Google Docs

We will be using this picture to create a collaborative story about the mouse and toad in Google Docs.    We are a very creative group so I am very intrigued to see how our story will evolve!  We will also be creating a recommendation list for books to read and movies to see.

Wordle - One of My Favorites

Yes, it is a favorite as it is a pretty easy resource to use and integrate into my teaching.  I used this last year with the Kindergarten class to show their knowledge of word endings.  Pairs of students would recite words that would end in at, an, etc. and we would create a word cloud.  The students loved it.  For my Wordle, I created one based on the words I heard at the Oct. 29th Curriculum Day.  I used the editing tools and picked Indian Earthy under the Color tab.

I then copied and pasted the same words in to Word It Out which also creates word clouds.  It's a little more cumbersome to change colors, fonts, etc. but still produces a nice cloud.

Lexipedia would be a great tool to use on an interactive white board with weekly spelling words.  I put in "Metropolitan" and it indicated that it could be used as a noun or as an adjective. It will also say the word - not as good as Apple's Alex voice but useful for students.

First DLC Challenge

I have a great staff here at Leverett - as of today, we have 16 blogs and at least 3 that are in the works!  Everyone seemed to find creating a blog fairly easy to do which was surprising to many.  I am looking forward to working with my staff on this challenge and see how they begin to implement these tools in their daily teaching.

October 29th Curriculum Day

Lots and lots of planning but so well worth it.  Comments that we received were encouraging and appreciative of the effort that our team put into the day.  Paul, as always, was a dynamic speaker and discussed many useful tools that are available on the mac.  Was great fun launching our Union 28 Digital Learning Challenge (DLC) for this year - thought the staff did an awesome job with the video portion of the presentation!

Now onto planning the January job alike!