7 weeks later...

In just 7 short weeks I've gone from dreading a technology class to being really excited to start a classroom blog for my students and parents next year! I wasn't expecting to learn much if anything that I'd actually use in my classroom going into this class. Having one desktop as the only available technology, my attitude always was that it's easier to not use technology then to try. In this class I've been exposed to a wide variety of tools and am walking away with a handful of ideas that I can see myself using in or for the classroom. These tools include: Google products specifically Google docs, voicethread, animoto and blogger. 

The biggest change to my classroom next year will be a classroom blog for parent communication, providing information, pictures, student work and at home practice for students. I will use animoto for picture slideshows of things we do in the classroom as well as making digital flashcards and voicethread for making digital versions of our class books. I think google docs will be helpful in creating out team lesson plans. 

Other fun tools I found that I will use for classroom decor are quotes cover and tagxedo. Quotes cover is a fun tool to explore for making beautiful quotes to hang in your classroom, see my blog post about it! And tagxedo uses words to create art. 

In reflecting on this class I decided to make a tagxedo. I have used products like this to enter my students names for a welcome poster at the beginning of the year, but this week I learned that if you enter a keyword or url then tagxedo will create a word cloud for you! I entered my blogs url and created a beautiful piece of word art that sums up what I have learned over the past 7 weeks. The more commonly used a word was in my blog, the bigger it appears. 

Tonight in class we learned how to make a google survey. Here is my first attempt. Please fill it out and let me know what you think!

Pre-Kindergarten Memories: A Digital Story

What better way to reflect upon the year then to create a digital story about it?
That's just what we did. Most of my students entered my classroom not knowing their letters, sounds; how to read or write; and some had never held a pencil...I'm so proud of all that they've accomplished this year. Thanks to my Integrating Technology and Literacy grad class, I'm able to share their progress with you in the form of a digital version of our last class book of the 2013-2014 school year.

Pre-Kindergarten's end of the year bulletin board

In class last week I learned a tip about creating captions in a voicethread story. I took a screenshot of the child's work, put it in powerpoint and typed in my caption. All I had to do was screenshot the powerpoint slide, and save it as a picture. In vociethread i was able to select the original picture, select "replace" and change the old picture for the one with the caption. As long as I selected "change/replace" the children's reading remained with the slide. There are still some little tweaks I would have made (like making sure the dotted line text box or mouse arrow was not on the page when I took a screenshot) but lesson learned, and my next one will be even better.

The end of the year in pre-k is a really exciting time because the kids have a good sight word vocabulary and are using these words in their writing. My students are really excited about reading and writing time and everybody loves a read-aloud, from this class assignment I have learned that technology can help combine the two into a digital story.

Knowing their page will be in a class book gives the kids a little extra motivation to do their best drawing and writing. The challenging part of writing time with younger students is getting them to read back their writing. Reading their words on audio recording allows my students to hear themselves read. If they didn't like the way they sounded they were able to rerecord until they were satisfied. This was great practice for them. Now that the book is together it can be used just the same as any other class book, provided the technology is available. The story is bookmarked on the classroom computer and on my phone, for the students use. The kids LOVE hearing themselves and their friends reading the story. Another perk of technology, unlike a class boo that has to remain in- class, a digital class book can be emailed or even texted to families!

And now here it is...the final draft of my second digital story, "Prekindergarten Memories in Room 11" (with captions):

Digital Story Round 2

After spending about an hour stringing together my students videos, adding captions and effects I learned about voicethread. We experimented with this website in class- it basically gives the same effect as the digital story I made, but in a LOT less time. 

On our second to last day of school, writing time was about our favorite pre-kindergarten memory. (Hint--ask children this question BEFORE you finish your curriculum and spend a week of going on long neighborhood walks and picnic lunches...almost every child wrote about our week of fun.) We did our writing, I took a picture and had the children come over to me and read their sentence. 

The most exciting part...you can do this all on your phone with the free voicethread app!I took a picture of each page (take pictures in the order you want them to appear, you can't drag pictures around like you can on the computer version), then had the kids come up one at a time to read their sentence. The app counts down for you "4, 3, 2,1" then your picture appears and you speak. The picture will appear on the screen for as long as you speak. 
HINT: you can't crop the sound effects on voicethread like you can with windows live movie maker, so make sure to re-record if there is a huge pause that you don't want to appear in your story.You can preview the comment and choose if you would like to save or re-record, so this is easy. 

There are less effect choices than movie maker, but I found voicethread much more user friendly and for a busy classroom teacher- it's the perfect tool to make a quick digital class story. 
I attempted to add captions to the voicethread just like I did in movie maker, but the text shows up as a comment on the side after the speaking rather than under the picture as the child reads like I wanted. I still have more playing around to  do, but for now- here is my first attempt at a voicethread digital class book:

Crazy about quotes!

I love quotes. They can be inspirational, they can be funny, whatever my mood- there's a quote for it. So last week I was introduced to a really exciting website for people who love quotes as much as I do. /

Quotescover is a website that allows you to sort through quotes ad proverbs and make fun posters out of them. In my classroom I have a wall of quotes. I print them on computer paper, frame them and use them as inspirational and fun decor around my classroom. It's really easy too! You pick the quote you want, select the format you'd like- I chose prints, then it brings you to a menu of different sizes, which I chose typical printer sized paper, but there are options for greeting cards, business cards and posters of all sizes. From there you can play with the font, colors and all sorts of effects. You can draw or write and also add in one of your own pictures as the background. With most programs like this, there is a hidden fee somewhere- but not here :) I was able to save my quote to my computer and print!

I'm so excited to play with this website over the summer and update my quote wall for next school year! I recommend checking it out. Here is one I made using one of my favorite quotes and a picture from field day.

"Where can we see red?" A Digital Story

For my class digital story project I decided to make a class book with my students. This week our new sight word was "red" so we went on a color hunt around the classroom then students had to draw a picture and write a sentence about what they found. 

Since the kids loved seeing their sight word animoto I decided to turn our paper book into a digital version. I have windows live movie maker on my laptop so I decided to try out that program. I took a video of each of my students reading their page then uploaded each page to movie maker. I added a title slide, which was pretty easy, then tried to add the "adult" spelling to their kid-spelled sentence on the screen. Adding in the text was a little tricky since I had to figure out how to time each text box to appear at the beginning until the end of each students page. I played around a bit with effects and found a transition that looks like turning a page, which I added to make it appear more book-like. 

I created this video in about 40 minutes while my kids were in special. Once they returned I  shared my work with my students. 
My kids were thrilled to hear their voices reading on the computer! Many of them couldn't believe it was really them. They were all really excited and we watched the digital story three times. 

Here is my first try with Windows Live Movie Maker; let me know if you have any movie maker expertise feedback! 

Hopefully you enjoy "Where can we see red?" nearly as much as my students did...

Digital flash card success!

This morning I showed my class the sight word practice animoto--it was a success! Luckily for me my sight word inspired animoto makes a great literacy project for my grad class. 

The kids were all excited to see the words they colored up on the computer screen. It was a little tricky to get everyone positioned to see my laptop screen, so after the whole group introduction, I told them my computer would be available at center time for sight word practice. Two at a time all my students circulated through. This method of practicing sight words got positive feedback from all of my kids. One student told me my video was "better than great." Multiple students asked if we could make more learning videos.

Update:
Seeing how well my kids respond to this animoto is inspiring me to want to incorporate more technology in the classroom. 
The sight word digital flashcards have been available on the computer during centers all week and are still getting used!
 I also was able to bookmark the video on my phone and have had my students practice that way as well. The sight word practice has come in handy during transition times such as the end of the day and waiting for other students to get off the bus in the morning. Many of my kids are asking to practice sight words on my phone. 
Incorporating technology has refreshed their excitement and engagement with sight words, which is especially great in the last few days of school. 

Digital "flash cards"

I have enjoyed my first few animoto attempts, so I decided to try and use animoto for something slightly more academic for use with my students. We practice sight words all the time in my class and the kids love to play "teacher" and go through the sight words with friends. Since I know they enjoy sight words, and need more practice I decided to create a sight word animoto.
At first I tried to find images on google of the words, but it was really hard to find images I wanted to use. Who would of thought it was hard to find something on google?
Anyway, I decided to make my own. I typed up our sight word list and had the kids color them as part of a literacy lesson. I took pictures of each word, uploaded them to animoto and chose background music that I thought wouldn't be too distracting as the students tried to read the words. 
Here it is...So excited to share it with my class tomorrow!

Look in the sky...it's a storybird

Tonight in class we were introduced to a new storytelling tool, Storybird. This website encourages storytelling by providing illustrations for adults and students alike to use to develop ideas to write a story. Liz, Amanda and I collaborated to explore this website and created a story inspired by the If you give a mouse a cookie series, called "If you give Hedgie an Apple." Check out our first try...



We spent some time looking through pictures to try and find inspiration for our story. We discovered that you have to use pictures all by the same illustrator throughout your story. We had a tricky time trying to figure out how to add and save pages and got a little frustrated with trying to place the images on a page. Once we figured it out and got our story going, we wrote it pretty quickly. I don't think the website is user friendly enough to use with my students, but I can see using it to inspire my students writing. I could begin a story, then ask students to add a page or write the ending in their writer's notebooks. 

Picnic in the park

This Tuesday, my class went on a picnic in the park. We can see a large park form out playground and all year the kids have asked if we can go over there. So we decided that we'd make an afternoon of it and have an adventure. During centers in the morning we made sandwiches and packed a lunch, then we walked over, went on a scavenger hunt, ate lunch and explored a new playground. Upon returning to school we wrote about our experience. Such a fun was to spend the afternoon!  And a great way to practice my new animoto skills! The kids will love to watch and remember our day :) Check out our adventure...

Attempting Animoto

In my grad class I was introduced to Animoto, a way to make a video slideshow from your pictures. You can register for free and attention teachers: you can register for a free educators account that allows you to make longer videos!

 I experimented with creating a video tonight, and was able to make one using pictures of my bunny , Bailey. So far it seems pretty user-friendly. I uploaded pictured from my computer, dragged them into the order I wanted, chose a layout and music. I plan on using animoto in the near future to make some videos for my students, both pictures of some memories form the year as well as some letter or sight word practice.
Here is my first attempt:

Sign language and literacy

Recently I was asked to present at a professional development about my use of sign language in the classroom. I have noticed great progress in learning letters and sight words with the addition of sign language to my literacy instruction. A variety of research shows that preschool aged students benefit from sign language; from gains in receptive vocabulary, to the relationship between print and meaning to acting as a "picture" of a word for visual learners. Sign language allows students to see, hear and feel the words. the incorporation of multiple senses allows students more opportunities to process the information.

I have noticed in my sight word testing, that children recognize the sign before they recognize the word. A majority of my students will sign before saying the word, showing that sign aides in recall. As the year goes on and I notice more progress with my students I learn more ways to incorporate sign language in my teaching. Recently we had a health and safety themed unit, so I took the opportunity to learn the signs for some fruits and vegetables. I found this helpful with reinforcing initial sounds because many signs for fruit use the first letter of the word; "apple" is the sigh for "a" next to your mouth, "orange" is the sign for the letter "o" under your mouth, "banana" is using one hand to pretend peel the sign for the letter "b."

Pictured is my word wall, which has the letter, a picture that starts with the letter sound, the sign for the letter, and students names and sight words that begin with the letter.