Ideas, Resources, & Tools

Here are a few ideas, resources, and tools that have recently captured my attention from Twitter networking, educators' blogs, and Diigo social bookmarks.

Diverse possibilities for learning with VoiceThread below come from Tom Barrett's 'Interesting Ways' series on EDTE.CH. View others on numerous additional topics including the iPod Touch, Interactive White Boards, Classroom Blogs, and Wikis. These are crowdsourced, or collectively created by users, so consider emailing him and having your idea added too!



The Writing Teacher's Strategy Guide:  
a downloadable e-book containing all kinds of writing strategies, many of which relate well to the research process and product creation. The Transaction-Action-Details chart (p. 40) offers a way to help kids craft more fluent sentences and expand on their ideas. More instructional eBook downloads can be found at TTMS.org

ReadWriteThink Printing Press:
Students can create a brochure, newspaper, booklet, or flyer easily with these simple publishing templates. Guides for the process are built into each one, and picture spaces are available in each type. A digital image cannot be added however, so students can create add their own original ones after printing their work.

It is so important for kids to create their own drawings, diagrams, photos and visual representations of their ideas, and not to use ready-made graphics too frequently! Jamie Mackenzie's article Beyond Clipart: Encouraging Children's Own Drawings is worthwhile reading on this issue.

Education Place
has a concise collection of graphic organizers students and teachers might use to organize and analyze thinking -- the following 3 may be helpful for students as they work though identifying main idea and details and also for research topic development.

E-Chart


Idea Rake


Tree Chart


Planning Chart

VoiceThread: U.S. History Research

Mrs. Goodman's 5th grade students have created research projects about the United States. Areas of  study included landmarks, people, major cities, and regions. Within each category, students chose the specific topics they would like to explore. By applying strategies from the Independent Investigation Method (IIM) framework, students developed questions and set research goals. Then they selected print and online sources and collected notefacts. Students are developing the skills of writing ideas in their own words in a format that is both short but complete enough to make sense. Documenting sources has also been a key component. Students are developing an understanding of plagiarism and ways to avoid it. In order to begin writing and creating a product to share what they learned, students categorized and organized their notefacts.They originally planned to make a picture book that each student would take home, so at first their work was printed out in black and white pages. But some students expressed concern about the amount of paper that would be required in making so many copies. So instead we decided to have kids showcase their work in a digital format instead.

We chose to use a tool called VoiceThread, which is an online media album that allows us to make comments on images, videos, documents, really simply. Our project is embedded above, and can be viewed directly here. Voice recordings and comments can be made using your voice (with a microphone or phone), text, audio, or by video (with a webcam). It's easy to control who can access and comment on a VoiceThread, and an entire conversation can be collected in the world and shared in one central place.

Now students have been able to record reflective comments about their work, and get voice and text feedback from not only their peers, but also the wider ROE school community. The audience for their work has expanded far outside classroom walls to our faculty and families here in Houston and beyond. Students evaluated and raised new questions about their work. They focused on including evidence, elaboration, and examples as part of their comments and ideas. In addition, students created an avatar as part of learning how to build a safe online identity and how to contribute to an online learning community.

For more details about about how we worked through our project, please visit the project guidelines page. You can learn more about VoiceThread with these tutorials. See more exciting possibilities with these examples of VoiceThread as Digital Portfolio. 

International Photography Contest For Kids

ROE student photographers should definitely check out this National Geographic International Photography Contest!  Click on the icon above for rules and guidelines to enter.

"Take a photograph of something in your world that fits one or more of these four categories: humor, animals, scenery, or people. The Grand Prize winner in this contest will be selected from the First Place winners in each category and win a trip to Toronto, Canada. Then the four First Place Winners will go on to compete against other First Place Winners from National Geographic International Photography Contests for Kids being held worldwide. The best photo worldwide will win the Grand Prize in the worldwide contest, a trip to Washington, D.C."

You can also explore National Geographic Kids online and be sure not to miss the National Geographic Photo of the Day. Two of my recent favorites are the Tour de France, Paris and Storm Clouds, Grand Canyon . These photographs through a microscipe of insect eggs are also simply amazing too!