Malchow's Tech Bytes 👩🏻‍💻~ January 14th

Click here ---> Malchow's Tech Bytes~ January 14th <---

Tech Bytes~ ❤️ Valentine's Day Edition ❤️

Malchow's Tech Bytes ~ Valentine's Day Edition

Tech Bytes~ Jan 22nd

Tech Bytes~ Jan 22-26

Super excited this week to be able to share a link to a Google slide deck of Seesaw Activity Templates that I've been working on putting together for teachers in my district. Feel free to grab what may be useful for you. 

Have any great Seesaw Activities that you've put together? Send your activity links to sjmalchow@pulaskischools.org and I'll add them to this resource with credit given back to you. #BetterTogether

Martin Luther King Day Resources~ Tech Bytes Jan 8th

Tech Bytes~ Jan 8th

Next week Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. 

How can you make the world a better place? Check out this weeks' Tech Bytes for a variety of resources you can use in your classroom including a collaborative Flipgrid that your students can add to. Responses are moderated to be sure that content is appropriate. I hope that you'll check it out! 

Happy New Year!! Tech Bytes 2018!

Click to access this week's Tech Bytes with clickable links

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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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Poetry Month, Bubbles and Word Clouds

April is National 

Poetry Month!

We've been working on learning a little bit more about poetry this month and what better way than to blow bubbles! Well, actually we blew bubbles to experience the different colors, sounds, and feel of bubbles which in turn gave us background knowledge for our poems.

We used a template for our poems which had us thinking about adjectives to describe our bubbles, action words and similes. 

After writing our poems we used ABCya's Word Cloud app to showcase our poems in a different format. We're planning to print our poetry in both "normal" format and word cloud format for all to enjoy at our upcoming Writer's Tea.

ABC Word Cloud app

If you don't have the ABCya Word Cloud app on your devices yet, I highly encourage you to pick this up while it's free. If you know what Wordle is, you'll love this app for the younger students. f you don't have iPads, you can also access ABCya Word Cloud online. Using the word cloud, students are able to create a graphical representation of word frequency. This could be a wonderful tool for a student written story, adjectives to describe a character, adjectives to describe an animal as part of a research project, and so much more. 

I've written about this app before here and used it last year to make part of our Mother's Day gifts as well. The app itself is very easy to use and only took my kiddos last year about 5 minutes to be able navigate independently.My one suggestion would be to either compose your words in the notes app so you can copy and paste or to copy your words in the app prior to creating your word cloud so if you have to go back, you won't have to retype everything.

Have you used ABCya Word Cloud in the classroom? If so, please leave a comment below to share how you used it.

Word Clouds

Have you tried the new app by ABCya called Word Clouds? It is currently free and is phenomenally easy to use! If you are not familiar with word clouds the idea is that you get a graphical representation of your text. Words that are used in higher frequency are represented larger. 

This app is phenomenally easy to use. My kiddos learned how to use it in about 5 minutes. The next day, they taught another first grade class how to use the app. If a first grader can teach someone how to use it, you know it's easy!

We used this app to create a word cloud for our moms as part of their Mother's Day gift. We did a bit of brainstorming together on chart paper to get the ideas flowing. Students were then asked to write the name they call their mom at the top of their paper (mom, momma, mommy, etc). They then numbered their paper from 1-10 and thought of 10 (or more if they could) words that would describe their mom.

When putting their words into the app, each student typed the word "mom" four times so that it would appear larger than the others and then proceeded to type in their other words. When they were done they were able to choose the font, color and directionality of their words.

These turned out wonderful and were a nice addition to our Mother's Day gifts.

fridge magnets

Remember those colorful fridge magnets that scratch up your fridge, fall off and get lost but are sooo much fun? Well now you can play with fridge magnets on the computer....no more lost pieces, no more scratched refridgerator doors but still all the fun! The best part is, as children move the letters around, it will also say the letter name to them.  I love this site!!  For those of us who have SMARTboards,  a version of fridge magnets is in the gallery, but I like this one sooo much better as the letter names are said as the letters are touched or moved.
We will be using this on the SMARTboard during our spelling practice time in the mornings and on the netbooks during our Daily 5 word work time. I will also be introducing it to one of my children who has trouble with letter identification. Using it on the SMARTboard this child will be able to work independently but I will also be able to easily keep an eye on his work. 
I also like the fact that students can print their creations when they are done or save them.
The link is: http://abcya.com/alphabet_number_magnets.htm

Need a primary level Wordle-type site?? Here it is...

I was jumping for joy when I found this site earlier this year. I've used Wordle in the past with 2nd graders and although they did a great job there were a lot of choices for them in regards to color, style, etc that seemed to take some of them far too long to decide on their final product. There was also the possibility of coming across inappropriate Wordle's in the gallery which was something I was a bit uncomfortable with. Well... fear not- there is a solution and it's ABCya! Word Clouds.

Just to give you an example of what an ABCya! word cloud looks like, I pasted the paragraph above into the word cloud generator and here's what my creation ended up looking like. It doesn't take out as many of the insignificant words as Wordle does, but to me, that far outweighs the other issues.

Once students have typed or cut and pasted their text into the generator they are able to change the font, the color scheme (only 8 to choose from), and change the format (only 3 layouts available). ABCya's Word Clouds also give you the option to print your creation or save it, something that Wordle made difficult for 1st/2nd graders to do.

This would be great for students to use with a short story or a poem. I personally have used it for students' poems for our May baskets as well as for cloze-sentence projects. It just gives it a little different flair and really appeals to our digital native learners.

ABCya!

I came upon this site, http://www.abcya.com/ ,last year when I was teaching 2nd grade. The site is laid out with educational computer games and activities, but the best part is... it's organized by grade level. 

 All of the educational computer activities were created or approved by certified school teachers and all educational games are free and are modeled from primary grade lessons and enhanced to provide an interactive way for children to learn. The grade level lessons incorporate areas such as math and language arts while introducing basic computer skills. Many of the kindergarten and first grade activities are equipped with sound to enhance understanding.




My 2nd graders last year loved this site and my first graders this year are no different. The boys, my son included, love the Create a Car (make a toy car) game. This is also an app that can be downloaded for the iPod Touch. It seems so very simple and almost too game like but a great tool for teaching clicking and dragging while having fun.

I have heard some say that they go up a grade level as well for a bit more challenging content for their kids.

Give it a try and let me know what you think!