Blogging hiatus 🤦🏻‍♀️

 Anybody else still working on getting back into a normal swing? Whew! 

It's been a crazy year and I've had all I can do to keep my personal and professional lives organized and flowing smoothly, let alone managing my digital life. Nothing life altering, just life in general keeping me busy to the extremes. My youngest son is marching with his high school band in the Tournament of Roses parade in Pasadena, CA on Jan 1st! We are quite excited as my husband and I will also be making the trip with the band. It's been a whirlwind of planning and preparing but will so worth it in the end!

My hope moving forward is to get the blog back up and running on a consistent basis as I've missed the connections and collaborations from near and far that have come from this space!!!

So here's to my first post moving forward....

This morning I did my monthly Breakfast Bytes meeting with my staff. (This is a monthly meeting where we discuss technology and tech integration) December is always such a crazy time of year so I theme the meeting around tips and tricks in hopes that everyone will walk away with one or two small tidbits. 

Did you know that you can now insert stickers and gifs 

into your Google Slidedeck directly from the Insert Image menu?

Or that there is now a pen tool that you can use when in slidedeck mode?

To view these tips and others, slide on over to the Breakfast Bytes page of the blog and click on this month's image on the Padlet board!

If you pick up a new tip or have a great tip to share, leave a comment below to let us know!

Merry Christmas everyone!! Enjoy your time away with family and friends!

 

May the 4th Be With You Day 👨‍🚀 🛰️

For those of us that are Star Wars fans, May 4th always brings an extra smidge of fun into the classroom. I've been collecting resources for several years to use on this day while still staying true to the curriculum (although I do weave in a bit of fun too!) 

I've done my best to curate some of what I've collected into the resource board linked below and will continue to add to this resource as I continue to collect. 😀

You'll find activities for all K-5 grade levels and content areas including Seesaw activities, Kahoots, coding activities, drawing tutorials, escape Rooms, Stick Together Boards and so much more! There are 4 pages of resources organized by content area so be sure to click through all of the pages.

Click the image to access the clickable resources

👨‍🚀 NASA Space Selfies! 🪐 Tools of the Mind Integration

 Are you a kindergarten teacher who is using the Tools of the Mind curriculum? Two of our kindergarten teachers are currently piloting this program and our district has adopted it for all kinder classes for the 2023-24 school year! 

I've been collaborating with my kinder teachers to find meaningful and engaging ways to integrate technology into their units. Currently our classes are reading, The Magic Tree House: Midnight on the Moon. As we began talking about our objectives and ways students could use a creation app to show their learning we decided on using three apps:

1) NASA Selfies -available in the App store for iPhone and iPad and Google Play.

2) ChatterPix Kids - available in the App store for iPhone and iPad and Google Play.

3) Seesaw

The NASA Selfies app lets you generate snapshots of yourself in a virtual spacesuit, posing in front of gorgeous cosmic locations, like the Orion Nebula or the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The interface is simple enough for kindergartners to use! You just snap a photo of yourself, pick your background, and then save to your camera roll! 

We plan to have students put their NASA selfie picture into ChatterPix Kids where they will be able to record their voice and make their mouth move on their picture. Their recording will be a prompt that we will be able to use as a quick, formative assessment. Once these are done, we will have students share them with their parents by uploading them to Seesaw.

Here are a few other resources that we may incorporate into our learning as well:

Story Time from Space- this is a great website hosted by the Global Space Education Foundation. Books are sent to the International Space Station and then astronauts videotape themselves reading the books to the children of Earth!  

How about a VR Expedition to the moon? We also have the RobotLabs VR kit and are planning to do the Moon Landing expedition!

Don't have a RobotLabs kits, you may want to check out this app for another VR opportunity. The app provides information about the science behind these stunning images. There are currently 30 eye-catching images to choose from, all taken by Spitzer. More images from the agency's other science and human spaceflight missions will be added in the future. 

Have fun!!!

Thank you to all that participated in the 19th annual St. Patrick's Day Graphing Project! It was a great year of counting, sorting and graphing our favorite St. Patrick's Day cereal, Lucky Charms!

As you can see by the graph below, we found out that our hypothesis was not true. We worked to prove that there were more green clovers than any other marshmallow piece. Interesting as well as that several classes commented that they did not have any Pots of Gold marshmallow pieces this year which may be why our results show only 1,052 total pieces. The "Other" pieces were reported to be unicorns by all of the classes.

If you'd like to see the results, feel free to jump over to St. Patrick's Day Graphing Project website.

☘️ Here's hoping that all of our classes had a wee bit of fun and that you'll join us again next year! Registration for 2024 will open the end of February 2024. ☘️