Mrs. Mackay 's Class Personal Narratives

I have had a lot of fun working at Altara Elementary with Mrs. Mackay's 6th grade class on writing projects. Each student in the class wrote a personal narrative in a program called Pages. Pages is one of the three programs in the iWorks suite. The students had fun choosing a template. There are so many beautiful looking templates, it was hard for some kids to choose.
We then printed out the narratives on white cardstock and bound them into a book using the Cerlox binder. the book looked great!

The next week we recorded the narratives in GarageBand. The students burned two CD's. One to take home and another to tape to the back of their personal narrative in the book. The book will be kept in the classroom. Students will be able to listen to their peers' narratives whenever they have free time.



Mrs. Mackay said that her students were so excited to do this project. They liked writing the story in Pages. The loved recording their narrative. They were super excited to be able to take a CD home for their family to listen to their project.

Mrs. Mackay has a wonderful group of students. I enjoy working with students who are so energetic, nice, and respectful. Great job Mrs. Mackay's 6th Grade Class!

Willow Canyon 4th Grade Podcast

Recently I had spent time with Mrs. Morrison and her 4th grade class working on a podcast about the history of Utah. Mrs. Morrison is so willing to integrate technology into her curriculum, and her students are amazingly quick learners. We had some technical problems, however everybody just rolled with the punches, worked through the issues, and came out on the other side intact and excited!

Mrs. Morrison began by creating a general script for the podcast, and each student was given a part. When I arrived at her class, everybody was ready to learn how to record their script using GarageBand. After a 25 minute lesson on how to use the software, each student was given a headset, and the began recording their script.
As students practiced their scripts, they realized that we all use little idiosyncracies in our speech patterns such as “um” , “uhh” and so on. They kept re-recording their parts and working on making their recordings sound natural. Soon the class felt they were ready to record the final version.

Mrs. Morrison had the students record their script in a quiet room. It only took about 30 minutes to record the entire class. The students had their script with them as they recorded, however they had practiced so much that they focused on sounding natural, and most students required only one take. Recording the final take was the easiest part of all because the students we so prepared. What a phenomenal class!

The next step was to the edit images that Mrs. Morrison and I had collected. The students edited the images in a free online editing site called Picnik. (Side note: Another good free online editing site is Fotoflexer.com) Lastly, Mrs Morrison inserted the edited images into the enhanced podcast track of GarageBand and saved the project as a podcast. The class watched the podcast on their big screen. It was exciting to see how everything came together at last.

Due to a couple of computer glitches and technical server issues, Mrs. Morrison and I decided to upload the podcast to the T4 server. Because the T4 team uses a podcast template, I imported the podcast track into iMovieHD, added some transitions and text as well as the T4 Tips Podcast logo. The podcast can be found on the T4 website. Just click on T4 Tips Podcasts.


A big shout out to Mrs. Morrison and her class for all their hard work. I thoroughly enjoyed each student. They were extremely courteous, hard workers, and a lot of fun!

JOKE FOR YOUR CLASS:
How did the farmer fix his jeans?
With a cabbage patch. (hee, hee)