Spark Student Motivation Saturdays: Using a Document Reader to Share Student Work

Hi all!  I'm linking up with Head over Heels for Teaching to share a way I kept my kiddos motivated this week.

We got a new toy: a document reader!

And I let my kids play with it immediately!  My students love coming to the SMARTboard to show their work for math, but sometimes that technology really slows us down.  Often the screen needs to be calibrated, or they don't leave themselves enough room to show all of their work. Another big time zapper is the work itself is sometimes so complex that I lose the attention of the room while one student shows the rest the solution.

Before we started math on Friday, I told my kids that they could use the document reader to show their work during the review portion of our workshop...but they'd need to have neat work,with all of the steps shown. To their credit, work they completed was detailed and organized!  Take a look at their work for reducing fractions:

While this student showed her I spotted an error on a subsequent problem, so I was able to fix that while she was explaining her work.

I love how neat this work is!  All of the calculations are shown and it's so easy to follow!

Lots to praise here as well.  This young lady leaves little check marks, showing that she's paying attention to the work presented by her classmates.

I am so in love with this new toy.  It is going to make it so much easier for kids to share their work with each other, for use to discuss text or to dissect text books!

Tell me, do you have a document reader?  How do you use it?

Tech Tip:Leveling Your Library!

I came across an interesting Pin this week....a book leveling app!  Have you heard of it?  It's called Level It Books (link to iTunes page) and you use it by scanning the bar code of a book and it will search a database to find the level of your book!  Such a cool idea right?  And seems a lot less tedious than searching through the giant Fountas and Pinnell book!

I was hesitant to purchase it, being that the reviews weren't great, and even more hesitant to post about it being that I'm not in my classroom and I don't have access to a large library to scan.  However, I did try it out on the few books I did bring home with me this summer and all of the books were in the database.  I believe the idea is that teachers will collaborate to enrich the database and the app will become more useful as more information is uploaded.  But for right now, the app is $2.99, so I wanted to share!

Here is what you see when you scan your book:

You can add your books the folder called Library and then you can use your iPhone, iPod or iPad to check books in and out of your library.  Cool, huh?  I'm not sure I'm going to use the checkout system for my entire library, but I may use it for the high demand books that sometimes go "missing." Yes, Shredderman, I'm talking about you ;-)

On this screen, you can see I added a few books I know I have in my library to see if the Fountas and Pinnell levels matched what I thought they were were.

Overall, it's a cool little tool to have.  For $2.99, I'll be pretty happy if most of my fiction texts are in their database.

Oh, and a quickie reminder that my Back to School Math Center Sale ends tomorrow!

Tell me: How do you level your library?  By lexile? By Fountas and Pinnell?  Do you level ALL of your fiction books?

Have a great day!

Tried It Tuesday: Prezis!

I'm linking up with Holly at Fourth Grade Flipper for another Tried It Tuesday!

This week, I'm going to share how I used a Prezi in my classroom!  If you don't know about Prezis, they are sort-of PowerPoint-esque.  A Prezi is a really dynamic and engaging way to presenting information.  For those of us with SMARTboards,

Here is what they say about themselves:

About Prezis

I made my first Prezi last year.  I spent some time playing around with the technology to see what I could do with it.  My Prezi was about Spanish Conquistadors.

Click to see the actual Prezi

Some things that worked:

- My students loved the movement across the screen.  It kept them really engaged and focused and allowed us to get through a lot of content quickly.

- Being able to add graphics (paintings, maps, flags and primary sources) to the Prezi was great for all students but especially my English Language Learners.

- It was really easy (and kind of fun!) to make.

- You can pack a TON of information into a pre-made template. 

What didn't really work:

- My conquistador lesson was very teacher driven.  Other than tapping the SMARTboard, the students didn't really interact with the lesson.  However, I think if you want the students to create a Prezi, they are going to need to see one first!

What I'll try next:

- I'm thinking of using a Prezi for a read aloud.  I JUST finished reading Wonder by RJ Palacio last night, and I think it would be awesome to create a Prezi focusing on the different narrators and points of view in the novel.  Once testing is finished, I should be able to get my class into the computer lab, so I'll have them work on the different characters in the book.  Once they have their pieces done, we can put it all together in one large Prezi to share.

Have you used a Prezi in your classroom?

Adios, Google Reader. Hello, BlogLovin!

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

You may have heard that Google is discontinuing Google Reader this summer.  That's a huge bummer for a lot of us who read our blogs that way.  When I log into my blogger account, I always click on "view in Google Reader" to see all of the blogs I've subscribed to all in one place.

If you do the same, you're going to need to find a new way to read your blogs!  There are a lot of options out there for reading blogs, but I thought one really stood out with an easy to use page and an attractive layout.   So I'm going to give you a mini tutorial about using BlogLovin' to do all of your BlogReadin!

So the first thing you need to do is head over to http://bloglovin.com and click "Sign Up" in the upper right hand corner.  From there, you will have the option to sign up using Facebook or with your email.

I opted to sign up using Facebook.  It's easy, and I hate remembering usernames and passwords.

After creating an account, you will be able to sync all of your Google Reader blogs with BlogLovin'.  I am subscribed to over 200 blogs and the sync only took a few moments.  From what I can tell, the sync only includes the last 3 posts published for each blog, which is FINE with me.   I just like having all of my blogs in one place.

This is what the feed looks like:

Nice, clean interface.  Blogs in the feed are organized by most recent, or you can have them organized by blog.  Here is how my own blog looked when I clicked on it (why yes I do follow my own blog!).  I'm just guessing, but I THINK it displays the first image in the blog post, so if you are a blogger, that's definitely something to consider when you are choosing images for your posts!

When you click on the name of the blog, it will take you to that blog post.  If you click the image, you will go to the blog post, but there will be a cool little header on top of the blog.

See the cool header? From there, you can pull down the menu and navigate to other blogs you are subscribed to.  You can also share posts directly to Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest.

 Here's another reason why I really like BlogLovin':  I was able to manage the blogs I'm reading with just a few clicks.  To do that, click Following.

From that page, you'll see a list of all of the blogs you are following with three options: Private, Change Group and Unfollow.

I went through the list of blogs I'm following to be sure I really want all of these blogs showing up in my feed.

I "unfollowed" a few diet/recipe/fitness blogs that I haven't been reading, so that my feed is really just education blogs, plus a few running blogs that I LOVE.

I also created a group for the Fifth Grade blogs I'm following so I'd have all of those posts in the same place.  These steps are not necessary, but I thought a few minutes of organizing would make future blog reading easier.  To create the group, you click Create New Group and you will be prompted to name your group.

To add blogs to the group, you just pull down "change group" and click the name of the group you created.  Super easy.  Just one pull down and your blog is added!


I hope this post gives you some food for thought! 

Tell me, how do you read your blogs?