Awesome Stories - Primary Source Research for Students

Awesome Stories is a great free story based research site that provides additional media with a focus on cited primary resources.  The stories are high interest, focusing on events from the present as well as the past.

With the recent passing of Nelson Mandela there are story snippets from his book Long Walk to Freedom. Each page contains numerous additional resources in the form of hyperlinks within the text as well as from the list on the side of primary source photos, movies, sound files, and other media.   

Students can use the search bar to look for specific topics or use explore the calendar to see stories for that week.

With the free version of this site there is access to all the stories and the primary sources.  With an additional silver membership (free for a 30 day trial) there are expanded options such as teacher account with student tracking, audio read alongs, visual vocabulary builder activities, CCSS alignment resources as well as other features.  A more advanced gold level is in the works.

The Hour of Code - Celebrate Computer Science Week Dec 9 - 13

Join classrooms around the country next week by doing an hour of coding with your students. Code.org has pulled together resources to make coding simple to introduce to students at all grade levels as well as being easy to understand for teachers who are unfamiliar with coding.

Why coding and why introduce computer science to your students?

The site as some jaw dropping statistics.  By 2020, there will be 1,000,000 more jobs than students in computer science.  9 out 10 schools don't even offer computer programming classes.  Just to list a few.

Visit the site, look though the tutorials and try a few out for yourself.  Do you have limited access to computer labs?  Only a few tablets in your room?  The site gives many different options, including non-tech lessons.   For coding and programming apps check out the post on our iDevice in the Mountains Blog. 

Not only will you be introducing them to computer science, but you will be helping them build problem solving strategies and teaching them perseverance. 

8 Classroom Photo Sharing Ideas Using Yogile

Yogile is a simple to use clean photo sharing service perfect for the classroom.  To begin sign up for a free account, create an album, and choose between a couple of settings.  

Albums created under the free account status will be automatically deleted after 14 days. It's perfect as they clean up the photo projects. You just need to remember to download the photos you want to save.

Yogile provides a random URL to access your album, or you can create your own.  

With this URL others can send photos to the album using the created email address, or upload them directly from a computer.

Another nice setting perfect for the classroom is to approve all photos before they are added to the album. This is perfect if you have students emailing a variety of photos for a particular assigned task.

There are no ties to social media, so you aren't playing photo roulette with "suggested" photos appearing on the webpage while you open the website in front of your classroom.

Ideas of how you can implement a shared photo album in your classroom:

1. Primary students can use iPod Touch's or iPads to take pictures of items that begin with letters of the alphabet and email those photos to a shared album.  It's best if the teacher types the email address the first time so that the email auto pops up for all following emails on an iDevice.  Other topics could include different shapes, different colors, or different sets of numbers.
2. Students could take pictures while on a field trip and upload their photos to a shared folder.
3. Students can email photos of whatever they want, and at the end of the week students can use the photos as writing prompts.
4. Have students take and share selfies to be used during class projects.
5. Students working on projects can have people from other parts of the world take and email photos into one shared folder, rather than have them arrive in many different emails.
6. Keep a photo record of different lab experiments conducted by students from various periods or classes in a district to be compared with each other at the completion of a unit.
7. Students can demonstrate an understanding of a vocabulary word by taking photo of them or someone "doing" the word, then store the photos in a shared folder to be reviewed later.
8. Have students take pictures of iconic images around town, like buildings, parks, murals or sculptures.  Then use a shared folder to place them all in one location accessible by anyone in class.

Please suggest other ideas how you could use a shared photo album with your class.

Happy Numbers - Learn Addition or Subtraction Algorithms

Happy Numbers is a nice online site, iPad compatible, used to allow students practice opportunities towards mastering the traditional addition and subtraction algorithms.

While working on problems, students are guided through the process of completing the algorithm.  Each step must be completed correctly without an error to get the problem "correct".  Once the student has answered 10 questions complete "correct" they have completed the level for the day.











Data is stored online showing progress of students throughout levels that are available to them.

As a teacher you create your free account.  Then create a class.  After the class type in your students name.  Happy Numbers will assign a class number to your class, and a password for each student.  You can change passwords if you would like.

For students to login, they type in the class number, click their name, type their password, and proceed onto their practice for the day.



This site is quick to set up for you and your class, saves data about your students daily practice, and provide students practice opportunities while mastering the standard addition and subtraction algorithm.

K-5 Math Teaching Resources

How often do you find yourself asking, "isn't there another way I can demonstrate a particular math topic to my students because they aren't understanding what I've been doing thus far"?

Try finding a suggestion at K-5 Math Teaching Resources.

This website has loads of ideas to peruse through.  You can filter your search by grade level, strand, Mental Math Concepts, Interactive Whiteboard ideas, or Centers.


When looking into a grade level of activities, ideas are separated by standard, with links to printables if necessary.







The links to Interactive Whiteboard Resources take you directly to the IWB activity that relates to the concept. 

 
There are many activities ready to use in a centers based environment, providing you have or create the manipulative for the activity (note, they do provide links to download these interatives).  For example these are a few of many ten frame and dot card activities you can use in a number sense center.




There are many Mental Math Activities available, including a nice overview of using empty number lines in your classroom.  And don't forget to check out the ideas for your 100th day of school. 

This website has been a golden goto resource for k-5 math ideas and activities for several area teachers.  Aren't we all looking for additional ideas?

Non Fiction Reading with Newsela

Virgina Petit shared a great resource yesterday for non fiction articles that connect directly to the ELA Anchor Standards of the CCSS.  The clincher with Newsela is the ability to change the Lexile Reading Level of the article, customizing it for the class or the student.  Signing up was easy as a teacher.  It gives a class code to give to the students to sign up for the specific class.  No emails are needed for the students.  Google sign in is also an option.

These are high interest daily news articles focused around the topics war & peace, science, kids, money, law, health, and arts.  There are four different levels offered for each article, with the four ranges varying  from third grade to college prep levels.

Easily assign an article to a class.

 Here is a look at the beginning of the same article at two different reading levels.

660L 

1020L

Quiz adapts to the Reading Level as well.  

If a quiz is avaliable to take with the passage, it will show along the right hand side of the screen.  In the teacher view, it will show the question, the correct answer, as well as the standard the question is addressing.

 Both students and teachers have a binder at the top of the screen.  This allows for the students to see if a specific article has been assigned.  For the teacher, it gives a view of which anchor standards have been addressed, over all class scores, as well as being able to view individual student work.

Student View

This is just another site to add to your resource list.  This site is also iPad compatible, easily add the link to the log in page onto the iPad.
We can never have to many sources for non fiction!
Newsela is currently free and in BETA.

Online Assessments for Understanding Digital Citizenship

Common Sense Media is an absolute awesome web resource for obtaining curriculum addressing digital citizenship topics to your students. 


 There are 8 topic areas of content written in all four grade level stages; K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12.  There are videos, questions, activities, and many resources to assist any teacher with integrating digital citizenship content into their classroom.  All activities are aligned to common core standards.

 

If you look into their scope and sequence of how these lessons are recommended being taught, lessons are broken into groups of approximately 5 lessons per unit.  At the end of each unit is a Unit Assessment.

I decided to take a couple of Unit Assessments to experience what the students will encounter.  There are a variety of question types similar to what you'll be seeing in a Smarter Balance test, that is to say there are very few multiple choice type questions.  Most questions involve higher level thinking like arranging an order of events, or placing items onto different parts of a venn diagram.

Students begin an assessment by typing in their name and an optional email address for their teacher, which will auto send the results to the teacher at the conclusion.  If a student incorrectly answers a question, the program will ask the student to try again, upon which if they miss a second time the correct answer will be revealed.  Only the students first answers are calculated and printed in the assessment results at the end. 

Allow for at least 30 minutes for students to complete the activity, as there are 15-20 questions they need to answer.  Students will be able to print the results of their assessment which shows the question, how the student answered, and the correct answer.