I am not a big fan of the gory, bloody or violent war games that many of our elementary school students play online. There are obviously not on the school’s recommended resource list. On the other hand, I love to be able to allow them time to design and experiment with games that require a [...]

Over the past few weeks, I had the opportunity to connect and collaborate with teachers and students from Lima, Peru and Buenos Aires, Argentina. We connected Preschoolers (4/5 year olds), Kindergarteners (5/6 year olds) first (6/7 year olds), and 6th (11/12 year olds) graders.
The success of these Skype connections are due mainly to the planning [...]

As I am preparing for a presentation about Digital Storytelling, I am collecting examples how teachers at our elementary school have used different tools with and for their students. I chose to create a map story of Jose’s travel to Latin America and his search of the Crystal Skull and Pachamama to embed it into [...]

I just wanted to share a great lesson from our Kindergarten teachers.  In preparation of the Presidential elections in the USA, they used an interactive Electoral College map from Yahoo on the SmartBoard. The map allowed them to pick a map of neutral states, ready to be changed into a Republican or Democratic one.

One click [...]

So, as a follow up to my previous posts about typing and keyboarding practice

Necessity for Keyboarding Skills in Elementary School? and
Keyboarding Program at Elementary Schools )

here is a lesson that worked well with our 4th graders.
After explaining to students what a time saver it would be for them to be able to type [...]

Have you ever had this “real” feeling that something you did had an impact on someone else? That is what we as teachers and parents live for. Right?
Well,thanks to Melanie Holtsman and her team of teachers at Chet’s Creek Elementary school, I got goosebumps, when I received the link to the following VoiceThread.

It gave me [...]

Each classroom and resource teacher at our school has a blog, that they are “required” to keep up to date for communication purposes to parents. Updated, meaning to at least create a post once a week. I have written about my effort to encourage teachers to Creating a learning community with your Elementary School Blog [...]

Our school has purchased a green screen and some lights. The idea is to film students more, encourage them to slip into different roles, be more visuals, ans add more effects to the final product. We want to emphasize the skills of speaking, appropriate and constructive video content.

Some examples that we are planning to record:

Fifth [...]

4th graders were supposed to come to TechConnect today to practice some math facts with typical drill and kill activities found on funbrain.com. All the hairs on my neck stood up and I could not help but suggest a last minute change of “direction”.
What if we ask the students to use the SmartBoard Notebook software [...]

We all know that collaboration and communication are 21st century skills. We all want to incorporate these skills. What pushes us? What holds us back? What works? What seems to stall?
At the beginning of this year (January 2008), I wrote a blog post titled Collaboration Projects- Doomed to fail? that drew many comments.  I was [...]