Class 3-304 Update

We have been working hard on our imovies. We are almost finished with them. We have added sound, pictures, titles, transition and edited the ken burns effect. Some students even played around with the green screen. They had a good time putting themselves in all different locations. I think underwater was their favorite even though they could not use that background in their imovie. Some groups played with the maps effect with imovie and had fun with that. We ust have to edit a few things and then will be done.

404 Update

I brainstormed with Ms. Catania who had some excellent suggestions, which I took. To begin with, I used her idea of an organizer for Post Its, and then to categorize the Post Its in another organizer. So the students are putting ideas into categories. Also, I created a PortaPortal for the students. It has links to "teacher approved" websites. In some cases, the links are bascially to images. The students have used some document analysis techniques to write off of the images. Ms. Catania also mentioned that the students are familiar with Pages; this program is new tome, but very intuitive. I am thinking of having students create Pages and import them in to wiki...any thoughts?

Happy Thanksgiving

I'm so sorry I missed out on Friday. I can see everyone was busy without me! We are working on setting up a make-up day. I hope everyone has a great thanksgiving and I'll see you next week. Missing you--- Ms. Moran

1-104 Activities

This week, we finished up a few loose odds and ends, and started to work on our speeches for the presentation. The last two students painted pictures of their community helpers. Students began to put together a collage of all the pictures we have collected up to this point. In the afternoon, we sat as a class, and started to brainstorm ideas for our speeches. I had initially (last week) tried having a few students write on their own, but they were getting off topic, so I changed to a shared writing and it went much better. After we had written the intro, I had those who volunteered come up in front of the class and practice public speaking. The rest of the people in the audience gave a compliment and suggestion to the speakers when they were done. It worked really well. I am going to type up what was written, and send it home with those who are interested so that they can practice. We will pick the actual speakers, and alternates, in the beginning of December.

Class 504 works on their story Boards.

Today we missed Ms Moran. We hope everything is ok. Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family. We worked hard on our story boards and scripts for our imovies. We took intro shots with the kids introducing themselves and their topic. In the afternoon, we had the School-wide Spelling Bee so we took a break from the research.

K-14 Name poems

Finally, we completed the name poems recording. We also finished typing them on the keynote. It was a challenge for my kindergarteners to sit quietly during the recording. But we did it. My children were having fun playing with the Photo Booth today. They created some amazing and funny photos and videos. Ms. Moran, you have seen some of the children’s family posters in my classroom before. I think we can use them in our project. Tomorrow, I will schedule a Show and Tell activity for my children to speak about their family poster. Then on Friday, you decide whether we can record them.

4-404 Gathering Images

Wow! Thanks to Ms.Moran for all the great ideas for parent involvement. Also kudos for finding images to use as primary sources for EVERY one of the students in 404. I've linked the New York State Archives Image Search to the wiki and I've created a sample page showing how a link to an image can be put into a wiki page. Today we'll try to get half the class to find and link and image from the archive onto their page, and to explain the image briefly, using the information from the archive.

Getting Parents Involved

I'm starting to see comments from parents on our blog!

Brianna's mom asked: Is there anything that a parent can do from home to assist in their child's project?

If you haven't done so already, you may want to send home a letter to parents explaining the project, its goals, and letting them know about the presentation day (December 18.)

It is often helpful to give parents something they can do with their child that relates to the project. Here are some ideas off the top of my head, but feel free to add your own ideas:

• K-14: Ask parents to talk to children about family and family traditions. Make a mini picture album of "who's who" in your family.
• 1-104: Talk to your child about what you do and where you work. Interview friends and relatives about their jobs and why these jobs are important to the community. 
• 2-204: When you run errands or visit places in the community (specifically Brooklyn), show your child where you are going on a map. Mark the map with important places in Brooklyn that your child has visited.
• 3-304: Discuss your family culture and heritage with your child. Where were your ancestors from. What types of music, food, clothes, and traditions are from that culture.
• 4-404: Look at maps of New York State. Mark places on the map you have visited or want to visit. Research statistics about NY State and create a graph or chart.
• 5-504: Have your family do a health and safety evaluation. What steps do you have in place to ensure the health and safety of your family? What areas could you improve?

All students benefit from working on their home computers with parents. Play learning games at FunBrain or Primary Games or use some of the free Internet tools such as Animoto or Wordle. Use the interactive tools at Read-Write-Think. In the younger grades, parents can help students find pictures or visit learning web sites. In the upper grades, students may be able to teach their parents some of the skills they have learned in class. Parents and children can create a family blog  to promote writing skills and keep family members up to date with what is going on in their lives.

1-104 Recordings Complete

On Monday afternoon, the last three groups completed their recordings on Garage Band. It's no small feat to keep 12 1st graders silent during those few seconds where we actually hit the "record" button, but everyone was up for the challenge, and I'm happy to report that there is no coughing, paper rustling, or pencil tapping in the background.... We are excited that we will be adding our photos on Friday!

4-404 Moving Forward

Today we spent sometime working on the wiki. As promised, every student has a page devoted to their subtopic and every page ins in a folder for each of the five groups. I've sent a rubric to Ms. Moran for her to look at. I've also seen the wiki from last year. Today, students used a writing strategy called "boxes and bullets" to write something about their topic. In reading, we read nonfiction books about our topics and wrote Post its. In social studies we found an image for our pages and created a Word document to capture the image, along with the web address for the image itself. We discovered that students don't have access to delete or rename pages, but that wasn't a problem.

Class 504 works on their Story Boards.

Week Six

The theme of today was building. All the classes except grade four are firmly in the building phase. Here was todays busy breakdown:

K-14: We continued to work on our family keynote presentations. Students learned to add new slides. They began typing in their name poems, which meant learning to use the enter key. Using Photo Booth, we learned to take videos of ourselves reading the poems. When reading them aloud, some students realized they needed to revise their poem. If parents helped write the poems, they had trouble reading them aloud. After school, Ms. Ieong figured out how to post her animoto onto the blog and how to link the animoto to her google website. We also figured out how to create a homework page. During the week, Ms. Ieong will help students revise their poems and continue typing in the poems to the keynote. Students who revised poems will film them using Photo Booth.

1-104: We had some issues with recording this week. Students accidentally recorded over their previous work in a few groups. Once we realized what happened, we were able to make sure it didn't happen again. About half the groups are finished recording. Ms. Hamlin will make time for the last few groups to finish up so that next week we can add our pictures.

2-204 and 3-304: Scripts and storyboards were finished so we began filming our videos. During this session, we learned to add still images to the movies, add title, edit titles, and format titles. At the end of the period, students shared what they learned. Some of the responses were:
- You can't change the font or color on animated titles.
- If you are using a light picture, you need a dark colored text.
- If you have too many words in your title, the letter will be too hard to see
 Students will work full-force next week to work on building and editing their movies.

4-404: Fourth grade worked on revising their essential questions and refining their subtopics. Some of the groups thought it made sense to divide their main topic by historical periods, so that some students would focus on a specific time in New York history. Other groups found different ways to divide their main topic. Mr. Amft will post the topics/subtopics on the wiki. We helped students define their questions further and discussed how students will research their subtopics. Each student was asked to find 2 Internet web sites and one or two print resources by next week. Students were also given the following challenge: Change the name of your individual page and post your resources and questions on that page. Ms. Moran will send a step-by-step handout for this activity, but not all students are required to do this if they aren't ready. 

Ms. Moran also met with Mr. Amft to discuss the goals of the project. This is a summary of that discussion:

1. Mr. Amft will prepare a rubric that outlines what each individual student must include on their main page. (Ms. Moran will send a sample). 
2. Each student should include primary source documents. Mr. Amft felt that it would be best to provide students with some sample primary source documents for their first try. Ms. Moran and Mr. Amft will help locate samples students can use to get their topics started.
3. Each group should have a  map of some type for their group page. Groups will have to figure out what type of map makes sense for their topic.
4. Each group should have one or more non-technology pieces for their project. This can include poster, brochures, dioramas, games, speeches and skits. We can use still and video pictures to showcase these on the wiki.

5-504: Fifth grade had a slightly shorter period, since they were preparing for the social studies test on Monday. We still managed to get a lot done. All the groups have very good plans, and have done a good amount of research. Some groups have even begun typing up the text for the various pages. Today we divided the tasks so that each member of the group had a specific job. The priority was to get scripts and/or storyboards completed so that filming could begin next week. Many groups also need to find and/or take pictures for their secondary web pages.

I just wanted to mention how great all the students, teachers, and administrators are doing for this project. There is a buzz in the classrooms and I'm really looking forward to our December presentation day!

Class 3-304 Counties

Well we are on our way as well. We spent ALL day Friday working on our story boards for our imovie. After sitting down with each groups and working one on one with them until they had something presentable, information packed and relevant we are done. It is so hard to be out on a Friday. I hope not to miss one the rest of the year. We started our title page for our imovie. The kids are really getting excited now. They love when they get to have the computers out in front of them. Based on what I saw from working on their story boards and from what I saw when they did their title shot that they need to refer back to what they have done while working. The main problem with the story boards at first was the students did not look at what they researched to create them even thought it was right in front of them. Then when they started their imovie again they did not look at the title they wrote on their story boards when typing in their title on imovie. So next Friday as they continue to work on their imovies on their countries I am going to make it a point to make sure they refer back to their story boards and continue to look at their research if necessary. I think it will go better if they get in this habit.

Class 2-204

On Friday our class finished editing and typing their scripts. They learned how to make them sound exciting and how to make sure the information was in their own words. They did a great job writing their introductions to draw in listeners. Each student will use their scripts to create an iMovie with their partner on their topics. We also searched for pictures that match each sentence in our script so we are prepared to put our movie together.
Ms. Moran showed us how to add our first picture and title and change our title fonts and colors so that they show up over the picture.
Tabitha and Gabriel- Cool Landmarks and Places to Visit in Brooklyn
Jahid and Tracey- Famous Actors and Dances from Brooklyn
Gregory and Kyoti- See Sports Teams Play in Brooklyn
Nicholas and Amy- Fun Sports and Athletes from Brooklyn

We will be posting our movies as they are made so you can see What's Up in Brooklyn.

Class 504 gets the move on

Class 504 has been very busy this week preparing for the 5th grade Social Studies exam but they are also very eager to get working on their Projects. We met with Ms. Moran who approved most of our ideas. This week we will create story board for the many videos we have planned in the class. The Nutirition group started working on thie food pyramid which is in the ahllway. They will cut out colorful pictures from magazines and paste them on the pyramid as an awareness tool for students that pass it. Happy Working!

K-14 Trip to Green Meadow Farm

4-404 Lost in the Weeds

Some of the students are having a hard time with their topics. The Museum kids aren't sure what they should be doing. They thought they were going to learn about the history of museums, but they haven't been able to turn up any good resources for information. I talked to them near the end of the day and they agreed it might be better if they switched to government. Katherine is going to do Native American government, Robert will do government in the 13 colonies, Jonathan will do Dutch government and Jerry will do New York state government today. They are happy with their new topics, and should find useful resources on the web. I'm wondering what the next step should be for the landform people. The sites they visited had little information about their topics. I'll look on the web for additional sites.

Class 2-204

On Friday Class 2-204 used their research information to write scripts for their iMovies. Most of the students completed their scripts and a few that were researching more than one topic will finish the rest tomorrow morning so that we are ready to start making our movies. We worked with Ms. Catania's class while they made their story boards for their iMovies.

We also practiced using the Wordle and Webspiration technology for science and reading this week.

K-14 Tag

I signed up with Animoto.com and got a free access to create my video. I created two videos: one to introduce all the children in my class and next to document our trip to Green Meadow Farm. I do not know how to post it in this blog. Please help.
For this week, my children were working on their ABCs. We finished up to the letter "T" but some children finished up to the letter "V" on their own.
Also I have received all the permission letters from my children's parents.

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Class 4-404: Non digital project ideas

I have some thoughts on non-digital projects outside of the wiki, for the presentation:

Sports & Entertainment could learn Native American games, build game boards, teach them to others and play others.

Landforms could build a scale 3D topography map of the state, showing elevation.

Buildings could build replicas of longhouses, Dutch buildings, and so on, from cardboard.

Government (if we make this change official) could dress up as statesmen and act out, memorizing short speeches, maybe...

Conservation could write brochures for major state parks.

Any thoughts?

404 Animoto

4-404: Playing Catch Up

Ms. Perez was kind enough to come in this morning to administer a lesson on essential questions. Each group was asked to write four or five essential questions related to their topic. Then, each group created an “Essential Question” page on the wiki to keep track of them and to make them public.

Two problems surfaced. One is that only one person can edit a page at any one time. So four children hoping to post four questions on one page could not do it. So, we had them take turns editing the pages. Also, we were unable to get the wiki to spell-check. So, students wrote first in Word, then spell-checked there and finally, cut and pasted into the wiki.

Also, they had forgotten how to edit and create pages, so we had to do a little review.

I’m thinking about the museums group. The other groups have easy access to information. Any thoughts?

Week Five

Sorry this post is late, but just to keep everyone in the loop:

Friday was a very busy day, with lots to deal with. Classes took field trips. Ms. Catania was out. (Congratulations, Ms. Catania. Hope your day was WONDERFUL!) But we still managed to get a lot done:

K-14: The kindergarten class has been busy practicing their typing by working on the ABC books in Keynote. They are halfway done. Taking this one step further, we went back to our All About My Family presentations and learned how to put a picture from PhotoBooth into our presentations. The class also showed off their family posters. Ms. Ieong needs to make sure that the picture release forms are all collected from students by next week so we can showcase more Kindergarten work!

1-104: First grade continued their research on community workers by visiting the firehouse. Hopefully Ms. Hamlin took lots of pictures so we can see what students learned and did. During our project period, students used their graphic organizers to write their podcast scripts. We used a round-robin format so that students could record their scripts in garage band. We are about halfway done recording scripts.

2-204: Second graders finished their notetaking and research. Using their notes, they began scripting their movies. We learned that it is important to make our beginning exciting in order to draw in the viewer. We also learned that when writing a script it is important to skip lines. 1) So that there is room to make changes in your script and 2) To make it easier to read the script. We also discussed revising our script to make it interesting and entertaining. Ms. Newman will make sure the scripts are done by next week.

3-304: Third graders had gotten about halfway done with their storyboards. We continued to work on the storyboards for two periods. While most groups had a good start, we discussed how many of the storyboards were vague and not specific. We discussed how it is better to focus on specific places to go, foods to eat, things to see, etc. Students collected images for their movies to help them with their storyboards.

4-404: We missed working with the fourth grade because of their trip. We will make up the time next week. Mr. Amft will review students research questions and make sure that every student has good questions that relate to the content of the project.

5-504: We reviewed the essential questions fifth graders had prepared for their research. Most questions were good, although some needed to be revised and some groups found that their questions fell into categories or groups. We also discussed finding reliable sources for our information. Wiki sites, such as wikianswers.com and wikipedia are not necessarily reliable. We discussed strategies for determining if a site was reliable or not and also using non-Internet resources.

On a final note, our presentation day is coming faster than you think. We are past the halfway mark! Let me know if you have any concerns or questions about the upcoming weeks and what is expected from you and your students. Thank you everyone for your hard work. You are doing a great job!

504 Creates questions

Class 2-204

We looked for pictures that match our topic and came up with who, what, when, where, why and how questions to research. We are so excited to use the pictures and information we found to start making our iMovies.