Technology Teach

I was gonna start this post out with this cute topic sentence, "Get out your computers and get ready to visit these sites and download these apps!", but then I realized this is a blog...online...and you are already using you computer, phone, or tablet to read this. SO instead of starting it off with that catchy sentence, I decided to explain why I chose not to start with it...such a great idea :)

Anyway, for one of our class assignments we had to find websites or apps that could be used in the classroom or just used by teachers. I thought to myself, "What a great idea for a post!" 

I've divided them into two categories: Websites and Apps, and I've briefly described what each of them are and how they could be used to alleviate some teacher stress!

Starting with the Websites:

• www.abcya.com 

This is a website that has tons of educational games, and not boring or lame games! Games that kids actually want to play and they are learning something! I've seen this used during Daily 5 in the 1st grade class I'm in, and the kids seem to really enjoy it. It's easy to navigate, bright and colorful, and there aren't any nasty adds that pop up. This is a free website (score!), but you can pay for additional things or to be add free.

• www.jeopardy.rocks

  

  This is a website that is obviously a giant modifiable jeopardy game. I think it's much more appealing than the old traditional classroom jeopardy game, plus its easier to access than lugging in a huge TV cart and hoping that it works! This is also free! Teachers add in questions, change the amounts of "money" earned, and add in the amount of teams.

• www.socrative.com

This is a website that allows you to make quizzes, and not just any quizzes. They have four different categories/formats: regular quiz, space race, quick question, and exit ticket. I have personally participated in the space race version, and it's a pretty fun way to add some healthy competition and learn at the same time. As a student, you do have to download the app or just "log in" as a student, but both the website and app are free! Is it obvious yet that I love free things?

• www.kidblog.org

This one is exactly how it sounds, a blog but kids get to write in it. It's a safe blogging environment, allows students to learn how to positively use social media, and you can connect to other classes around the world. What more could you ask for?! This is also free, and you have a class log in and then a student log in. This way if one student is in charge of a post, another student can't access it and make any unwanted changes.

• www.getkahoot.com or kahoot.it (for the students)

This is another quiz and survey making site, and is pretty similar to Socrative. Students or players just have to log in to kahoot.it, create and nickname, and start playing. No extra app necessary, just access to the internet is all that's necessary....and can guess what I'm gonna say next? It's....FREE!

Now Apps (I only have a few, sorry!):

• Remind - www.remind.com

This is an app that teachers download, and they can keep parents and students updated on what is due, picture day, etc. I've actually been in a college class that used this, and it was a lifesaver! It also free...

• Class Dojo - www.classdojo.com

This is a behavior tracking app. This is usually displayed on the projector screen in a classroom, and students can see the amount of points they have. Parents also have access to it. It can be really successful in classes, if used right. I've seen and heard some stories about teachers using it in their classroom and students just not caring if they get points taken away or not. So its a controversial app in the teaching field, but that decision is entirely up to you! Oh yeah, and its free.

• Educreations - www.educreations.com

Now this is a cool app! Students and teachers can use it, and its freeeee. Teachers can use it to make tutorials or examples for problems (it's kind of like an online whiteboard), so that if students need a refresher, they missed a lesson, or parents are trying to help their kids out but don't know how to do it can access it.

There you have it, a list of websites and apps that teachers can use in and out of the classroom. I hope to use them one day, and I hope you learned something new! Thanks to my classmates for showing me these awesome websites and apps.

Keep On, Teaching On,

Charity

Word Ladders

What are Word Ladders?

Word Ladders are a great word study activity, and are pretty easy to make! They can be used to help students understand that they can manipulate letters in words to change them into different words, teach rhyme, word families, spelling, and more. I definitely recommend doing this as a guided activity at first or else the students don't get the meaning behind doing them. 

Word ladders can be a great morning work activity, teamwork activity, or review activity at the end of the lesson. I originally got the idea from a professor last semester, except he made his for older students who had a better grasp on spelling. His also had directions on what to change the next word to, but his words in the word ladder wouldn't stay in the same word family either. Since my student was much younger, I chose the word family route.

Here are some pictures of what mine have looked like. 

Since my student was so young we did it as a partner activity and with a whiteboard, this is so we could erase and add letters to the words and see how the words changed throughout the process.

 

 

There are various ways you can tweak these to make them appropriate for your students. My student and I really enjoyed working on them together. You may use my work, but please give me credit!

Keep On, Teaching On,
Charity

Posters!

POSTERS!

As you can tell by the title, I'm a poster enthusiast and I'm going to talk about two posters that I have made. One is a Writing Process poster and the other is a Reading Strategy poster. I made them both for my Literacy Block and I'm pretty proud of both of them! I love, love, love posters and the possibilities of what you can display on them are endless. I personally love posters that are interactive and go along with your class theme. 

Feel free to take my idea and modify it to make your own. If you copy it down word for word, you could always give me credit or tell your educator friends about my blog!

This first picture is my Writing Process poster put together and the second one is of it being taken apart. I have a thing for puzzle piece pattern (I don't know why), but when we reviewed the writing process it came to me like one big puzzle. Each stage was a piece and when you find all of the pieces, and voila you have a completed puzzle/story. So as you can tell by the pictures, my poster can be taken apart piece by piece - literally. I intend to use it to teach the whole process, but then when my students begin writing, I will only put up one piece at a time. For instance, if my students are at the Revising stage then only four puzzle pieces will be up. I plan for it to be a reminder of what they should be doing at that certain stage and as writing tracker. I also thought it'd be a neat idea if each student had a small version of this and they could track the process independently, but that would depend entirely on your students.

What I used:
- Basic white Dollar Tree poster board
- Ribbon (I'm a crafty person, so I used what I had leftover from a previous project)
- Velcro (for easy removal of puzzle pieces - get the kind with adhesive it'll be easier!)
- Paint (I painted the title portion just because I messed up, so this was just to cover my mistakes!)
- Markers
- Clip Art (I think I'll end up remaking it and put actual pictures of what each stage looks like)

              

This is my Reading Strategy poster. I decided on the connection strategy, and then I wanted to do a theme. I originally wanted to do a detective theme, then a scuba diving theme, then an octopus, then finally decided on an under the sea/fishing theme (I like the ocean, if you can't tell). So with that theme swimming - ha - in my mind, I came up with a rough draft, a catchy title, and started drawing! Since I was doing a cutesy theme and not a step-by-step poster, I wanted to make it easy for ELL students to understand as well. So I decided to make each fish have an object that represented each type of connection (e.g. the book with the text-to-text fish), and for the students who need a little nudge I added sentence starters. Looking back, I wish I had made the sentence starters removable so that later on in the year I can take those off and not have my students use them as a crutch. I got the basic idea for this one off of Pinterest, just search making a connection poster and tons of them will pop up!

What I used:
- Basic white Dollar Tree poster board
- Printer Paper (I drew my fish on this, outlined and colored them, then cut them out and glued them to the poster)
- Crayons (I laid one flat to make the background look extra oceany)
- Markers (for outlining, I like the way it looks with outlines)


And that's my poster post! Hope you liked it and it sparked some creativity in you to make some posters to decorate your classroom (or for an assignment like I did)!


Keep On, Teaching On,
Charity