Lately I have been looking at all the wonderful technology we have available to us in Wicomico County. We have so many applications at our disposal, I often wonder if many of us know what wonderful tools we have that will help our students reach higher levels of achievement. With that in mind I have decided to devote a few posts on this blog to sharing and investigating some of the applications available Wicomico County teachers.
Pixie is one of those really cool applications that you may have seen in your Novell window and wondered what is this and how can it help my students. Pixie is a creativity tool that allows students to demonstrate understanding through pictures that they create using the computer. That sounds complicated, but it really isn’t. It is more than using the computer to draw. And it is much easier than you think. Your students will learn it before you do. It is intuitive. You can either have your students do the creating or you can create a learning activity for your students to interact with. Pixie works with students of all ages. It is simple enough for the very young, and yet the older students can take it and run with it.
Pixie is so simple that teachers don’t need to worry about losing instructional time to teaching the program. Students catch on easily and are quickly working, learning the content, or demonstrating understanding.
Tech4learning produces Pixie and also provides wonderful resources on how to use the program as well as a large bank of lesson ideas. Tech4learning also provides the Trading Post where educators can upload templates, lesson plans, and activities to share with other educators. You can download them and use them for free. There is no need to re-invent the wheel. See what other educators are doing with Pixie and try it with your students.
Bonus Features
- Saving Options: You can save your students’ work in common formats such as .jpg which will allow you to use the drawings in other programs such as Word, PowerPoint, Photo Story 3 or Movie Maker. Children love seeing their work displayed. Pixie has a feature that allows you to make a slideshow of the projects with music and transitions.
- Printing: One of the things I really like about Pixie is that it has some really cool printing options. One of the printing options that educators will like is the trading card option. You can have your students do a report on a historical character or book character. Print them as trading cards (9 cards to a sheet) and then jigsaw your class. They can share and trade their cards. They have fun. They share. They learn! Another printing option is the post card. You can have your students research places and create postcards telling about those places. You can print them and make table tents out of them. Use them to group your students.
- ELL: Pixie converts from Spanish to English and visa versa. Great for ELL or foreign language classes.
Lesson Ideas
- Research characters. Make trading cards. This can be adapted to any subject. Have your students reserach a scientist, historical figure, or author.
- Planets: Research, Write, and Illustrate. Put the finished products into a slideshow.
- Poetry: Write and illustrate poetry. Put finished poems into a slideshow with music.
- Angles: Have your students take pictures of things that have angles in them. Insert them into Pixie. Use the drawing tools to identify the angles and tell what type of angle they are.
- Geometry: Have your students take pictures of things and use the drawing tools to identify the geometric shapes.
- All About Me. Have your students create a picture that tells all about them. Print them and display them as an All About Me Quilt.
- Make a Spanish/English dictionary
- ABC Book
- Illustrate open-ended math problems. Show all the ways your students came up with to solve a given problem.
- Illustrate life cycles of animals
- Illustrate food chains
- Create your ideal diet. Put what you eat in a day on a food pyramid.
- Create a postcard from a historical place or a fictional place!
- Book report
- Vocabulary – Word, definition and picture. Put them in a slideshow. Or, print them as trading cards and share for take home study.
If you have tried Pixie, I would love to hear about it. If you want to try Pixie or have questions, I would love to hear that too. Let’s talk about how we can use this wonderful tool to excite our students and increase their comprehension!
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21st Century Skills is another one of those buzz words that seem to be getting thrown around and I wonder how many people using this term have actually given pause to what it means. What are those skills that our children will be needing in the 21st Century? Are they different from the skills we needed to have growing up? The answer to this is yes the children of today do need to learn different skills than we were taught. Their world is vastly different from ours and we cannot teach them using the same strategies and tools. We need to prepare our children for a future that does not exist yet. We need to give them skills to interact in a world that is changing quicker than we can teach. So what are those skills? What should the 21st Century classroom look like?
Today’s children need to be able to:
- Communicate Effectively - So much of today’s world revolves around communication. Texting, e-mailing, and social networking are all forms of communication that our children will need to be able to use in order to be successful.
- Develop, Implement, and Communicate New Ideas - This is a skill that I believe that our children are desperately needing. Many times I see children waiting to have the answers fed to them. They need to be taught how to think for themselves.
- Think Critically - When one uses critical thinking they evaluate or make judgements based on observations, experience and input from others. Thinking critically involves thinking about the evidence, relevance, significance and accuracy of the information. Children need to be taught how to use their brains to make these types of interpretations for themselvses.
- Work Collaboratively – Businesses are finding out that they are more productive when their employees work collaboratively. It is a more efficient use of everyone’s resources and provides opportunities for creative solutions to problems.
- Problem Solve – Higher order thinking process that involves self correction and detailed problem analysis. Students need to learn methods for understanding what the problem is and figuring out ways to solve that problem.
- Application Skills – Students need to know how to apply what they have learned to real world situations. This is where technology really gives you the big bang for your buck! Technology and the increasing number of Web 2.0 applications allow you real world audience, real world opportunities to solve problems, think crictically, work collaboratively, and communicate effectively.
So, ask yourselves are you providing learning opportunities where these skills will be nurtured? Here are some ideas to get you started:
I think the most important thing to remember about 21st century skills is that it is not about the technology. It is about good teaching. Technology is the tool that lends itself to teaching these valuable skills, but good teaching is what makes it stick. If teachers are current and planning meaningful, relevant, engaging lessons then our children will learn the skills they need to be successful in the 21st century and beyond.
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I went to a conference this summer and learned about loads and loads of new and exciting ways to integrate technology meaningfully into daily instruction! I hope to share much of what I learned in the coming months in this newsletter. The first amazing technology integration I want to share with you is really a mix up of different technologies. It’s called a mashup. If you google mashup, you will find a wide array of websites. Some of them might be a bit overwhelming. The idea of a mashup has been around for a long time. On the radio we often hear remakes of songs where two songs have been mashed together to make a new song. The original music video is technically a mashup of video and music. Even educators are not strangers to the mashup. Content area teachers use reading strategies to help students comprehend their subject. Physical education teachers combine writing in their lessons. I have seen teams of teachers combine all their skills and contents to make one amazing culminating event for the students to remember for a lifetime.
According to Wikipedia, digital mashups are when data from two different sources are combined on one web application. In the simplest terms mashups are two or more of anything combined together to make something new. The term can apply to audio, video, art, or anything else you can think of. The mashups, I want to share are these digital mashups. They are valuable web 2.0 tools that allow novice users to create and display information in a meaningful way and share it on the web. They are engaging for the creator and the viewer. This is really cool because you get to hit many technology standards and vsc objectives in one lesson. More bang for your buck. Working smarter not harder. I am sure there are more cliches, but I think you get the idea. Alice Christie gave an awesome presentation where we used a digital camera, a gps device, Google Maps, and flikr to create a virtual trip.
Let’s imagine that you were taking your students to the Salisbury Zoo. Groups of students could pick a theme and as they traveled through the zoo, they would take pictures of things that fit with their theme. Each time they took a picture, they would mark the place they took the picture with the gps. When they got back in the classroom, they would upload the coordinates into Google Maps. They could insert a picture at the corresponding coordinate and write about what the picture was and why it belonged in the theme. Then the trips are saved and shared among the class, so every student gets to revisit the trip from different view points. Students have an authentic audience. They can share their work with anyone anywhere in the world. Many vsc objectives are met and a higher level of learning is achieved. You have provided your students with a meaningful, engaging, rigorous and relevant activity. I have stewed on this all summer and come up with a few ideas of ways mashups might be integrated into your classrooms. Check them out.
- Field Trips
- Botany – Send students out to take pictures of plants, and mark their location with the gps. Upload information to Google Maps. Have students write about the plants and where they were found.
- Entemology – Same as with botany project only with bugs.
- Creative Writing – Take pictures and have students formulate stories about the pictures. Upload the pictures and stories into flickr or Google Maps.
- Literature Trips – Track the travels of the characters in your favorite books on Google Maps. Add pictures and discussion questions along the way.
- Math – Use Planimeter or Pedometer to calculate distances and area in Google Earth.
- Create a timeline on Dipity. Plot locations of events. Add pictures and video. So much fun! It is new and they are adding new variations soon.
I am sure there are more ideas out there. I feel as though I am barely scratching the surface. I would love to hear your ideas on how to use these cool tools.
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