Second Grade Life Cycle Movies

The following lesson was created for the New Teacher Program currently in place at the Tri-Creek School Corporation.  Students were asked this question: How can we, as scientists, create a movie to compare and contrast animal and plant life cycles?  Students then worked in groups to create the content presented in their iMovie videos.

LP G2 LifeCycleLesson by Dan Gibson

ELL Sock Puppet Repeated Readings

The following lesson was created for the New Teacher Program at the Tri-Creek School Corporation.  The lesson focuses on using repeated readings to promote fluency, while using the Sock Puppet app with students.

LP ELL SockPuppetsConversation

First Grader Bloggers

The following lesson was created for the New Teacher Program currently in place at the Tri-Creek School Corporation.  This lesson focused on teaching students how to write book reviews, while also teaching them how to blog.  The results were truly amazing.  These first graders really became writers.  Just check out some of the finished student products.

The Kidblog app was used to post and comment on their blogs with great success.

LP G1 BookReviewsBlogging (2) by Dan Gibson

First Grade Predators and Prey

The following lesson was created for the New Teacher Program currently in place at the Tri-Creek School Corporation.  Students were engaged in a variety of technology, which was used to enhance the instructional message being presented with this Life Science lesson.  Take a look at all the work that was put into this lesson.

OH LifeSciencePredatorsandPrey

Kindergarten Animal Research Project

The following lesson was created for the New Teacher Program currently in place at the Tri-Creek School Corporation.  Students were given a variety of web-resources to use while researching a student-selected animal, and student's final project was presented through a LittleBirdTales video.

LP K ScienceAnimalResearchProject

Kidblog App

Kidblog is a great web-based platform for allowing students to blog with a safety net.  It is a great tool for iPad classrooms or MacBook classrooms.  Because all published posts are saved, you will be able to compare beginning of the year writing samples with the end of the year writing samples.

To get started, teachers would need to create a blog and student accounts on the Kidblog website.  Next, I would introduce the concept to students using the BrainPOP blogging video or BrainPOP Jr. blogging video.  These two videos provide students with a brief overview of blogging.  After introducing the concept of blogging, I would then setup the ground rules for writing blog posts and comments.  Last, provide students with regular assignments and guidance as needed with the blog.  Check-in with students and scaffold there progress as a writer with a true audience.

For more resources, check out my Getting Started with Blogging Resources page.

Kid Blog App Cheat Sheet

Control your desktop with Doceri

Overview:

Doceri is a great app to control your laptop or desktop screen with your iPad.  To unlock all of it's features, Doceri is a paid app.  For 95% of us in education though, the free app will work perfectly.

An added ability that Doceri allows you to do is resize your screen on your iPad.  This will allow math teachers to fit entire equations on a screen, where this is a difficult task in other screen control applications.

Control Your Desktop With Doceri

Gmail - Switching accounts on your iPad or iPhone

This post is meant for the people within the Tri-Creek School corporation.  I apologize if people from the Twitter-sphere haphazardly mound up here.

Watch this short 1:44 video on switching your Tricreek account on your iPhone or iPad.