Technology Tuesday: Newsela

Last week my Instructional Technology Specialist friend, Jennifer Heine (@JHeineEDU) happened to be on my campus for 2 days.  We have been outside-of-work friends for 12 years now, ever since our now 13 year-old boys were in the baby class together at daycare, but rarely ever see each other during the work week as she is assigned to different campuses.  She is also one of my go-to people when I have a technology problem or question and I want to look smart for my campus. Additionally, she is one of a small handful of people that talk as fast and erratically as I do, so while no one else can follow our conversations, we understand each other just fine.

Usually our sharing of ideas happens in the summer while on one of the rides at Schlitterbahn, where we have no paper to write them down or at some sporting event where in the midst of the work related talk we are also cheering and by the time the game is over work related thoughts are gone. 

12 years old

6 years old

Since she was on my campus for a whole 2 days, it was my opportunity to pick her brain in one of those "look smart for my campus" situations.  After the first round of STAAR, my 5th grade teachers like to spend two days rotating the kids around -each teacher has a different science activity and the students spend an hour with each teacher.  One of the teachers came to me an asked if I could think of anything "fun" they could do with the chromebooks.  I mentioned this to Jennifer and before I could even finish the request she was bouncing in her chair ready to tell me the perfect thing!

Newsela!  Have you heard of this?  It is a website full of nonfiction articles for all subject areas and reading levels.  Teachers can create classrooms and assign article to kids to read based on level or topic.  The articles are not too long and what kid can resist reading about these kinds of things?

Anyway, we were talking and bouncing ideas of what they could do with these articles and decided google classroom and slides would be a great option.  I took the idea back to the teacher and she loved it!  There are some things that need to be done within newsela to set up the classroom ahead of time.  Then the teacher picked 8 science articles related to things they had talked about this year in science. The task was for students to choose an article, read it and then make a google slide about the article and how it relates to something they have learned in science. 

I'm excited to see how these turn out. The students were definitely excited about the different articles assigned to them. 

Technology Tues: Library Memes

I love collaborating (or in this case stealing) ideas from the librarians in my district.  One of my good friends and librarian at Canyon Ridge Elementary, Wendy Howk @whowk, sent an email in the summer to a few of her "tech-ie" friends" asking an innocent question about an idea she was working on.  She wanted to know if we knew of any kid appropriate meme generators because she wanted her 5th graders to make library rules memes for their orientation.  Our fabulous Terri Eichholz @terrieichholz, suggested that she download pictures that she wanted the students to use into google drive and work from there.  Well, before I could even reply, Wendy had already started created a folder in google drive with blank meme pictures,  I told her I loved the idea and would love to help in any way.  Well, then summer happened and neither of us really did much with it over the summer.

When we got back to school, I mentioned it to my 5th grade reading teachers and of course they loved it and signed up right away - yes, like the first week of school.  So over text messages one night, Wendy and I hammered and tested and retested and played and figured out how it might work through google classroom - which I had never really tried, nor have my teachers - that's right, I live on the edge.  Now, Wendy will say in her sweet way, that we "synergized" on this and that is how it came to fruition, but really it was all her idea and I just pushed her along because I needed to know how to do it to look good for my teachers.  

So anyway, here is how we created Library Rule Memes...

First, We(ndy) created a shared folder in google drive of a bunch of blank memes from a meme generator.

Then I made a google classroom for each of my 5th grade teachers.  

I made a template slide presentation with a title slide for each class and uploaded it into the assignments of the classroom.  

And then I uploaded the memes from my folder as "materials" on the "about" page of classroom.  (This was after I accidentally deleted the shared folder that Wendy had created with all the memes in it, had a huge panic attack and she talked me off a ledge and we figured out how to re-share the images - don't ya love those little "oopsies").

So once the students came for the lesson, I had a Slideshow about memes and some examples of just funny memes and other rule memes.  I also linked to the wikipedia definition of an Internet meme so I could point out to the students that they were intended to be humorous, shared and also the formatting of the meme.  Pointing out that this was not the time for fancy fonts and bright colors.  I also had on the slides how they should log into google classroom on the chromebooks and that is where the fun began.  

Luckily, I had the foresight to ask our instructional technology specialist, Laura Moore @learnmoorestuff, to be with me for at least the first class in case we had trouble.  It was the typical problems of student logins not working that she was able to troubleshoot, while I was explaining how to navigate through google classroom and actually make the meme.  

Each student was going to add a slide with a meme into the google slide presentation that I had assigned the class.  They each added a slide and put their name on it.  They were fascinated that they could all be working on the same presentation at the same time.  Once they had a slide, they looked through the pictures of the meme backgrounds and chose the one they wanted to use.  On the chromebook, they had to do a "two-finger puch" on the mouse pad in order to get the option to "copy".  They went back to their slide and CTRL-Vd to paste the image onto the slide.  They had to resize and then create text boxes with the correct formatting that we saw in wikipedia and added their text.  

And so here are their finished Library Memes.  Of course, these are the best of the best of 7 classess.  I wouldn't lead you on and say they were all this good.  I had kids who only got the picture pasted on and kids that totally missed the idea of "library" and just made a meme. But being that it was the first week of school and that we had never used google classroom before, I was pretty pleased with the results.  

I told the kids that I was going to be making laminated posters out of a "few" of the memes to hang on the wall in the library.  How do I choose?  I could use some help deciding!  Which ones do you like?