Resources for Flipped Learning

Did you read my last post that summarized what blended learning was?  If not, you should check it out.  Well, one of the more common forms of blended learning is flipped learning.  Many schools and districts are experimenting with flipping some of their lessons.  The idea behind flipped learning is having your kids watch videos of lessons or lectures at home or on their own time, and then you can use class time to do projects, discussion, and practice.

Getting started with flipped learning can seem overwhelming. The idea of having to create a ton of your own videos and then find a way to easily share them with your students seems daunting.  I thought I would share a couple easy suggestions to help you get started.

Resources for Videos Already Made

These are suggestions of websites that already have a lot of videos and you can search them for ones that might apply to a lesson you want to teach.

WatchKnowLearn - WatchKnowLearn is pretty easy to search.  They have a pretty big selection of videos by lots of different subjects and domains.

LearnZillion - LearnZillion focuses on Common Core resources so the videos are for Math and Language Arts.  Most of them are short, engaging, and pretty easy to understand.

KhanAcademy - This one is obvious.

StudyJams - I really like Study Jams for Math and Science.  The videos are short and animated,  They are a little cheesy, but they are good for summarizing information and making it easy to understand.

Resources for Creating Your Own Videos

Creating Animated Videos 

Below are resources for creating short, animated or photo-based videos.  These seem like they would be fun and engaging.

GoAnimate4Schools

GoAnimate

Animoto

Creating Videos with White Boards in the Background

The iPad has a lot of great apps for this, but for web-based options here is one:

Educreations

Storing Videos

A lot of websites have file size limits, so some of them can be tricky to use.

Youtube - This is probably the most obvious and easiest option.

Schooltube and Teachertube - These will have more protected backgrounds than Youtube, but I found they had file size limits that did not work with what I needed.

Edpuzzle - This is my favorite solution that I found.  We use Edmodo and this ties into our Edmodo account.  I can upload videos without a limit.  I then assign the videos to the kids on the day that I want them to watch them, and it gives me a progress update on how many people have watched them.

What are your favorite resources for creating and storing videos?

What is blended learning?

Since I work in a blended learning environment, I thought it might be good to share some information on theories and models of blended learning.

What is blended learning?

Blended learning is essentially a blend of a traditional school and online learning.  Usually, online learning courses are used at a physical school location and blended with face-to-face instruction and small-group student interaction to personalize learning for students. HERE is a post from Blackboard with some overviews of different definitions.

What does blended learning look like?

Blended learning is considered by many to be the future direction of education. As technology leads to an ever-increasing globalized world, we want students to be prepared for the 21st century.  One of my first introductions to the ideas behind blended learning was Sir Ken Robinson's ted talk on "Changing Education Paradigms."

Now to better understand blended learning, it is good to understand some of the different approaches to this new form of educating students.   You can find a good article to summarize them here HERE.

Clayton Christensen in his book Disrupting Class explains the need for disrupting innovation.

Sustaining innovations are meant to improve existing models of doing things, where disruptive innovations offer something new or a completely new way of doing things.  You can read HERE for more information about Christensen's ideas on these two types of innovation.  It is not that one type of innovation is necessarily better than the other.  Many times in industries both are needed for different purposes and in different situations.

In the world of blended learning, some models are considered sustaining innovation and some are disruptive innovations.

Sustaining Innovation Models of Blended Learning

The Rotation Model

• Station Rotation
• This model works really well in a workshop (reading, writing, or math) approach to teaching.  Students rotate through different dedicated stations, with online-learning being one of those stations in the classroom. 
• Other stations would be small-group instruction, games, projects, centers for practice, etc. Stations are usually all completed within the self-contained classroom.
• Stations require a lot of modeling, scaffolding, organization, and routine. 
• Lab Rotation
• Students rotate through stations, but one of the stations is a computer lab for the online learning. 
• In the lab, students work at a more individualized pace through usually reading or math content/practice. 
• Labs are supervised by an assistant, not necessarily a certified teacher. 
• This frees up the teacher to spend time doing small-group instruction without having to focus as much energy on classroom management because not all students are in the room at the same time. 
• Flipped Learning
• This approach is one of the most common "buzz words" in teaching right now.  
• Many schools and districts are transitioning to flipped learning.In this model, usually students watch videos of a a teacher lecture at home and then come to class to practice and apply the concepts from the lecture.  Thus, the normal process of lecture in class and homework done at home is "flipped."  The "homework" is done in class.
• Be careful not to over-use this approach because watching too many videos at home for too many subjects could quickly get to boring.
• Difficult in schools where students have limited access to internet at home.
• Individual Rotation
• In this approach to rotations or stations, not all students may have the same rotations or online courses.  
• Teacher can assign and use as needed.

Disruptive Innovation Models of Blended Learning

The Flex Model

The private school I work at would be considered a flex model.  We use online-learning content created by vendors to deliver the instruction in some courses.  We pair this with small-group projects, some face-to-face teaching, and a lot of individual tutoring. Students in the same classroom may work at different paces and levels, providing a lot of opportunity for acceleration.  We also have other courses where more of the instruction may be directly from the teacher, and we use technology for enrichment, practice, application, student engagement and choice, and demonstration of learning.

The A-La-Carte Model

In this model, students may take just certain courses completely online to supplement other face-to-face classes they take at a physical school.  This can be a good option when a school does not provide the particular course that a student wants or needs in person.

The Enriched Virtual Model

This version of blended learning is used in often in graduate school programs (like Executive MBA programs) for their online courses.  Much of the content is taught and discussed online, but the class will have required face-to-face classes periodically to enrich the online content and provide opportunity for face-to-face discussion or a project. At the collegiate level, this option provides flexibility for individuals who are pursuing further higher-education while working.

Have you used any version of blended learning in your classroom?  How do you use technology to help differentiate in your classroom?

Making Writing an Authentic Habit in the Classroom

As an educator, I believe it is important to strive for authenticity in the classroom.  Learning should have meaning and reflect what happens in the real world.  Finding ways to apply skills to the real world can be difficult.  Approaches to teaching like project-based learning are a wonderful way to incorporate real-world application.  Now, I wish I could tell you my classroom was a masterpiece of project-based learning, but I am striving for authenticity, right? I truly do want to incorporate more PBL this year, but that is another story.

Learning should be authentic. 

What I want to share with you today is about writing. By now, you may know I am working on my PhD in Educational Psychology with a focus in Gifted Education.  One of the things my advisors have been encouraging us to do lately is to set aside time every day to write.  This is nothing new.  I have heard this in creative writing classes and from other graduate professors before. However, that does not mean I have actually implemented this habit in my life.  The hardest part about writing every day is figuring out the time that works best.  My schedule is crazy hectic between work and school. I just started this week and have decided to set aside 20-30 minutes every morning to write.  For me that means, I will probably write most mornings between 5:30 and 6:00am.

To become a better writer, you have to practice.

To produce writing, you have to set aside time every day to write. 

Choose a time.  Be consistent.  Just write. 

It got me thinking.  I want to be a better writer.  I want to actually produce writing.  I want my students to be better writers.  We need to make time for writing...writing without pressure...writing without due dates.  Now, don't get me wrong.  We will have assignments.  We will have due dates, but writing needs to be a regular and authentic habit in my classroom.  Writing needs to be a time to allow for creativity, risk, flow of ideas, and authenticity. 

In the past with my elementary students, I have usually done 5-10 minutes of journal writing.  I find this is a great way to help kids get used to putting ideas down and get over the perfectionism of every sentence having to be perfect. I usually did this almost every day.  This year with my middle school students, we have a block schedule.  Thus, we only have Language Arts twice a week.  So we will only be able to set aside a dedicated space for writing twice a week.  Now, I don't want you to think we haven't been writing.  We have been doing more formal writing assignments, but not necessarily every class. 

I started thinking about how I wanted to collect my own writing every day.  I would rather type it.  I know I do not need 10,000 Word documents.  I thought about storing my journal entries in Evernote, which would work well. Then, I remembered a website I had looked at a couple years ago, but I never ended up using in my classroom.  Penzu.  Penzu is an online writing journal.  Now, if I was writing something super personal, I may not store it online. But for writing for grad school or even writing drafts of blog posts, I think it is a fabulous place to store entries.  With Penzu, you can customize fonts and backgrounds.  They even make the page look like notebook paper, so it feels like a journal.

I decided I wanted to try Penzu with my students this year as well.  I signed up for Penzu Classroom for a teacher account.  This way, I can view their journals and even send them assignments.  I can even comment on their assignments within Penzu, so I am excited to try it out.  Yesterday, I got everyone signed up for accounts. Most likely, I will still have them publish final drafts in Word.  We will use Penzu more for pre-writing, brainstorming, short journal entries, and free-writing. If students do not lock their journals, they can even view one another's journals.  I am thinking this could work well for peer feedback.  We will have to see how it goes. I'll let you know. I also gave my students the option of using Penzu or having a paper journal.  Almost half of my students chose a paper journal, and the other have chose to use Penzu.

You can view a video on Penzu Classroom below.

How do you make writing authentic in your classroom?

Tried It Tuesday: Close Reading and 21st Century Skills

I just finished up a Statistics midterm, and my brain is tired. I wanted to link up with Holly's Tried It Tuesday though.

I actually have a few different websites I have been trying out with my class I want to share with you, but I will probably spread it out over several posts. Because I work at a Blended Learning school, my students spend a large chunk of their time working more independently on online curriculum that is provided by the school. I supplement that with other lessons, activities, group projects, etc. I have tried out lots of websites that I hear about in blog posts or stumble across just to try different ways to expose kids to material and ideas.

There are few websites I really love and use all the time. As I think about those 21st Century Learning Skills of creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication, I am trying to really be mindful about what activities we use different pieces of technology for and what activities or lessons we approach other ways.

Non-Technology Tried Its:

My students do spend so much time working independently that right now I am really trying to re-evaluate how I want to bring in more opportunities for collaboration and even hands-on activities like task cards. We have used task cards a couple times in the last couple weeks and my students have loved it! Kids love technology, but they also need to interact with one another and do hands-on activities. I am not doing a strict interactive notebook this year, but I am trying to use a lot of foldables because they need the practice with motor skills and following directions.

Several people have mentioned close reading as their tried it this week. We have tried a couple resources for Close Reading, and I have really enjoyed them. I purchased Primary Polka Dots Really Creepy Stuff Close Reading Kit and used it in October. She also has one for Really Gross Stuff that could be used all year.

I also purchased Jennifer Findley's Close Reading Mega Kit in the back to school sale. She has Close Reading bookmarks aligned to each standard.  My plan is to glue the bookmarks in our notebooks and as we cover each standard also practice it with close reading. She also has some poetry close reading book marks. Her kit includes posters you could display as well.

I plan on using her poetry close reading book marks starting next week. I really would like to start analyzing a poem a week. I think poems are a perfect place to start with close reading because they are short, but allow for a lot of depth and critical thinking. My students have been asking when we will write more poetry since they wrote their bat cinquains, so I really do need to add in more reading and writing of poetry. I actually have copies of Love That Dog, so I think after reading Holly's and Jivey's posts, I might add it in as a shared read when my students get to their poetry module in their curriculum.

Technology Tried-Its:

Edmodo - Edmodo is a fantastic website and iPad app. It can be used as a communication tool, a planner, and even a gradebook and system for students to submit assignments. I send students notes about when things are due and if they have missing assignments. This way they can't claim I never told them something was missing. I would like to start posting weekly poems and quotes on Edmodo. As we discuss them, the students can respond to questions on Edmodo. I think this would be a fun way to even do a "close read" of a quote. As we do some more reflecting this month on who we are as learners, I am going to have my students put a lot more thought into creating their Edmodo profiles. There are so many more uses for Edmodo I have not even explored yet.

Raz-kids - Raz-kids is the website and iPad app version of Reading A to Z's leveled readers. We have read some of the stories this year and taken the quizzes.  Raz-kids gives the teacher the ability to assign online running-records and assignments of the different leveled readers and corresponding activities. The only downside of the Running Records and leveling is you have to already have a good idea of the student's level.  I would love to find a good paper running record resource that is matched to the lexile system so I can more accurately determine a student's level other than just trial and error. I would like to use some of the Raz-kids stories as close reads. We will pair them with Jennifer Findley's bookmarks for each standard.  We can read through the story three times and focus on different things each time. I think we are going to start following up the close reads with written reading responses where the students have to cite text based evidence using quotes and explain the quotes.

I have some other websites I will share with you in some other posts. How do you help your students become 21st century learners while balancing out the technology with other methods of delivery to meet your students' needs?

Organizing Students' Electronic Assignment Submissions on the iPad

I hope you are having a good Thursday.  I went back to work today.  I enjoyed having a couple weeks off.  Next week I will be off for 3 days again because I am off to the Vegas Teacher Blogger meet-up.  I am super excited to meet lots of teacher bloggers!

Kristin at ITeach1:1 is having a "Tune Into Technology" linky that focuses on iPads.

I work at a school that uses technology constantly.  Our middle school and high school students all use Macbooks.  This past year I taught a grades 4/5 class.  We used Macbooks in our classroom as well.  This upcoming school year we are adding a grades 2/3 class.  The 2nd and 3rd grade class is going to use iPads, so I have spent some time researching apps.  I am excited for this linky to get some more ideas.

We also have been toying with the idea of whether or not the 4th/5th grade class should remain using laptops or should also use iPads.  I have my students submit a lot of their assignments electronically, so that was my biggest concern about using iPads.  I wanted to know my students could still submit their assignments to me without having to email everything.  I do not want to have sort through a million emails.  I like their assignments to be submitted all in the same place in an organized and systematic way.

This year I used Edmodo some at the end of the year.  Edmodo is a great app because of its versatility.  The students can use it as a planner, they can store files, they can submit assignments, and you can also use it post comments to the class. We primarily used it for the planner. 

In my research for an app that allows students to submit assignments electronically, I discovered a new app called Showbie.

With Showbie, you can add classes and students.  Within the classes, you create assignments.  The students submit their assignments to Showbie from their iPad and everyone's submissions are organized by class and assignment.  You can get the app for free, so it really seems like a great way to create a paperless classroom when you have access to iPads.   I like the idea that students could take screen shots of assignments and submit those or even take a picture of an assignment done on paper and just submit the picture. I look forward to trying out Showbie this year and moving a little closer toward a paperless classroom. I think you could also use Evernote somehow to organize student assignment submissions, but I haven't figured out how yet. How do you organize electronic student assignment submissions?

Tutorials on Securing the Clipart in Your PDF files

If you use clipart in your products (which most of us do), you are supposed to flatten and secure the images before turning it into a pdf to protect the art.

Here is an article I found from the 3am teacher on securing your pdf files.

Here is another tutorial.  This one is from Jivey. 

At work, we use Macs.  We actually have Word and PowerPoint for Mac.  If you use PowerPoint on a Mac, you can still save all of your slides as JPG's or PNG's just like Michelle's tutorial.  You can't just right-click on the images and say "Convert to pdf."  You have to use the "Automator" application.  Here is a tutorial on how to use the Automator application.  Now, I just need to figure out how you reduce the file size of a pdf without destroying the image quality.  Any suggestions?

Biomes of the World Webquest Freebie

Today is Tuesday, which means it is time to link up with Techie Tuesday and Tried It Tuesday.

We have been studying biomes.  I have been loving loving this unit!  My students are reading nonfiction books on biomes and practicing the different nonfiction Common Core Standards for Informational Text while reading.  It has been a great end of the year project and fabulous interdisciplinary unit.

I decided I also wanted to try a webquest with my students.  I decided to create my own.  We have been working on it the last few days for Science, and it has been really fun to watch them engaged in student-centered learning, practicing reading and note-taking skills, as well as being creative. We used the Biomes of the World website for our research.   They had to take notes on each of the biomes and then come up with their own idea for a zoo to represent all of the biomes.  They will then create a brochure for their zoo and a map of their zoo.  We are done with the web research and still working on the zoo projects.  (I will show you pictures of the maps and brochures when we are done).

You can get a copy of the webquest here.

You can get a copy of the notes form I made here. There is a note page for each biome.

Here was a post from about a week ago from Technology Rocks Seriously with lots of different online games for kids to learn about animal habitats.  I plan on checking them out to have my students try some of them.

Have you used webquests?  This was my first time to make one, and I have really enjoyed watching my students work on this project.

Online Student Planner through Edmodo

So the last two nights have been super busy, and I have been really tired by the time I finally stop moving.  Exercising and eating better is great, but boy is it time consuming.

I wanted to link up with Holly's Tried It Tuesday and Technology Tailgate's Techie Tuesday on Tuesday.  (Now, it is Thursday night.)

My students use laptops on and off all day long, and many of them are working at different paces.  Helping everyone get organized has been a constant struggle. I have tried so many ways to help them keep up with when things are due and what is missing.  We tried paper planners, which I could not get most of them to actually consistently fill out. I tried making different chart templates that they would fill out (but it was already partially filled out for them).  This worked better for some of them.

I have been researching online student planners.  I looked at quite a few, but most of them seemed more appropriate for high school or college students.  They seemed a little more involved than what I needed for my 4th and 5th graders.  I also wanted a tool that would allow me to send them assignments and due dates.  I remembered from some Facebook posts people mentioning that Edmodo had a planner type application.  I had signed up for Edmodo ages ago, but I had never done anything with it.  Edmodo has all sorts of applications and uses, but it does have a planner application.

I decided to try it just for the planner part.  We have been using it this week, and so far I love it.  I can input assignments and due dates.  They can upload assignments directly to Edmodo to turn them in.  They also can add their own tasks to the calendar to keep up with when they are due.

(See, if you look at the planner I meant to blog on Tuesday.) One of my other favorite features is that I can set up different classes and within the classes I can setup small groups.  I am doing three different book clubs (literature circles) right now, so I created small groups based on the Book Clubs. I can add different assignments for each book club, so not everyone in class necessarily sees the same assignments due on their calendar.  As they finish assignments, they turn them in.  For tasks they add themselves, they check the box when they finish them.

We are still new to using it, but so far it seems to be working better than the other paper type planners I have tried. I know Edmodo has all sorts of features and eventually it will be fun to test them out, but for now I am just excited about an online planner that was easy to setup and use.

So far my students all updated their profiles on their own and are sending class messages to each other with things like "If you were a super dog, what super powers would you have?"  Do you use Edmodo?  What are your favorite applications for it?

In my effort to get healthier before summer, I am having a Be a Better You Giveaway.  It ends tomorrow, so I hope you will enter.  You can earn a $30 gift card to a store of your choice to get healthier.

Sumdog Math and...English!

I am joining up with Technology Tailgate's Techie Tuesday.

Have you ever used Sumdog?  It is amazing.  My students love it.  It allows them to do a spiral review of their Common Core Math skills in a fun, interactive way.  They get to play games against each other,  students across the world, and the computer.  I like it because we are doing spiral review, but I do not have to copy worksheets just for review (or grade it).  You can sign up and use Sumdog for free.  If you get a more premium membership, you get access to more reports and stuff.

Now, they have created Sumdog English.  We tried it out today.  They were very excited to practice their Language Arts skills as well.  If you sign up by the end of February, the cost is 75% off!  You can read more about Sumdog English here. Sumdog is one of the best resources for reinforcing the Common Core skills I have seen that is highly engaging.

Source: blog.sumdog.com via April on Pinterest

Organizing Resources for Reading Genres and an Easy Way to Add Pics to Your Blog

Today, we reviewed over the different reading genres because we have been looking a lot at different fables, fairy tales, and folk tales. I have Ginger's Reading Genre posters on my wall so they came in handy during our discussion. 

Source: teacherspayteachers.com via April on Pinterest

As we have been working on Fractured Fairy Tales, I have decided I needed to start a binder with resources for the different genres.  I create stuff, gather stuff, etc., and I love having things organizers in binders with sheet protectors as dividers by topic.  I thought about making some dividers when it dawned on me I can print out a second copy of her posters and use them as dividers.  I am excited about this epiphany.  I love organization!  I know...I am a nerd.  Now,  I just need more binders and probably sheet protectors.

Side note - I have a new favorite way to share pictures on my blog.  Instead of saving pictures to my computer and then adding to blogger, I Pin the web source of the pic.  Then, I just go to my pin and copy the HTML code to embed on my blog.  Super easy!  Pictures I take myself I upload to Photobucket and then copy the HTML code there.

Also,  I started a personal blog about Balance and my journey toward being healthier called Balancing the Backpack.  I hope you will follow me. :)  I am working on updating the look of that blog.  (Note to self, I have needed to fill out that questionnaire for Ms. Fultz for awhile.)

Fractured Fairy Tales - Freebie Story Map

Our 4th Grade ELA curriculum references a lot of fairy tales, so I decided to pull in some fractured fairy tales.  If you have never taught Fractured Fairy Tales, it is a fabulous way to cover almost all of the Common Core Reading Literature Standards.  You can easily explore setting, characters, theme, imagery, point-of-view, visual elements, and even different text structures if you look at movie versions, poetry versions, and/or dramatic versions of fairy tales.

Here are three examples of some cute Fractured Fairy Tales from different points of view:

Source: parenting.com via April on Pinterest

Source: barnesandnoble.com via April on Pinterest

Source: astore.amazon.com via April on Pinterest

I am currently in the middle of making a Fractured Fairy Tale unit, but I thought I would share some web resources with you. Read Write Think has an interactive tool for students to plan and write their own Fractured Fairy Tale.  They also have lots of lesson ideas for Fractured Fairy Tales.  Here is a book list they have created with text suggestions. Scholastic has a tool where students can publish their Fractured Fairy Tales after they have written them, and students can find out info about John Scieszka (author of The True Story of the Three Little Pigs.)

Here is a website where you can get text suggestions of Fractured Fairy Tales.  Here is a website where you can original versions of fairy tales.

Last but not least is a quick freebie from my unit I am making.  It is a Fairy Tale Story Map.  I am going to have my students read an original version of a fairy tale, a fractured version with a different setting, and then a fractured version from a different point of view.  They will fill out this story map for all three versions. 

Then, we will compare and contrast the three versions.

Great Technology Resource for Tutorials

I am back for a quick second post today.  I wanted to share a great link for Technology Tutorials.  Ms. Jessica at A Turn to Learn does a Technology Tuesday post every week.
 

She has some fabulous topics there from the last few months.  Here is the link to all of her Technology Tuesday posts.

Favorite Online Resources for Teachers

I thought today I would share some of my favorite online resources that I have discovered from the blogging world or workshops:

Watch Know Learn - I just learned about this one today from Krista at Stellar Students.  It has videos for educational topics, even Common Core.  Just yesterday I was researching the different tools I could use to create lessons and videos for flipped learning.  I love finding great free videos and resources though.

Planbook - This is my online lesson planning software.  I love it.  It cost me $12 for the year, but it is super easy to use.

Engrade - I use this website to record grades.  They also have some apps and tools for creating online lessons and quizzes.

Weebly - I use this to create my class website.  I love it!  I had the option to add an assignment form where my students can submit assignments to me on my website.  It is fabulous. I am going to blog more tomorrow about ways I use my class website.

Sumdog - This is a really fun website for math practice.  They can play math games tied to Common Core.  It is a lot of fun and has a lot of choice.  You also can edit the skills by student to choose what math skills for them to work on.

Xtramath - My students use this to practice mastery of the four basic operations.  It works very well and has helped a lot of my students.  They were really struggling with basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

Readworks - This is a website with passages, questions, and lessons tied to the Common Core Reading standards.  I love it!

Writing Fix - This is my favorite website for text related writing lessons.

ReadWriteThink - This is my favorite website period.  There are so many lesson ideas and interactive tools for Reading and Writing.  I use it every day.

Sumdog Math Games and Read Write Think Online Interactive Graphic Organizers

The new technology resources we tried today:

Sumdog

I had seen lots of bloggers recommending Sumdog. I wanted to try it out.  I created an account awhile ago, but had not implemented it in my classroom yet.  My students love it!  They are begging to play at lunch and at recess.

With so many levels of Math, I like that I can differentiate this for my students.  After you add your students, class, and add a challenge.  Within the challenge, you can edit the skills by student.  I have some students working on 4th grade skills, some on 5th grade, and some on 6th grade.  They loved being able to earn coins, change their avatar, and play against each other.  They all want to be the top of the leader board.

Essay Organizer

I love Read Write Think.  Here is a link to all of their interactive graphic organizers.  There are 59 of them.  We tried two of them today.  Since we have computers, I am trying to find resources that they can use that help us achieve things we need to accomplish.  We are writing informative essays about the Olympic biographies we read.  We had tried organizing our 5 paragraph essays on paper with a graphic organizer I made. Some of my students understood it and some were not making much progress. I decided to try Read Write Think's Essay organizer.

Oh my gosh.  It made a world of difference for some.  The depth of clicking through the process seemed to help them a lot with the thought process.  Interactive made a huge difference for some of them. After they make the organizer, they can save it and even email it directly to the teacher.  So after they emailed it to me, I printed it out for them.

Story Cube

We read the first story from the 7 Habits for Happy Kids about being proactive.  Sammy the Squirrel has to learn how he can be proactive to take care of his own boredom.  We made the Story Cube for Sammy the Squirrel reviewing the character, setting, problem, resolution, theme, and favorite part of the story.

I made them answer in complete sentences.  They saved the story cubes and emailed them to me from the website.  I printed them out, and they made the cubes. One activity worked on story plot skills, understanding theme, web skills, writing in complete sentences, and the motor skills to actually cut, glue, and make the cube.

Overall, we had a great day!  How do you use Read Write Think?  Any other interactive graphic organizers you love?  Do you have any great suggestions for building online quizzes for short answer questions besides Google Docs?

Online Lesson Planning and Grading Software

I have across some fabulous online resources for being organized. I have tried several of them out and am going to give you my opinion on the positives of each.

Online Lesson Planning Software

All of these software programs will make working on your lesson plans from home and school or on multiple computers easier.  They also all allow you to tie specific standards to your lessons easily. I will be using these to select the Common Core Standards when I put lessons in.

Planbook - Planbook is an inexpensive resource that allows you to create lesson plans online. It is $12 a year, and you can try it out for free. You can set up your classes and have different schedules for different days. You can add lessons for each subject for each day and even check off the standards that you used (I haven't gotten quite that detailed yet, but I'm getting there.)  I have traditionally done my lessons in Excel, but I like that I can access from both home and work without having to worry about printing it out unless I want to.  I like the way you can set your weekly schedule in Planbook. The schedule shows up each week and you just select the class and day you want to update your plans.  I like the Schedule part of Planbook the best of the three software programs.

PlanbookEdu - I checked out PlanbookEdu after seeing Randi's post today. Some features are free and the premium features are $25 a year.  It seems fairly user friendly. It seems pretty similar to Planbook.  You create a "planbook" and then set up lessons that can recur.  You just tag the lessons the name of each period.  Then you click on the specific lessons and days you want to edit them individually.  PlanbookEdu does seem to have some nice printing and exporting options for the lessons.  It does also seem you can attach files and links to the lessons.

Learnboost - I also checked out Learnboost after I saw it via Teacher Playground via Technology Tailgate. Learnboost is free, which automatically gives it a thumbs up to begin with. I like that Learnboost has built in lesson planning and gradebook capability.  This was my first choice, but Planbook ended up seeming more user friendly to me for what I needed.  Learnboost does have it built in to create more detailed lesson plans. 



If you are looking for something to replace a basic lesson planner where you write short descriptions and have a quick reference, I would go with Planbook or PlanbookEdu. (You also can just opt to type more detailed lessons in the boxes).  If you want to create more detailed lesson plans and attach links and videos, I would go with Learnboost. However, Learnboost does not make it easy to view your lessons at a glance for the day or the week. My first choice for me is probably Planbook, but I am going to try out PlanbookEdu for this week so I can decide between the two.

Grading Software

The Learnboost grading software seems easy to use, so if you went with Learnboost for planning, I would use the grading software, too.

Engrade - Engrade is a free grading software that, so far, I have found very easy to use.  You can create your different classes and select how you want to weight assignments.  It's very user friendly and more convenenient than dragging a physical gradebook back and forth from school. It also has additional features where you can create online flashcards, presentations, and quizzes for your students.  For grading, I have decided to use Engrade.

Here is a video about it:



Have you found any other great online resources for planning?  I want to start using LiveBinders as well. I need to organize my bookmarks a lot better.  I am debating what is the best method to share links with students...just via my class website or should I start using Edmodo or Kidblog?  I think my students are feeling a little overwhelmed with websites right now.  Or would it better to use a resource like Symbaloo where I might be able to use thumbnail images to organize the links? I want to make it easy for my students to go to one page to keep getting clickable links for thinks we use often.

More technology tips

I have discovered some great technology posts this morning, so I have decided to extend my technology tips linky and giveaway for two more days before I pick a winner.  I hope you will share the link to my post so we can can really share some great technology resources with our fellow teachers.

I started a Pinterest Board called "Technology Tips for Teachers." I am going to start pinning all of the great technology posts and sites that I find here to share with you, but also to help myself remember.  I know there a never-ending amounts of great technology resources.  I cannot implement them all, so I am going to try and organize them as best as I can so I can find them when I need them. I am going to look more into Symbaloo and Livebinders to see how they might be helpful to organize sites/posts with no images (as this is the limitation of Pinterest).

Here are some great posts/sites I found that are worth checking out for Technology Tips:

Charity Preston's Technology Pinterest Board
Ed Tech Ideas' 125 sites for kids
A website with Picture book suggestions for Math
A Pinterest board with online stories
"50 Educational Tools Educators Should Know" by Kinderbear Blogger (This post made me want to click on every link and see how I could use these sites.)
The "Technology Tip" Tuesday from Blog Hoppin's Teacher Week.
Technology Tools for Teachers link up at Literacy and Laughter

Here are some of my new favorite technology related blogs: