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)

Mrs. McShinsky’s Class & The Clickers

On a recent visit to Alta View Elementary and Mrs. McShinsky’s 6th grade class, her students shared their thoughts with me about their new set of Senteo clickers. (class response systems)

(can you find 5 things that were not in the picture when it was taken?
If not, you may want to look at www.fotoflexer.com)

After a really fun demonstration of how they use the clickers during Math, I asked the students what they liked or disliked the most about the clickers.
Here is a sample of their replies:

What we like:

They’re a lot of fun

• They simplify work.
• Makes doing math and reading faster.
• Clickers help save paper, go green.
• Saves time, do not need to pass out papers.
• Do not need write all of our answers down.
• Students see their scores immediately.
• The teacher can print off a report telling what kids got right, so it saved correcting time and gives us more time with our teacher.
• Takes off the pressure. When the teacher looks at the results, she can see what we did wrong and figure out a way to help us.

(Do you know why this picture is so puzzling?
If not, you may want to look at www.picnik.com)

What we do not like:
We have to share them with other classes.

Mrs. McShinsky finds ready-made lessons and tests online that are aligned to the Utah core curriculum. She spends less time spent on creating lessons, writing quizzes, and grading paper, and more time on interacting with students.

And best of all,students want to improve their scores. They willingly ask for help on problems they missed so that they can score higher on a redo test. Kudos to Mrs. McShinsky and her class for diving right in there with the clickers and finding wonderful ways to use them.

Check out Mrs. McShinsky’s blog on the right hand side of this page. You will find more great ideas from her there.


A math joke for your class:
Five out of four people are bad with fractions.