Author Blogs: Visit Kate Messner's Blog to Learn More

Kate Messner, children's book author, has an excellent blog, and included on it as a Page to find other authors' blogs. 

Here's a quick screen capture of the authors' blogs she offers, with links to them, but you need to visit her page to use the links virtually to get to the blogs.

While, you're on her site, look around. She offers a variety of information for young readers and encourages children to read and write. Here's a screen capture of the pages on her blog showing she has pages for Books, Blog, Kids, Writers, Speaking, Appearances, and About Me. If you set up a classroom blog, you might want to create a page to help your own students find authors' blogs online.

Perhaps seeing that authors have blogs will encourage your students to want to have a full class blog or to create their own individual blog, or join a class blog organized with a platform like KidBlog.

In addition to Kate's blog, she also can be found in these places:

Twitter

Facebook

Google Docs for Learning: Way More than Meets the Eye

Susan Oxenovd created this great Glogster of multiple ways to use Google Docs. Click any object for details.



Let us know if you find this Glogster useful for finding new ways to use Google Docs.

News, Book Reviews, and More for Kids

I've heard numerous teachers extol the value of using the DoGo website with students. Here students can find current events to read about and then have writing projects in their class based on what they read. They can also read book reviews written by kids, and better yet contribute their own reviews to the site. Check out the book review section. Click on the image below.

Explore this part of the site to see the reviews students have written. After you have explored around, then check the Dogo News for Kids section, by clicking on the link image below. Notice news is listed in categories. Also, notice the tabs: Teachers and Kids.

After browsing around the site, let us know if you would recommend this site to teachers or if you would consider using with your students?

"This Is The Best Video I’ve Seen On Perseverance & Resilience: “There’s no dishonor in having a disability”

I found this video from a tweet posted by St. Louis, MO School District Curriculum Coordinator Justin Tarte who came across it on Larry Ferrzzano's blog, and it is really worth passing along. Feel free to share with others, and if appropriate to share with your students for discussion, a writing prompt, or an introduction to unit of study. It is also a great motivational video to show students the value of persistence and resilience. Let me know what you think after you watch it, and thanks to Justin and Larry for spreading around this video, which has already had over 23,000 views on YouTube. Larry also posted on his blog a link to a lesson plan for using the video with students, and I will be including that link as well.



Here is a link the lesson plan which is sponsored by the TED-ED Lessons Worth Sharing Site: There’s no dishonor in having a disability - Steven Claunch

Cranes for Peace: A Global Project

Once we introduce technology in our classrooms and schools, we open up opportunities for students to collaborate in ways unfathomable before. One excellent example is a quad blogging. The Cranes 4 Peace Blog, a collaborative project, follows this format, with students from countries around the world contributing to a common blog. Here is an image from just one of the posts on the blog,

http://cranes4peace.wordpress.com/2013/09/04/st-thomas-more-cps-peace-cranes/

Check the About page for the project, and then go to the blog itself, The Cranes 4 Peace, to see what the children in this collaborative blog are posting.

http://cranes4peace.wordpress.com/about/

Take some time to look. Don't rush. Leave your comments on this post after you've looked around. Have you gotten any inspiration from The Cranes 4 Peace blog? Would you consider implementing a similar project in your school?

See this website to learn more about the Peace Crane Project. The site will offer ideas for ways you can celebrate in your own schools and bring awareness to world peace.

Here is a video about the project:





For more information about the International Day of Peace, celebrated, Sept. 21, 2013, also  check this website: International Day of Peace, Education for Peace.

Still Wondering What Dot Day Is and Looking for Activities

Dot Day can be celebrated any day. The Educators' Handbook for Dot Day is an excellent guide for lesson ideas for any day of the year. This free guide can be downloaded from Fable Vision Learning. Click on the image below to access the online pdf of the guide, and save the file for reference.

And for more inspiration, check this blog which is a steady stream of artistic contributions in celebration of the ideas represented in the book. Click on the image of the blog's banner below to get to the blog:

See for instance, the contribution from artist Jon Klassen, winner of the 2013 Caldecott Medal for "Most Distinguished Picture Book": This is Not Hat. 

You will find close to 100 illustrations on the site, as of September 15, 2013, which marks the 10th anniversary celebration of the book's birthday. Check the blog archive to trace back contributions.

Special Education Resources for Teachers and Others

We all teach students with special needs whether we are certified special education teachers or teachers working with students in our classes who have special needs. Here are some resources I recently discovered.

• How Technology is Being Used in Special Education (from Edudemic, includes a helpful infographic)
• On Special Education, an Education Week blog
• Keep Students with Special Needs Safe from Bullying (U. S. Dept. of Ed.)
• U.S. Department of Education Video: It Only Gets Better is embedded below

• 10 Things You Need to Know About LD Evaluation
• Parent Toolkit: Bullying, What's A Parent to Do
• Student's Guide to the IEP
• Accommodations and Modifications in an IEP
• Dyslexia Insight #2: The Best Way to Start a Conversation about Dyslexia  (Also, see how the article's author used Dragon Speak Naturally to help with writing the text)
• Special Needs Digest is a blog that posts information and news daily of interest to the special needs community
• Best Rated Apps for Autism and Applied Behavior Analysis
• 13 Free Assistive Technology Resources

Thanks to Melissa Taylor for sharing many of the above resources on Google+.

What are some of your favorite resources for special education teachers? What tech tools do you find most helpful for students with special needs? Which of the above resources were most helpful to you?

Fifth Graders' Animoto: Classroom Vision

Mrs. Ripp, a 5th grade teacher from Wisconsin, is the brains behind the Global Read Aloud. She also has several blogs, and her students blog with KidBlog.

Here's an Animoto that her students recently produced and that Mrs. Ripp posed on two of her blogs:

• Blogging through the Fourth Dimension: My Students' Classroom Vision
• The Adventures in Mrs. Ripp's Room: My Students' Classroom Vision

   

Mrs. Ripp also invites others to post comments on her students' KidBlog: Mrs. Ripp's Class 

To get students ready for blogging, Mrs. Ripp introduces a paper blogging project, where students practice writing comments to one another's writing using paper and sticky notes. Here are two pictures she posted on Twitter showing her 5th graders doing paperblogs.

If you're looking for some fresh ideas to implement with students or ways to communicate with parents, scroll around Pernille's professional and parent blog. Also, search through her students' KidBlog, and leave them some comments.

To access each of the blogs, click on the images.

Professional Blog:

Parent Blog:

Mrs. Ripp's Class KidBlog

What ideas for implementation in the classroom did you get from flipping through Mrs. Ripp's blogs or her students' bog?

Ideas for Using Animoto to Enrich Student Learning

The Read/Write/Think website, which offers lots of lesson plan ideas, recently ran a post, "Bringing Animoto to Life in the Classroom." The post included many good ideas for using Animoto successfully in the classroom, as well as strategies for introducing the tool to students.

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by dennisar

The post also reminds us about opening an educator's account and then enrolling your students by using the code Animoto provides. Setting up an Animoto Educator's account following the directions provided also helps to keep a class organized as students work with the tool and want to showcase their work. One suggestion was to set up a wiki with links to the students' Animoto. I did something like one semester to keep track of students' Animotos and to make it easier for other educators to find the Animotos all in one place.

Animotos for Spring 2012 students on a wiki page.

Some of the ideas that teacher Kathy Wickline suggested on Read/Write/Think website for using Animoto include:

• Students introducing themselves. One of the Education 584 teachers in the West Hartford Cohort did this with his 6th graders. Take a look at his blog post where he includes three samples from his students, "Pulling It All Together."
• Use of Animoto for students to recap a research project. This option can be offered as an alterative to the classic PowerPoint.
• Set up an Scavenger Hunt in which students go off and take photos to document their findings. My niece did this with campers she supervised when she was a counselor this summer. The campers loved it, and then we assembled their photos in an Animoto. It was nice to share this with parents. In a school setting, the Animoto could be posted on a class website and shared with parents.
• Create scrapbooks to review the school year. The Read/Write/Think does not include creating a Scrapbook specifically of a field trip, but one of the former Education spring 2012 students did just that. She created a scrapbook using photos of biweekly field trips her students made to a local farm, "Farm Trip Animoto."  Another teacher from the Spring 2012 also used Animoto for a field trip summary, "Field Trip Animoto." 

Given the valuable ideas the Read/Write/Think site offers, including organizing setting up a class Animoto site, I suggest going right to the post as well as following some of the links in the post. "Bringing Lessons to Life with Animoto."

Once you go the post on Read/Write/Think, notice the teacher, Kathy Wickline, who created the post, also has other contributions.

Screen Capture done with Awesome Screen Capture

If you click on her Profile link, you will find other lesson ideas she contributed to the Read/Write/Think site. She has lots of good ideas for using other Web 2.0 and other tools such as:

• Voki as a way to create commercials
• Prezi in relation to historical fiction
• Glogs for book reports
• Book Trailers created with PhotoStory 3 including a template for students to organize the trailer

Let us know what ideas you gather about using Animoto? If you are not yet following the Read/Write/Think site, you might consider doing so.  Take a look at the site's homepage to get an idea of the wealth of resources offered. Read/Write/Think.

So What Can Kindergarteners Do with Digital Tools

Matt Gomez, a kindergarten teacher in Texas, does amazing things with his students. Check his blog, and check this recent post about how he uses blogging with students. The post includes links to a variety of projects his students are doing.

Click on the image below to access the specific post:

If kindergarten kids can do all of these things with digital tools, think about what kids in general can do when teachers expose them to digital tools for learning and creating.

Here are  some screen captures from the post to give you an idea of what students are doing.

So what's your reaction to how the kindergarteners are learning with digital tools? After exploring Matt's blog and some of his posts, what have you been motivated to do with your students using digital tools?

International Dot Day Coming Your Way

International Dot Day falls on September 15, but students read the book, The Dot, any time of the year.  In September, teachers make a concerted effort to share with the others their students' responses. Some share through a Twitter tweet with a link to a blog post, video, or image. I'm including examples below.

First, here's an Animoto.  Click on the image below to access it.

Here's another Animoto, created by students at the Brewster and Korn Elementary School in Durham, CT. Click on the image to view the Animoto.

Here's an example of a bulletin board students created.

Below are other images I screen captured from teachers' tweets. 

The students above are coloring pictures and will use the colAR App to make their pictures come to life in 3-D.  Here's an example of 2nd graders using the app before coloring the pictures. It's hard to imagine how the app works in this 2-D environment, but you can learn more about it from the colARApp site. The site includes in its collections coloring pages for Dot Day.

The one below is of Connecticut school media-librarian Anne Doyle, from RSD#13, in the Middlebury-Durham area. Anne Doyle is the school librarian, grade 5-6, at  Memorial School Library.  Great to see an educator and student dressing up to celebrate the book's theme of "make your mark on the world." 

Jenny Lussier, a teacher librarian at the Brewster and Korn Elementary Schools in Durham, RSD#13, is also getting ready for dot day. Here is a shot from her web page.

The Korn Elementary School, one of the schools, even has on its homepage, information about the school celebrating Dot Day.

http://korn.rsd13ct.org/

And another Connecticut teacher, Nada Nanoun, in Avon, is also celebrating Dot Day with her 2nd graders, and posted this picture:

She shared this follow-up comment on Twitter:

And one of the best ways to follow along with what students are doing for Dot Day is by checking the author's own Dot Day sign up page and his Twitter feed, which does not require a Twitter account to view.  Click on the image below to find Peter Reynold's Twitter 

Look for pic.twitter.com ULR's in tweets to for links to click on to access pictures. Here's a screen capture to show you what such a pic.twitter.com link looks like.  

Well, by now, hoping your creativity is flowing, and you're inspired to join in. Let us know your plans or thoughts about Dot Day or the book The Dot and its many messages to go out and "make your mark" in the world.

What is Storybird and Why Use It

I made this short voice-over recording using the ShowMe app on the iPad, and used the app as an opportunity to tell you something about the Storybird website that students in previous courses have used with students.




While I was also playing around with the ShowMe app, I also made another quick video to tell you about a free professional development opportunity coming up the first Saturday October 5. So here it goes.