (SweetSites) organized by subject and academic level. Another useful section was SweetSearch Biographies, which could be used by categories or by names of people.

Students walked away that day knowing some tools to get to useful websites, being aware that some of those websites may or may not be at their reading level, and no longer believing that the best place to find information in the Internet was Wikipedia.

There might be other websearch engines that you are using that may be useful for elementary students. If you would like to share them, please add them as a comment. I would love to extend this list of search engines!

Our Brain's Right-Side Skills and our Digital World

The end-of-the-year holidays gave me the opportunity to relax, unwind and then catch-up as much as possible with what is new. I enjoyed reading Daniel Pink’s thought-provoking book, “A Whole New Mind” which discussed the ideal skills that need to be taught in schools to prepare students for work and life these days. Through the chapters, the author explained the way our existence is affected more and more by three forces: 1) Material abundance generating a need for products that are not only unique but attractive and meaningful; 2) Asian workers taking over routine jobs at a very low cost; and 3) Automated jobs such as software programming, medical diagnosis and legal advice, being performed by computers. All these current factors require changes in what is being taught in schools. Kids now need to develop artistic and emotional abilities, as well as a capacity to detect patterns, behaviors and opportunities, and an overall vision that can drive them toward innovation. In addition, students nowadays have a need to acquire skills that will make them empathetic, understand human interactions, and find meaning in the things they do.

It was interesting to read how some schools are starting to direct their attention and time to art.  An example given in the book is a high school that uses design to teach core academic subjects giving students a daily art or design class period. This institution aims for students to develop empathy, detect patterns, and acquire a holistic understanding of the context through design. Hopefully, these students will be able to apply these design skills further on in their lives.

Throughout the book, the author clearly shows that to be successful in these times, students require a whole new mind where the left and right sides of the brain work hand-in-hand having the left side taking care of the sequential, logical, and analytical chores and the right side being in charge of inventions, empathy, happiness, and meaning. As a result, schools need be teaching in a way that helps students develop abilities not just from the left side, but from both sides of the brain.

My perspective of students who are artists but have a difficult time with their academic work has changed.  They are already strong in aptitudes that are needed for the 21^st century and I can see that there is a lot to learn from them. For students who are not there yet, technology that is available in the school’s lab as well as in the Internet can offer students many tools to develop the skills that are needed. Students can use them to create videos, pictures, songs, slide shows, podcasts, collages, storybooks, etc. The possibilities are unlimited. One thing I could do in class, is encourage students to be more creative adding art, music, animations, videos, sounds, etc,  to their assignments. Students need to know that attractiveness does make a difference. It’s no longer a matter of just entering information.  The way information is presented and the way it gets to people is relevant.

If you have any ideas or lessons that could help develop right-side skills using technology, please share them in a comment. I would love to read them.

10 Web 2.0 Tools Used in the Elementary School during 2010

It is the end of the year and time to stop and look back at what has been accomplished. I’m happy to realize that tech classes at the elementary school have taken a step further by using collaborative web2.0 tools that offer students the means to attain 21^st century skills. Thank you to my PLN (personal learning network) friends and colleagues at school that have taught me about them.  I feel grateful to have this amazing learning network that has made me open my mind to new digital class tools.

I would like to share with you ten free Web 2.0 tools that my students have used during 2010 in the computer lab. They are in no specific order and are all amazing!

1- Titanpad

Titanpad was a totally successful collaborative tool in class. My students belong to upper elementary and most of them do not have gmail accounts nor have had any experience with google docs yet.  For this reason, students were introduced to titanpad, an online tool similar to google docs, where several students can participate in the creation of a common word processing document being able to make simultaneous modifications and additions. Students were deeply engaged. Some continued to work on the assignment at home and some have convinced their homeroom teacher to let them use titanpad for further class assignments such as group research and presentations.

2- Scribblemaps

Our social studies mapping units are in the process of changing. Old activities are being revised and new ones are emerging. Scribblemaps  is an amazing web 2.0 tool that provides an online world map that allows students to draw and add text on top of it, and once the final map image is ready, it may be emailed to the teacher. Fifth graders used it to plot explorers’ voyages coming to the new world giving them a more authentic vision of the actual explorers’ journeys. 

3- Twiddla

As a follow-up on collaborative tools, students were introduced to twiddla  to experience drawing in a realtime online whiteboard with a group of classmates.  To my surprise, and probably to their surprise too, it was harder for them to draw a picture than to type a story together with a friend.  The perfectionist side in them may have appeared, not allowing them to work as smoothly.

4- Kerpoof

Students in third grade created animated movies using Kerpoof.  The website is quite friendly and it was easy for students to rapidly understand the concept of animation timelines, movements, and audio. They enjoyed working in groups, helping each other create the animations.  Many of them later at home obtained an account (parental permission is needed) and were able to save their new productions.  This free web 2.0 tool can not only create videos, it also offers features such as spell a picture, make a card, make a drawing, tell a story, and more. It is total fun.

5- Professor Garfield

This awesome website, Professor Garfield,  lets students create comic strips using new and previously-created characters, props, backgrounds, and speech bubbles. It is easy to use and it is fun. It also includes several comic activities that help students understand a variety of comic strip concepts.

6- Wacky Web Tales

Students used Wacky Web Tales to fill in madlibs and create funny stories.  Every time they have used it, students have practiced their grammar skills as they answered the blank spaces with adjectives, nouns, verbs, and more.

7- Grand Prix

This website has been a favorite for students practicing multiplication skills. In Grand Prix they create a car race and online participants enter the competition.  Once the race starts, they have to solve multiplication problems to be able to advance.  The faster they solve the problems, the faster the car runs. This website has been a first choice whenever students finish their work before the end of the period and still have some free time.

8- Boolify

Boolify has been a convenient website that has helped students visually understand the way search engines work. Students drag puzzle pieces together using ANDs, Ors, and NOTs to filter search results. Moreover, websites that are finally listed only contain information that is age-appropriate for elementary students.

9- Wallwisher

Wallwisher  is a collaborative online board where students post online stickies to answer a question displayed by the teacher.  Teachers have used it to post questions about books that are being read in class as well as new concepts that are being studied. It has been an engaging way to have students read other students’ ideas and push their thinking even further.

10- Glogster

Glogster encourages students to create online posters that share their learning using pictures, text, music and videos.  Fourth and fifth graders were able to use their creativity and share their knowledge about technology at the beginning of the year using this great website.

The list above presents only ten web tools that were useful in our tech classes, and of course, we all know there are many more out there. I would love to read any comments you have about these websites or any others you have used. It's always enriching to learn how other teachers use web tools in their classes.

I wish all of you a happy new year and I hope we can learn more from each other during the coming year.  I’m convinced that learning never stops and there is always more to discover. Best wishes!!

Introducing Scratch in the 4th Grade

Last week we started an exciting unit with our fourth grade classes: Animations using Scratch.  In case you are not familiar with the application, Scratch is an application developed by MIT that can be downloaded for free in both Macs and PCs. It involves simple programming and animation commands and serves as a great preparation for our students before they start with the Lego-Mindstorm unit. The software includes the creation of “Sprites” (characters), “Costumes” (character instances), “Stages” (backgrounds), motions, sounds, looks, and more.

Since Scratch is totally new to our fourth grade students, I decided to teach them an introductory lesson totally based on exploration and discovery, giving students an opportunity to find answers for themselves and not through the teacher.

The initial instructions were:

In your dock, you can find a new application called Scratch. Try to imagine that you just received this application as a Christmas present and nobody has told you what it can do or what it is about.  You are on your own and this is your time to find out…

After exploring for about 10 minutes, the class met in front of the smartboard to share findings. Things like: creating a new sprite, drawing a new sprite, deleting a sprite, creating backgrounds, etc, kept coming up and were modeled by students who found out how to do it. Once the discussion was over, students went back to their computers trying to solve a new challenge: making the sprite advance and turn as if walking in a square. They were only allowed to talk to their neighbors in case they had any questions and could not ask the teacher. Since I believe students are open to learn from one another, I used my computer’s Remote Desktop application at different times during the session, so that students could present to the class the different solutions to the problem they were working on. Putting together everybody’s knowledge, took student learning quite far!

Tech classes, in the following weeks, will work more or less in the same way (explore-discover-share). It is amazing to witness how much kids are able to learn from their explorations, their classmates’ discoveries, and their discussions. New knowledge and skills emerge as they build up from each other’s discoveries. By the end of the initial lesson, they were already moving the “sprites” using the motion and control commands, thinking about angles, distances, and speed, and of course, adding all sorts of sounds as the sprites were moving. I have to say that the activity never asked them to add sound, but someway or another many of them found their way into music and special sound effects. It seemed that students had a need to make the animations as real as possible and adding sound really helped. I found that learning in this context happened because of the excitement they felt with their discoveries, the experience they had with the hands-on activity, and the way their thinking was pushed as they listened to their classmates’ discoveries.

Some kids went home and downloaded that same day Scratch into their computers and started emailing me all sorts of animations or games they had created. They were totally into it! Here are some examples of very basic work done by 4^th and 5^th graders using Scratch:

Walking in Squares
http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/105369

Christmas Animations
http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/105373

I’m also including some very good lesson plans I found in a wiki that belongs to Classroom 2.0:

http://wiki.classroom20.com/Scratch+Lesson+Plans

I look forward to finding creative lesson ideas from the links listed in the webpage.  If you have had any experience with Scratch in the elementary school, I would love to hear and learn from your experiences. 

Student end-of-trimester reflections

I believe it’s very important to take some time at the end of the trimester or at the end of a unit to think about the learning that has been taking place. Since we are closing the first trimester of the school year, third grade students were given the opportunity to reflect on their learning during tech class. They answered the following questions (all regarding technology) in a word processing document:

1-   What have you learned?

2-   What was hard?

3-   What was easy?

4-   What would you like to learn?

It was interesting to read their comments.  When they were asked: What have you learned? Most of them immediately replied that they had learned the homerow position as well as how to use the Ultrakey application that teaches them keyboarding skills.  Little by little, they started remembering all they had worked on during the trimester: Wordle, Timeliner, copy-pasting pictures, capturing screenshots, Hyperstudio, Pages, and a few Mac shortcuts. They love technology and anything new they learn about it is exciting for them.  Simple things, such as obtaining an apple icon when holding the shift-option-k keys all at once, has made them really happy. When students reflected on the second and third questions, just a few mentioned that using the homerow position had been hard, but the rest said everything had been quite easy. They have a beautiful, open and positive disposition to learn anything about technology. When asked what would they like to learn, most of them stated that they would like to create websites and videos. It’s amazing to see that these young students are totally aware that they can post their productions in the Internet. They do not see themselves just as information-receivers, but also as information-producers, even though they have not yet had that much experience in the Internet.

After the reflection, they worked on an activity that taught them Mac shortcuts.  By answering an online quiz, they realized they just knew a few and there were many more out there. Since they were already using a computer, they began testing those shortcuts.  I heard lots of exciting cries as they discovered these new shortcuts. I was happy to be present in those “aha” moments. Finally, the assignment ended with an individual creation of a handy list of shortcuts that would be kept in their desktop. It was nice to watch students logging out using the shortcut they had just learned and it was also fun to listen to their conversations as they were lining up to leave the lab talking about all sorts of shortcuts they use in their computers at home. It felt like a good learning activity.

Energy Wednesday Reserved for Technology

This past Wednesday, all teachers at the elementary school attended two technology sessions during “Energy Wednesday” hours at the end of the day. An introduction to google docs session was mandatory for all teachers, leaving the other session totally up to their choice.

Ime and I offered two sessions: imovie ‘09 for beginners and imovie ‘09 for advanced users. It was so much fun! We projected student-made videos on the smartboard as teachers were coming into the lab and since that moment teachers were already engaged and talking about video-production at ASFM.

We had many people attending the beginners’ sessions, however, there was something in the session’s environment that was different from past years’ workshops. Most likely, it might have been that many more teachers showed a big interest in learning video-producing software and were now feeling at a comfortable level learning it.  Years ago, whenever we taught any video-producing-beginner sessions, stress and nervousness were felt all over even though the workshops followed a slow and friendly pace.  This time, it seemed that most attendees were simply seeing the session as an opportunity to learn a new technique/software to be able to publish a nice end product. I have to say that we did have a few scared faces, but for the most part, most teachers were eager and open to learn the how’s and the where’s. Self-confidence and high-interest floated around the lab.

The advanced session was the most fun of all. Fewer people attended and it was nice not to go over the usual basic steps such as: importing a movie, adding photos, adding titles and transitions, organizing clips, etc.  Teachers who showed up to this session had already experienced creating basic videos and were eager to learn more about it.  We first taught them useful tools such as stabilizing shaky videos, adding map clips, recording voice over clips, etc, and then ended the session with two highlight features. The first one was the picture-in-picture option, which allows the user to place a smaller video clip somewhere inside a larger clip. The smaller clip in many cases shows a person explaining what is happening in the larger one. The last feature was the use of the green screen and they loved it. This is where a scene is video-taped with a green cloth on the back of the scene totally covering the background. This green-background-clip is then placed over a second video clip. What happens next is that all the green background of the first clip is detected by imovie and immediately replaced by the second video. All the non-green parts of the first video are seen on top of the second video. Barbara, who coincidentally was wearing a green shirt that day, helped us recording herself. Her green shirt was also detected by iMovie causing the end video to be a funny one since only her face showed sliding around in the other video… right during Halloween week.

If you are stuck creating a video with iMovie or would like to learn more of its features, Apple has great video tutorials. They explain one feature per video, making it short and quite clear. You can find those tutorials at: http://www.apple.com/findouthow/movies/ Scroll down the webpage and you will find the list.

If you have led similar workshops, I would love to hear from you. Enter your comments or follow me @marybellr in twitter