Feb
8
1:1 Site Visit - The Nueva School
February 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Today my colleagues and I spent the day at The Nueva School in Hillsborough, CA. We were hosted by Matt Levinson, the Head of Middle School, and were there with the intention of hearing about their brand-new 1:1 laptop program in grades 6-8.The Nueva School is a 40-year old K-8 school located in Hillsborough, CA [...]
Jan
23
Maiden Voyage with Voicethread
January 23, 2008 | 1 Comment
I’ve been very anxious to begin playing with the new educational version of Voicethread, and I finally found a willing set of guinea pigs in our 2nd Grade Team. If all goes according to plan, we should begin recording student voices later this week. For $10, it has been relatively easy to set up an [...]
Dec
17
I Love SketchUp!
December 17, 2007 | Leave a Comment
2nd Graders using 3-D modeling software? No way! See for yourselves…here is a little project our very own 2nd Graders have been working on. To quote one student, “Now I like going to the Computer Lab even more than lunch!!”
Click here to see the projects.
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Oct
27
It’s Elementary Kids, Working Web 2.0 With Grade 3-4
October 27, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Here’s a link to another terrific presentation from the K12 Online Conference, given by John Pearce of Geelong, Victoria, Australia:
http://k12online.wm.edu/its_elementary/player.html
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Oct
16
Bringing the Computer Lab into the Kindergarten Classroom
October 16, 2007 | 1 Comment
In January 2006, I wrote a post entitled “The Demise of the Computer Teacher,” wondering aloud about whether the entire format of the tech coordinator’s job should change. Almost 2 years later, the MCDS Kindergarten team and I are piloting a new model for Computer Lab this Fall, in which I go to the Kindergarten [...]
Aug
18
Blogging & Podcasting Presentation: Hello World!
August 18, 2007 | 10 Comments
I recently presented a session at the CAIS (California Association of Independent Schools) Northern Regional Meeting in Atherton, CA. The session was entitled “Hello World! Blogging and Podcasting in the Elementary Classroom.”
If you attended today’s session, please be sure to leave a comment letting us all know how you’re intending to use blogs & podcasts [...]
Aug
17
c/net Article about Starfall
August 17, 2007 | Leave a Comment
One of the websites I love using most with my Lower School students is Starfall, a reading & phonics website for small children. Here’s a link to a c/net article about why I love it so much!
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Nov
7
Using Flickr Export with iPhoto
November 7, 2006 | Leave a Comment
I just downloaded the demo of this plugin and here are the results — yet another cool way to publish/document student and classroom work!
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Oct
31
Using Technology to Explain “Best Guess” Spelling
October 31, 2006 | Leave a Comment
One of the things I love most about working with 1st Graders is watching them morph from pre-readers into confident readers and writers. It is always so much fun trying to decipher words when they write stories using “best guess” or invented spelling.
In honor of Halloween, I asked the 1st graders to write & illustrate [...]
Oct
18
BAISNet’s Favorite Tools for Creating Web Pages
October 18, 2006 | Leave a Comment
I posed the following question to my colleagues on the BAISNet listserv yesterday:
Hi All,
I thought I would utilize your collective expertise once again! What are your current favorite software applications for wysiwyg webpage creation? I’ve lately been working with websites that have built-in web-based page editing, so I feel a bit out of touch. When [...]
May
31
4th Grade Mission iMovies
May 31, 2006 | 1 Comment
My tech department colleague and one of our 4th grade teachers took the “blog as final project publishing tool” model one step further this week. Using the identical setup to the one I used for the audiobooks and the duck blog, these wonderful teachers have created a repository for all of the 4th grade student [...]
Apr
29
1st Grade Podcasts - Almost Halfway There!
April 29, 2006 | 2 Comments
Who’s brilliant idea was it to try to upload 56 1st graders’ stories as podcasts before the end of school?! Oh yeah…mine… I’ve been trying to wrestle with a combination of Audacity, GarageBand, archive.org and edublogs to make the whole thing work for free (excluding the price of GarageBand and my time…)
To give a [...]
Apr
19
A Duck with a Blog
April 19, 2006 | Comments Off
Over Spring Break, our Director of Facilities discovered that a neighborhood duck had decided to build her nest right under the Middle School play structure. Being the tech-savvy school that we are, of course, we had to create a blog for our own feathered mom-to-be. I used the comments section of the first post to [...]
Mar
30
Podcasting 1st Grade Stories
March 30, 2006 | 1 Comment
Each Spring, the MCDS 1st Graders host the First Grade Library as a culminating project to celebrate their collective growth as readers and writers. Students hand write a series of stories, edit the stories, type them into a PowerPoint template I’ve created for the project, print the stories out, illustrate each page and bind them. [...]
Feb
9
I’ve jumped into the river!
February 9, 2006 | Comments Off
Today I got one of our second grade classes set up on learnerblogs.org! The teacher plans to pose a weekly question and each of the kids will post their responses. They did a great job for the first time out, and when I just checked my email this evening, 2 of the parents had left [...]
Jan
30
Using Technology to Show the Process, Not Just the Product
January 30, 2006 | Comments Off
This coming Wednesday, Debra Jarjoura and I will be giving a presentation to the MCDS Lower School faculty about how to use technology to document classroom activities and to create simple student portfolios. Debra, a preschool teacher at The Phillips Brooks School and a true Reggio Emilia aficionado, would definitely not describe herself as a [...]
Jan
23
The Demise of the Computer Teacher?
January 23, 2006 | 2 Comments
A Lower School Technology Coordinator at a K-8 school recently posted a question to BAISNet, wondering whether other independent schools still schedule regular weekly computer lab classes for K-4, or whether we are moving toward a model based on individual teacher signups as classroom projects and needs arise.
For a long time, I’ve been arguing that [...]



