Learning with YouTube

Nothing needs to be boring! YouTube is our friend!

There are so many resources available on YouTube to help us with concepts in the classroom and help make learning engaging for our kids.

Let me give you a couple of examples from our week this week....

Counting

Our backwards counting is not so great. I saw this clip in my daughters Kinder room and knew it would be a hit with my kids

This counting video is a great one for the beginning of the year with numbers to 10...

Magic 'e'

We know that very important rule that an 'e' can make a vowel say its name...these 2 videos are some that my kids in Kinder and last year in Yr 2 all enjoyed and helped them remember...

Morning Routine

We use these songs nearly every day as part of our morning routine or calendar time

Days of the week

Months of the Year

And lastly a time video that the kids love!

Do you have any favourite videos you use?

Techy Tuesday....Topmarks Ladybirds

If you haven't used TopMarks before, you need to go and visit! There are so many fun, interactive games for kids and they look and work great on the IWB too.

This one in particular has had a facelift and is working really well in my Kinder computer time.

The great thing about this game is that it only deals with numbers between 1-10 making it perfect for early learners.

Subitizing! Put the right amount of spots on the ladybug

Matching/subtising/numeral identification - matching the number of spots to the number on the leaf.

 Ordering (counting/subitizing) smallest to largest

Ordering (counting/subitizing) largest to smallest

Go and have a look :) Click any pic to get there.

Ken Robinson

Have you seen a video on TED with Sir Ken Robinson speaking about the shift in education. If you haven't you will find a powerful piece of viewing. It talks about technology and its impact on education. He says that we are educating our children out of creativity instead of teaching it to them. Here is the original video link.

But on our last day of school for 2012, our new principal showed us this talk, but done very differently by RSA. It is one of those animated drawings and puts visuals to the words.

Please go and check it out and share with your teacher friends. It is a long clip but definitely worth it.

Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

Website Wednesday - Techie Tips

Not a website this week but some information I found from some websites that I think you will find useful!


I was trying to find a suitable division sign for something I was making for my class and I wasn't happy with just using the stroke or the one you find in the shapes section. So a bit of googling later, this is what I found out.


For a Division symbol
If you hold down the Alt key and type 0247, you should get a proper division symbol. NOTE: you need to type on the keypad, not the numbers on the top.




For a Multiplication symbol
If you hold down the Alt key and type 0215, you should get a proper multiplication symbol. NOTE: you need to type on the keypad, not the numbers on the top.


Hope this nifty little trick can help you sometime :)

Tutorial - Make your own Favicon (instead of Website Wednesday)

Now I know this is something that lots of people already have but to tell you the truth, I was feeling a little left out! So I thought "Brooke. You are getting ok at the internet techy stuff. Why don't you try and work it out?"


So here is a quick outline of how I did it! I thought it was fairly straight forward. Apologies for the extra large pictures but I thought the print was a little hard to look at.


1. I used http://www.favicon.cc/ . Choose Import Image. Its a good idea to know which image you want. 

 2. For mine, I copied the image of the button from my blog and saved it as an image (not the code!) before I did this step. Choose your file to upload. The second thing I circled was keep dimensions and I did this because my original image was a square. But you might like to play around with it if you have a different shaped image. Then click upload!

 3. Fingers crossed, your page now looks a little like this. This is your pixelated image. Now if you want to play around here you can change colours etc but I just stuck with what I had. Boring I know hehe.

4. Don't get tricked on the next step. Underneath your pixel picture you will need to scroll right down. There is where you find a preview of your Favicon and the button to download. It will give you a file extension of .ico

5. now the fun part - putting it on your blog! You will need to go to your layout to edit. Find the little gadget that says Favicon and click Edit

6. Choose your favicon file. You should see it pop up after it has uploaded to the page.

7. If it doesn't appear on the blog sidebar or on other people's blog sidebars, then you will need to clear your cache/ browsing history. I am using Google Chrome so I go to the spanner tool, click Tools and the choose Clear Browsing Data. In Internet Explorer, you would be looking for the same thing. Now refresh and have another look. You should have success!!!

I hope you have found this helpful and look forward to seeing your new favicon pop up in my sidebar :)

Mystery Blog Hop

It is a hoppin' kind of day. Jump on the QR code blog hop and read some great technology related posts from some great bloggers. Just follow the codes below. And if you dont have a special ap on your iphone, ipod or ipad, all the links are clickable :) Enjoy and thanks again to Christi for organising this unique experience.

Website Wednesday

Im taking a detour today. Away from the 'academic type' websites and towards a more engaging, interactive fun one that the kids will love (but still has a place in your literacy time).


The website that my last year 2nd graders had heaps of fun with was Kerpoof.

KERPOOF

 The home page is your key to unlocking the fun. If you want your kids to save any of their work, you might like to look into signing up. There is a fee though. I never needed to save my kids work last year so this didnt bother me.

This screen shot is from the activity Spell a Picture. Students have to use the letters to spell the word which corresponds with any picture shown. When the word is spelt correctly, students chose the picture and it is added to their background to make a bigger picture.

This one is from Make a Card. Students choose a theme and then add whatever they like to make their own card

This shot is from Make a Picture. After choosing a background, students add embellishments to create a scene. All pics that you can can be resized, flipped etc.

This was my class' favourite activity. It is called Make a Movie. After choosing a theme, students add characters and props. They can move their characters around the scene, use perspective, add sound effects - the possibilities are endless! Its like movie making 101 and totally kid friendly.

This would be great for literacy. It is called Tell a Story. After choosing a theme, students illustrate their pages by using the pictures provided and then write text to match. Pretty awesome hey? I love this one.

Another great page is the Lesson Plans page. There are some great goodies for teachers, some lesson plans and then advice on how to use Kerpoof to address the topics in the plans. And they are linked to standards too!

Click on the first picture to go and check out the great fun at Kerpoof!

Website Wednesday

I was wondering what I was going to post about for this week. But then, during a rather boring riveting professional development session this morning at school, I was introduced to this little beauty.

THINKING BLOCKS

 Thinking blocks uses manipulatives to model how to solve word problems for all operations

 It gives you lots of choices about the type of question and the size of the number, making it adaptable for K-2 and primary students. The following are screen shots from an example addition question I ran through.

 Place the labels and 'blocks' in the correct place

 Add the numbers to the correct label - this enables you to find the missing number (or part of the word problem you need to solve)

 Use the calculator to help you solve and input the answer

I have only just begun playing with this but it looks like a fantastic tool for helping to dissect word problems and gives your visual learners those cues as well.

Click on the first slide to go try it for yourself :)


Now keep on blog hopping!

Website Wednesday (on Thursday)

Apologies for the slight delay on this post. Its been miserable weather here in Sydney and when I went to write this the other night, our power went out and didnt return til the next day. Better late than never hey?


Just one website this week that my kids will be using tomorrow in computer time. I saw some people were posting about it last week so I decided to try it out.

A B CYA

 General screen shot of the home page to the website. The following pics are from the Grade 2 part of the site.

All about Number activities

More number

Other cool stuff including shapes, geometry, patterns, art and much more.

This site is well worth a look. I certainly enjoyed cruising it and I have only just scratched the surface.

Enjoy!

Interactive Whiteboard fever! and a FREEBIE

Now I am not new to the world of IWB. There has only been one year (my first) of my teaching career that I have not had one of these babies in my classroom and I know how lucky that sounds.


At my current school, I had one installed in the first 6 months I was there and it has changed my teaching totally (as Im sure you will agree). If the technology is not rocking though....dont bother knocking - cause I am probably muttering curses under my breath at everything from the projector to the pen to the whole system.


In my current classroom though, the board has been anything less than satisfactory. The projector has been so bad that for my kids to see what is on the board, we have to turn all the lights off and close all the blinds on the windows. But then you have the problem of kids straining eyes to see what they are writing etc etc.


So you can imagine how pumped I was when on Thursday afternoon, I was pulled aside and was asked if I minded moving out of the classroom for a bit on Friday. Why? I asked. Your new board is going in tomorrow was the reply. I happily replied I would work on the oval all day if necessary.


So in it went. It is a cool new Panaboard with the facility to have 3 people touching it at once! Pretty cool. I know my kiddos are going to love it :) And maybe I can stop cursing at the pen.

So to celebrate my new board, I am happy to share with you one of my Notebook lessons for multiplication - Making Arrays. It is in Smart Notebook format and you can grab it from TPT for FREE

Website Wednesday - You Tube

I'm taking a slightly different approach this week. We have been looking at all the ways an 'e' on the end of a word effects different parts of the word. Last week we did 'magical silent e' which makes the vowel say its long sound. Here are two awesome YouTube videos which focus on this concept

SUPER E

 VOWEL BOOT CAMP

Hope you can find a use for these in your class rooms. My kids LOVE them :)

Website Wednesday

Hi all
If you are anything like me, I scour the internet for websites and interactive games that are appropriate for my lessons and user friendly for my students to access independently. So what I would like to do each Wednesday is choose a focus area and give you some websites I have 'road tested' in the classroom with success (or maybe sometimes abject failure!!! - you know it happens to the best of us)


My first focus is going to be Subtraction which we have been focussing on this week in Maths groups. If you would like to read more about how I run my maths groups click here to go to that post.


The games that we have played this week are


Subtraction Soccer
In this game students have to remove the right amount of players as stated in the takeaway. Then they click the kicker. If they have matched the subtraction correctly they score a goal. My boys especially liked this one.

SumSense

In this game the students have 3 numbers and they have to rearrange them to make a subtraction that works. Links nicely with fact families.

 The Digit Workout
The final subtraction game we played was this one. It has many different applications but we used the Level 2 Subtract from 20 ones.

I hope these sites can come in useful in the classroom the next time you look at subtraction. Leave me a comment to let me know what direction you would like me to go in for next week.