Digital Scrapbooking

Whether you are studying famous Americans, characters in a book or a location, Scholastic’s Scrapbook is perfect.

Upon entering the site, the student will be asked to type the title of the book and the character. If you were studying a famous American, you would type in the time period he/she was alive or the name of a battle that he was a leader in.

The next screen will have two sides. On the left is a drawing area. It offers options for humans and animals. The animal options are dogs, pigs, mice, a cricket, fish, a mole, horses, cats, a dragon, a monkey, a bull, a rabbit, a giraffe, an owl, a dinosaur, a turtle, or a gorilla. These images are as is and do not offer an option for additional accessories.

The human images offer more variability. You can change skin color, hair, eyes, nose, mouth and clothes. The completed picture is of the shoulders and head.

On the right side of the screen is a table where students can type in various things regarding this person. Using the arrows, you can scroll through the options that are 10 Words to describe the character, details about their appearance, facts about their personality, challenges faced and accomplishments. Each line holds 60 characters where the students can type ideas or complete sentences.

There is also an option to print out a blank scrapbook page if you want them to draw their own picture. Scholastic has created a teacher guide with lesson plans and ideas for use of the scrapbook with various grade levels that can be found in the lower right hand corner of the screen.

How can you use this in a classroom?

character study in different forms of media
famous Americans, artists, historians
analyzing historical and current structures
whole group or on an interactive white board
independently on student computers

Category: interactive white boards, Language Arts, Science, Social Studies | LEAVE A COMMENT

January 18

Word Up!

Wordle is a neat way to display a student’s writing in a different way. It may not be a paragraph or have any punctuation, in fact it may not even have a sentence. It will be filled with many, many words.

What it will be is text presented in an artistic way. The text can be adjusted by color pallete, layout and font. Once the words are placed in the window, they can be adjusted as many times as you want. The size of the word depends on the use of it. Looking at the Declaration of Independence below, government is the largest word because it has been used the most. The smaller words are used less frequently. If you were to type the words in yourself, you would type one word several more times than other words to make sure it was larger.

Another example that is similar to Wordle is Tagxedo. Tagxedo offers the same features as Wordle. It also allows the creator to select from various shapes, which will enhance the presentation of the text. Once created, if you roll over the words they become hyperlinks. Clicking on them will take you to a website where you will find more information. (This feature is only available while in the site. Once it is saved as an image, you cannot click on the words.) Below is the same text as above, The Declaration of Independence, but presented in a shape.

How can you use this in the classroom:

create list of traits about a character
description of vocabulary word
words used in a Science or Social Studies unit
synonyms or antonyms
historical documents
back to school activity
book reviews

Category: interactive white boards, Language Arts, Science, Social Studies | LEAVE A COMMENT

December 15

Chatting in the Classroom

Social networking and online chatting are part of our everyday lives. It is our responsibility to teach our children how to use these tools responsibly and respectfully. The challenge falls when the well known social networking sites are blocked in schools, which is done with the best interest of the child in mind.

How do we overcome this hurdle? http://todaysmeet.com allows this to happen. The students are able to create a room in 30 seconds and share it with one, or more, members of the class. From here, all members will join the room and begin chatting. Once the students are comfortable doing this in one location, consider chatting with another classroom, local school or across borders.

Possible uses in the classroom:

digital citizenship
book reviews/group
historical decisions that affected countries
discussion on solving Math problems
impact of online chatting
proper use of grammatical skills through conversation
proper use of written tone

There is the concern of keeping a record of this type of conversation. TodaysMeet offers the ability for all transcripts to be printed. Simply scroll to the bottom of the screen and select Transcript. A new window will open where a document will display the entire conversation. (It may be on more than one page.)

Below is a list of ways that this site was used in the classroom:

Category: Language Arts, Science, Social Studies | LEAVE A COMMENT

December 1

Crayola Writing Prompts

Crayola has been around for years and has a way of tapping into our creative sides. They have done it again, digitally. This time students can create their own coloring sheets. They can choose from one of the ten backgrounds, select images from the different libraries using the drop down menus and add speech bubbles. (There are also pre-made sheets hanging on a clothesline at the bottom of the page that can be selected.) Keep in mind, when this is complete it is a coloring sheet. There are no capabilities to add text to the picture before it’s printed.

With that being said, how can it be used in the classroom? You have been working on word problems in Math. You have given them story problems where the students have read them, created the number sentence and solved it. The students have completed the same activity on their own, but some students respond better to things presented graphically. What if the coloring sheet was created to portray the word problem? The student will have to think of an topic of their story problem and create it using this site. Next, they will print out the picture and add the words to the speech bubbles. You will notice that the speech bubbles have three different shapes-one for conversation, one for thinking of ideas and the last for stronger comments.

This activity can also be tied into a history lesson where the picture would show a scene from an ancient civilization. The characters added to the coloring sheet could explain an event that happened during a specific time.

The best part about this site is it could be used in a wide range of ages when the age appropriate skill is attached to it.

Category: Uncategorized | LEAVE A COMMENT