Friday, Feb. 24

Hello,

I have been out yesterday and today because of an illness, but will be back on Monday. The students have started their new project on energy this week. They were in the computer lab on Wednesday and today. The groups set up their voicethreads accounts and will be ready to start putting images on it and recording their information on Monday. I wanted them to get a really good start on their research before they got started on the voicethread. This is a new computer tool for them, but is similar to Photo Story that they used for the last project. It is very user friendly and can still be accessed from home, so if someone is absent or needs more time, they can work from home. Voicethreads use images that the students find about their topic and then they record what they want to tell us about those images. The difference between this and Photo Story is that students can doodle on their images to point out specific areas, if needed, and there is no background music available. It is a very fun way to do a project, too. I hope that they like it as much as they did the Photo Story. Well, that is about it for this week. I wanted to get on here and let everyone know what was going on, even though I could not be at school. I will talk to you next week! Have a good weekend!

Monday, February 13

Good Monday morning!

Well, we have finished up the rocks/minerals projects and are viewing the last of them today. I have a few activities I want the students to complete using rocks and minerals and then we will be completely done with this topic. Once those are done, we are going to start our energy project. We will use a new computer tool called a voice thread for this project. It is a tool that can be accessed from home, so students can work from home, if they need to. The only part of a voice thread that needs to be addressed, if a student is going to use it at home, is that they need a headset with a microphone attached. They will be recording their voices again and putting in images to show their part of the project. I will give the directions, when we get to that point. There are four weeks left in this grading period. The last week of the grading period is when I will collect all the labs for extra credit. I will give them the list on Monday and they will be due on Wednesday. I always give the students two days to put them all together. After that, we have one more nine weeks grading period left to this school year. I can't believe how time is flying by us. Even the students have mentioned that this school year is going by so fast. Have a great week and I will talk to you soon.

Thursday, February 2

Today will be the second day for being in the computer lab and working on the rocks/minerals wiki projects. According to the note from my sub yesterday, the students had some trouble getting on the wiki yesterday, but we got it all straightened out today. They will be typing on their wiki pages today. We will be working on these projects Monday and Tuesday of next week, too, then start the presentations on Wednesday. That is our goal, anyway. I may have to adjust it, depending on how the research goes. I have a hands-on lab planned for the students, too, after their presentations, that should be interesting for them. They will have all the background information they need for the lab from the projects.

I still have some of the vocabulary words to cover with them, so we will be picking up those tomorrow and every Friday until they are all completed. If you remember, there was a 6th grade Science terms list that I was to cover with the students throughout the entire year.

Have a good weekend. Talk to you next week.