Resource Sharing: Wonderopolis

Wonderopolis is a site whose goal is to promote curiosity, questioning,and inquiry. New topics are posted each day to wonder about and explore. It's worth a daily visit for families to spark interesting conversations and learning opportunities at home:

"Our Wonders of the Day will help you find learning moments in everyday life, ones that fit in with dinner preparations or carpool responsibilities or a stolen moment between breakfast and the bus."

It's a great classroom resource too. Take a look at this approach:  Wonderopolis and Question Writing from 'Teaching in the 21st Century' Blog. This is a valuable source of online non-fiction articles to build reading comprehension and inferential thinking.
Some recent 'wonders' to explore:

• Why are school buses yellow?
• What's a tsunami?
• How does a species become endangered?

Skype in the Classroom

Signing up for 'Skype in the Classroom' is a great way to connect with an online international community of educators. We can expand our students' international mindedness through building relationships and exchanging ideas with students and teachers all over the world! Teachers first create a profile that sets out their interests, specialties, and location. Then, they are able to browse the community for teachers who they can help or who can offer them help in making cultural connections and instructional exchanges, or even practicing a new language with native speakers! Register now and get started by clicking here.

Additional Reading & Technology resources:

Fluency (including many anchor charts and examples of fluency instruction)

• Having Fun with Fluency: A Bridge to Comprehension (Part I) 
• Having Fun With Fluency: Strategies Readers Will Enjoy (Part II)
  (via Scholastic's 'Top Teaching' blog)

Keyboarding

• Create a Keyboarding Learning Station using these downloadable practice cards from (ICT Teaching and Learning blog)

IBPYP Exhibition

Website by Elizabeth, Aarohi, and Maya about Service Animals

Exhibition is a demonstration of students' learning of key concepts within the IBPYP curriculum framework. It is an intense, multi-step, multi-layered process, and students' success provides evidence of every aspect of the Learner Profile. It not only shows students' development of transdisciplinary research and social skills but also their communication and self-management abilities too. It is a testament to learning that has happened not only in 5th grade, but in each grade level that has come before. 

Exhibition work is student-led and requirements involve research, writing, technology and taking action as an extension of learning. The role of mentors has been essential to ensuring student's receive much needed support. The quality of students' work is also directly connected to our teachers' ability to balance strategic guidance and intervention at the point of need while at the same time ensuring students' own what they are learning and are given the tools to steer their own course. 

Students designed lines of inquiry and investigated self-selected topics in connection to the central idea: 'Action impacts our community and our world.' Pre-search experiences gave kids the opportunity to choose topics they were truly passionate about. Working in collaborative teams, 5th graders developed questions and lines of inquiry through concept mapping. They used multiple sources to gather research information in the form of notefacts, and cited sources along the way. Organizing notefacts at the midpoint of research was key in order to identify gaps and unanswered questions, and then research resumed to address these. Students also brainstormed, developed, and implemented 'action' plans. Kids experienced first-hand that they could make a difference in our community in relation to their chosen issue.

To synthesize understandings from their research, students wrote essays to summarize what they'd learned and then began developing presentation ideas and planning products incorporating technology. Next, they transformed their gathered research information into a range of original creative products, a few of which are embedded above and below. They used BibMe to finalize their bibliographies, and teachers coached and guided teams in delivering their final presentations in ways that both engaged and informed their wide audience of families, community members, and students from every classroom throughout our school. 

Just a few examples of ROE Exhibition 2011 products created by students are posted here. Many links to other phenomenal work continue to be added HERE.

 An animated presentation about Parkinson's Disease by Jackson and Robby (created with Prezi)-Note: Click arrow to load and view presentation.

An e-Book to inform River Oaks students about Autism by Ilona and Alexandra (created with VoiceThread)--Note: Click on  students' avatars to hear voice recordings page by page.

A Multimedia Pop-up Book about Ocean Pollution including original illustrations by Corbin, Joann, and Warren (created with Zooburst)--Note: Click small ''show more' arrows above story text on each page for additional text & click exclamation points above images for thought bubbles.

Technology Timeline on Dipity.

An Interactive Timeline about Technology by Beckett and Stuart (created with Dipity). Note: Click any timeline label for more description of events. 

A Multimedia Poster about Alzheimer's Disease by Will and Sabrina (created with GlogsterEdu)


Find additional links to projects HERE . 

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

Book Fair: February 7-9, 2011

Book Fair: February 7-9, 2011

Grandparents Day: Wed., Feb. 9th (9-10:30 am & 12:30-2:00 pm)

Family Night: Wed., Feb. 9th (6:00-8:00 pm)

Concept Mapping Research Topics

Research is a thinking process and there are steps to follow when trying to learn about something new. Initially students need to explore and build a knowledge base from which questions can develop and inquiry can grow. We help students to become immersed in resources on a given topic by providing opportunities for exploration of print non-fiction and online information, viewing video clips, or hearing a speaker on the subject.

As one example, 5th graders embarking on their culminating IBPYP exhibition project recently worked through a 'pre-search' phase. They chose 3 potential topics of greatest interest to them in relation to the central idea: 'Action impacts our community and our world.' Then they spent time locating and exploring resources before actually choosing a final topic. As a result, students not only expanded their background knowledge but also determined whether or not there were relevant and readable sources, and even eliminated some topics from their consideration.

Next students need to organize their thoughts and form meaningful research questions. It's important at this early stage of the process to consider what one already knows and what questions will drive the process forward. A concept map is one way to help students focus their thinking and make plans for research. This can be done in a whole group process with younger students or done more independently or collaboratively by older students. Both facts and questions are added, then organized and categorized on a concept map. This is essentially a graphic organizer with a web structure. The goal is for students to make meaningful connections among ideas and to recognize relationships or categories for the facts and questions they have gathered to this point. What are the things they'd like to know more about? How can these ideas be organized into a research plan?

When students have analyzed their concept map and developed questions, they are on their way to successful research. Goal-setting follows which includes refining questions, identifying sources and brainstorming key words for effective searches.

Concept Mapping Resources:

Students can use concept maps in a variety of other ways too. They can create them as part of pre-reading or pre-writing strategies. They can be used as thinking tools in content area reading across the curriculum as kids prioritize main ideas with supporting details and subtopics.

• Concept Map as Research Tool
• Concept Map as Pre-reading Strategy
• How to Create a Concept Map (ex. of more complex linking phrases and relationships)

                     Online Creation Tools:

• Read-Write-Think Webbing Tool
• Exploratree (see 'knowing trees')
• Create Simple Diagrams
• Use DabbleBoard to create mindmaps

Looking at 2011 and Beyond

Each year the ROE library collection is analyzed to make sure non-fiction titles are current and accurate. Here is a snapshot of a few books that don't make the cut. They have become historically informative, but they can no longer be used as sources for useful up-to-date learning about technology and communication! 

It's fascinating at this time of year to consider how the world of education is evolving as well as the possibilities that await us in the future. From paper to books to even the jobs students will have in a 2nd grade classroom--the ideas shared in these articles certainly are thought-provoking!

What is...What will be...Obsolete in 2nd Grade

20 Things That Became Obsolete in 2010

21 Things That Will Become Obsolete in Education by 2020

Five Minds for the Future

"In this age of digital media and information overload, students with knowledge within a discipline must be able to sort out what is important and what is not from the massive amount of available information (the synthesizing mind)."

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.