Malchow's Tech Bytes~ Oct 31st 🍁🎃

 

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Malchow's Tech Bytes~ Nov 8th 👩🏻‍💻📰📱

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Malchow's Tech Bytes 👩🏻‍💻 ~ Nov 16th

 

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Malchow's Tech Bytes~ October 26th

 

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Malchow's Tech Bytes~ Read Across America Edition

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Malchow's Tech Bytes~ Feb 18th 👩🏻‍💻🍀

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Malchow's Tech Bytes 👩🏻‍💻~ November 5th

Malchow's Tech Bytes~ November 5th

Did you remember to set your clocks back today?

☘️St. Patrick's Day Project ~ #SPDProject18 ☘️

St. Patrick's Day is just around and I couldn't be more excited.This is one of my favorite holidays (I'm a wee bit Scotch-Irish love the wearin' o' the green!) There were always a few shenanigans going on in my classroom this time of year... those gosh darn leprechauns, always causing trouble thinking that I had stole some of their gold. 😉☘️🌈

One of my favorite activities to part in though was the Lucky Charms graphing project that Jen Wagner hosted on her ProjectsByJen site. (If you've not checked her site out, you definitely need to take a peek. She runs some fantastic collaborative projects that will get you connecting outside the four walls of your classroom!)  Needless to say, Jen was not planning to continue the St Patrick's Day project and I just couldn't bear to see it die... so.... I've taken over the reins and am super excited to continue this fantastic opportunity for our youngest learners! 

https://stpatricksdaygraphing.weebly.com/

For those not familiar with the project, it involves having your students sort the marshmallow shapes from a box of Lucky Charms cereal. As a group we are working to try and prove that there are more ☘️green clovers☘️ than any other shape. 

This project covers multiple standards (which you can find on the site) including: 1:1 correspondence, sorting, graphing, and analyzing data. By participating in the project, you'll also be covering several of the new ISTE standards including the Global Collaborator-GC1 standard.







Also included this year is a coordinating Flipgrid board where your students can participate in several topics such as creating a math problem for others to solve, using their marshmallow pieces to create a story or simply share their favorite marshmallow piece.  






We have over 140 classrooms already signed up to take part and would love to see your 4K-3 classroom join us. For more information, or to register, check out the official St Patrick's Day Project website~ 
☘️🌈  https://stpatricksdaygraphing.weebly.com/ ☘️🌈 our hashtag is: #SPDProject18 ☘️🌈

View St. Patrick's Day Project Participant Locations in a full screen map

Malchow's Tech Bytes~ Nov 6-10

This week's newsletter has lots of odds n' ends. Hopefully there will be a tidbit of two that you'll find helpful.

If you're looking for a wonderful, global collaboration opportunity, I would highly suggest checking out the Holiday Card Exchange by Projects by Jen. This year's theme is stars. My 1st graders always enjoyed this project. It was a great way for us to learn about others, practice geography skills, and connect with others through Google HangOuts. 

Malchow's Tech Bytes~ November 6th

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Picture It Project 2015

We are once again participating in a Projects by Jen online project. This time we are participating in Jen's Picture It Project. The project is set up to be a collaborative project with 23 other classrooms around the world to create a collaborative piece of artwork. This years' project has us creating a quilt. Each class is responsible for creating a 7" x 7" quilt square in whatever fashion they choose. We will also be filling out an "All about Us" sheet that will be sent along with our artwork. 

I chose to embed some of our "About the Class" info directly into our quilt pattern and then turned our project into a color-by-number to reinforce turn-around facts and symmetry. 

In hindsight, I wish I would have let the kids pick their own 3 colors for their code so that each of the quilt squares would have had their own look and feel. Live and learn. Seeing as each piece will be going to a different school, so will be part of it's own unique quilt, it won't be a big deal. That's what happens when you try to save time during a busy time of year and not let the creative juices fully flow. Our piece will be similar to the one seen here. This is my digital master of our finished square.

As our pieces come in from the other schools we will locate the states/countries on our map using clues such as, "This state is in the northwest corner of the US" or  This state is north of Florida". This has been an authentic and engaging way for my students to practice and reinforce their map skills. Once things get going they always look forward to finding out if we received any mail. After we locate the states we will place each piece in the hall, along with the information that each class sends us, to create our quilt. I'll post an updated picture as our quilt begins to take shape.

If you've never participated in one of these projects, I highly encourage you to look at the various projects that Jen offers. There are many and they span multiple grade levels. They are very engaging, collaborative, cover multiple standards and are a great way to embed technology into your curriculum.

Lucky Charms Graphing

Another wonderful year of participating in the St. Patrick's Day LUcky Charms graphing project hosted by Projects by Jen.

We worked hard to find out how many marshmallows were in a box of Lucky Charms. We made predictions and shared them with a Mrs. DeGroot's class (@mrsdegrootclass) class in Iowa via our Twitter feed. We then began sorting, counting, and graphing our results. When we finished we added up the total for each of the marshmallow shapes and were quite surprised by our results. Our original job was to find out if there were more hats (clovers) than any other marshmallow in the box. We not only found that to be true, but were surprised at how few we had of some of the other shapes that were in a our box. (We had an XL Sam's Club sized box)

These were our results from our box
of Lucky Charms

Later in the afternoon, we participated in a Google Hangout with Mrs. DeGroot's class to share and compare our results with theirs. Mrs. DeGroot was not able to find the same size box as we had so she bought 2 small boxes to equal the same size as our box. Would you believe that they had more marshmallows in almost every single category and that they had 200 more marshmallows all together?? We had a pretty interesting discussion after our Google Hangout about why this might be. 

We also thought we should write to General Mills to tell them about our results and ask them why the same size boxes (technically) would have such a discrepency in the number of marshmallows. My class decided that they want to buy their Lucky Charms in Iowa from now on. 

Mrs. DeGroot tweeted about our
Google Hangout call on Twitter

Pumpkin Seed Project and Twitter integration

On Thursday of this week we took part in a Projects By Jen online project in which we had to find the number of seeds in a pumpkin. We took part in this project along with our buddy class in Oshawa, Canada via Twitter. 

We started our adventure by tweeting pictures of our pumpkins and our predictions to each other. As we began to open our pumpkins up, we again tweeted a picture of the insides of our pumpkins to each other in the event that we would need to or want to update our predictions based on what we saw.

After we scooped all of the seeds out of the pumpkins, to the delight of most, but groans and ewwww's from others, we began to talk about how we would go about counting all of the seeds. We had some great discussion, and in the end, decided that it would be best and easiest if we put our seeds into piles of 10s to start with. This was a great strategy as it is exactly what we have been focusing on in math. As the teams went to work counting out piles of 10s, we again tweeted a picture to Mrs. Drapers' class to see if they could figure out what counting strategy we were using. The groups then began to work collaboratively to count their seed piles. 

After passing the 100 mark some found it difficult to go on, so we discussed what happens when you get 10 piles of 10 and how many that is. We were then able to combine more of our piles into groups of 100 which made the counting even easier. In the end, one of our pumpkins had 3 piles of a hundred, 4 piles of 10 and 7 extra ones. Using this information, we were able to quickly figure out that the pumpkin had 347 seeds.

When we were done, we tweeted a final picture to Mrs. Draper's class to show them the final count so they could compare their predictions to the actual number of seeds. It was a great collaborative activity in our classroom as well as via Twitter with Mrs. Draper's class. It was also fantastic way for us to work on problem solving skills, predicting, counting by 10s and 1s, and our writing skills all while using technology to enhance our learning.

You can check out our Twitter feed here.

Global Art Project- Projects by Jen

We are again participating in a Projects by Jen online project. This time we are participating in a World Art Project. This year's project is collaborative project with 23 other classrooms around the world to create a rendition of Vincent Van Gogh's, Starry Night. Our class is responsible for piece number 10. We spent some time before spring break coloring our pieces so we could send them out to the other participating classes. Our group has classes from pre-kindergarten through 6th grade from places such as: North Carolina, California, and New Jersey and as far away as Canada and Australia. 

Each class will also fill out an "All about Us" sheet that will be sent along with their artwork. As our pieces come in we will be placing them on top of the matching section on our World Art Project board in the hall along with the information that each class sends us. We are excited to get our first piece and hope that it arrives soon.

We will also be skyping with a 1st grade class from Connecticut that is also part of the project but from a different group (There are 10 different groups of 24 participating) to compare our art work to theirs. We will also be discussing facts about our classrooms, local weather, and our cities with each other.

If you've never participated in one of these projects, I highly encourage you to look at the various projects that Jen offers. There are many and they span all grade levels. They are very engaging, cover multiple standards and are a great way to embed technology into your curriculum.

St Patrick's Day Tech-ified

Today we participated in the St Patrick's Day Lucky Charms graphing project from Projects By Jen. This is my 2nd year participating in this project. It's a wonderful project that is easy to implement, doesn't take much time but has a lot of bang for the buck (predicting, counting, graphing, and comparing/ contrasting, in addition to a technology integration piece if you feel so inclined) Our goal this year was to prove that there were more green clovers than any other shape.

Our class started by making our own predictions on which marshmallow shape we felt would be represented the most in our box. Each student then tweeted their prediction to our partner class for this project, Mrs DeGroot's class in IA. My kids were so excited to see Mrs. DeGroot's class' predictions come through on our class Twitter feed. What an engaging and simple way for us to connect.

In the afternoon we opened our box, sorted, graphed and ate the results. We had a great discussion about which had the most, the least etc.
Later in the afternoon we made a Skype call to Mrs. DeGroot's class in IA and shared and compared our results with theirs. We recorded their results for more discussion later but as we compared each class had to decide if they had more or less than the other class and then put their hands on their head if they had more or hands on their shoulders if they had less. It was a quick and easy way to have the whole class involved in the comparing and an easy way for kids to see each other.

When we were done Skyping, we spent a bit of time locating our buddy class on the map and discussing their location in relation to ours. Just another great integration piece.

Overall, the project was a great success and I would highly recommend to others to participate in the Projects by Jen activities . Adding the technology component truly was the highlight and really made the project come to life. I will definitely take the time to add that piece again next year as the learning and collaborating that came out of that piece was far more powerful than the graphing alone.


Here are the results from all the classes as of 3/19. We didn't prove our hypothesis at this point, but what a great discussion to have with kiddos on the scientific process and their rational for why things turned out the way they did.

Results as of March 19, 2014
Classrooms	235
Students	4,481
Marshmallows Counted	106,279
Hypothesis Correct	NO
As a GROUP -- we will be trying to prove that there are more GREEN CLOVERS than any other shape