Water Cycle Comics

Great job, Vielleux Crew kids!  Your water cycle comics look fantastic.  This was a performance assessment task to see how well the students learned the basics of the water cycle.  Here are some samples!

I love how this one shows the importance of the sun in the evaporation process.

Fantastic example!

And clearly, this student understands the process is ongoing!

Indirect Bullying

Water Cycle Rap

Can you learn the water cycle song?  Disregard the creator's poor spelling in places.  The content is great.

Yo! Yes?

Today we learned about two important writing traits:  Voice and conventions.  Following a VERY INTERACTIVE lesson, kids used their knowledge of voice and conventions to create their own "conversation" using a very limited list of words and punctuation.  Listen very closely to their intonation to see if they punctuated their conversation properly!

 Conversation script #1

Conversation #1



Conversation script #2

Conversation #2

First Day of School Questions

Vielleux Crew kids and parents:  What questions do you still have after the first day of school?

What questions do you have after our first day of school?... at AnswerGarden.ch.

Out of my Comfort Zone

My theme for the week (self-imposed, of course) has been "out of my comfort zone."  In my oldish age, I have fallen victim to the ruts and routines that I expect.  This week, I branched out.  On a shopping trip, I bought some school clothes that were out of my ordinary.  I read some things that I wouldn't have normally. Why not branch out of my comfort zone with my final project for the course I am taking this summer, Techsploration 2012?

My project is a two part and focuses on a Google App that I am the least comfortable with-- Google sites.  I find Google sites to be the LEAST intuitive App available, and the most confusing one to work with.  However, I had a purpose.  As president of the local teacher's union, I needed a way to stay in communication with members across more than 5 buildings, as well as a way to archive documents like meeting minutes and updates. I thought perhaps a Google Site might be perfect.  I hope that the site can be one that members of the HEA can use as a resource or communication tool, while providing some stable, generic information about the mission of the HEA.

At the same time, I am newly recruited to help run the Greater Hartford Youth Football Association's Minicanes Teams.  Next year, my football-loving son will be playing for the team, and I'll be there anyways, so why not?  What a good way to become involved in a great program with two good  teacher friends, Tracy Thompson and Gigi Stone!  So I volunteered my less than stellar Google Sites experience to create the Minicanes' first website.  I hope that coaches, staff members and parents are able to use the site to get valuable information like procedures, schedules, directions to games and forms.

The first site I created was the Hartford Education Association site.  Here's a screen shot of the site:

It took me a whole to figure out how to edit the pages and get things set up the way I wanted to.  I did a lot of googling like "How to __________ in Google Sites."  You fill in the blank.  I am sure I googled it.  I have some basic information about the officers for both the teachers and the support staff, as well as meeting dates and times, and I even added a place where I can update members of issues.  For example, the most recent issue was the fact that of the 17 companies that employees send 403b retirement contributions to, ZERO of them were compliant with the IRS regulations.

About a week later, I started on the minicanes site.  For this website, we needed our own url-- something the parents and community would be able to remember.  So I resisted the urge to call my computer nerd brother, and purchased the desired url from a website (yikes).  Then I figured out how to add that url to the google site.  This whole process was tricky to me, and hopefully I didn't make a mistake.  All I know is that when you type www.minicanes.com into your browser, you get to the right site.  Check it out!

I will know if I am successful with these sites if people use them.  I haven't explored it too much, but I hope that google tracks data about the sites like blogger does.  If parents and staff find the sites to be useful then I have done what I set out to do.  While, I can't share the url for the HEA site until I share the site with returning members, please check out the Minicanes site, and provide any feedback you have!

What makes someone tech savvy?

This.  The ability to try things out and fail.  Then you might need to fail some more, ask someone a fraction of your age for help, and try it again.  THAT's what makes someone tech savvy-- actually that's what makes someone a learner.  If you put a set of K'nex in front of me WITH the step-by-step directions, and I will have the thing built by, oh, Y3K.  That same set, in the hands of a former former fifth grader who read on a first grade level-- he had that thing built in 10 minutes flat with an itemized list of the pieces I was missing.

Forgive my harsh words (and this word is one of my LEAST favorites), but at the recent BEST conference, we teachers joked that we all suck at something-- and we need to embrace our suckiness and ask for help in order to overcome it.  Kids need to know that it's okay to suck at things, and it's okay to admit that you suck.  That's how we know what we need to learn.

Rock on, Grandma.

Do you 2.0 and Avatar Fun!

I have been playing around with various web2.0 tools this week, and evaluating which I might want to use with my class this coming year.  First, I played with Voki.  It was easy to set up an account, but once I tried to create my avatar, I was very frustrated.  The free avatar choices were not very good-- I didn't want to pay the yearly fee just to get an avatar I liked.

My favorite avatar style is one that looks like the Wii Mii's (maybe that's what they're called), and a person I follow on Twitter now (thanks to the Dynamic Landscapes Conference) is Jennifer LaGarde-- or as she is known by her twitter handle:

I love the style of her avatar... cartoonish, and cute, and looks just like the real person (minus the cartoonish part).

I have been searching the net off and on for months trying to figure out how to make an avatar in that style-- which clearly was a big old brain fart on my part.  Why did I not just tweet her to find out?  So I have now done just that!

And ironically, LibraryGirl, just tweeted this-- literally 5 minutes before I tweeted her:

The link will bring you to a page describing 20 different ways to create an avatar, and one of them will even put your head in a jar.  Seriously...check it out here.  I think I even found the way to make the cute wii mii person like LibraryGirl.

I have also been playing around with Edmodo.  It was super easy to set up an account and I was quickly able to set up my page.  I like that it looks like a Facebook page-- I have a feeling that my class this coming year is fairly savvy with Facebook.  I need to play around with it more to see what it is capable of.  Maybe I'll send out a tweet to see what other teachers think.

---   ---   ---   ---

Ok... so I'm now back a couple of hours later to say that I am absolutely having sooooooo much fun playing with avatars.  Here are the one's I have played with from the link found above:

My lego avatar

My Simpsons Avatar

I Picasso'd my face

   and my favorite so far

Wee Mee

And I still find myself playing.  The kids would really love to "Wimp" themselves at www.wimpyourself.com!  Here's my wimp avatar: 

Here, I played on www.clayyourself.com and made a clay avatar:

Google Apps for Ed and Learning

This week, as part of my Summer Techsploration class, I was asked to play around with some of Google's apps for education.  The first app I started with was MAPS.  By customizing a map, I am able to create my own interactive map.  We always begin the year with a study of the US Government, so I was right away intrigued by mapping out the three main buildings in Washington D.C. that represent the three branches of government.   I love the way Google Maps make you feel like you are standing in the middle of the street, or in another case, in the middle of the White House.  This is a great way for Vermont students to take a virtual tour of our government buildings.

There is nothing like looking at some of the actual places we study.  It was also interesting to see where the buildings were in relation to each other.  Using the draw tool, I connected the three buildings.  In the future, I might ask the kids to find Dothan Brook School in order to put the location into perspective.

New Beginnings

The new year ahead will mark some new beginnings for me.  First, the fifth grade team will be new.  We're a variety of sorts, this new team, but we complement each other nicely.  I'm excited about all of the new and exciting things that the new year will bring us, but will still be missing and thinking about Mrs. McCullar a lot.

Here's the brand new Fifth Grade Team:

Mrs. Torrey, Mrs. Vielleux, Mr. Burns

Next, our school is moving forward with our plans to continue some of the PBiS projects we planned this summer.  A team of us just got back from the BEST Summer Institute in Killington, where we were the proud winners of the Scavenger Hunt.  We also got to pose for a picture with Vermont's Commissioner of Education, Armando Vilaseca.  What a day!