Pear Deck

I attended the Tech Innovation Conference from ERLC in Edmonton earlier this week, and one of the presenters used a website called Pear Deck to do his presentation. I had heard of it before, but hadn't really given it the time of day. However, after seeing his engaging presentation, I knew that I needed to give it a shot! 

Pear Deck is a platform that allows you to create slides to deliver information to your students, but the fun part is that you can add different types of questions to your presentation for students to answer as you go (multiple choice, long answer), and you can also add youtube videos right into your presentation. The best part is, you get students to join your presentation, and it plays it right on their devices for them to follow along. If you upgrade to premium,  it spits out a Google sheet with all of the students answers to the questions recorded in a handy spreadsheet when you are finished. 

My kids absolutely enjoyed a "boring" social lesson today because of this fun tool. I highly recommend checking it out!

Some of the slide options you have

It is as simple as typing your info in

You can see what your students will see on their screens using the student preview

Writing News Articles

A few times a year, our students are asked to write news articles.  They are asked to do this in response to literature,  about events happening around the school and as a school wide writing prompt.  All too often, we ask the kids to write the article, but don't really tell them how to do it beyond including the 5 Ws.

In recent years, we have found the kids have been more successful in grade six by using a structure for the articles.

The structure we use is as follows:

     First Paragraph: 

• A general overview, including all the 5 Ws.  
• You should get the general idea of the whole article from this.

     Detailed Paragraphs:  

• The paragraphs following the first paragraph are dedicated to giving more specific details on an element of the story.  
• It may be a paragraph that tells more about an event, character, location, etc.  For each specific area, there should be a specific paragraph.

     Quotes:  

• Students should then provide a quote that captures something important about the article. 
• The quote should be specific...not "it was fun!"

News articles are then assessed on the content of the article and content management.



Example:

The Trial of A. Wolf

This awesome lesson was created by Debbie Tchir-Houle, and it was too fun and amazing not to share with everyone! A huge shout-out goes to Deb for all of the hard work she put into setting up this activity, it was so comprehensive and well thought out!!

So here is the activity:
Using the book "The true Story of the 3 Little Pigs" by Jon Sciezska, students are witness in the trial of A.Wolf. They are asked to evaluate the evidence presented to arrive at either a guilty or innocent verdict for A. Wolf, who is accused of killing and eating 2 little pigs and attempting to kill the third. There are several exhibits from both the defence and prosecution that support either an innocent or guilty verdict. Students are shown all the evidence, and then left to arrive at a verdict based on what they seen and heard during the trial. 

I made a digital collection of the evidence (which is embedded below), but Deb has a physical collection as well that goes along with it! 

Here are some pictures of the evidence

When the students were finished, they had to go to their science blogs and explain their verdict, as well as their justification of why they decided he was either innocent or guilty. It was a nice tie between our evidence and investigation unit and language arts, where we just finished writing a news article about the Big Bad Wolf escaping from jail. Plus, it was a pretty fun science lesson!! 

Here are a few of our Blog posts:

http://taneshascienceblog.blogspot.ca/2016/02/the-trial-of-awolf.html

http://danielkscienceblog.blogspot.ca/2016/02/the-trail-of-wolf.html

http://kaydencescienceblog.blogspot.ca/2016/02/the-trial-of-awolf.html

Concept maps for Vocabulary

I'm in a really interesting course right now on connecting science and literacy in the classroom and I came across a useful good idea I thought I would share. By having students create a concept map in a small group to introduce a unit in science, you are able to engage them in meaningful discussion about the vocabulary they will be using during the unit of study. 

To do this activity, you simply print out a list of the vocabulary words that the students will be using during the unit and give each group a sheet. In small groups, you challenge them to arrange and glue the words on a blank sheet of paper based on the connections between them. They also need to write their own definition of the words as a group and use lines to connect words that are related in some way. Any words they are unsure about they use sticky tack to place on the side to connect in later. 

We did this activity today to introduce our evidence and investigation unit, and I couldn't believe how rich the dialogue was! Students were actually discussing the vocabulary and trying to work together to figure out what the words meant and how they could be connected together. For me, whose class is full of non-talkers, this was a big breakthrough! 

Here they are, working away! 

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.