End of Year Technology Survey for May 2011

School is officially out for the summer and my classroom is closed. Before the kids left for vacation, however, I had them participate in a survey about the technology we used in our classroom this year. I wanted to know how they felt about the projects and websites we used. To administer the survey I created a Google Form, which I embedded in our class wiki. Read about our survey and the projects they liked and did not like by visiting my blog, Day In the Classroom.  You can find it at http://dayintheclassroom.edublogs.org/.

Our New Class Photo

This is our new class photo.  I know we look a little different than we did in our previous pictures.  These are our Avatars, and we created them on the cartooning website, Bit Strips for Schools.  We are using it in connection with our Being a Writer curriculum.

The unit we are working on now is called, “Functional Writing” and it focuses on the everyday ways we use writing in the real world.  This includes, among other things, writing directions, recipes, and cartooning.  I wish I would have gotten started earlier with it, because we are having a lot of fun.

I had used the website Toondoo to create cartoons for my blogs, but I remembered seeing some cartoons that Aviva Dunsinger’s  students had created, (@Grade1 on Twitter), so I asked her about it.  She recommended Bit Strips for Schools.

I like the fact that I was able to set up a class account for my students.  This enables me to more closely monitor the content they are creating and are exposed to.  The added bonus is that this website has ready-made assignments for students that you can use.  The first assignment is to create an Avatar, and then create a comic strip with your avatar as the main character.

We are having a lot of fun!  We will be embedding these on our Kidblogs when we’re done.  We will also be drawing our own cartoons this week.
This is a great way to end the school year!

This is a duplicate of a post from my blog Day In the Classroom.  Don’t forget to visit this blog to see some of the things we did during the 2010-2011 school year.