Today you are going to explore some of my MOST FAVORITE websites!! Are you excited? I am!! Read books, play games, explore, and learn with the sites below. If you have time you may leave me a comment telling me which one was your favorite!
Dallas Symphony Orchestra for Kids
Do you have any cool sites to share? Put the link in a comment on this post if you do!
Karen Littrell and Kaleo Kaleohano are amazing first grade teachers at our kula!
One of the projects that they have designed that integrates technology involves the study of each of the districts of our island. One of the core goals of this project is to help our students’ develop a sense of place.
The students will be going on a huakaʻi to each of the districts throughout the year; learning from cultural experts, their kumu, and kupuna; taking pictures and video; learning oli and mele about the place; and more.
Listening to Karen and Kaleo talk about their goals for integrating technology is very inspiring. They want to increase student engagement. They want to begin to redefine the kinds of things students are doing. But, their biggest hope and dream is to foster curiosity in their haumāna and to share the wonderful work that is being created.
When technology is involved sharing becomes easier. With the district project students are creating movies that showcase pictures they have taken along with a narration in which they share their learning and connections to each place. Karen and Kaleo began with the end in mind. They knew they wanted the students to create a multimedia presentation that showcased their learning and connection. They also wanted the students to be able to share their work with a variety of audiences.
Here are Karen and Kaleo talking about their vision of tech integration and their project:
Here are two finished student examples. These are videos they made on the district of Puna:
Dylan:
Seth:
This project aligns with:
SAMR –
NETS-S –
Danielson Domain –
In June I traveled with a group of my amazing co-workers to the ISTE Conference in San Antonio Texas. It was inspiring, fun, and exhausting! (San Antonio is HOT! But, at least now I can say I’ve been to Texas.)
There were many new tools I learned about and people I met in person for the first time after collaborating with them online or learning with them on twitter. One of the COOLEST things was finally meeting a teacher from New Jersey that I have done projects with for the past four years. Carlene Anderson is an amazing teacher. Our students have connected with each other to share, ask questions, and learn. We met at the conference just before giving presentations on global education.
Another incredibly rewarding experience was presenting with two co-workers, Ellen Cordeiro and Kainoa Bowman. We did a session on using Google Docs in the classroom. (A presentation wouldn’t be complete without the token “look it’s my name” picture!)
On top of all the wonderful experiences I had meeting people and presenting, the thing that really made the trip to Texas worth it was the continuous theme in all my sessions of the importance of student voice, student leadership, and student choice. It helped shape my own thoughts about my goals this year and the way I want to support teachers. We are lucky to be educators right now. It is an exciting time!
If there is one thing I recommend you do, it is to watch the closing keynote given by Adam Bellow. Yes, the video is over an hour long. But if you don’t have an extra hour, here are my favorite parts:
22:46 – 25:00
35:01 – 37:38
44:30 – 46:16
49:36 – 53:27
Adam made me laugh, cry, hope, and wonder. It was the perfect ending to an awesome experience. And most importantly, it made me excited to get back home and go to school!
This past Monday our fabulous teachers had a Digital Citizenship refresher to prepare themselves for the year ahead.
First they brainstormed ideas about Digital Citizenship encompasses using a web tool called padlet.com:
Then a small group of teachers worked together to create a presentation on their iPad based on one of the 8 strands within Digital Citizenship. Take a look at them below!
Creative Credit and Copyright:
Cyber Bullying:
Digital Footprint and Reputation:
Relationships and Communication
Privacy and Security (coming soon)
We are very fortunate at our school to be able to Skype so often with people from all over the world. This year has been so busy that I have not blogged about our Skyping adventures as often as I would have liked.
We have learned about other communities and cultures (from Mexico, Wales, Canada, and all over the USA). We have shared our community with others. We have acted as experts for those learning about Hawaiʻi. We have used Skype and other tools (Voicethread, Edmodo, and more) to strengthen long term projects that we have with schools in Maine, New Jersey, Baltimore, Boston, Canada, and more.
Skype has become an essential way for us to connect to other learners and teachers. We are so lucky! Here is a video with a few highlights of our Skyping adventures this year.
Mrs. Derr’s Kindergarten class had a wonderful experience a few weeks ago in technology class, and it was all thanks to the awesome people at Skype in the Classroom.
Dr. Jennifer Aaker read Alex and the Amazing Lemonade Stand to us. Thanks to the generosity of Skype in the Classroom we were able to read along as well with our own copies of the book.
We loved the story, and after our Skype session was done it inspired many ideas for projects for next school year. We know that no matter how old you are you can do something good to help others. This Skype session was just the beginning of a journey for us as we will use the book next year to inspire us to do good in our community and around the world.
After Dr. Aaker read to us we were able to ask her some questions. She told us that her favorite place in the world is……Hawaiʻi! And one of her favorite author’s when she was a child was Dr. Suess!
Click here to read the blog post that Dr. Aaker wrote about our Skype session!
And here is a short video with a few pics and video clips of our session! Enjoy!
Both Kumu Littrell and Kumu Kaleo’s classes got to be experts for some fellow first graders from Pennsylvania last week. The first graders in Pennsylvania have been studying Hawai’i and they had many questions for us to answer to help them learn about our home!
There were many questions about volcanoes and sharks! We were also very happy to perform a hula for them and to ask a few questions about life in Pennsylvania, which is all the way on the other side of the USA!
After the children from Pennsylvania learned about volcanoes they drew pictures that showed how they think our islands were formed. Click here to see their pictures!
Here are some pics of our Skypes!
What do you think of when hear the word Wales? Do you think of the animal? Well, before we started learning from our third grade friends there that’s what we thought of too! But, we soon learned that Wales is a country in the United Kingdom. It is next to England.
We are learning all about our friends in Wales using Google Presentations! Check out the neat stuff we are teaching and learning about each other!
Click here to see our collaborative presentation!
What a wonderful time we had last week celebrating the talent of our students! Here are just a few pictures from that night. I was so proud of the dancers. They worked very hard.
Our lovely little kindergarteners are part of an awesome project! We are collaborating with classes from Baltimore and Canada to create our own versions of the story “The Mitten” by Jan Brett. Mrs. Derr and Mrs. Nihipalis’ classes are done with their versions of the story. We followed the same basic plot line but used a Hawaiian setting and characters!
We can’t wait to Skype with the Kindergarten students in Baltimore and Canada to share our story and see their story too!
Check out our stories below!
