// Langwitches Blog

On Teqsmart, I saw the following post about Creating a Reset button in a Smartboard Notebook file. Many times over the past year, I wish I would have been able to reset a student activity. Students were working individually and wanted to repeat an activity or students from different classes of the same grade level [...]

Having written a few days ago about What is in a Field Trip?, it was time to put the theory to practice.
Gail Lovely ‘ s quote about “framing a field trip” resonated with me
framing the event in learning before and after – & give them something to do while there!
Our third graders go on an [...]

A picture is worth a thousand words… A thousand words can tell a story…
Using words as a visual give a different impression than text alone. Visuals can allow us to “see” a concept or, a relationship that text alone might not make apparent. It can tell a visual story of words, keywords, thoughts, text, and [...]

Nothing personalizes a story better than the voice of the author…
Nothing allows someone better to let their own imagination run wild than an oral story or audiobook…
There are no pre-set images of how someone else envisioned the story that taint your perception. How many times have you seen a movie after reading a book and [...]

Storytelling has existed since the beginning of time as a form of human interaction. It evolved from cave paintings and oral transmission of how and why our people existed and as an explanation of the world around us to troubadours who traveled the country to inform others of news and happenings of places and people [...]

Storytelling used to be the only way to pass one generation’s knowledge on to the next one. Oral transmitted legends, fairy- and folk tales for example allowed elders to explain and help understand the world around them to their descendants. When books were scarce or did not exist and few knew how to read them, [...]

Windows Movie Maker is a program that already comes pre-installed on your Windows XP or Windows Vista computer.
Creating a movie in this program involves three basic steps:

Get started by clicking Start > Programs and then locating the MovieMaker icon

Double-click to launch the program.

You will want to use Windows Movie Maker if you have video [...]

If you own a PC, you can download Microsoft’s PhotoStory for free .

To get started creating a story:

Download and install the program on your computer.
Once installed open the program by clicking “Start”, then “Programs”

Find the icon for “PhotoStory 3 for Windows”
Begin a new story by selecting the radio button and pushing the [...]

Storytelling has been a great part of our school year, which is already winding down. From…

telling about our and Jose, the travel bear ’s adventurous stories live while in Egypt
outfitting EVERY classroom in our school with their own digital cameras, so teachers and students could create a visual of their daily activities or create [...]

My school updated all computers with the newest version of Microsoft Office 2007 suite last summer. I have to admit, that I have been slow to warm up to it. I do want to share with you the feature of creating visuals from PowerPoint 2007, that I am enjoying tremendously. I don’t necessarily use [...]