My Love Affair With BrainPOP

If you have spent anytime reading my blog you will know that I have a love affair with BrainPOP. I use it for everything in my classroom. I launch lessons with it, use it as a review, use the quizzes and graphic organizers and often assign the videos as out of class bonus activities. This year I have two students who, for reasons way beyond our control, can not attend classes. I have spent some time creating independent units of study for these kiddos and BrainPOP has become about a third of these assignments. My own fabulously amazing six year old got on iPad for Christmas and has absolutely fallen in love with the BrainPOP Junior app. In the past eight weeks he has learned about the solar system, the seasons, factor families and fractions, just to name a few of the topics. He just went back to kindergarten after his February vacation and came to home to tell me they had started to learn about money in class. "We're just learning about pennies, though. Tim and Moby taught me about all the coins."

Even though I would have been content with my one sided love affair (otherwise known as stalking) BrainPOP has actually reached out to me (read about that here.). Recently, they have asked me to do some beta testing of some top secret happenings:). So the other day when I went to my mailbox and got this...

I just assumed it had to do with my top secret and oh - so - important project. But no..... It was a present.

They gave me a tshirt, called me a POPStar and wrote me a lovely letter thanking me for being a loyal and faithful patron. They also told me my top secret directions were forthcoming and I could tell you about it but then I'd have to kill you. Subsequently, the bottom portion of the letter combusted minutes later:)

My son was VERY disappointed the shirt was for Mommy and not him, but Mommy was just impressed with this company that keeps improving their content, making their quizzes more thought provoking, and that has done a wonderful job at integrating gaming took their time to send a Tshirt to a fan....out of nowhere.... Just because they are a good company. I'll keep blogging about them because they are just good people:)

 

 

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Explain Everything App, Primary Sources and YouTube.... A History Techie's Dream

Yeah....February vacation!!!! Although I am going to take it easy and just have fun with my baby girl (the boys had vacation this week.... How sad, right?) I have three school related tasks.

1. Enter professional development into the system.......Ugh! I'm up for renewal this year and in the last three years I have entered zero hours of development yet completed about 300. I also left that folder at school. Guess I'll be bringing the midget for a field trip!

2. Grade my Citizenship Project.... If you can find the time to blog about the project, I guess it's kind of pathetic that I haven't "found" the time to grade them. I tend to be pathetic so I'm okay with it but there is always time for change :)

3. Blog! My last post has received over 800 hits which is just ridiculous in such an awesome way. I had been keeping a list of blogging topics so I'm going to try to carve out the time to write at least two over break

As I have been documenting here, I have really been trying to wrap my head around the Common Core, their role in the middle school, and Social Studies' role in the standards. I tend to throw myself into things, sometimes forsaking others, to try to feel some semblance of mastery. I have continued to use the primary source lesson for Reading Like A Historian, a project of the Stanford History Education Group and continue to love them.

They have obviously seen the potential for major success because they have added content and reworked their web page. We had been learning about the formation of the first political parties with a focus on their founders, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. I had my kids use this great website that appears to be created by a fellow teacher (http://mrkash.com/activities/hamiltonjefferson.html) and they created a really great foldable. We watched the BrainPop video that detailed their differences, played Grudgeball to review and took a quiz that the kids aced. They really understood how different these guys were from each other. After I felt we had established the textbook differences I introduced the Reading Like A Historian's lesson, which included letters of from each of these men to George Washington. Sometimes I feel like the sole thing holding kids back from truly understanding primary sources is just the fear that they won't understand them. I have found a good way to take away this fear using an app called Explain Everything.

Explain Everything is one of those iPad apps that acts as a whiteboard and allows you to screencast. It does cost $2.99 and although there are a lot of free ones out there, this one has the capability for you to screen cast your actual use of a website. I bought this when I needed to create a video tutorial of our online sign up for parent teacher conferences and many of the free ones didn't have the capability for recording my use of a web page. This one does that and a whole lot more. What I wanted to use it for, this time, was basically to create a screen cast of me reading the letters with the appropriate emotion, focus, etc.

1. I went to Google images and got myself a picture of Alexander Hamilton and saved it to my camera roll. (I borrowed the picture from http://mrnussbaum.com/amrevolution/hamilton/)

2. I brought the picture into the Explain Everything app, added the title from the primary source document and simply recorded myself reading.

3. When I was all done I simply exported the video directly to my educational YouTube account.

4. For the kiddos, I created a Google Presentation and embedded these two videos.

I had the kids read these to themselves when they were done with the quiz. When I played them, I gave them the choice of listening or reading along. The point of the lesson is that Hamilton and Jefferson weren't just different. Jefferson was bashing Hamilton all over town and as one of my students said, "Um, Jefferson's kind of a jerk, Mrs. Wilkins." As they were listening to the letters I saw their faces register with understanding. The videos allowed them the freedom to really pay attention to the letters and not stress over them. I had already done this for the Shays' Rebellion lesson as well, so this definitively allowed me to know that attacking primary sources this way was successful.

So....are you trying to integrate more primary source materials into your classroom? Do you have any tips for us early stage Common Corers?

Digital Unit: Citizenship... I Didn't Even Need to Be There

Last year I created this digital unit that the kids absolutely loved. I was totally jazzed to implement it again this year and I was a little disappointed my life took over and I actually had to be out of school for two of the five days of the project. The funny thing is, I had created a digital unit where they would not only create independently but also learn independently. Goal accomplished! They were able to continue on with everything without me even being there.
I needed to teach my kids the basic concepts on citizenship and I had always done a quick worksheet to quickly cover the standard but I always knew I wasn't doing it justice. After a little investigation I was able to create a fun learning experience that gave them room for creativity. Here is a quick look at the project:

1. The kiddos watched a BrainPop on Citizenship and took the quiz. Google and BrainPop have a wonderful relationship which allows children to submit their score to a Google spreadsheet in my account. It's wonderful because it creates a grade book in my Drive account where each quiz taken is a separate tab in a spreadsheet.

2. In order for students to learn who can become a U.S. citizen, I had them play Immigration Nation on iCivics.  In this game students learn the different reasons people can become a U.S. citizen and give students practice on identifying and classifying these reasons.  Students took notes as they played the game.

3. Next the kids had to play Responsibility Launcher at iCivics.  In this game students learned about the things that citizens have to do and the things they should do to make a better country.  Again, they took notes as the played the game.

4. Once they were done gathering information, the kids had to create a presentation that would help people understand the what it means to be a citizen of the United States of America.

In order to do this, kids were given the option of three different digital mediums:
     1. Google Presentation - This is Google's own version of PowerPoint and my kids are masters at it.  The
         benefit is they can share it with me.
     2. Prezi - Prezi is considered a "moving presenter".  I works along the same lines as PowerPoint but
         instead of having multiple slides, you have one work space and you zoom around the space.

     3. GoAnimate - OMG my kids loooooove this.  You type in your dialogue and it creates an animated movie for you.  There is a quick version which just requires you to type dialogue and a full video maker which gives a bit more freedom in design.

For two years now my students have really enjoyed this project and have learned so much.  The games really help the children work with the information and they really loved the creation part.

Check out what they made!!!


Citizen by musicdog on GoAnimate

Animated Presentations - Powered by GoAnimate.

Change is good

Originally posted 1/19/2012 on Weebly
Although I have been teaching the same subject for twelve years, my ADD kicks in constantly and I always feel the need to change how I attack each unit. This doesn't always end in success and many times I've gone back to what I did the year before. Sometimes, though, it really pays off.
Although I have alway been happy with my Bill of Rights unit, I decided to jazz it up a bit this year. I used to give an illustrated explanation of the Bill of Rights but this year I decided to do a foldable. After nine years away from using interactive notebooks, I've decided to launch it again next year. When I first had students keep interactive notebooks all those years ago, foldables hadn't even been imagined. Now Dinah Zike has entire books on foldable activities created especially to fit into notebooks. I've decided to start to integrate notebook activities into my binders this year as practice.







At the end of our discussion on the Bill of Rights, I gave the kiddos a homework assignment that asked them to name the most useless of the amendments and the most important.



When they came in the next day, I had made a grid on the board representing the ten amendments. They were to put a green sticky on the most important amendment and an orange sticky on the one they felt we could live without. I then asked them to tell me what they noticed. In each class, this led to deep conversations mostly concerning the usefulness of the 9th amendment and we continued our discussion on how some of these things seem like nonnegotiables but maybe that's because we have had these freedoms for over two hundred years. My favorite insight was into the lack of stickies for the eighth amendment. One student commented that although that amendment doesn't matter to him because he is fourteen he like knowing it is there just in case he ever needs it:). 





After we finished our discussion, we watched a BrainPop on the Bill of Rights and then this very fun video I found on YouTube.

We were able to just start our next activity where the students created law firms and I present them with various scenarios dealing with the amendments and they need to identify the amendment for each case. For each one they get right they receive $100 Wilkins' dollars.



I'm really glad I tried some new activities this year. I think I have improved the unit!!

Afternote:  The kiddos also love the Student Rights Video on BrainPop.  It really helped them understand that they have rights, but being in a school makes it a little different.