Monday, September 15, 2014

What happened to all the paper books?

Some of you may be wondering what happened to all of the books that you used to see in our Technology Center (formerly "media center"). In an effort to make is easier for students to access age/grade appropriate books, each of our teachers spent considerable time going through our entire library collection. Each teacher created from that collection a set of four "classroom library" boxes. These boxes will be rotated quarterly to keep the classroom library fresh with new books for students to choose from for classroom pleasure reading as well as overnight checkout. All checking out of books will now occur in the classroom.

Believe it or not, having every teacher choose four large boxes of books didn't even put a dent in our collection! The remaining collection is housed in a room in the technology center designated specifically for our paper books. All of the old shelving was moved to this room and now serves as a resource area for teachers to use to add to their classroom collections or to search for specific books of interest whenever they see fit.

In addition to this, all of our students will be learning how to access ebooks via the public library. I will share more about this initiative in an upcoming blog post.

TECHNOLOGY IN THE CLASSROOMS
With each of my posts going forward, I will be sharing examples of how technology is actually being used in the classrooms. This week we see some examples from Kindergarten and 6A/7.

Grade: Kindergarten A
Teacher: Poirier
Subject: Math
Apps: Bubble pop addition 
This app shows the children a problem at the bottom of the window. There are bubbles that float around and they need to pop the correct one that answers the problem.
This activity enhances learning by giving the children a chance to practice their addition skills with a fun activity other than pencil and paper. It also has gotten them familiar with using the iPads. We do this once a week and slowly we will start adding other apps, websites, and games for almost all of our subjects. 

Student feedback: "Awesome!" They love going to use the iPads. It makes them feel like big kids. They ask me every day if we are using them in the afternoon!

Class:  6A/7
Teacher: Galzerano
Subject:  World History
Activity:  In class we learned about the Epic of Gilgamesh.  It is the oldest known story that dates from around 2000 BCE.  The class used their IPADs to read one of the stories from the book from the website.  The story was how  Gilgamesh defeated a Demon in order to obtain cedar wood.  They answered questions prepared by the teacher along the way.  We then discussed the story and how it relates to similar stories/movies we see today in the 21st Century.
Feedback: Students enjoyed it because it was short and had comic-book type pictures along the way to help them understand it better.  They were able to draw comparisons to today, which amazed them since the book is about 4000 years old.  It made them see the connection between the ancient world and today, which is a wonderful way to teach History.

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