Sunday, July 15, 2012

More iEverything for the Classroom

All of my dated iPods sit in the tech drawer at home collecting dust. So today I synced them all to include our classroom music library. Best of all, I have an iPhone 3G that was waiting to be sold to Radio Shack for $50. Then I started thinking, why would I sell my iPhone for less than I can buy an iTouch? I began googling using iPhones as iTouches. The very first video (below) clearly explains how to jail break an iPhone without a sim card and use all of your apps, music, videos, etc. in the classroom. Now I have three iPods, an iPhone, and an iPad for my kiddos! What's lying around in the back of your drawers??

Monday, February 20, 2012

Sweet Mathematics

To celebrate Valentine’s week, we graphed our conversation hearts by color (and then had a tasty treat!). After collecting our own data, we combined all of our totals using this interactive talking(!) calculator from PBS Kids.

There are a ton of graphing tools out there that are perfect for IWBs, but this Primary Grapher was perfect for me to pull up in the middle of a lesson and quickly create a graph! Because of its simple interface, I could easily change the Y values as we continued to push the 100 mark.

Checkout Brain Pop, Jr.'s short introductory clip and all of their extras (at the bottom). KB Connected and Mr. Nussbaum both have more links for graphing in the classroom.

Sunday, January 29, 2012

Happy New Year

What better way to bring in the New Year than to let the little ones make a glyph? I loosely based this glyph on a holidays glyph book by Scholastic. I find that their glyphs are just too complex for Kindergarten. After the children filled out their glyphs, they got the appropriate tracers and chose construction paper. Using their portraits from the first day of school, I printed them out two to a page and let them "bubble" cut their faces. They glued the hats on their heads, and I glued it to butcher paper for a hallway display.

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Keeping Everything in a Safe Place

I may be the worst at backing up my data regularly, but a 1 terabyte (read: 1000 gigabytes!!) external hard drive is perfect for backing up large volumes of information for a small price. This improves professional productivity because all of your documents and files can be backed up in one safe place in an easy, convenient manner. In combination with incremental backup software, teachers can set up an automatic weekly or bi-monthly schedule so that your computer only backs up new drive changes such as new flipcharts, PowerPoints, or photos. This means backups are more current, and lost files are less likely.

My recommendation is the Western Digital WD Elements SE 1 TB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive. The Western Digital (WD) external hard drive is a small, portable storage space for backing up data of all sorts (music files, documents, photographs, etc.). Much like a flash drive, an external hard drive uses the USB port for connectivity and power and holds 1 TB, or terabyte, of data. One terabyte is equal to 1024 gigabytes (GB)—that’s the size of 500 2GB flash drives! You can even find them around $60 on eBay.

Read more here:
How To Back Up Your Data on a Windows PC
http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Back_Up_Your_Data_on_a_Windows_PC

Alternative External Drives: