Q: What’s the difference between a car and a golf ball?

A: Tiger Woods can drive a golf ball 400 yards…

I never said it was good joke.

Tech Showcase: It [...]]]> Well we’re another week closer to the Holiday vacation and Tiger wasn’t drunk, he was just avoiding his golf club yielding wife. I thought this befitting of a joke.

Q: What’s the difference between a car and a golf ball?

A: Tiger Woods can drive a golf ball 400 yards…

I never said it was good joke.

Tech Showcase:
It is always nice to get to Friday and look at all the options I have of great tech integration projects happening around the Puxi ES. This week I am giving a big shout out to the ESOL and AS staff as they have been doing some great stuff using a variety of Web 2.0 applications and Mac software.

Kevin Desmond and David Young have been doing a great deal with voice recording/podcasting and making digital stories with narrations.  They have used everything from Voice Recorder (PC) to GarageBand to Audacity to record the voices and stories of their ESOL students. These are then posted to the portal and Kevin posts them to the ESOL blog site. Another tool they use is VoiceThread. Voicethread is a web based photostory application that allows you to upload photos and audio to make digital stories. The cool thing that seperates VoiceThread from other applications like iMovie and Photostory is that anyone can view your photostory (if you want them to) and make audio comments on the pictures in your slideshow.  This way, not only can you share your photostory, you can also start conversations around them. This can be a very powerful tool for students reflecting on writing. Below are two links, one is an example of a VoiceThread Kevin made around Just Right Books and the second link will take you to VoiceThread. I urge you to visit VoiceThread and have a play for yourself, make a talking Christmas card “book” for your family.
http://teachers.saschina.org/kdesmond/voicethread/
www.voicethread.com

The second showcase piece this week is from Kathryn Dungan. She has been using GarageBand to record audio versions of books in the second grade classrooms for her ESOL students (and any other student in the classes) to listen to. This is a great way to differentiate instruction for your auditory learners. According to Kathryn, “It allows me to be in two places at once. I can have kids at a station listening to these books and I can be at another doing small group work as the kids work through their stations.” She saves the audio books on the I: drive so they are accessible from any computer in the 2nd grade. Below you will find a link to one of these audio books, Bearenstein Bears Go to Camp. Have a listen at your leisure or download it and put it into iTunes to listen to on your iPod/iPhone. These audio books are also an excellent way to use the iPods we now have available through Ellen in the A/V closet. You could load a bunch of these stories on iPods and have them available for your kids in class to listen to whenever appropriate.
http://portal.saschina.org/elgg/action/file/download?file_guid=724

Weekly Tech Tip
Finally, my personal tech tip for you this week comes in the form of music. Trying to find that Cole Porter Christmas album or looking for a little Bing Crosby to ring in the holidays?  Look no further than Lala.com. Lala.com allows users to listen to any of the 8 million  songs  on the site for free, in their entirety, in an ad-free environment.

www.lala.com

Granted, you can only listen once. But if you like the song you can buy a web version of it for a mere 10 cents. It’s then saved in your personal library, accessible from any browser,
including the one in your phone. Your music is on the “cloud” whenever you want to listen.

MP3 versions are available for an additional 79 cents (that’s cheaper than iTunes). These are loaded straight into iTunes and, because they are DRM-free, can be played on any device you have. This means all the music is licensed (and legal). In other words, your days as a music pirate may be over. Better than iTunes, because they are not coded like they are when you buy music from iTunes, you can share the music from Lala with as many people you want and listen to it on any device. So go ahead, get that Bing Crosby album you used to listen to during the holidays or that long lost Vanilla Ice album you have been to ashamed to ask your friends for.

First, A big shout out to The 5th grade team who are off and running with class blogging. I especially invite you to look at the 5TM and 5SH class blogs, but more so, I invite you to run down their blogroll’s and take a look at some great [...]]]> Here are my weeks Tech Showcase projects.

First, A big shout out to The 5th grade team who are off and running with class blogging. I especially invite you to look at the 5TM and 5SH class blogs, but more so, I invite you to run down their blogroll’s and take a look at some great student blogging. Why is it so great? Why should I bother? Both valid questions. First, as a teacher it is great to see what students are writing and saying and thinking. It keeps us in touch with our “clientele”. Second, their students’ post are succinct, about school and their lives and lack fluff, cartoons, pictures, etc. that don’t relate to their writing. Third, it is just plain impressive to see the writing our kids are capable of and that is a testament to the hard work you teachers put into reading/writing here at SAS.

***A friendly reminder, if you are blogging with kids, make sure all their blogs are linked to your teacher blogs, we want their blogs as accessible as possible so parents, other students, and the world can see the great things you and your kids are doing in class.

Second, the first graders have been using Kidspiration lately to do a “virtual” grocery shopping trip. They were asked to select 5 healthy and 5 unhealthy foods from the stamps in kidspiration and place them into a shopping cart template. Besides the obvious of kids having to make smart choices about the food they were selecting, they also got to practice their mouse skills-dragging and dropping, opening a file from their network folder (big stuff for these little guys), and it got them talking about food choices. Is pizza healthy or unhealthy? The debate still rages. To see what the Kidspiration template looked like and to read more about this project you can read my blog post at:

http://teachers.saschina.org/estechpuxi/2009/11/05/1st-graders-go-grocery-shopping-virtually/

Finally, as promised, my personal tech tip for all of you. Actually there are two this week.

1) With Thanksgiving around the corner I thought this site would be timely for all of you who will be spending some time in the kitchen in the upcoming week.  http://www.cookstr.com offers a  celebrated list of recipes provided by a roster of 250 star chefs and cookbook authors (including Alice Waters, Mario Batali, Daniel Boulud, Julia Child and Jamie Oliver, among others). The dishes in here look amazing and there are a ton of Thanksgiving dishes just waiting for you to try your hand at. C’mon, step out of www.recipes.com and try something new. Your mouth will thank you.

2) Now that we are all MAC users and I see a lot of you with music in your iTunes I thought you might find this little tip handy for organizing your music, finding missing track titles, and getting that long lost cover to that ‘77 Cornell Grateful Dead Show that you have been searching for.  Look no further than http://www.tuneupmedia.com. TuneUp, is an application that fills in the missing info–artist,song name, album, release year, cover art and genre–for any music in your digital library.

TuneUp runs alongside iTunes. You drag your “dirty” tracks into the TuneUp box and it compares the songs to the Gracenote database, pulling in the missing data. While TuneUp isn’t 100%reliable at identifying every song ever made it was accurate enough to straighten out my messy song library.