Suitcase

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Guardians of Gahoole

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Sadako and the 1000 paper cranes-304

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The kid who became President - 304

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My teacher is an Alien - 304

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The BFG by Roald Dahl

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Book Trailers - 304

Today we worked on creating book trailers for the books we loved. We hope to upload them to our Book Wizard site. The students enjoyed working on Animoto.

Congrats All!

Yes, I have seen our website, and it is a doozy. Thanks to all for making it such a success. A fitting tribute to our dear departed Ms. Perez. As for me, I thoroughly enjoyed this project. Working together to create one project was fantastic. I learned all about Dropbox, GarageBand and podcasting and now I'm psyched for the next project. Lauren, when my students create new reviews, I shall put them in the folder in Dropbox.

Have you seen our website?

Lots has been happening behind the scenes, and while the website still needs quite a bit of work, there is now plenty there to look at. Check our "beta version" at http://ps376.org/books/.

404 Getting Down to the Wire

I hope everyone had a good weekend. I have made plans for our display boards. Since I have four groups I would like four boards. Each board will explain one facet of podcast production: writing a script and recording the voice, editing the voice, adding images, and adding sound effects and music. In addition, each board will discuss one popular series: Dragon Slayer's Academy, The Series of Unfortunate Events, The My Teacher is an Alien series, and the Boys Start the War series. Why? Because these students have all read many books in these series. What do you think?

By the end of the day Friday 404 have all the podcasts saved as files that can be used by the webmasters at 504. Also, we put all of the Pages for the podcasts and the "About the Reviewer" in the Dropbox.

Lauren, I put Alyssa's and Evenez's files in the dropbox and I am about to do Zen'z once I find them (he's absent today).

third grade TAG & ESL

PHEWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!The movies are done and on the dropbox. Both classes learned alot about meeting deadlines. We worked very hard and added nice pictures and nice backgrounds!!!!!Congratulations to the Logo winner from 1st grade. And congratulations to the children that were runners up from class 304!!!!A job well done.....Thanks to 504 for all their hardwork and continued dedication to the project!!!!!

1-104 Phew!

Our class brought it to the wire, but we were able to complete all of our Keynote reviews. We spent Friday working on our speeches and then created pop-up card invitations for our families. We will finish off by selecting our "costumes" for the presentation, choosing our speakers, and practice, practice, practicing....

WAY TO GO CHRISTOPHER!! You're logo was awesome. To be fair, I didn't tell our class that his logo was one of the finalists, so he won on his own merit. The class will be thrilled when they find out on Tuesday. :-)

Book Wizard Logo

The voting was soooo close, with only one vote separating the first and second choice. Amazingly, a first grade student's artwork was ultimately selected. Congratulations, Christopher,  for creating the winning logo:

Second Grade- One week to go!

This week we finished up most of our review iMovies and we only have one more to complete and send to Ms. Heinz by the end of today. We also wrote a song about reading that will be linked to the main page of the Book Wizard website. We took pictures of students in each class holding some of the books they reviewed. One group will input these pictures into an iMovie and have the song playing in the background. Today our plan is to record the letters that some of the students received from David A. Adler, Mike Thaler and Jack Batcher. If we have extra time, we are going to create a game to link onto each book page with comprehension questions.

Next week our plan is to make a presentation board of our author letters and practice the presentation speeches. I'm sending each group home with one part of the speech that they will write for homework and then we will have auditions to see who will present on Friday.

Mentoring Class 5-502

Things are continuing to go well while mentoring Mrs. Maria's class. The students have helped most of her students create about them pages. SOme have been absent so we are finishing them up today. The post casts are all recorded most have images in them and some are just adding the jingles. Some students in Mrs. Maria's Class are finished but we are not sure how to export the podcasts correctly. I was wondering if we can get a lesson on that during 2nd period so I can help them with finishing their projects.

Class 5-504 Busy Busy Week

Class 5-504 has been working very hard this week on the project. We have spent a little time each day including one full project day during the snow storm. We Have been taking all classes pages and movies and adding them to the website. This has taken a LONG time even though the students do it fast. There is just so many to do it takes a long time. The students are loving this and are always asking if they can work on the project. They are interested in starting the main, reviewers, the book and the authors homepages.

Logo Contest

Well, we had a lot of good submissions and some wonderful artwork. For the voting, we selected the best five images and digitized them using Flash. Here are the entries:

You can vote for your favorite logo by taking this survey: vote now

4-404

Friday was crazy trying to get the podcasts together. The first student would get one in good shape, then you help someone else. Then you preview the first student again and it's a mess. As a result, the "about the reviewer" pages didn't get done. Also, I thought the podcast pages were supposed to be blank. We spent all day today redoing those.

Any suggestions on how to get kids to 1. focus and not spend hours fiddling with design 2. listen and apply ideas of good design?

As a result, I did not have time to work on logos in Word, as I had said to Ms. Moran. Dumped the revised podcast pages in dropbox today @ 4:24. Dropbox does not really work on the laptop I have, so I have to use another computer for that. It's annoying.

FYI Gael is sending me away Tuesday. I really don't want a snow day; let's pray for blue skies!

To All Teachers

If anyone finishes any media or pages during the week please send put them in the drop box right away so class 5-504 can add it to your webpage as we get them. This way they will not get piled up and the kids have to rush through their work. Also on Friday as you are working all day. As a group finishes you can send their work. Please don't wait until the end of the day if they finish earlier. The students will be working on the webpage with all of your work throughout the day. Thanks a lot.

5-504 and 5-502

This week class 5-504 mentored class 5-502 on pages. The students picked it up easily and finished most of the pages in just one period. The students are still working very well together and have learned 3 different programs now. Keynote, GarageBand, and Pages. They are almost done with their podcasts and only have recording to finish.