Technology Tuesday: Flubaroo

Have you heard of Flubaroo? 

 It is a game changer for teachers!  Flubaroo can grade multiple choice or fill in the blank assignments in under a minute.  I have been using it as a Google add-on to my Google form quizzes for the Bluebonnet books.  It is super easy to use and literally takes less than a minute to grade my 10 question quizzes.  Check out the step-by-step directions here.

I love it for grading my quizzes for 3rd-5th graders each week, but I can totally see teachers who are flipping their classrooms using it as a quick assessment of the night's videos.  How might you use Flubaroo?

Friday "Wrap Up"

It was digital citizenship week in the library this week.  I had to tech the district copyright lesson to Kinder, 1st and 2nd (see post here)

- 3 Second Grade digital citizenship lessons
- 5 First Grade Digital Citizenship lessons
-5 Kinder Digital Citizenship lessons and story/journal time
- met with one book jobber
- spent lots of time working on my makerspace that I will be starting Oct 5.

And my wraps... Renaissance, retired Orchid Glimmer and Retired Galaxy.  Renaissance is one of the new "Satin" wraps.  It is so shimmery and applies really nicely.

Technology Tuesday: Chatterkids Digital Citizenship

Every year, teachers in my district have to teach 4 district provided lessons in September about Digital Citizenship.  The 4th lesson is about copyright and so it makes sense that the librarian teaches that one.  Copyright is an especially hard concept to teach to the younger grades out of the blue.  I think they understand it more when we revisit it with our research units in the spring.

Anyway, this week we are doing the district provided videos, but I decided to kick it up a notch and add a fun app called ChatterPix Kid to the mix.  

This is a fun app that makes anything talk.  All you have to do is take a picture, draw a mouth and record.  After watching the district copyright video and discussing why it is not ok to take someone's work without giving them credit, I had the students get iPads and create a video explaining it in their own word.  The took a picture of a book cover or a computer, recorded their explanation and then I allowed them to add stickers to their video.  What fun!

Friday "Wrap Up"

Besides Dot Day activities, this week in the library

- 4 2nd Grade "Just Right" lessons

- 5 kinder Storytimes

- 5 3rd grade Amelia Bedelua/Educreation homophobe lessons

- interviewed 25 5th graders for anchors on morning announcements

- held 1st eNewspaper Club meeting

- attended Region XX Resource Roundup

- presented Twitter: #dontbescared at Resource Roundup

And I am still wearing my Dessert Mirage wraps from last week so I thought I would highlight our new TRUSHINE Gel Manicures. This is Gilded Leopard(wrap) with Party Dress Gel

Flamingo Gel and Hint of Marsala Wrap

A Little Hand Holding

When I first came to my school 12 years ago, there was a third grade teacher who never took her kids to the computer lab.  She is a wonderful teacher.  She is very structured, has very detailed plans and very high expectations for her kids.  She just would not step foot in the computer lab because of the high possibility that the technology would not do what she wanted and she would be left to wing it.
 

Fast forward 12 years… this particular teacher (now in 5th grade) checks out the iPad cart from the library. She asks for ways to integrate technology into her lessons. She finds a way to complete projects on the iPads when the computer lab is closed for testing.  She is blogging. And hold on to your hats… She is even flipping part of her Language Arts class this year!

How does this transformation happen you might ask?  I don’t really have the answer.  I do know that 12 years ago when I came to the school and in the spring suggested that we do a lesson in the computer lab, after she stopped hyperventilating, she trusted me enough to meet me in the lab and let me walk her students through creating a Book in a Box PowerPoint.  She saw how engaged the students were and how proud they were of their finished boxes.  I am sure that we had technical difficulties (who doesn’t when they are in front of 23 students?) but we just made a plan B and carried on. 

After that, when I heard her talking about another project they were doing, I would casually mention a technological component and again with promises that I would be there with her, she would cross her fingers, hope I knew what I was doing and venture into the lab again. 

The next year, she asked me if I was available to help her in the lab when it was Book in a Box time again.  I went with her and while she taught the kids what to do, I stood by as a security blanket in case anything went wrong.  Of course, she handled everything fine.

The next year, I caught her going into the lab with the kids BY HERSELF!  I peeked through the window and she was doing the Book in a Box lesson.  Later that day, when I asked why she didn’t let me know, that I would have come to help, she said, “You were busy and I thought I’d try it myself.”

And now look where she is. 

I am proud of this teacher.  I am proud of the risks she takes for her students.  I am proud of her for stepping outside her box 12 years ago and venturing into uncomfortable territory.  And I am proud to see how even though she still does not consider herself “techie”, that she is integrating technology into her space every day.  

So today, on the day after "Dot Day", I realized that all it takes sometimes is a little hand holding to help a person make their mark

Technology Tues: Dot Day

We are celebrating "Dot Day" again this year.  Dot Day is inspired by The Dot book by Peter Reynolds.  The Dot is the story of a teacher who encourages a student to trust in her own abilities by being brave enough to "make her mark". What begins as a small dot on a piece of paper becomes a a challenge to create bigger and more inspiring things. This movement has gone on to connect students and classrooms around the world.

This year, I made the "D" page in my kinder journal D is for Dot Day.  I shrunk the page that was given on the website to use with the Quiver 3D app and had the students color.

Then they brought their journal to me and we made their dot come alive.  It was so fun to see the amazement on their faces as their dot became 3D.

 

I also wanted to get in on the skyping part of Dot Day, so Matthew Winner and I connected our kinder classroom - Texas to Maryland.  The students from each class shared some of the Dot Day activities they had done and we please to discover that BOTH classes had made dots out of their initials.

While we were waiting for Mr Winner to call us, we sang the Dot Day song.

A fun Dot Day today and we have more stuff planned the rest of the week.  I love special events like this that put the "FUN" back in learning.  

Friday "Wrap Up"

TGIF is all I have to say! Why does it always seem like 4 day weeks are longer than a regular week? Whew. 

This week I started my every other week lessons with 1st and 2nd grade and started seeing kinder. 

- 3 Second grade lessons on choosing a "just right" book

- 6 First grade lessons (read Wild About Books and made a class book)

- attended 2 after school library meetings

- met with the other teachers I am sponsoring an online newspaper club with

- 6 kinder lessons and checkouts

- attended my 7th grade son's Meet the Teachers" night

And my wraps are retired Desert Mirage - I am anxiously awaiting my order of new fall wraps! If you haven't seen the new holiday and fall wraps check them out at www.sararomine.jamberrynails.net

 

Friday "Wrap Up"

Posting this on Saturday because Friday I was busy taking care of my 3 year old nephew while my brother and sister-in-law were still in the hospital with their new born.  He won't pose for pictures very often, but luckily she doesn't have a choice. 

Here's what happened this  week in the library...

- Bluebonnet QR code Orientation for 20 classes

- 2 5th grade meme orientations (see Tuesday's post) 

- submitted  2 book orders

- worked on ideas for the makerspace I am starting in October

- attended 2 library trainings 

And my wraps for the week- Remininsce and StarGazing

 

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?