Last week Craig Krieger, Crown Prosecutor for Technology & Internet Crimes from the Government of Alberta, was invited in as a special speaker for grades 5-6 and 7-9 classes. Craig’s presentation titled Cybercrime: When Computers Go Bad gave students and teachers valuable information on cyber crimes, Internet safety, digital footprint awareness and identity theft. Some of the main points from his presentation include: • Computers are used as tools, but can also be used as targets • Keep your antivirus software up-to-date • Think before you type! • Carefully decided what information you give away online • Protect your email address • What you type to someone online is not private
Many of the Internet safety websites Craig referenced in his presentation can be found on this blog in an earlier posting under the Internet Safety tag.
We are all back and looking forward to another year of sharing, collaborating, creating, engaging and participating in new technology learning opportunities. The library computer lab has been updated and we are excited about having the addition of another mobile lab available for classrooms.
On August 31st and September 1st teachers attended workshops by David Warlick titled Leading & Learning in the 21st Century and Cracking the Code. Some of the key points from David’s presentations included: • Promoting life-long learning • Preparing students for an unpredictable future • Learning to live in a culture driven by hyper-connectedness • Redefining and reinventing what it is to be an educator • Teaching students ‘how to teach themselves’
VoiceThread is one our favourite Web 2.0 tools here at Camilla School. Teachers are using VoiceThread as a digital storytelling tool that can be shared in the classroom, school, and education community. This tool offers online collaboration, interaction, communication and participation from around the world.
4L students read Judy Blume’s book Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing as a novel study. Judy Blume is an award-winning author of children’s and young adult literature with over 80 million copies of books in print.
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing tells the story of fourth grader Peter Hatcher and his little toddler brother Farley Drexel ‘Fudge’ Hatcher. As a big brother, Peter always has to help his little brother Fudge, who seems to get all of the attention. This makes Peter feels neglected by his parents. Peter feel like a fourth grade nothing! This book is filled with more interesting characters such as Mr. Yarby, Sheila, Jimmy, Sam, Jennie, Dr. Brown, Mr. Vincent, Dr. Cone and of course Dribble, Peter’s pet turtle.
Judy first got the idea for the book when her children’s babysitter showed her a newspaper article about a toddler who swallowed a turtle. This quirky story inspired Judy to write the story as a picture book titled “Peter, Fudge and Dribble.” Many publishers rejected the idea until several years later when it caught the eye of an editor who wanted the story to be told as a chapter book, and the novel was written. Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing is the first book in her Fudge series.
I came across an article last week titled “Hey Teachers: This is How I Learn.” from a blog titled TeachPaperless: Seeking social solution to the mysteries of 21st century teaching and learning. The philosophy behind the blog is to help educators create paperless classroom through integrated technology learning communities. The blog posting reflects on a classroom discussion between one teacher and a class of students.
The Ted Harrison Studio in Victoria, British Columbia has begun collecting student artwork to share via the Internet. We are pleased to report that the 2K artwork from our April 18th Ted Harrison VoiceThread has been invited to be part of the online student gallery in Flickr photosharing. Flickr is a free Internet photo and video hosting website that houses over 4 billion images.
To view a full screen version of this VoiceThread and leave a comment for 5B through the tool, please use the following link: 5B Novel Study: The Incredible Journey
5B has just completed a novel study using the VoiceThread multimedia tool. The visual component of this VoiceThread project has allowed grade five students to showcase comprehensive volcabulary words, setting/locations and core characters from their novel study captured in a free tool called Wordle. This online tool is becoming increasingly popular in education because its versatility across all subject areas. Wordle creates ‘word clouds’ or a visual display using text.
During the reading of the novel, each student was responsible for creating a Microsoft Word document listing important vocabulary words, significant locations and main character names for each chapter. After the novel was finished, students copied and pasted their assigned chapter list into Wordle and a word cloud was created. Wordle gives users the artistic freedom to customize their image by choosing: • foreground and background colour schemes • horizontal/vertical layout of the words • font style
Once Wordle images were uploaded into Voicethread, students recorded their chapter highlights through the use of an external microphone.
Ms. Tonhauser
5B has just completed technology enhanced project combining Wordle, language arts writing, summarizing skills and their recorded voices. Our VoiceThread focuses on the thrill seeking novel, The Incredible Journey that we read together as a class. Each student was assigned a partner and with that partner they were asked to summarize a chapter of the novel into eight main events. They also had to choose twenty interesting and important words found within the chapter for the wordle they created. We are lucky to also have some very talented artists in our class who recreated a beautiful cover for our project. Many students commented that it was an exact replica of the original on the cover of the book! The students were thrilled to see their finished work on display for the entire world to view! They had a fantastic time working collaboratively and creating their own summaries for The Incredible Journey.
Kids in the Know is an interactive educational website to support parents and educators in promoting online safety for K-12 students in Canadian schools. This site contains safety tools, online quizzes, safety checklists and cyber strategies.
Welcome to our school blog! Camilla School is a K-9 school located in the Hamlet of Riviere Qui Barre, Alberta, Canada (Sturgeon School Division).
Our "Catch the Dream...Build the Future" school motto recognizes our commitment to engaging and educating students in the 21st century.
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