Visiting Local Libraries #2

On Wednesday, April 29th, the Club ReciLectura visited Nuevo Cuscatlan’s Library. During the visit the our ABC students shared the activities they had prepared with 4th grade students from the Pedro Pablo Castillo School. The activity was entitled,  "My First Book". The goal of this particular activity was to share in a reading of  "Year of the Jungle"  by Suzanne Collins and and to follow up with a related writing activity. 

Year of the Jungle  is an autobiographical picture book, which focuses on a father and his daughter who are separated when the father is sent off to fight in the Vietnam War. 

The students enjoyed the reading which was followed up by a short writing project. The project had the 4th grade students writing their first recycled book. In doing so they were to use recycled materials and write about something happy that they had lived through, or an activity they enjoyed doing.

For more pictures visit Flickr

Post by: Hilda Gomez

Librarian

This was a very successful activity, which brought students together, encouraged them to express themselves, and brought a certain focus to the important topics of families and the environment. Our ABC students were a bit reluctant to leave at the end of the session and many of the 4th graders felt the same way. They all left feeling a great sense of commitment to their project work.

This is the second in series of library visits our club will be making and we look forward to posting more information about their work, when the time comes. 

Here is a link to our post about the club's first library visit during Earth Week of this year. 

Jennifer Garcia

LRC Coordinator

Working with MakeyMakeys

Today we held our first lesson with our new 8th grade creative carousel group.

This class is made up of students chose to take ICT in the latter part of the school year.

When planning the units for this last carousel of the year, we made the decision to use an exploratory approach within a PBL model of learning.

This week's lessons focus on input devices through the use of MakeyMakeys. The students discussed input devices, watched a short movie about MakeyMakeys and experimented with connecting up the devices to cardboard guitars and potatoes.  They then tested out their devices using a web version of guitar hero and a free download of Whack-a-Potato.

We found that once a few simple instructions were given, the kids were ready to roll. In fact they were extremely excited about using the devices and worked diligently in their groups, on each mini project.

I am including links to our  digital workbook here and a photo gallery from today's work. 

We are working with both Doctopus and Google Classroom. The workbooks were distributed using Doctopus directly to each group, which were also generated through Doctupus. We will be using Classroom to keep the stream going, assign homework and personal tasks to the students as the units progress.

Do check back for more updates as the project progresses.

Brain Week is Back!

The ABC's annual Brain  Awareness Week begins on Monday, March 16th.

During the week ABC staff and students will focus some time on learning more about how the brain works, keeping the brain healthy and trying out various brain related activities.

The LRC is developing some special plans in support of Brain Awareness Week. These will take place in the interactive Brain Week Playground at the back of the LRC.

Here is a quick glimpse of those activities. 

During Brain Awareness Week, students will learn more about the positive effects music can have on the brain. This will happen in the MakeyMakey section through interactions with a large step piano. Students will also get to try out their hand reflexes by playing Whack-a-Potato and Guitar hero. This will again feature MakeyMakey input devices, which will be connected to special LRC guitars and yes, you have it, real potatoes.

I will share a post on the MakeyMakey work later next week. So do check back if you would like to see how we set things up and how we made our large interactive Piano.

The Raspberry Pi computers will be powered up and ready to go with brain puzzles, games and brain teasers and there will be a multitude of other puzzles and code breaking activities available on site, for students to try out.

Watch our short Promo Video



Teachers can book slots for their students through the LRC appointment calendar and interested students can also book a bit of time, with LRC staff members, during break times.

Here is the link to pictures from last year's Brain Awareness Week. Do check back in a week and a half for updates from Brain Awareness Week 2015.

Science Classification in Jokaydia Grid

Our 8th grade students are working on classification skills in Science. This year, as in the previous school  year, we took them into our ABC El Salvador 2 region of Jokaydia Grid for some practical work. This section of the region is called ABC Pandora, inspiration for which came from the movie Avatar, and yes,  we even have a huge tree of souls!

The Science teachers prepared their annotation resources in Google Drive and shared them with the students while we prepped the region.  This time around  we built a new 2 story lab with the classification grid embedded in the floors. Each teaching group was then assigned a floor.

We needed a few examples of algae and moss so we added these as well and ensured that certain copies of plants were copyable by the students.  The idea was that they would search out examples of the plants they needed to classify, take copies and then place copies in the appropriate sections of the grid.

We added one other element,  eyeballs and flying fish which were scripted to follow the students around on the grid. Of course when I demo it to the kids I am covered in flying eyeballs and fish as I am the only one in there. As they kids get in however, that soon changes and the eyeballs and fish begin sticking to them. It is a bit silly, but what would Pandora be without an element of slightly annoying native creatures and objects.

The kids are very experienced in working in Jokaydia Grid since they built their environmentally themed park last school year. They didn't need a long tutorial or explanation, just a reminder on how to set up the grid on a different machine.

Finally they were given their users and passwords and in we went. Things became quite electric for a while as the activity intensified.  What really stands out here is that the kids had a blast doing this and learned so much at the same time.

Here is a short video we managed to capture during the final session.
We hope you enjoy it!

7th Grade Programming Project.

Hi Everyone,

Our 7th grade students are  developing learning games with Scratch and are on the lookout for some teacher input during the design process. Please consider taking a moment to fill in our survey, if you teach 1st-2nd grade students. http://ow.ly/ISl8J.

Thank You!

:-)

Creating French Dialogues with iPads and Google Drive

Last week we did a bit of work with the French department, on a small cross curricular initiative. The 6th grade students have been working on writing up dialogues in French lessons and the teacher was looking for a simple way to record these using video.  Our 6s have used the iPads a great deal this year for both audio and video work, so I suggested them as our tool of choice.  It just made sense, the kids are familiar with them and the apps are very user friendly.

Next we looked at all the options and decided that due to time restraints and the required outcome, a fully edited video was not needed this time around. Next, we needed to address the potential issues of trying to share media work on iPads with teachers, over wifi connections. This can be a huge problem. DropBox blocked and emailing the videos would not only be difficult, due to their size, but also be a breach of our school email protocol.  In the end we decided to work with Google Drive and I am so glad we did!

This made a lot of sense. We are a Google Apps school and the kids use their Google Apps accounts for a good portion of the work they do, across subjects and grades.  The initial plan was to record the videos with the camera app and then upload to drive. Later that day I began playing around with the upload option in Drive when I struck gold! I was thrilled to find that one of the options was to record a video through the Drive App!

This is so easy to do! All you do is navigate to the folder you want the video to be uploaded to, click the plus symbol. Next, select Use Camera from the menu and point and record.

When you have finished recording, you will be asked whether or not you want to use the video. If you select the Use Video option, it will save in your Google Drive account within the folder you specified in the beginning. The other options are to preview your videos before you select Use Video and  retake them if needed. Finally, be prepared to wait a few minutes to process videos before they are viewable. This was fine for us, as our students used the wait time to share their videos with their French teacher.

Now none of this is particularly new. The option has been around for a while. It is new to me however.  I am thrilled with how easily staff and students can create videos, and share them right in their Google Drive Apps. 

If you would like more information about video creation within Google Drive for the iPad, Bill Campbell has produced a good video on the process.

Below I have included a short Animoto video featuring some of our students as they work through the activity. As you can see in the video, the iPads, or any mobile device for that matter, are fantastic for audio/video work. These devices enable kids to plug in, move around and work in more unconventional learning spaces, outside of the tradition classroom walls.

Internet Safety Week 2015

Our ABC Internet Safety Week , also known as Safer Internet Week, starts on Monday.

During the week students will learn more about safe online practices through daily mini lessons, assemblies and focus activities in lessons.

We have been  talking to students and parents about online safety, providing strategies and holding practical workshops for the past 7 years and although progress was slow initially, most of our community is aware of the issues and can apply certain strategies in their daily lives to help ensure that they remain safe online and make social networks work for them.

If you are on the lookout for good resources to use with your students,  have a look through the Mini Lesson resources we have compiled.

Here are three short videos done by the younger students in their after school club.  They contain very brief messages, which offer advice for staying safe online.

These videos were fun and easy to produce using the school iPads.