SJEDS Tech Connect

Drawminos is game, where YOU get to design your own domino path by dropping each individual pieces and balls onto the screen. What are you waiting for? Try it out to see if you are a Drawmino Master.

6th graders have been working together with 6th graders from the Goethe School in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Talented Mrs. Menger challenged them to share and show life around Jacksonville to our new friends in a different media.  With her help, they composed a song to the tune of of “We didn’t start the fire” by Billy Joel.  They took the song and added images to create the following music video.

A new program has arrived for our computers here at SJEDS. It is called Kid Works Deluxe. It gives users the possibility of creating their own books, complete with illustrations, sound, and text. There is an incredible amount of clipart stickers available that are fueling the children’s imagination.

This program has received the Award for Excellence from TechLearning:

Updated with a fresh look and feel, Kid Works Deluxe remains a standout writing and drawing application that puts younger students to work creating books, stories, letters, and invitations using hundreds of media elements. Judges liked the text-to-speech functionality so students could hear stories read aloud by the computer.

Mrs. Davidson’s second graders did not hesitate to jump right in. Their requirement was to work on a book about Thanksgiving and experiment with the different toolbars and buttons. They used background images, stickers, animated stamps, paint brushes, shapes, entered text, changed font sizes and colors.

We heard many “How did you do that?” and “Let me show you.” around TechConnect. You could literally see the learning taking place.

Hurrah for Mrs. Davidson’s class in leading our school in learning this new tool .

Kindergarten skyped again with Sra. Tatiana’s class in Lima, Peru from San Jorge school. We had a wonderful time. One of our Kindergarteners said:

That is so cool, that we can talk with them

Together with Sra. Gallo (our Spanish teacher) , our Kindergarteners had learned a song in Spanish called “Una mano, dos manos”. Sra. Tatiana had also prepared the same song with her students. It was great to be able to sing together, although we were on 2 different continents, thousands of miles apart.

Sra. Tatiana’s class taught us another song in Spanish called “La vaca Lola”:

La vaca Lola, la vaca Lola
Tiene cabeza y tiene cola

La vaca Lola, la vaca Lola
Tiene cabeza y tiene cola

La vaca Lola hace Mooohhhh

From that song, we asked each other what kind of sounds do other animals make in our countries. We found out that the dog says “wau-wau” in Peru, while in the USA it say “woof”. Cats in both countries say “Miau”, while a rooster will say “cacadoodledoo” in the USA and in Peru will sing “Kikeriki”.

Each class had a chance to ask questions : What is the weather like today?, What time is it?

We finished the video conference by singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” in English and Spanish.

What a great morning it was, communicating and collaborating with children, just like us, from another country.

We met a wonderful teacher from the bilingual Colegio San Jorge in Lima, Peru while we were traveling with Jose, the travel bear. Sra. Ugaz is an amazing teacher and was immediately willing to collaborate with us and our students in any shape or form. Since she teachers 4-5 year olds in Peru, we matched her students with our Kindergarten classes.

Last Tuesday was the big day for our first video conference between Peru and the USA.  We played a game, called “Arbólito de Perú” that Sra. Gallo (our Spanish teacher here at SJEDS) had taught the students in Spansh class already. It is a counting out type of game, where students introduce themselves with their names. Everybody had a wonderful time.

We are planning two more video conferences with our new friends in Peru over the next two weeks to sing songs and read a bilingual story together.

Our Kindergarten classes had a great time in Tech Connect this week. In preparation of the Presidential elections in the USA, they used an interactive Electoral College map from Yahoo. The map allowed them to pick a map of neutral states, ready to be changed into a Republican or Democratic one.

One click turned the state red, a second click turned the state blue

Here you see the predictions of one for the Kindergarten class. Students especially learned from the interactive bar on the bottom that moved as they added a red or a blue state.

The day after the elections, the class returned to TechConnect to use the SmartBoard to turn the states the color they were voted in the Election.

Our Tech Patrol carved virtual pumpkins and learned how to take screenshots with the SmartBoard Software. Check out their creations.

When you are practicing your typing skills, you will quickly find out that knowing WHERE your letters and symbols are on the keyboard is very important.

Here is a website that will challenge you to identify and move the correct key into the right space.

Click on the screenshot of the site below to start the Challenge!

When you have the Keyboard Challenge completed, look and record your “Clicks” score that you’ll find in the lower right corner.

To assess how many WPM (Words Per Minute) you can type accurately, click here to start the Typing Test.

By using the arrow to get the drop down menu, choose 3 minutes for your test duration. You can choose any Test Text you wish and make sure that under Speed Unit “WPM” is selected. Then you can get started to type. Make sure that you also type the title of your paragraph.

When you have completed your test, write down your results and come to the SmartBoard in the front to record it on the  Spreadsheet of your class.

After you have entered your WPM, you may go back to the site and play some typing games.

Again, here are some more keyboarding practice sites you can use from home.

• Tux Typing 2 (free to download)
• BBC Practice Typing
• http://sense-lang.org/typing/
• Fun School Super Speller Play a game and improve your typing speed
• Krazy Keyboarding for Kids
• Stack Cups
• Key Seeker Keyboarding for Kindergarteners
• Super Hyper Spider Typer Hungry lizards with words on their backs are after Berry the hairy spider!
• TypeRacer
  Remember to not use your real name, use your avatar name instead.

What if we asked our students to become the teachers? What if we asked our students to articulate the process of something that they have learned? The SmartBoard, that we have installed in TechConnect also has a special software that is available on all of the computers at school. That software includes the capability of recording what is happening on the computer screen.

I demonstrated an example on the SmartBoard and let the kids go to the computers to CREATE a tutorial about a math operation that they have learned in class.

Let me present you our 4th graders!  It was their first time using the SmartBoard notebook software.

• creating
• teaching others
• practicing their speaking skills
• using technology to communicate across space and time
• HAVING A GREAT TIME PLAYING AND EXPLORING THE SOFTWARE