Top 10 for Pinnacle Week

I have spent this week getting recharged on my technology knowledge and working on new ideas that I can use in my classroom this next school year.

Here is my Top 10 List of things that have happened at Pinnacle this year.

10. Mindcraft can be an amazing tool to use in the classroom.  Just make sure you take the Dramamine before attempting to play!

9. Badges!  What a great motivator for students to keep up their work.

8. Inquiry Circles...Great way to incorporate technology and content together!

7. Wonder Notebooks-In the past I have done Day Books for my students to use across different subjects.  I am excited to see how using Wonder Notebooks allows my students to tap into their natural curiosity.

6. Nearpod-what a neat tool to engage learners quickly.  I am excited to explore this tool next school year.

5. People Machine-loved this idea for getting students to collaborate and engage with others.

4. Personalized Learning-This idea has caused me to wonder how it would be possible with our current curriculum frameworks we have in place.  I will researching more about this topic and adding components of it to my room.

3. Working with other pinnacle leaders.  I don't get to see some of these educators  very often, but when we are together, amazing things happen.  We build off each others expertise and energy and are able to come up with great ideas that we use in our classrooms.

2. FOOD!  Ice Cream Sundaes, Biscuit Bar, Gourmet Popcorn, Cookies and Milk, Pizza lunch.....are you hungry yet?!?!?!

1. AppMazing Race!  I loved this activity.  It incorporated multiple different tech ideas and allowed our group to be creative and have fun.  It was so much fun, a group of us created one to use at the beginning of the year with our students.

Pinnacle Day 1 Reflection 3-2-1

3 Things I Found Out
1. I need to get more comfortable with TPAC and know how to utilize it better in my classroom.
2. I am excited about trying the menu idea to allow students to work through a learning task.
3. I am not ready to go back to school and for summer break to end!!


2 Interesting Things
1. Moving from first grade to fourth grade, I am excited about the new technology ideas that I will be able to use in my classroom.
2.  I like the idea of making my classroom more individualized for each student.  I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the planning aspect.

1 question I still have
1. How to manage the time to learn about the different technology ideas and then plan the lessons to incorporate them into my day.

Techie Tools Professional Development

I am privileged to be part of a group of technology leaders in my district called Pinnacle.  One of the requirements was to begin this blog.  I had never blogged prior to this year, and I honestly didn't see a reason to blog.  Boy was I wrong!!!!  I have learned so much from all of ya'll and I know that this is because of reading what you are doing in your own classrooms.  I would have missed out on so many new ideas that my kids have loved if I hadn't joined the blogging world.

Another requirement for Pinnacle is to lead professional development at my school.  This freaked me out!!!  I can talk all day in front of kids, but adults are another thing.  This has been the year of trainings at my school, so I decided to offer several different sessions on how to incorporate technology into the classroom.  Teachers were allowed to chose which sessions they wanted to attend and opt out of those they were already familiar with.  Overall the sessions went well and I didn't get tongue tied too often!

The first session I did was Blogger and Kidblog.  I LOVE my blog and all the wonderful bloggers I have met through the blog world and I wanted to share that with teachers at my school.  Have you ever used Kidblog?  I love it!  In the past, I have always started it with good intentions, and then let it fall to the side.  This year I have used it more consistently and in a variety of content areas.  If your interested in setting up your own Kidblog, here is the handout I used.

I also did sessions on Photostory and Audacity.  My kids love using these programs with digital storytelling.  Having iPods to use in my classroom, we use Audacity to create podcasts to share what we have learned about various topics.  Love doing this instead of a test!

My favorite session was the last one on using Voki.  What I love about Voki is the fact that it can be used with any age and it is EASY!  I showed my kiddos how to make their avatar once and they were off making their own.  Several kids even asked for the website so they could make them at home!

 
We were studying Presidents in our Government unit so I loved using Abe!

Last week we finished up our non-fiction reading workshop unit and my kiddos each created a Voki showcasing what they learned about.  It was a great way to celebrate the end of the unit.  Pick up my handout here 

If you haven't used these tools, check them out!  They are a great way to spice up lessons especially at this time of the year!

Pinnacle Unit - Communities Around the World

This summer when I found out I would have to create a unit to enhance a topic I already taught, I immediately knew that I wanted to do mine on a social studies concept. History has always interested me and I love learning about things that happened in the past, but social studies has always been the subject that was so horrible to teach. The curriculum is a little boring and our text is less than thrilling. This unit began with a study of where in the world do we live. It never fails, every year my students get our state, country, and city confused. I wanted them to be able to tell me for certain what our state and city were. I started with our universe and worked all the way into each students' actual street address. I used the SMART board to create interactive instruction and some clips from Discovery Education to get their prior knowledge going. My students also responded to a blog post about which continent they would most like to live in at the end of our unit.

Check out my previous blog post about this unit.

Below is a video of our culminating celebration

Next we moved into talking about each specific type of community. We watched 3 short videos from Discovery Education about each type of community. We then created classroom charts listing the things that would be found in that type of community. Students then took what they had learned from the videos and their peers and created a community foldable (thanks Pinterst!).

I then broke the students up into cooperative learning groups and assigned each group one of the community types: urban, suburban, or rural. As a group, they completed a Netvibes reading and answered questions about what they had learned.

Sorry its so small, I can't figure out how to make the images bigger!

Each group took what they had learned and created a diorama to represent their community.

We never once cracked our text book, and I feel that both my students and I learned so much more then when I force them to read the text book and worry about taking a test to get a grade. I can't wait to plan more units to increase their excitement of social studies and hopefully help some of my students pick up my love of history in the process!

Pinnacle Peer Review