A Second Grade Teacher’s Blog

 This post is cross posted at http://harju.edublogs.org/.

We have been meeting many of the other schools involved in Rock Our World through Skype Chats. We enjoy getting to know the other students and teachers and learning about where they live. We each choose one of the states we have Skyped with so far and wrote about that state on our Kidblog.

Oklahoma - We Skyped with Mrs. Park’s 2nd graders in Howe, Oklahoma. They sang us a song! We know that Oklahoma City is the capital and the state is shaped likes a pan with a handle. Howe, Oklahoma is in the pan part, not the handle.

Florida - We met Ms. Snyder’s 2nd Graders from Oneco Elementary in Bradenton, FL. We learned that the Orange Blossom is the state flower and the weather is warm there. They are also near Disney World.

Pennsylvania - We talked to Ms. Abernathy’s Ponderous 5th Grade Pandas. We learned that they have 8 class pets! 4 chinchillas, 3 bearded dragons and 1 ferret. We told them that we have a pet rock that Mrs. Harju keeps outside. We learned that Pennsylvania is the Keystone state and they have a state dog – the Great Dane.

Wisconsin - We met with Ms.Huttner’s 3rd grade students at Glacier Edge Elementary in Verona, WI. They only have 8 students in their class and they told us they have a class rabbit. They also speak Spanish and English. We know that the state bird is the robin (just like Michigan) and that the capital is Madison.

We enjoy sharing facts about Michigan and telling a few jokes in our Skype Chats. We tell the other classes about the fruits and vegetables grown in Michigan and how the lower peninsula of our state is shaped like a mitten. We always hold up our hand to tell them how to find Grand Rapids.

We can’t wait to meet more students in the US and around the world!

Next week we hope to visit North and South Carolina and Poland!

I was honored to among the many wonderful presenters at this year’s MACUL conference in Detroit, Michigan, March 17-18. MACUL stands for Michigan Association of Computer Users in Learning. My presentation titled, “Wikis and Web 2.0 in the Elementary Classroom” appeared well received, although one cannot always tell as teachers in an audience are so quiet! My presentation ppt is below and I am happy to share it as well as answer questions.

I give credit for my “Wow” tech moment to Julie Myrmel from Hudsonville. It was 5 years ago that I attended her MACUL session, “Wikis and Blogs and Podcasts” and my teaching has never been the same! I was thrilled that a teacher approached me after my presentation to tell me that this was her “Wow!” teaching moment. I am so happy to pass on the Wonder of Wikis and Web 2.0.

This is my first post written on an iPad. I have my own and One will be donated to my classroom in the next couple of weeks. I am very excited to use both iPads in my classroom. Yes, I am going to let the children use my personal one. My hope/plan/dream is that when parents/admin see the amazing things that will happen with the iPad (and it will be amazing!) that more funds/iPads will be donated for not only my classroom but all classrooms! (If you are going to Dream, DREAM BIG!)
So, here are some of the Apps that I have on my iPad. A few are just for me (Angry Birds!) but most are ones I will be using with my students. I am most excited about Timed Reading, BrainPOP, TanZen, Counting Coins, Drawing Pad, QuickVoice, Mobile Mouse and will be checking out Air Sketch next.
The screen shots were taken with the iPad and I used the Photobucket App to insert them into the post. (so cool, so easy!)

Rock Our World, founded by Carol Anne McGuire is an amazing project! I have been involved in this project for over 8 weeks and my students are loving every minute of it!
The first part involves creating a drum beat using Apple’s Garageband. Once I played around with the program, it was easy to figure out. The students and I worked together to create the drum beat. Large group collaboration is not easy, but a great experience. We add the weekly instruments to the tracks in the same way. We always take time to dance to the music we create as well.

The second part revolves around the the theme of PEACE. We are working with Animation-ish software provided by Peter Reynolds and creating a class animation video sharing our ideas on how to promote peace. We had fun creating a Peace Sign animation that we set to our Drum beat.
The third part of this project is connecting with classrooms all over the world. We have Skyped with students in Iowa, North Carolina, Florida, and Pennsylvania, and internationally with students in Poland, Canada, New Zealand and Peru.
The children are learning about music, other parts of the US, other countries, learning animation, practicing communication skills and so much more.
We finish the project with a Family Day where we will share our music, a short video and our reflections with the other schools in the project via a Live Stream and iChat. While the project may be over soon, we will continue to benefit from it! We will continue our relationships with many of the schools, we will continue to promote peace and we will continue to make music!

This entry is crossed posted on my DEN blog.

I attended my first DEN Summer Institute last week at Bentley University in MA. Met many amazing educators (DEN Stars!) and learned a great deal. Lodge McCammon‘s all day workshop taught me many new (and simple) ways to use video (Flip cameras) with my students. Can’t wait to have them create their first Paper Slide video or act out a math concept. I am working on finding lower elementary songs to use in concept music videos Lodge Style. Had a great time making the video on Plant Cells with the whole group.

Matt Monjan did a great job showing us all the new features of the Discovery Education website, especially the Builder Tools. I look forward to using the Assignment Builder, Quiz Builder, and Writing Prompt Builder with my class this year. I had fun showing these features to some teachers this morning and it was fun to watch their amazement and excitement at using these tools. One of the teachers kept texting another teacher while we were talking to share the site with her.

I enjoyed meeting Peter Reynolds and visiting his Fablevision studio. The Fablevision website has many wonderful resources for educators. There are Flash versions of some stories as well as a free download of Benjamin’s Bowtie in the Fable Library. He was nice enough to autograph a copy of So Few of Me for each of us. He also autographed my copy of The Dot that I brought along. His books are perfect springboards for lessons on creativity and caring and it will be fun to plan lessons around them.

Hall Davidson joined us later in the week and shared Web 2.0 tools and great tips for making movies with Green Screen and DE Streaming. His presentations are always filled with many great tips/ideas/websites. I enjoyed talking to him about the ways I have used Green Screen with my 2nd graders.

We used Edmodo as a backchannel during the Institute and it was a great way to learn how to use this tool. We had fun putting up polls, questions, links and images. It still is being used by the DEN Summer Institute attendees to share our trips home, reflections, ideas, links.

Loved all the free stuff – Discovery Blanket, Book signed by Peter Reynolds, DE T-shirt and Glogster T-shirt, great note cards from Florida (Thanks Francie), Hyperstudio, etc.

I enjoyed this first DEN Summer Institute and hope to attend again in the future. I know many people put in a great deal of time to make it happen and I am very thankful. I met Lance Rougeux and many of the DEN leaders for the first time and am impressed by their hard work and leadership. Lance and the DEN crew were there to make sure we had a wonderful and educational experience. They were amazing!

I was having difficulty using Discovery Education Video Clips with iMovie 09.
I downloaded the video to my computer, but iMovie 09 would not recognize the .mov format. I was puzzled, perplexed, frustrated and annoyed. Why wouldn’t it work? So I went to my faithful and knowledgeable PLN (Twitter and DEN Blog) and found the answer. Thanks PLN!

There is an easy way to convert videos or clips so that iMovie will recognize them.
1. Download the video or clip to your computer.
2. Add the video or clip to your iTunes library.
3. While in iTunes, click on the video or clip, go to the toolbar to the ADVANCED tab. Choose either Create iPhone or Create iPad version (I chose iPad thinking it would be converted for a bigger screen.)
4. Now the video or clip is in a format that iMovie will recognize, .m4v and you can easily import it.

Below is a video segment showing how DE clips can be used. I added them to part of a Landforms video created last fall with my 2nd graders. Another example is in the previous post – My Media Mash-up.

This video is cross posted on my Classroom Blog.

In a DEN Blog post by Hall Davidson, he asks for video Mash-ups created by teachers or students. He wants to showcase some of them when he presents at ISTE 2010.
As I am on summer vacation (first week), still in my creative/work mode, and have many video clips still on my laptop, I decided to see what I could come up with.
I started with a recording of my 2nd graders singing
“I Know and Old Lady.” They sang this in music class and I thank our wonderful music teacher Mr. V for playing the piano and recording this during class. (He used my iPod Nano with a microphone attachment.)

I then searched Discovery Streaming for clips of the animals mentioned in the song and downloaded them. As I am using a Mac and iMovie 09, I next needed to add the videos to my iTunes library and using the Advanced tab, convert the clip to an iPad (or iPhone) version. Now the clips are in a format that iMovie 09 will recognize. I did a Google search for Old Lady pictures and then used Blabberize to animate some of them. (Blabberize lets you download your animation as a video for free.) After the animals, Old Lady pics, and song were added to the timeline, I choose clips of my students that were filmed with Green Screen. We made quite a few videos this year, so I had many clips to choose from. The video might have been better if the student clips showed them actually singing or acting out the scene, and if I did this during the school year I would have had the children decide how to illustrate each section of the song.
This was fun to create! A great start to my summer.
Enjoy!

In February I attended wonderful Professional Development sessions with Dr. Sara Kajder. Her sessions inspired me to try Digital Storytelling with my second graders. Digital Storytelling was something I wanted to try but didn’t know where to start. Dr. Kajder’s examples and explanation simplified the process for me, and gave me the confidence to try it with my second graders. I realized that even a simple story was a great start – that I had been making it too complicated.
Find more videos like this on MACUL Space


I chose to have the children write about themselves, their thoughts and memories. I began by showing them a sample story I created about myself. There were to be 4 pictures in our story. One self portrait (that we made from construction paper), 2 pictures, or pictures of objects that the students brought from home, and another piece of classroom created artwork which was a Religion reflection. As we are a Catholic School, I wanted to bring Religion into the project, so I had the children journal some reflections about Religion, and then create a picture to go with their journal entry.
The other pictures trickled in all week. Some were emailed to me by parents, others were objects that the children happily brought in and displayed so that we could take a digital photo of them. I collected these pictures and created a folder for each child with their 4 pictures. (The classroom artwork was scanned or a digital photo was taken of it to convert it to a jpg.)

By the end of the week the children were ready to write a script for each picture. What does it make you think about? What story do you want to tell? For the religion picture the children copied their journal entry. For the self portrait I gave the children an open ended template to guide them. For the other two pictures the students were given a blank script for each picture. When the children finished their 4 scripts they practiced reading them aloud to a classmate. The children tried to give some feedback, but I have found that second graders don’t really like to do a lot of editing. When they are done, they are done. I read the scripts and gave some feedback and helped some of the children add more to their script. I corrected a few spelling errors, but left it mostly intact as they would be reading their own words.

Find more videos like this on MACUL Space


When all of the pictures were in, I brought the kids to the lab in small groups and showed them how to find their folder of pictures on the server, import them into iPhoto and then open iMovie and start a New Project. We finished this session with the pictures dragged to the timeline and put in the order of the students choosing. My only requirement on order was that the self portrait go first.
In the classroom the next day I demonstrated the next steps. Adding a title and end credits, recording their narration and adding a soundtrack. Then I took children to the computer lab in small groups to begin this process. The time we used was the time my class has reserved in the lab for reading and Accelerated Reader Testing. I have an aid in the classroom with students reading, and a parent in the lab helping them take the AR tests. All of the children knew we were recording and that they needed to be quiet. They did a great job – they were almost silent. I worked with about 4 children at a time setting them up recording. They used their headphones so they could listen and re-record if needed.
Find more videos like this on MACUL Space


The children figured out how to use iMovie very quickly. We were able to complete 5 Digital Story Projects on our first day. I was quite pleased with the results. A few more children have a project that is close to being done. They need to add the soundtrack and credits. My hope is that we will be able to finish the rest of the projects this week. I am also confident that the 5 students who are finished will be excellent teachers for the other students. They know that they can change or edit their project as well. They will discover things that they want to change as they help others and view their project.

All finished projects will be embedded on our class wiki www.harju.wikispaces.com and blog www.harju.edublogs.org. (I uploaded the MACULspace in order to get an embed code for each story.) Check back next week to view the rest.

This project was especially easy as we were using Macs. iPhoto and iMovie work beautifully together and the integrated microphone on the Macs allowed the children to do their own recording. If we were working on PCs, we would have used Photostory or Windows Movie Maker and plugged in a microphone to each computer.