Happy New School Week! 

Here are some ideas that we would like to share with you this week.

We are sure that many have heard of Go Noodle.  It is a great way to have a break in your busy day with your students.  There are a variety of  videos that you can use for your students.  Here is a link to get you started.

 https://family.gonoodle.com/activities/are-you-more-like-a-foot-or-a-sock


We use Wixie from Tech4Learning for our younger students as a platform to do activities.  One great part of Wixie their work is automatically saved.  No worries of lost work or tears as they lost their work.  It has many built in templates to use to create your own lessons.  It is simple and easy for you as a teacher to make your lessons for your students. 
There is also a online resource called Creative Educator to help you with ideas along the way.
https://www.tech4learning.com/

https://creativeeducator.tech4learning.com/?utm_campaign=t4l_menu&utm_source=t4l&utm_medium=web


Have a good week.  More later

Happy Fall All!

Fall is in the air and we are getting ready to plant flower bulbs around our school.   We do a flower bulb study and use Journey North as a resource.  https://journeynorth.org/ 

 It has a great section on planting flower bulbs with a  booklet you can make for your students.  It also  a section of a online video to help the students learn about flower bulbs.  We need to get going on it before our Indiana weather turns very cold and the ground freezes.  We have a had some pretty cold mornings with frost on the ground. 
Journey North has lots of great links to projects besides the Tulip bulb section.  You may want to take a look. 

We also started a pumpkin experiment. We placed a small pie pumpkin in a container with soil in the bottom.  We poked a few holes in the sides of the pumpkin and added some water.  Now we just wait, with luck it will decay and break down inside the closed container.  We will watch the water cycle and see if the seeds inside sprout.  You can then take that pumpkin in the spring and plant it in your garden.  It does work.  Last year was not successful, but the year before it worked great!

Will be posting more helpful hints later. 

Back to School -- IN FULL SWING!

Wow! Our first quarter is quickly coming to an end.  It is hard to believe how fast time zips!   We are up and rolling along, sometimes hitting speed bumps that slows us down.  We have been busy learning how first grade works and exploring IPAD  apps.

Our favorite online site, as well as an app, is SpellingCity.com.  We are lucky to have the premium edition which gives the students more activities to learn their spelling words. I love it as a teacher since I can go into the site and see what activities the students have been using and the length of time of engagement. 

Skoolbo is an app available but it has a fee.  The kids are able to create their own avatars and play various activities in reading and math.  They play against their fellow students as well as other students around the world.

We are looking for our buddies using Flat Stanley. com as a resource.  At this point in time, we have not made a connection yet, but some of the schools in other parts of the world are just getting started.  We are hopeful to have a connection soon. 

We celebrated International Dot day on Sept. 13th.  We played twister, made giant dots on the playground with chalk, created a human dot and decorated and cookies with M&M dots. We sang the Dot song at morning assembly to get everyone motivated for the day.  We had fun making our mark and seeing where it took us!

Our next project is planting tulip bulbs and connecting with our schools around the world using the IEARN tulip bulb watch program.  IEARN is  a fee-based way to connect with schools around the world.  The cost is $400.00 for an entire school or $100.00 per classroom. There are numerous projects available for all grade levels to connect their classroom globally. We are involved in the Holiday Card Exchange. We always look forward to receiving the unique holiday cards from around the world.

We use JenProjects but we are saddened to hear that at Christmas she will be no longer be involved in creating programs.  Jen has been fighting cancer and it has spread to other parts of her body.  She will be in our thoughts as she battles her disease.  One of our STEM projects is the Oreo stacking.  The students see how tall they can build their tower of oreo cookies without holding them up.  We count to get an average, submit to the project and see how we compared. 

Last Day at ISTE

It was the last day at ISTE--- but the learning and discovering continues



We were out and going by 8:30.  We checked out of the hotel put our bags in hotel storage and off we went.  We told ourselves we cannot  pick up anything more as we had no more room to bring it back. Well of course that did not happen. We ended up shipping treasures home via FedEx, which just happened to be in the hotel.


Our first session was an IKEA Makerspaces presentation.  You might be asking yourself or not what is a Makerspace.  Well in a nut shell it is spot in your room to create or have a learning station.  She was giving ideas what you could purchase at IKEA to put in your classroom to use every square inch of space to  be creative.  So the next time you go to IKEA think how can I use this in my classroom as a learning stations aka Makerspace.

We then went to the Expo Hall to finish up exploring.  We used Prodigy Math which is FREE, last year  but found that it was way to hard for our kids.  We told them at the booth. They told us did you know you can override it and just have it for your grade level?  No, we did not know that.  They are willing to help us on their end to help us when we go back to learn the secrets to the program. This math program could be used with ELearning  in the coming school year. It is not  just for primary grades it  goes all the way up!

Everywhere we went there was mention of Flipgrid which is FREE.  It is a way for students to create and post videos of projects or activities that they are doing in  class.  It is a place for students to collaborate too.   Again, this could be used for ELearning for them to make a short video of them responding to a question or problem you have given.  They had a special FlipGrid tent that could be used for the recording station in the classroom. It was an awesome green tent which we wanted but you had to win it. 
You may want to make yourself an account this summer to have it ready to go.  Both Jeanine and I have made an account and are going explore how we could use this with first graders.  We both use SEESAW which is free too as a platform to share the kids work.

So back to the green tent...
 We were sitting in the hotel before going to the airport at the end of the day.  They came through the Lobby giving them away.  Jeanine and I both scored one!   I got one and Jeanine emailed them and they are sending her one.  They did not want to carry them back home so we scored one.

Merge cube was also super hot item at the conference. It is a augmented reality trigger.  You can use CoSpaces to created virtual tours or you could use it make a Merge Cube book review, using google slides to create a six sided template for the students to use. Again CoSpaces is something new to both of us. There is a fee for using CoSpaces.  I am putting in a link to a 10 minute podcast of some suggestions for you to get your creative ideas going  especially for the older kids. 

You could use your Apple TV to share the students projects from the Merge cube.  You could upload their project to Flipgrid for sharing too.  As you can make a video of the project via the cube save it then share it. 

Merge cube ideas

There is a lot more out there in ISTE which we will sleuth around this summer.  You could sleuth around too by going to # NOTATISTE. This is a site in which lots of educators use as a link to great ideas that were happening.  I have included a link to this below.  (I opened this page and there is a how to for Flipgrid included there too!)

  Not at ISTE

We hope that you have found something that sparks your interest in our blog. Our brains are on overload.  There was a ribbon you could put on your badge MY BRAIN HURTS!  "DITTO"


  Enjoy the rest of your summer!

Day Three --- Our Presentation Day

BE BOLD AND EXPLORE RESOURCES FOR THE PRIMARY CLASSROOM.
 IT IS NOT JUST FOR LITTLE KIDS BUT ALL !  

We left our room at 8:15 and headed to Starbucks for breakfast.  It was crazy and very crowded.  They had at least 13 people working and was jammed packed with hungry early morning convention goers, trying to wake up before heading to the conference.  After a very quick inhaling of our breakfast we headed to the conference to set up for our presentation at 10:00.  We had a lot of teachers that were stopping by around 9:40 to gather information.  We were non-stop until 12:00 sharing all the different things that we use in our classroom plus lots more.  They were most interested in the Merge Cube, penguinscience, Wixie Seesaw, Dash, Osmo,  and how we accomplish all the things we do with our little kids.  We  passed out close to 350 handouts and many other people just scanned our QR-code for our google doc resource.  Jeanine met a representative from Epic books who was interested in how we liked it.  He had a great conversation with Jeanine and other teachers in our poster area.  He asked them how Epic could improve their product. Many ideas and suggestions were given to him and he was writing them all down. We find most of these tech companies are so approachable and really listen to what teachers need and use!.

We had a great time sharing with others.  We met teachers from West Virginia, Zambia, Washington State,  and Philly, just to name a few.  We hope they came away with a lot of new ideas.   

We visited the Expo Hall and discovered the following gems. Teachers First/Source for Learning is a non-profit service organization. It has a lot of free resources, the one that caught our eye was MySciLife to engage middle school science students.  Another one was a a collaboration with the tech teacher and the art teacher using Sphero.  We can see Leslie and Joe doing some fun things with this.  Plus we scored a cool pen. :)    

We found  a start up company that provided free online tutoring for 8-12 grade students.  We thought that looked great for our kids.  

Our big find was Everfi which offered five different programs on Social and Emotional Learning.  All of them are free and funded by Amazon. It focused on grades 1 through 8.  This looks like a great resource for one of our new focuses.

We still have many areas in the Expo hall to explore tomorrow.  Hopefully we can see it all.  

We journeyed back to the hotel around 5:30 and sat to have a relaxing drink and snack in the lobby. We met a new friend who worked for Renaissance.  She told us that the new reading series "Into" by Houghton Mifflin is teaming up with them  to help us better understand the needs of our students.  We just inform our Renaissance representative that we have adopted this new series and we will be able to receive valuable data from Star both from their testing and from the online "Into" work the children will be doing. Next year they will be teaming up with Sadlier to do the same analysis with our Math program.

Tomorrow is the last day of the conference, we have many sessions planned that we are going to attend before we leave to  head home in late afternoon.  We will post our finds when we return home.  We hope to discovery many other resources to share.  

Day Two ISTE

Another Jammed Packed Day of learning!

We were off and running at 7:15 today to visit the poster sessions before we went to Leslie Fisher presentation at 9:00. We stopped by and spoke with a group from Australia.  There students do a research project on an area. We were introduced to Book Creator, which we heard about again in Leslie Fisher's session.
Our session with Leslie Fisher--- Websites, Apps and More was packed with awesome resources.  We were introduced to storytelling tools Quick Draw, Auto Draw, and Book Creator,  We learned about Immersive Reader being rolled out by Microsoft which is a great benefit to students who may be Dyslexic or the struggling reader too.  It has a color therapy feature, line focus, picture dictionary and can translate for students.
Flippity is a site that can take a google sheet and turn it into a interactive version.  There are built in templates that student can use and share.  It could be used for Elearning.
Kahoot now has a create screen page and has a question bank that you can access without scrolling to look for already made Kahoot questions.  You can set a timer as long as 240 seconds for that struggling learner not too feel frustrated by time limitations.  Alexa also has a game it can open using Kahoot. This feature rolls out at Back to School time.

PDF candy is free and can help you convert documents into PDF format.  We learned about PDFBob which we need to explore to understand all of its features.

We were able to meet up with Ann Oro and Anna Baralt who we have had connections with for many years being involved in the Monster Exchange project in which they organize and facilitate. It was fun to meet them in person.

We visited the Expo Hall for a short time, then off to Apps Smashing session.  We were already familiar we several of the apps being  highlighted Chatterpix, Doink and Flipgrid.  We went to a session on Green Screen using Doink again as the app of preference.  The reason a green background is better than other colors is that is easier for lighting.

We ended our day with a fun event with Tech4Learning at the Magic Artist Garden.  We learned about the new updates being rolled out this summer.  We asked for a one on one webinar for teachers who were interested in learning that Wixie is not just for the little kids but would be a great tool for even grades 3-5.  It could be a tool to use for Elearning. We talked about how they could put together that session.  They stood their and brainstormed how this could be accomplished.

We went back to our room to crash and relax for the evening.  We basically have had time for only one meal that being breakfast and lots of not so healthy snacks.
Tomorrow is our day to present in the morning.

Day One at ISTE

Our day began early with visiting the NASA playground.  It was amazing to see the resources that NASA has available for free for all levels of teachers to use.  We discovered the Dome, which will take students into a world of amazement depending on the lesson the teachers would like to plan for them.  The cost is not too bad for them to  visit a school for a day.  These are portable planetariums, which are located around the country for available for presentations.  Different program are available for different grade levels to use on the same day. Here is the website link  for more information  Discoverydome.   The prices may vary in different areas. 

Our next stop were poster sessions that were targeting the younger students.  We learned about Raspberry Pi , which is a microcomputer that is the size of  a credit card.  It is only $35.00 to get started!  Guess who will be learning about this as soon as we get home? Check out RasberryPi link here.

We went to Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality poster sessions. We learned about 360 cameras and using Google street view to create their own virtual tour of a any place that the student would like to learn more about.  You can create them and use an IPAD if you did not have virtual googles at your disposable.

Our next poster stop was to learn about Cospaces which is a free resource to create 3D augmented reality projects. We got an idea for a Snowglobe. 

Learning more about  how  Dash the robot was also an interesting poster stop, in which the college professor gave us a resource on how to use Dash in learning measurement.  She worked with her future teachers in creating a coding project lesson plan for them to teach in their assigned classroom settings. 

Our last stop of the day was at 2:30 to learn more about Virtual and Augmented reality resources.  This session was filled with numerous platforms to use with students.  Here are just a few of the resources given-- Cospaces, Google Expeditions, Round Me, Nearpod, 3DBear, Metaverse, FigmentAR, CatchyAR, StoryTab, LeoAR, Thyng and Shapes 3D.  It was a fast moving session with tons to ideas to use with kids.

We came back and crashed in our room for about 30 minutes then headed out to the keynote at 5:30.  There were three awesome speakers to energize everyone for the next few days.  The future is in our hands to inspire and give our students the tools that they will need.  That is all for today.  Tomorrow is another jammed packed day beginning early.