Part C-Implementation

Below you will find my podcast about how I am feeling with the project I accomplished.  I feel like this project has been a great exploration and it has proved to me that the resources out there are not scary or overwhelming an htat the enthusiasm it being the students are well worth the little bumps....

I am going to record some of my students and how they feel about Mathletics and Khans Academy.
Here is the Poll Everywhere about which one they like the best:

As you can see Mr. Nussbaum is in first (probably because the games are so enchanting!!) and Mathletics is number 2.  I don't think we used Gizmo enough, to be fair.  Khan Academy is great, but it is not as flexible as Mathletics.

WWP Part C- Mathletics

The third installment for my Wicked Problem project is..... Mathletics!
This tool has been purchased by our school for every student in it. I have used parts of it but I had not delved deeper into it until this project and I was completely surprised at the versatility it brought.
First of all there is a live Mathletics game that my students adore. When they play it it has several levels, level 1 starts out very easy (but I discovered I can turn off levels and push the kids beyond addition and subtraction!).
How does it work?
You can sign up your class, or school or as a family or individual. Then you get access as a teacher and can assign different lessons. The assignments always appear first on the students board. you can also create your own courses, so you can find all the lessons to begin your fractions unit so when you assign the students all the lessons are in one area. These courses are saved under a name of your choice so you can continue using them over the years.


What do I like about Mathletics:

• You can create groups for your students if you want to level them which is perfect for my class because I have some real high flyers.
• You can choose courses from all over the world, one day you might choose the Japanese curriculum and the next California which exposes the students to many different styles of teaching. I think the more styles and methods the students get, the more likely they are to find a way they understand.
• The students create their avatar and get points to purchase outfits, backgrounds, etc. This is great novelty for them and they really enjoy it.
• The Live Matheltics game is great, when the kids start playing there is a world map that moves around pointing to different countries, they are then paired with one or several students from anywhere in the world and they play against them. you should hear the shouts "I have a guy from South Africa!" I have a guy from Qatar!".
• There are a variety of reports that you can print for your students as well as certificates when they have high achievements.
• For each lesson the students do there are a variety of ways they can access help and there is always a movie with demonstration problems if they are stuck.
• They have lots of workbooks that can be printed out in pdf for extra work or reinforcement.
  

Some of the odd things:

• It is hard to get to know this program, there are tutorials but one has to mess around and play with it before you really get (and I am not exactly sure I am there yet!).
• The search engine for finding lessons can be clumsy.
• A few more standardized tests would be great for practice, i hate to teach to the test but getting kids used to testing is important.

In summation:

This is a wonderful program, the best I have seen so far. it has just about everything you need as a teacher and the positives are far more than the negatives. The students very much enjoyed their homework and I have very little accessing their results. This is an excellent tool to help reinforce mathematics,especially if the curriculum you are using is sparse.

Data Visualization Lab

For this lab I explored tools from this website that were new to me. I found some fun new tools and had a great time exploring them.

The first and most fun was Audioboo. This site really takes the hassle of publishing a podcast and makes it take about two seconds. Once you sign up for an account then you simply start making recordings. I downloaded the app for my iPhone and made the following recording in about five minutes. Grandma is going to be just a wee bit excited about this one!

Here is sample of an Audioboo of my son Brodi singing the Itsy Bitsy Spider :).

The second site I explored was called Open Clip Art. The reason behind this was to show my students. they too often rely on Google Images to find images for projects despite my constant reminders to use sources that allow for free use. This Is a great site, however it is not completely kid friendly. on the very first page there are a few new pictures that use the f-word as the title. Unfortunately this would cause for major hilarity, shock and perhaps even peats of the bad words.... So unless the edit language I don't recommend giving this to elementary students. Otherwise it has a lot of incredible clip art to use, so for teachers it is a great way to find interesting and free clip art!

The third site I explored was 1001 fonts...

This is a massive site chock full of fonts. The reason I went to this site was that I honestly did not know how to install a font onto my computer. Well this site makes it incredibly easy, and all of a sudden I was going crazy installing fonts left and right. My classroom newsletter looked like I had hired a printing firm.

Part B-Storyboard and script

Hello!

Things have been just slightly hectic in my life... First I get kicked out of my class for notnpaing tuition on time because MSU did not give me waiver for some insurance they require you to buy even thoug I am fully insured by my full time teaching job... Then my friend gives birth, but her husband is away, so I was surrogate daddy during labor, needless to say I am now officially convinced that adopted was the best route for me, and I am a god mother! Now I have taken the train to meet the family in the Polish mountains for a ski holiday (a place called Szczyrk, try saying that...) and I brought my iPad but am having a pickle of a time getting it to work with Google docs. So, here is my storyboard, I am linking this to my partner Jenns website where you will be able to view it. I think it is pretty great! Now when we make the tutorial it will be easy peasy (as my four year old likes to say)... I just got back from a morning ski and it is time to relax a bit before hitting up the spa...

Here is the link to Jenn'S fabulous post where you can view the entire storyboard.

Cell Phones in the Classroom

Eeek! What a subject! I am completely bamboozled while I try to read through the lab in our CEP812 class. Cell phones in 5th grade would be a distraction... Hands down (at least in my room). Our school has a strict policy for elementary students that cell phones stay in the locker (mostly this is prevent them from losing them....). the one time I have used cell phoens is as timers. I know that sounds odd but sometimes when we need to time something then I pull out my iPhone and the kids run and get their cells.

That said, I move onto other portable devices.

KINDLES! Yeah! Our school has a wonderful reading program called Golden Dragon, where they read a specific amount of books and get to go to a great party. All the books they pick are incredible, but the added twist was this year they could check out Kindles! With parent permission my 5th graders have excitedly received an email and been able to go pick up their Kindle from the library that is filled with all the Golden Dragon books! Amazing! What was even better was how many of them came back from Christmas break with their very own Kindle... From this teachers point of view, anything we can do to have them read more and feel excited about it, then let's do it!

We also have "Playaway's" in the library which are little mp3 players that contain one book for the kids to listen to. This is particularly popular with the ELL population at our school.
iPads are all around our school now. We just got a new iPad cart which is great, I have yet to check it out as the list to do so is incredibly long and my kids all have their own lap top, so I don't want to get overly greedy, but that guilt will pass soon!!
Flip cameras are great. My kids love to post movies they make and we have a great video project called "Day int he Life" where the kids make movies of one day int heir life and then edit them using Movie Maker. it is a beloved 5th grade project that may get thrown out as we are heading towards the Common Core and it is hard to battle to fit the project into our new standards... pity... Flip cameras are very easy to use, the one problem I tend to have with them is the sound can be not great. But we are getting quite adept at voice overs...
I am planning on trying to use Poll Everywhere with my kids next week. I was thinking of asking them which program they like the best of the ones we are trying for my Wicked Problem Project.

Part A- Brainstorm Session

Here are the meeting parts for our first group project. I am not, unfortunately, featured in the meeting as I am way love here in Poland, and the rest of my group is in the US. First impressions is that I am working with excellent people(Jen and Dilly)! Thanks to both of them for being so SUPER flexible!!!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Here are my thoughts after I listened to all three of the sessions (3 as they used Skype and Jing and Jing is limited to 30 minutes).

• I am so glad you picked ToonDoo!! What fun!!!
• Toondoo is totally free which is awesome! My kids have done a few projects which are fun (just Toons) and they have really liked it. I did want to check out the book part as the Toons seemed sort of short.... Which was a bit limited..
• I do have a pro-version of Camtasia so I think I could put together a bunch of Jings if we wanted to split up ToonDoo into chunks and each take a chunk. Then we Jing that part and I can stitch them together into one movie.....Just a thought...
• An intial "chunking" of ToonDoo (not necessarily in order)... Looks like this: 1). Toons (how to create cartoons-this is easy, my fifth graders showed me to day although there are lots of little pieces), 2). Books (a lot like Toons but I think you can have MORE, you do need to make Toons first then put them into the books), 3). The Basics of ToonDoo (how to sign up, the profile, Tools, the help Wiki) 4). Traitr a place to make characters 5). ImagineR- a place to edit and play with uploaded photos or images 6). doodleR- A place to draw.
• I am great at Prezi and I am getting really good at Camtasia, so assign me whatever you need :)
• I have been playing with ToonDoo, one downfall is the loading time...But making cartoons is EASY and fun! The tools are really good, once you are in it is EASY!
• We are meeting again on Wednesday for a follow up.
• Here is a link to one of my literature circles blogs where they used ToonDoo to describe scenes from their book. Feel free to comment on them as a friend of mine :) They would dig that!

Some tutorials I found:

A Teachers Guide to Toondoo- a WordPress blog that introduces the basics...

A good pdf for a reference on the basics

Under Ten Minutes-very cool! In a nice British Accent :) This is a great example of what our presentation could look like!

Surveys and survey results

For one of our assignments in CEP812 we were to use online survey tools to gather information about technology use. I chose to use Survey Monkey. I sent the survey to the 5th grade here at American School of Warsaw. Approximately 46 students took the survey (which can be seen here) and here are the results (I am not showing all the results, just the ones I found interesting AND I apologize for the size, because I am not a paying member of Survey Monkey I had to crunch the numbers using Excel, maybe they should think about giving teachers some sort of free services like a lot of the other great internet tools out there). I changed some of the questions on the survey as we have a one to one laptop program at this school.

In this questions you can see that mostly the kids learn new things at school (67%) or at home (27%). so perhaps the one to one program is working after all....

How often do you use a computer to....... In the everyday category the winners were 1). Sending and receiving emails (48.9&) and 2). finding information on the internet (60%). Was this surprising? Nope. In the 5th grade we are currently researching persuasive topics using our school databases, but we often "google" our questions, anything from converting km to mi to "Are crickets incomplete or complete metamorphosis?". And email is big here too. My students communicate with me via email if they are sick, if they have a question about the homework, I send them links, Google docs, surveys.... What was surprising was that 30% of my fifth graders never used Facebook, I assumed many more were on it.

I liked this question.How well are you able to: In the "Really Good" category there were a lot of winners: send and receive email (56.5%), finding information on the internet (34.8%)and ..... playing computer games (30.4%)! What was interesting however, was what they did not feel they could confidently do (marked with a "Not Very Good" or "OK"), perhaps we need to brush up on these items: creating videos, working with spreadsheets/databases, editing their papers and creating a Powerpoint. I know for a fact that I am guilty of shunning the Powerpoint, much preferring the newer methods of Prezi, Slideshare, or VoiceThread. We discussed this in our team meeting and found it funny that we had veered away from the standard forms of presentation and relied much more heavily upon internet resources or just plain pure speeches (we do a huge speech unit). Should we change? Up for debate.

When you are using a computer (instead of paper and pencil) to do your school work do you: the most interesting item from this was "Get more confused when using a computer to" a whopping 58.7% picked sometimes. I expected less from my students, but here is the proof in the pudding, these little netbooks still confuse the issue sometimes.....