Activity 5: YouTube Channel

It was great to establish my own YouTube channel! It will be so much easier to access the videos that I know we can safely watch than to have to go searching each time looking for the one I can/want to use. I'm so excited to have a place to collect the videos that I will use during the school year with my class. Some days we watch a video during morning meeting, sometimes language arts or unit studies, and my math group has a bunch of stuff they like, both fun songs and helpful instructions. I even found the collection of Moore Rockin' that Matt and Andy have been using for their flipped instruction. DOES ANYONE KNOW HOW TO SORT VIDEOS INTO GROUPS WITHIN MY CHANNEL, SUCH AS MATH OR WHATEVER? PLEASE LET ME KNOW! For now, I'll share one of my class's favorite videos from YouTube called "Everything at Once" by Lenka. We watch it repeatedly when studying similes. They love to sing along and try to count how many similes she uses in the lyrics. Enjoy!

Activity 4: ScreenCasting

It's taken me a couple of weeks to figure out all the elements of this activity, and I'm happy to have it figured out! Now that I know how to do it with my computer, I can easily go on to do more. I think it would be great to do some of these as a new instructional tool for various groups during our day in the classroom. I also like it because it is another way to model the use of technology and show that I value learning and using technology for students and myself. I did a math game on FunBrain.com for this activity, and found it quite simple once all the components were working correctly. It was really easy to upload my YouTube account and post it on YouTube, so now let's see if I can get it embedded in my blog posting! Thanks!

Activity 3 - Create a ZooBurst Story

Hurray! My ZooBurst story is complete, although not exactly what I envisioned. I played around with Story Bird for quite awhile, then gave up for lack of illustrations that went with any of the stories I could use. So I switched over and learned how to use ZooBurst with pictures imported from Google Images. There was a limit of ten pages for the ZooBurst story, which definately changed the plan, and I found that I needed to keep it very simple. I'd like to go back and do some editing and explore the sound mechanics to see if I can read the book out loud. I ended up doing a simple introduction (or summary) of our holidays around the world unit that builds on the idea of various cultures celebrating with lights during the long, dark winter months as a common factor of shared people in the world. Neat idea, yet I'm not sure I'd use it again over a simple Power Point presentaion. Another format utilized!