Taking Technology Into the Garden

How Ya Peelin’?
Taking Technology Into the Garden at Warren


Kindergarten, First and Second Graders have a special flair for demonstrating feelings. After being introduced to a specific color of our garden, pairs of students chose a vegetable to portray a facial expression of emotion. After discussing with their partner a particular emotion they wanted to work with, happy, sad, frustrated, surprised, and scared were some of the emotions they created on their vegetable using black-eyed peas and toothpicks. Students then wrote a list poem explaining how one feels when expressing that emotion.

Once faces and poems were completed, Blabberize, a free online program, turned those veggie faces and poems into an animated, talking, feeling video. Mrs. Powell, our music teacher, helped each class prepare a song about feelings. Students enjoyed choosing the transitions to use between Blabberized videos and digital photos to complete this project using Windows Movie Maker.

While the movie was being processed, Mrs. Brown read, How Are You Peeling?, by Saxton Freymann to eager listeners and viewers. They were surprised to see that the veggie faces they created were as ‘emotionally charged’ as what the book portrayed. After viewing the movie, teachers were already expressing other ways they were ready to use Blabberize and Windows Movie Maker with their classes. So….I guess we’re peelin’ pretty good about how technology was integrated into our academic day!

If you’re happy and you know it, click this link…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqsyHfLXoKQ

Our Hopes and Dreams

Many students and teachers in our elementary schools participate in an assignment where they have to share a hope or dream they have for the new school year. This year, we created a Voicethread so that we could share these hopes and dreams across the district. It is not too late to participate and we hope that we can collect some comments from other schools across the country as well. Let's work together and see how many hopes and dreams we can collect! If you already have a Voicethread account, you can leave a comment right from this blog post. Teachers, staff, students, and family members (from around the world) are welcome to participate!

Welcome Back!

This is going to be a fantastic school year filled with 21st century learning! Our first 2 professional development days were a great success. It is amazing that we have such a talented staff that is willing to share, collaborate and learn from one another. This blog will continue to showcase all of the hard work of our teachers and students.

The best way to learn from each other is to share what we know. So please use the comment tool on this blog to communicate with your fellow teachers.

Please be sure to check out our SlideRocket presentation from our PD days and don't forget to check out our RSD6EdTech Wiki for any resources and information from those PD days. If you have not already done so, here is a link to the evaluation sheet. Your feedback is very important to us!