Group items tagged

"I'm in the midst of teaching my STEM students how to use the iPad app "Explain Everything" to create short, narrated slideshows about the cantilever spans project we've been doing recently. My students share iPads on our STEM cart, and do not have their own Google logins to upload videos to YouTube. So, after they complete their narrated slideshows and export their finished videos to their iPad camera roll, the challenge is: How can we readily get these videos uploaded to YouTube? This situation is complicated further by the fact that YouTube uploads are blocked on our school network by our content filter, unless a teacher logs in in to bypass the filter. Here are two ways I've dealt with these constraints and requirements. I am sharing this post today because one of the librarians in our district ran into this same problem and asked for help!"

"Jackie Myers, the 4th and 5th grade art teacher at Independence Elementary School in Yukon, Oklahoma, explains how to create a functional iPad stand using a cardboard box, duct tape, and a box cutter. Jackie used cardboard iPad stands like these with her students in April 2014 on a stopmotion video project. View examples of student work on: http://iesart.posthaven.com. Students used the free "Stop Motion Cafe" iPad app for their projects."

"Yesterday in Yukon, Oklahoma, I led an "iPad Quick Edit Videography" workshop for Storychasers. Workshop participants and I brainstormed, planned, recorded and edited short videos focusing on digital citizenship issues which public photo and video sharing can raise. Our full curriculum from the workshop is available on Google Sites. I edited a video with some of these clips and published it to YouTube with the title, "Avoiding Digital Disasters: Video Is the New Pen." The statement, "video is the new pen," comes from Richard Wells' outstanding post from earlier this week on iPad 4 Schools, "The "One iPad" Classroom.""

"This is my 20th year in education but my second year back in the classroom, teaching STEM full-time to 610 4th and 5th graders at Independence Elementary in Yukon, Oklahoma. Our STEM program is very unique, since it's in the "specials "rotation for all students that also includes PE, Music and Art. This is the 4th year of the STEM program in Yukon Public Schools. As we're about to wind down our school year, I thought it would be good to reflect and share about the reasons I love teaching elementary STEM in YPS. If you want to learn more, come to STEMseeds PD Camp June 2-4, 2015!"

We all have a story to tell, and so do your students! From your Kindergartener's weekend birthday party to your 12th grader's Senior Prom, your students want to talk and share. 21st century learning and the Common Core State Standards encourage today's students to move beyond basic telling and writing to recording, publishing, tweeting and blogging.

"Soon after Maryanne Wolf published "Proust and the Squid," a history of the science and the development of the reading brain from antiquity to the twenty-first century, she began to receive letters from readers. Hundreds of them. While the backgrounds of the writers varied, a theme began to emerge: the more reading moved online, the less students seemed to understand. There were the architects who wrote to her about students who relied so heavily on ready digital information that they were unprepared to address basic problems onsite. There were the neurosurgeons who worried about the "cut-and-paste chart mentality" that their students exhibited, missing crucial details because they failed to delve deeply enough into any one case. And there were, of course, the English teachers who lamented that no one wanted to read Henry James anymore. As the letters continued to pour in, Wolf experienced a growing realization: in the seven years it had taken her to research and write her account, reading had changed profoundly-and the ramifications could be felt far beyond English departments and libraries. She called the rude awakening her "Rip van Winkle moment," and decided that it was important enough to warrant another book. What was going on with these students and professionals? Was the digital format to blame for their superficial approaches, or was something else at work?"

Really interesting information on being a better online reader. The author suggests the following: "Maybe the decline of deep reading isn't due to reading skill atrophy but to the need to develop a very different sort of skill, that of teaching yourself to focus your attention. (Interestingly, Coiro found that gamers were often better online readers: they were more comfortable in the medium and better able to stay on task.)"