A little of this and a little of that.....

April has been a huge month for me. I was given an opportunity to attend a presentation by Alec Couros which allowed me to reaffirm all the changes that I have made in my teaching this year. I have also been asked to attend an iTunes U workshop this week at Apple headquarters in Richmond, I am very excited to say the least.

In class my students have been finishing their Prezi's, which we had a huge celebration for! We invited our parents and several special guests from our school district. To say the least they were fabulous!
We also had our annual Aquarium sleep over and now students are creating personal movies of their adventure!
I have also been working with several other staff members to create a grant proposal that could allow our school to catch up to others in the area of technology. The grant is for $20,000! I feel that we did our very best and that the proposal is marvelous. We are just waiting, not so patiently, to hear if our proposal was accepted.

Oh....and I was asked to present at the STA Pro d Day! My workshop is Using Technology in the Primary Classroom!

Here are a few  pics from this month:

The view from my bedroom window!

Working with Arrays!

Skyping with Chicago

Our Prezi party!

Oral reading Challenge with iPod touches.

Always a fun time!

Creating an array storybook with our digital photos.

Happy Earth Day!

Our Truffula trees!

                                               




                      The Lorax art work.

Week of firsts

WOW......just like Mr. Slinger in Lilly`s Purple Plastic Purse...all I can say is WOW. What a week.
Over the course of our 2 week Spring Break I began to plan some new learning opportunities for my students and for myself. Through Twitter, I became aware of The Flat Classroom project and Wonderopolis. Both of these amazing learning tools have Tweetchats and on line discussion groups to share learning, successes and adaptions. I participated in my first chat with a fabulous bunch from Wonderopolis and saw immediately a perfect learning fit for my class. We began Wonder Wednesday last week. It provided my students with an engaging learning forum. many students wrote comments and quickly had feedback from Wonderopolis. How cool is that! Many students also reflected on their learning by posting on their personal blogs. WOW!

I have begun reading the Flat Classroom book but have been unable to join a chat due to time differences. There is one tomorrow and I am hoping to make it home in time to participate near the end.

We also had our first Skype session with a grade 2 class in Arizona. It was our turn to reply to their questions. Students had a day or two to collaborate and research(if unfamiliar) the answers to Ar. questions. It went very well for a first time. I would like to improve on the sound, it was not loud enough, and the placement of the camera in Ar.. I think students will be more engaged when the sound issue is worked out. We brainstormed questions that we would like to ask on our next session this Tuesday. To demonstrate what we have learned I would like st. to create a short video using maps and other tools to show the differences and similarities between our two classes.

We will also be preparing for our Aquarium sleep over the following week. Usually I have st. complete 2 research projects with questions that I have put together but this year I am hoping to get more st. input into the learning by finding out what they want to know in order to feel prepared for the the fieldstudy.

That`s it for this week......how do folks do this everyday?