Our students are spending time learning the parts of a water cycle. Jenny shared the Study Jams video on the water cycle. As you may begin to notice, we collaborate and share our goodies a lot! I’m not sure what I would do without her. This video did a great job of describing the parts of the water cycle. I loved having the students watch the video independently on the chromebooks. They were able to go back and rewatch parts they were confused about or pause in order to jot down notes. This group of students tends to struggle to remain engaged in whole class lessons. The simple act of holding the video in their hands, and listening to it on the own personal headphones really supports the engagement. If you have the opportunity, check out your iPads, or computers to watch your next video. I bet you’ll see an improvement in their engagement and comprehension of the content. Today we started learning about the water cycle. Not too long ago, I came across a great resource for science…… It’s Scholastic Study Jams. Have you ever heard of them? If not, you’re missing out! I love these videos so much more than BrainPop because they seem less corny and much more informative (in my opinion). My students would agree! Click here for the video I showed my kids. As Elizabeth mentioned in a previous post, our school is lucky enough to have 1:1 iPads, but also be piloting the ChromeBooks. Sadley the Study Jams don’t work on the tablet, so I have just showed the videos whole class in the past. This time, I checked out the Chromebooks, so the students could individually watch the video. This was great because during the video the students needed to record notes about each of the stages and then they had to complete a “Water Cycle Diagram.” Student could watch the video as many times as they needed and/or pause to jot down notes. This assignment was shared with students through Google Classroom. How did we ever teach without Google Classroom?! With just a few clicks I can instantly have copies of a document for each student, that already has their name on it AND I don’t have to carry the papers around in my teacher bag! It’s been a lifesaver. Anyway, the “Water Cycle Diagram” was created in Google Drawing. Elizabeth and I were looking for a way to use Google Drawing in the classroom and while researching Google Apps for Education we came across a blog that talked about using Google Drawing to create a venn diagram and students arranged the ideas accordingly. So, Elizabeth was so kind enough to create this diagram below for students to identify the parts of the water cycle. All they needed to do was move the text boxes at the bottom to the appropriate place in the picture. Given that this was the first time students were using this type of document, most did well. I did need to explicitly teach them how to move the text boxes and not adjust the text boxes. They needed to hover the cursor over the text box until it show the 2 perpendicular arrows. See example below: This is an example of the diagram each student was assigned. I enjoyed using this Google feature and I am still left wondering what ways we can use Google Drawing in the classroom in a very purposeful way.
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AuthorMy name is Elizabeth, I am a mother of 3 boys, and a 4th grade teacher of Math and Science. I teach at 1 to 1 Chromebook school and love to innovate in order to reach my students. Archives
November 2017
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