BookNerd&CatLady

This year my district decided to have 4th-6th-grade specials every other day for 10 weeks. Well, this is great if I was actually in the district every other day. I'm not and I haven't been. For the past five years, my shared position has been cycle days "2,3,5" which has worked great up until this year.  With the change this year a different teacher (the technology and woodshop teacher to be exact) has been "teaching" my classes on the days I'm not there.  To help with this I implemented Google Classroom this year to be able to teach to my students when I'm not in the district. This has made things both very complicated and difficult, to say the least. Not only am I trying to get through the difficult tasks of teaching databases, research skills, media literacy and more I now have to rely on someone else to "hopefully" do the same. It has been a horrible schedule and hopefully, it'll be fixed for next year. However, Google Classroom a

One of the hottest topics in today's society. Is it real or is it fake news? News literacy has become one of those topics that need to be taught in order for students to succeed well. Is everything you see on the internet real? No, but not everyone believes that some people truly believe that "everything" they see online is real. I have the argument with my father on a weekly basis- many times when we talk he'll start the conversation with "did you see what was on Yahoo this week?" My response almost every time- "No, dad- I don't use Yahoo." Many of my teachers in school have the students complete articles of the week or the month and we are sure to show them reputable news sites or databases that they can use. The science teacher that works collaboratively with me throughout the year has started to have her students use Today's Science database so that they are pulling real and reputable articles about science. It is important to have st

Beautiful.AI is a product I've never heard of before. I chose to look at this product to see what it is all about. I created a brief presentation about the Dr. Seuss Birthday Bash that we do each year in my district to go along with Read Across America. Here is the link to the presentation:  Dr. Seuss Birthday Bash I found Beautiful. AI to be similar to powerpoint and Google Slides but so much easier to use! I like how it automatically changes for you and switches around the format to suit the needs of the presentation. I think that this would be a great tool to use with younger students when also introducing them to basic presentations as it will do a lot for them and they are able to just still make choices for coloring. One thing that many students struggle with is choosing a color for their slides that will go along with the theme of their projects. It is important for the students to not only have creative freedom but for the slides to still look professional with this pro

I always struggle with running formative assessments. I have no problem giving the "test" at the end but checking along the way has always been a challenge. So I decided to try out Thing 18 and see what is out there to help me along the way :-) I have used Padlet in the past as a bulletin board or introduction board with classes-but never as a formative assessment so it was interesting to me to see that it could, in fact, be used that way. I then tried AnswerGarden. I sent out a test garden to the librarians in my region asking them for their favorite authors.  Demo with librarians I'm awaiting replies as I type, it looks pretty cool once there are a lot of answers plugged in. The more people with the same answer the larger the words are in the cloud. I like this because it will be helpful to show who has similar likes for projects.  I'm hopeful to see how it turns out with librarians before implementing it into one of my classrooms. I have a few ideas of how I

I decided to try Thing 4 out first this year. The video to start out Thing 4 really blew my mind! More people own a mobile device than a toothbrush! EWW! Over 50% of our population is younger than 30- that is a scary thought! Granted I am just over that threshold but that is a huge realization that more than half of the people in the world are under 30. Technology is a huge part of their lives and how they interact. The other statistic that blew me away was the one about their sense of smell. 53% of Millenials would rather lose their sense of smell than their technology. This is huge if a person would rather not be able to smell. With the ever-changing world of technology, our attention span is also decreasing. We currently have a smaller attention span than a goldfish! How is a person supposed to work/ go to school or anything if they can only keep their attention for 7 seconds? That is definitely not long enough to do much of anything.   This is a huge problem today (in my opinion),