What do you call a bear with no teeth?
A gummy bear.
1️⃣ QR Codes for All About Me
with Nancy and Jen
Nancy showed Jen some pictures and videos of the All About Me project they had been collaborating on for the last couple of months! Overall, the QR code that was added to the kids' All About Me displays was a fun addition for all the students and parents that visited the classroom that week.
Nancy mentioned how it would have been better if the room wasn't so loud, that way parents could hear the audio from the student interviews each QR code led to. This feedback sparked an idea in Jen’s mind, the Clips app has feature called Live Title! This feature is a super simple way to add automatically-generated subtitles to videos.
In preparation for next time, Jen showed Nancy how to use Live Title. It's not perfect, and works best if the students speak loudly and clearly. But it’s certainly worth trying.
2️⃣ Learning Landforms via Google Earth
with Gema and Dylan
Dylan hung out in Gema's class as they continued their landforms project. Gema had prepared a sheet for her students to fill out as they explored. One area to draw their landform in 2D/3D, one area to write notes and questions they came up with as they explored, and an area to summarize how they felt about the activity. Dylan noted how lively and collaborative Gema’s class was. Gema also puts a lot of work into classroom management (constant time reminders and setting expectations for what's about to happen). She had them logging in and out of iPads like a well oiled machine. 👍
The activity itself went really well. They started by exploring Google Earth with different gestures, pinching to zoom, swiping to move around, and two-fingered scrolling to change the angle from 2D to 3D (a big party pleaser!). To get all the students into the curated Google Earch activity, Dylan had prepared a bunch of QR codes that students could scan and would direct them straight to it! Easy peasy. From there, students spent 20 minutes going through the alphabet and choosing a letter / landform they liked. Then they spent the another 20 minutess drawing, taking notes, and coming up with questions they had about the landform.
Some of Dylan’s favourite questions included: "Where did all the sand come from?" and "Is this actually Mars?"
3️⃣ Introducing Read & Write
with Luke and Dylan
Luke and Dylan met to discuss a Read and Write workshop he's running soon. They took some time to talk through the tools and set some goals. They decided that students would use the tools on their existing Body Systems research project, so they weren't making more work for everyone. They also decided that after exploring what each tool does— students would rate the tools in the toolbar as their Top 3 and Bottom 3 and come up with questions or concerns they had about the different tools. From there, students will customize the toolbar to suit their needs by hiding and rearranging icons.
4️⃣ Seesaw in Gym Class
with Thomas and Jen
Jen met with Thomas to discuss his goals for using Seesaw in PE.
Two ideas came up during the discussion:
- Post student progress for parents to see, for the sake of transparency.
- Use Seesaw to share Health related resources or assign Health related assignments.
Thomas said he was a firm believer that his gym class time should never involve sitting down. So even though part of his PHE (physical and health education) curriculum is obviously about health education, he said the only thing he does with the kids is have a short discussion about it, and then move onto the physical education side of things.
It will be interesting to see what happens next.
5️⃣ Seesaw Scavenger Hunt
with Sonia and Jen
Jen stopped by Sonia's class to remind her about the Seesaw Cohort Reunion on the 28th, and to check in on her progress with Seesaw. Sonia was, unexpectedly, away most of January and admitted she wasn’t able to experiment much with Seesaw.
Through their brief conversation, they accidentally created and idea for using Seesaw for an upcoming lesson!
Sonia shared they've been learning about materials and properties of materials (what makes an object waterproof, not waterproof, etc) and she'd like the students to somehow compile pictures of waterproof things digitally. Jen suggested making a picture collage, and instead of having students look up images on Google, they could take pictures of things around the classroom.
The original plan was for students to go on a "scavenger hunt" around the class and school yard looking for items, then writing them down or drawing a picture. Natuarlly, taking a photo of the objects would be a great alternative, and something Sonia was excited to teach the kids.
Sonia was confident she could make a simple template for the students to upload their pictures into Seesaw, and write what they've found on the same page using the creative canvas.
Next steps, Sonia would introduce the iPad camera to students, discussing proper photo-taking techniques. Then students will practice taking photos of something fun in the classroom and uploading them into Seesaw, before Sonia reveals and assigns the actual assignment.
6️⃣ Poetry with Emojis
with Janelle and Dylan
Janelle and Dylan continued their previous conversation, where they settled on Emoji Poetry as a project. Here’s the plan the ended up creating:
- Step 1: Students explore poems in groups, by a specific poet chosen by Janelle.
- Step 2: Students replace words in each poem with Emojis. (Can you still read the poem with emojis? Is the poem better with emojis? What did you find hard about replacing words with emojis?)
- Step 3: Each studen writes their own 4 line poem.
- Step 4: Each student replaces some of the words with emojis!
- Step 5: Each student presents their emoji poem to the class and see if their classmates can read the poem!
This isn't happening until after spring break so there’s probably more to come.