Archives September 2021

French and Indian War Comic Strip Activity

In this lesson students will create a comic strip that explains the events of the French and Indian War.  

Sign up for an account at www.storyboardthat.com You will get a 14 day free trial so don’t sign up until you are ready to assign this project.   Pixton is another option to use that is worth checking out as well.


Here is a super lame example I made a decade ago in Microsoft Paint so your students comics should dominate mine.

Khan Academy

Khan Academy is an enormous resource for you and your students. I will let Khan Academy explain themselves to you below.

Now at Khan Academy on top of all of their immensely valuable resources is a new set of courses designed to help students close learning gaps on many math topics from 3rd grade through HS Calculus. This might be a great activity to assign to your students during down time on test day after completing a unit test.

https://www.khanacademy.org/math/get-ready-courses

Vocabulary Poster Template

Vocabulary posters are a fantastic activity for pre-teaching vocabulary at the front of a new unit. Pre-teaching vocabulary is a big benefit for all your students not just your special populations. You can provide the definition or have students create/find their own definition. Have students use the word accurately in a sentence. Also have students demonstrate their comprehension of the word by representing it visually through a drawing or finding a an image.

Here is a Google Slides Template for vocabulary posters. You can assign this in Google Classroom or even just print it out and go old school with it. Be clear with your expectations for your students. Do you want them to copy your definition or create their own? Do you want the students to find an image or draw their own? I left the directions off so that you can customize that to your needs.

Gif Maker

Here are a few different resources on how to make animated gifs. Gifs are like short video clips with no sound. Gifs can be very powerful teaching tools. Gifs are more exciting and more informative than an image. You or your students might make gifs to explain a concept, demonstrate a vocabulary terms meaning, explain mood or tone in a passage, predict or even show their own scientific experiments results, reenact historical events, showing steps to a math problem, etc.. Perhaps you have searched for a gif before but couldn’t find exactly what you needed. Now you can make your own. Jump in and get your students making gifs, they will enjoy it as it is a relevant and engaging activity for them. Please send me your gifs and the cool ideas you had for getting students busy making gifs.

Here is a simple young student friendly gif maker from abcya.com

https://www.abcya.com/games/animate

Gifcap captures your screen to create a gif

https://gifcap.dev/

Unscreen.com let’s you remove the background from a video and turn it into a gif.

https://www.unscreen.com/

Capture to a Gif is a chrome browser extension that can pull a gif right from your screen in a screen clipping fashion capturing only the are you want. I can see this being an incredibly valuable tool.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/capture-to-a-gif/eapecadlmfblmnfnojebefkbginhggeh?hl=en

Digital Collaborative Jigsaw Method

Expert Groups

Divide all of your students up equally into Expert Groups.

Assign a different topic from the unit to each expert group.

Expert Groups must collaborate online to create one digital graphic organizer that thoroughly and accurately explains their topic.

You might want to include specific requirements to lead your experts in the right direction.

Expert Groups need to choose an infographic template from the list here at Canva.com

They can share and collaborate on the same infographic by clicking share and then share a link to edit.

Teaching Teams

Teaching teams should be made up of evenly distributed students, one from each expert group.

Each teaching team needs to create a copy of this collaborative Google Slides Presentation and share it with everyone in their teaching team. Each expert needs to upload their infographic to the Google Slides Presentation.

Experts should download their groups infographic as a PNG image file. They then need to upload that image file to the background image of their slide in the collaborative Google Slides Presentation (directions follow below).

Teaching Teams should then take turns teaching each topic to their team using the infographic as a guide to their teaching.

Change Background
Choose Image, then navigate to find the correct image file and click done


OpenShot Trim a Video

OpenShot is a free video editing software that you can download and use for all of your video editing projects. You can use it to create full length video productions or for tasks as simple as trimming a video you previously recorded. Today we are going to take a look at how to use OpenShot to trim a video we recorded in Google Meet.

EdTech Update Episode 009

Join us for Episode 9 of the EdTech Update as we talk to Mr. Gunnels about this new year, we see the Fast4Friday from Harper Elementary School, we will hear from Mr. Vincent about the 1 to 1 roll out, we will see a cool little tool called Blabberize in action, and we’ll give away some Education Galaxy prizes! Also there is a give way contest at the end. BE THE WINNER!

Lunch and Learn 22 Sep 2021 Class Craft

Please join myself and our own expert, Lara from ClassCraft.com, live in Google Meet during your lunch time Wednesday 22 September. Lara will give you a quick introduction to Class Craft and answer any questions you might have.

Class Craft is a really cool gamified positive reinforcement focused classroom management tool. Classcraft also offers really cool customizable adventure quest lesson templates for you to create exciting supplemental learning opportunities. With your students now having full time Chromebook access, this is the time to jump into this amazing tool.

https://meet.google.com/ziq-cbxe-dhy <— 22 September during your lunch go there.

Super cool 8 second teaser trailer

Please see the links below for brief precursory overview.

 It was a pleasure learning more about your district. I have a few documents below for you to review; please let me know if you have any questions or if there is any other information I can provide.

Looking forward to our Lunch and Learn next week! Have a great day!
Sincerely,

Lara CrutcherSolutions Advisor at Classcraft

HMH Online Textbooks: Avancemos and more

Teachers and students will both access the online textbooks for HMH through ClassLink. It is the Holt McDougal My HRW app at this time (I have seen that change so look for something HMH related). Inside this app you can choose what ever text book you need access to.

That will drop you on your Dashboard which gives you access to the many available resources.

At-Home Learning Support gives access to .pdf copies of the text book’s student edition.

The Program Preview is a short video about the resources available to teachers and students

Teachers Edition opens a browser based online copy of the textbooks teacher edition. There is a print option available from the menu on the left side of the page as well as other helpful tools like the ability to create bookmarks and notes.

The Teacher Resources menu provides access to tons of resources but most importantly I found Graphic organizers and Rubrics. Also, Activities opened up an enormous Word doc that included printable worksheets and activities.

Student Edition opens up a browser based online version of the textbook with many tools including access to additional resources with practice activities.

Student Resources gives students access to practice activities, self check quizzes, and review games.

Assignments gives you the ability to assign online digital activities to your students.

Reports gives you access to ALL THE DATA!!!