Technology and Literacy

These are some of the great resource ideas that were pooled together and talked about
during our Friday PD session!
Check out the links below

1) Scholastic Story Generator  - A generator that comes up with a prompt for some creative story writing. Teachers have the option of letting students type out a story in the program and also drawing a picture to go with it.

2) Trueflix - A site that lists categories in Science and Social studies each having many books per category. The books open up for fullscreen reading and the book can be read aloud to the students depending on whether they tag "Read on" or "off". 

3) Bookflix - Our third scholastic site that also has tons of books for students to read. Each book on the site can either be watched as a video, read aloud to them by a narrator, or simply read as is.
There are also resources listed at the top right of each book that include lesson plans and key words for ESL/ESD learners.

4) Black and Gold Div II - Math, LA, FLA, Science and Social studies from 4-6 are listed here, with a ton of resources to take from specific to Alberta Curriculum. It has tons of good projects and activities for the classroom as well as achievement indicators for each.

5) Readings A-Z - A website with another ton of books categories in 30 levels from aa to Z2. Each book is printable and project able. They also come with lessons with extensions for comprehension, phonemes, grammar and classroom discussion ideas.

6) Voice Note II - Available in the Chrome store free, this app allows students to record Speech to Text in a separate window.

7) Speakit - Another app but this one is the reverse, Text to Speech for those students that struggle to read independently or who may want to select a given word that he/she cannot pronounce. Once installed through your students google account, a small speaker will appear on the right side of the URL bar. They may select text and press the speaker button to have it read to them.

Thank you Tech group!

Getting more from Google

On Friday I am venturing to Wainwright (I think...) to present on some Google stuff at a PD day there, but I thought I would share my slides for the presentation in case anyone can steal any ideas. It includes a lot of different project ideas that you can do using Slides and Docs in the classroom. 

Adventures in Math Centers

Since working with Jackie, Carol and I have started on an quest to do weekly math centers with our grade sixes. Each week, we try hard to include a variety of centers, such as a building center, a technology center, a game, etc. We also try to have activities that are differentiated to help meet the needs of all of our learners. The kids have really enjoyed this change in pace, and it has also allowed us to  review concepts we might have worked on earlier in the year in a fun setting. 

We realized that if we wanted our centers to be good year after year, we would need to be organized and keep a record of the centers we were doing for each of the different strands and outcomes. In order to do this, we have created a website that houses all of our resources. Hopefully this will help us create a huge collection of awesome activities and centers that we can use year after year! If you want to check out our site, you can click on the image below to visit our site. We are still doing some tweaking to how it is organized, but slowly we will get it to how we like it.