Happy New Year

This greeting card made with Smilebox

"SLO"wly catching up!

I am still here! Sorry I have been "SLO" about posting! Between the SLO's and sick little ones; and a few meetings thrown in here and there ~ I have just gotten behind...who am I kidding? I am always behind!
I do have a lot I want to share though! First off, did anyone use Remind 101 for red ribbon week? I did.... I reminded my parents using the app each night what the upcoming day was.  I had great class participation and had a several nice comments regarding the reminders the night before. 

Ok, so now for some of the cool sites and things I want to share with you!
First off , a great website to use with your interactice white board.  I love promethean planet but it is not always easy to weed through all of the flipcharts to find what you need.  This site is more user friendly and can also be used by individually by students.  It has worked well with our RTI focus groups in the mornings. 
Interactive Sites for Education is a collection of K-5 online, interactive games and simulations
Check it out and let me know what you think!

Pumpkin Math

We had such a great time measuring, weighing, couting seeds, everything you can imagine to our pumpkins!

This picture slideshow customized with Smilebox

Stick Pick ~ Another Great App

I am loving this app! You can randomly (or intentionally) choose a student’s name from a virtual can of Popsicle sticks. Student sticks are tied to a mode and level of difficulty for each learner. Each time a student’s stick is drawn, you will be shown over a dozen Bloom’s Taxonomy related questions that are tied to the learner’s individual ability level.
Questions can be linked to cognitive or linguistic needs to each student. Teachers can have multiple soup cans (classes) filled with sticks (students). During setup, teachers choose a category of questions that they want to focus on for the learner. Questions can be based on Bloom’s Taxonomy, English as a second language skills, and a degree of difficulty can be chosen for each learner.
Formative assessment is easy to track because teachers can tap a corresponding correct, incorrect, or opinion button based on the student’s answer. Teachers can also rate each student’s answer by selecting 0-5 on the critical thinking rubric (for Bloom’s) or an elaboration rubric (for English as a second language). Student data is saved directly in the app and can be emailed.
Stick Pick is a handy tool for any teacher device. Stick Pick can guide classroom discussion and formative assessment in really helpful ways. Teachers can mark sticks so that they aren’t constantly calling on the same students or asking students the same questions over and over again.
Students can use Stick Pick too. During small group work, students can take turns asking one another questions based on Bloom’s Taxonomy making group work more productive and on-task.
Record and send student progress to parents easily directly from the app.

Hey everyone!! I can't wait to tell you what I am using this year (and let me start out by saying this is not an infomercial!! I swear I'm writing this on my own free will to help you!)

As we all know our world is changing and calling or sending home a flier to every parent each night to tell them about something special occuring just isn't happening... that's where this dandy little app and website come in handy!!

It's called Remind101

Long story short you invite parents to join by text or email (I just found this out too!! It keeps getting better!) and what the app allows you to do is shoot a quick text/email through their server to your subscribers!! This way you don't have to give out your cell number or anything!! It works just like any major companies text services... You know those text food to 90210 deals to receive updates about blahblahblah?? Well this is it!

Forget to send a flier home or remind parents about picture day? ~ simply shoot them in a text message ~ without giving out your cell phone number.

Below is a flier or an email that you can send to your parents.

After they send the message to the correct number: they will see the message below......

You can set up different classes.. incase you need to send different message to different groups of students (thought of you 4th and 5th grade)..

Parents can respond by email too, so by having the app on my phone if I want to shoot my parents a message that picture day is in the morning. I can simply type it in the message on my app and it will send it to all text and email subscribers.

And JUST found out that you can schedule messages for later!! Have folders due each Friday? Why not shoot a text reminding parents Thursday night to sign and return them in the morning??

And Best of all it is FREE!!!!!

The only downfall is they can not respond back to the text. But overall I think that is very minor! I have been adding my email at the end of the text so that if they want to respond they can :)

I was very excited about finding out about this....and think it can be very helpful in my parent communication and I hope that you are too!

Techno Tuesday

Check out this cool program.  You can do it from your computer or there is an app on the iPhone.  It would be great for student work pieces. Students could upload a piece of work and then talk about it. I am excited about using this in my classroom this year! We are creating our own businessess with our services and goods and I can't wait to upload each student's picture and have them talk about it! :) How better to show the parents what we are doing! :)

WORDY Wednesday

Who loves to play words with friends on their iPhone? I do!
 I found a flipchart that the students love that is a spin off of the popular game. 

We adapted the flipchart somewhat to meet the needs of our lesson, but it was still a very fun lesson and the students beg to play every day during RTI time.