Khan Academy, Google Forms and the Flipped Math Class

I have decided to have my third grade math class watch Khan Academy videos at home, complete a Google Form in response to the videos and then review the material in class. I guess you could say I am working towards a flipped math class. So far students and parents love the idea. I have noticed that math homework is done the minute they get home from school as there is a date and time stamp. Also, all I have to do to check the student work is print out a two page Google Spreadsheet that occurs because of the Google Form. Now how cool is that? Khan Academy also offers the ability for teachers to become student coaches. If you chose this route you get all kinds of data. I am not that far along yet, and it is only third grade. But based on my early success with this FREE product, who knows where this might lead me? Take a look at the videos and forms on my website here.

Want to check out Khan Academy? Look here.

A TED video about Salman Khan and Khan Academy

What my website looked like:

Blabberize

I just returned from the TIE Conference (Technology in Education) 2011. It is a smaller conference but a worthwhile one none the less. I did present to teachers (Animoto and Prezi, see our class projects on these in an earlier post), but I also picked up some engaging ideas for my classroom.


One  I plan to use is Blabberize. Blabberize is is a very easy application that allows you to speak through a picture. Students can manipulate the picture to say what they want it to say. You can manipulate pictures of people, animals, even inanimate objects.


How can you use Blabberize in the classroom? Any report a student has to give can be done via Blabberize, while covering standards for the 21 century learner as seen here.


To check out Blabberize click here.


As always, be sure your students are finding pictures from places that have copyright free material such as Creative Commons, here or the Library of Congress digital collection here.


Update: Here is one of my students Blabberizes. Blogger is having an update problem. When they fix it, I will add more. Also, I have including a link to all of them. Enjoy!








Link to all of my third grade Blabberizes can be accessed here.



Here is a fun Blabberize I found on the Blabberize site. A student is reporting on Mt. Everest. Students and teachers have the ability to make their Blabberized items public (for anyone to see) or private. Keep that in mind.

Skeletal System Glogsters

This past school year my teaching partner introduced her students to Glogster. It was a huge success. Our third graders love seeing one of our laptop carts come down the hallway, it always meant a cool project was going to unwrap itself. And this time it meant Glogster!

What is Glogster? It is an interactive poster making app. Check it out here. Want to see some of our work? Click here and enjoy!

Twiducate, Twitter for Your Students

My students loved when I would turn on the Tweetdeck. I follow some great groups such as #elearning, #edchat, #edtech, and #edapps. The students knew that these groups could lead to new ideas, Skypes, or collaborations. When we had free time between specials and lunch we would see what educators where talking about. When I introduced the class to the student version of Twitter, Twiducate, they were excited. Twiducate runs like Twitter but is in a very closed environment. Students can only "Tweet" to those I sign up into our group. They can live chat, share ideas, and ask questions, thus staying in touch. It is also a great place for teachers to extend lessons, post homework or just communicate with students. To check out Twiducate click here.

Fodey for Your Lessons

In the spirit of sharing some of the ways we have employed technology at our school this past school year, I bring you Fodey. Fodey is an online newspaper clipping generator that a variety of our classrooms use. It is very simple to use, requires no login, and generates a bulletin board worthy product. Keep in mind that what the generator produces is, what looks like newspaper clippings, not whole articles. To take a look at the app, click here.  

Our Spanish teacher, used it to write newspaper clippings about the Japanese earthquake.

Our fourth grade teachers used Fodey to have students write about events in the Revolutionary War:

Third Grade Canadian Tech Projects

The last unit of our school year was on Canada. I created a GoogleTrek to introduce the students to the country and prepare them for their final project. To view or use our Canadian GoogleTrek check out this link. To learn how to make your own GoogleTrek, check out this link.

Once the students completed the GoogleTrek, they picked a province or territory to research. Students were allowed to use any technology they wanted to complete the project. To see the outline the students needed to follow, click here for the Google Doc.

Below are some the projects the students completed:

Braden: Ontario Prezi   http://bit.ly/iEh4oA
Austin: Quebec Prezi http://bit.ly/iPOwX8
Bennett: Quebec Animoto   http://bit.ly/jrl55F
Skylar: Saskatchewan Animoto  http://bit.ly/kIQt3V
Lydia: Quebec Animoto  http://bit.ly/maezRs
Emma: Quebec Powerpoint http://bit.ly/lH5ZWC

Class of 2010-11 Celestial Animoto Videos

As promised, I am posting my students Animoto videos. This was a two month project where students chose an unknown celestial object and learned how to do online research on this object including discerning between credible and questionable resources, how to complete bibliographies in MLA format, how to install a screen shot app so they could import their bibliography as a jpeg, into Animoto and more. Understand that this was a big undertaking for them and there are a few things we still need to address such as how to edit all the students in a timely manner. So you will find some grammatical errors. At any rate, the students worked quite hard and jumped way over the bar set for them. Take the time to watch a few of them, I think you will be pleased with the results.

Adena: http://bit.ly/lL9E8o
Christopher: http://bit.ly/kI9EDM
Alex: http://bit.ly/lhgVmk
Annika: http://bit.ly/kqIR6k
Avery: http://bit.ly/iIm6gM
Jared: http://bit.ly/lXTj7W
Skylar: http://bit.ly/mULiRR
Ashlyn: http://bit.ly/jDKWNV
Lily: http://bit.ly/m8pNsd
Cole: http://bit.ly/jEDX76
Braden: http://bit.ly/lkiV4z
Lydia: http://bit.ly/kmhju5
Austin: http://bit.ly/mOb0k9
Kristen: http://bit.ly/kmGanE
Chelsea: http://bit.ly/mQ483p
Bodhe: http://bit.ly/ih3R2M
Aleah: http://bit.ly/itlYUN
Grant: http://bit.ly/jbt2N0
Emma: http://bit.ly/iFjFJ6
Lucy: http://bit.ly/mlG6Gh
Jonah: http://bit.ly/jnkfCY
Analicia: http://bit.ly/lDOiWC
Samantha: http://bit.ly/mAgv6v
Bennett: http://bit.ly/jFpwq5
Nick: http://bit.ly/koyd2a