Tag Archives: google docs

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Let’s All Connect for LitWorld’s World Read Aloud Day 2016

It’s time for us all to start making plans and building excitement for Litworld‘s World Read Aloud Day 2016.  This year, World Read Aloud Day takes place on February 24, 2016, but many of us will celebrate the entire week of February 22-26 and into the next week for Read Across America.  We also have an exciting addition this year called the “7 strengths” of reading aloud, which will give us an opportunity to connect our voices leading up to the official World Read Aloud Day.

WRAD map

World Read Aloud Day “calls global attention to the importance of reading aloud and sharing stories.”  When we connect our students through Skype, Google Hangouts, or other web tools, they experience the power of the read aloud and realize that they are connected with a bigger world that is both the same and different from them.

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Shannon McClintock Miller and I invite you to start posting your schedules on our shared Google Doc.

WRAD 16 Doc

http://tinyurl.com/wrad16

When you share your schedule, be sure to include:

  • Your name
  • Your contact info such as social media, Skype, and/or email
  • Your role
  • Your school and grade levels
  • Your location
  • List your time zone when posting your available dates and times

After you post your own schedule, take a look at the other schedules and sign up on someone’s schedule to connect your students.  We’ve found that it doesn’t matter if same grade levels connect with one another. Often times, an older grade can read aloud to a younger grade or younger grades can find parts of a books that they can read aloud to an older grade.  There’s not just one way to connect.  Part of the fun is meeting new friends, planning your read alouds, and seeing what magical things happen during your connection that you weren’t even expecting.

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We have many ideas from previous years on our blogs.  You can read more about World Read Aloud Day 2015 on Expect the Miraculous and The Library Voice.  Litworld also has several resources for you to use in your planning and connections including:

Litworld WRAD16

Each week leading up to World Read Aloud Day, we will be focusing on one of the 7 strengths of reading aloud.  Wouldn’t it be fun to hear voices from around the world reflecting on these strengths as we await our real-time connections?  We’ve made a series of Flipgrids that anyone can add to.  We hope you will all will reflect on these questions with your students, teachers, and families and have them all respond on a Flipgrid.  All you need is a computer with a webcam or a free app on a tablet.  We’ll be sharing more posts about these strengths and questions later, but for now, here is a list of the strengths and the links to the Flipgrids.

LitWorld 7 StrengthsWe have an opportunity now more than ever before to connect our voices around the world leading up to World Read Aloud Day and throughout WRAD week.  We hope you will take advantage of all of these tools to show our students and the world that reading aloud makes us strong and connected.  Please let us know if you have any questions along the way.  Happy connecting!

Andy Plemmons @plemmonsa

Shannon McClintock Miller @shannonmmiller 

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Let’s Make Our Mark and See Where It Goes for Dot Day 2015

How do you and your students want to make your mark on the world this school year?  International Dot Day, which is September 15ish, is the perfect time to make connections with other schools, spark creativity and collaboration, and see where it takes you for the rest of the year.  Whether you’ve celebrated Dot Day from its beginnings or you are just getting started, we invite you to get creative with your students and share that creativity with the world.

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From the official page:
“International Dot Day, a global celebration of creativity, courage and collaboration, began when teacher Terry Shay introduced his classroom to Peter H. Reynolds’ book The Dot on September 15, 2009.The Dot is the story of a caring teacher who dares a doubting student to trust in her own abilities by being brave enough to “make her mark”. What begins with a small dot on a piece of paper becomes a breakthrough in confidence and courage, igniting a journey of self-discovery and sharing, which has gone on to inspire countless children and adults around the globe.”

There’s no “right” way to celebrate Dot Day.  In fact, every year people around the globe come up with new and creative ways to make dots and connect with others.  That’s the magic of this special day.

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What happens during a Dot Day connection?
Often, we start by reading The Dot by Peter Reynolds or other dot-inspired books such as Press Here by Herve Tullet.  This is done via Skype or Google Hangouts with a connecting class. We begin to connect the dots with one another by learning a bit about one another.  Sometimes we create something together.  For example, last year students in Barrow Elementary made collaborative digital dots with connecting schools via Google Drawing.

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If you need some ideas to get started, consider taking a look at Matthew Winner’s past lessons or check out what others have posted in the Dot Day gallery.

Shannon Miller and John Schu’s Dot Day video is always an inspiration.

Also, check out the Celebridots page for dots created by some of your favorite authors and illustrators.

Many times connecting schools send some of their creations to one another through traditional mail.

How to get started

  1. Register your school on the official Dot Day page.  You’ll be added to the global map as well as gain access to the educator guide which is packed with information
  2.  Visit our shared Google Doc to start making connections with other schools.  We plan to make connections during the whole week of September 14-18.  Simply post your schedule, ideas, and contact information. Then, browse the doc for other schedules that match yours.  Skype in the Classroom is also a great place to make connections.
  3.  Start collaborating with your connecting schools and get ready to make your mark with your students.

Part of making your mark on the world is getting your students’ voices and creations out into the world.  As you connect, share your creations on Twitter using #DotDay and #Makeyourmark  Consider creating a blog post to show your students’ work to the world.

Now, make your mark and see where it takes you.

tinyurl.com/dotday15

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2015 Student Book Budgets: First Steps

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We are a little late this year, but our student book budget group has finally started.  Each year, I reserve a portion of our library funding and allow students to make the decisions about how that money is spent.  This is more than just having a wish list for students to contribute to.  This is giving them complete control in every part of the decision making process.

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Each year, the groups are chosen in different ways.  This year, I made a video to show to our 4th and 5th graders to explain the project.

Then, I created a Google form that was shared with all of our 4th and 5th graders to tell why they would want to be in the student book budget group.

Aziz Coleman, 4th grade teacher, really wanted his ELT group of 12 fourth graders to be a part of the project, so all of them filled out the form along with about 30 other students.  After reading through the responses, it really seemed like everyone who signed up was genuinely interested in being in the project, so I took them all!

I created a schedule for our meetings along with a timeline of where we are going.  Over the years, I’ve fine tuned the steps that we go through, but student voice and student choice always stays at the center of what we do.

During our 1st two days together, we have focused on creating our survey about reading interests.  I made a contact group with all of the students in my gmail.  That makes it easy for me to invite the entire group as collaborators on docs that we use.  I made 2 docs.  One was a brainstorm doc for us to brainstorm possible things to ask about on the survey.  I thought it would be easier to brainstorm on a doc rather than try to do it all on the Google form.

It was amazing to see so many students working together toward one common cause.

After some brainstorming started, I gave them editing rights to our 2nd doc which was our Google form survey.  We made a copy of last year’s form, and then started using our brainstorming list to make changes.

This was the 1st time I’ve tried collaborating on the Google form.  Usually we just put it up on the board and work together whole group.  I liked seeing every student involved at once, but it was definitely messy.

I checked in with students periodically and gave them some focus.  At times, we broke the tasks up into groups.  For example, one group worked on fine tuning the brainstorm list.  Another group added questions to the survey.  Another group looked carefully at the checklist on the survey to see what needed to be added or changed.

Students worked during their recess, extended learning time, and even left to get lunch and come back.  They were excited and very focused.  There were a few students who started getting off task, so I offered that they might want to go back to recess if they felt like they had contributed their part for the day.  This was totally in their hands, and some of them took me up on the offer.

We are now in the survey process. We want to survey students at every grade level.  We will email the survey to our 3rd-5th graders since they all have a computer and we will use iPads to survey the lower grades.

 

Click here to view this year’s survey.

Since our meeting time is during a prime lunch time, we have been taking over the lunchroom with iPads to survey students.

Once we have results from the survey we will set goals based on those results and start meeting with our vendors such as Capstone and Avid Bookshop.

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Keeping Project Momentum When the Schedule Gets in the Way: One Use of Google Hangouts

Barrow Peace Prize Criteria Google Docs

Our 2nd grade is deep into their project on six people from Black History.  Most classes are finishing up their research for our Barrow Peace Prize Flipgrid project.  Before students begin the writing process, we want them to understand what the Nobel Peace Prize is and consider the character traits that someone might have who receives this award.  Every class needs the exact same lesson, but they need the lesson before students can really move forward with their writing.  Sometimes the library schedule can get in the way of these kinds of projects.  I don’t want the library schedule to cause a project to be delayed simply because we can’t fit everyone into 30 minute slots across a day or two.  This is the perfect time to use technology to maximize our time.

For the 2nd time, I did a Google hangout with an entire grade level in order to save time.  Before the hangout, I setup a Google Hangout on Air and sent the participation link to all of the teachers via email.  I also created a Google doc where we could do some brainstorming and invited all four of the 2nd grade teachers to be collaborators.  I made sure that the link to the doc was “view only” for anyone else with the link.

Before the hangout started, I opened the hangout, turned on my cam, and muted my microphone.  As the four classes joined, I could easily hear if their microphone and video was working or not.  Then, I could use the control room tool to mute each teacher’s microphone while we waited on all classes to join.  Periodically, I came back on the microphone to update the classes who were waiting and remind teachers to open our shared Google doc.

The purpose of the hangout was to help 2nd graders get familiar with Alfred Nobel and the Nobel Peace Prize as well as to develop a list of characteristics for our own Barrow Peace Prize.  After a quick intro, I read the book Alfred Nobel: The Man Behind the Peace Prize by Kathy-jo Wargin and illustrated by Zachary Pullen.  Then, I told the students just a bit about Malala Yousafzai, the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.  We watched just the beginning of a CNN video of her acceptance.

Then, I invited each class to look a the shared Google doc and brainstorm the qualities that we hoped would represent the Barrow Peace Prize.  I muted all microphones while classes discussed and added to the doc.  While that was happening, I shared the viewable link to the doc on Twitter so that an audience could watch the list be constructed.

We immediately had multiple viewers of our work in progress.

Each class had an opportunity to step the microphone and share just a bit of what they discussed.  I was in charge of calling on each classroom and muting and unmuting each teacher’s microphone.

Finally, I closed by reminding students to use their research as well as the character trait list when writing their piece about their person from Black History.

What would have taken 3-4 hours on the library calendar took only 30 minutes and now the 2nd grade can move forward with the writing process.  I want to check in with the 2nd grade teachers to see how things felt on the other side of the camera, but from my side, this seemed like a great model for whole grade lessons that lend themselves to a hangout.  I certainly wouldn’t want all lessons to be like this one, but this format felt right for this situation.

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List Poetry Google Hangout with 2nd Grade

list poems (1)During a collaborative planning meeting at the beginning of the quarter, 2nd grade all wanted to come to the library to learn about list poetry.  We love to use the book Falling Down the Page: A Book of List Poems edited by Georgia Heard.  We had a problem, though.  It was hard to find a time on the calendar for each of the 4 classes to come.  Rather than only serve a few of the classes or abandoning the project all together, I suggested that we use a Google Hangout to bring us all together for the same lesson and that we collaborate with one another on a Google Doc.

This was a perfect solution because it really served multiple purposes.  All of these teachers were able to experience a Google Hangout for the first time.  The students all heard the same information from me.  All of the students saw how multiple people can collaborate on a Google doc without erasing one another’s work.  It created more time on the library calendar for more classes to come for other projects rather than one project taking up 4 hour-long slots.

Yesterday, the teachers and I practiced after school for about 10 minutes.  I’m glad we did this because it allowed me to work on some issues with sharing the hangout with them.  I found that emailing teachers the link to join the hangout was much easier than inviting them via their Google Plus.  We also had to install the Google Hangout plugin on all of their projectors.  This didn’t take long, but it was much better to do without a group of students waiting.

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Today, I sent out the link to the hangout.  I also emailed the link to the shared Google doc so that teachers could have it pulled up on their screens.  Mrs. Yawn’s class came to the library since they have a longterm sub.  The other 3 classes tuned in from their own rooms.  As the creator of the hangout, I had the hangout controls pulled up so that I could mute all microphones.  This eliminates feedback from the projector speakers.  If a class needs to speak, I (or even the teacher) can unmute the microphone.  We could also communicate with one another via the chat.

I did a short mini lesson for all of the classrooms.  I talked about the kinds of lists that we all make and how those can turn into poems with just a few added adjectives.  I read Jane Yolen’s “In My Desk”.  Then, I muted my microphone, shared my screen, and we all started writing lines to a new list poem called “Under My Bed”.

List Poem by 2nd Grade Google Drive

I shared the link to the document on Twitter, and we instantly had viewers watching our poem develop.  This created a great discussion about how quickly something that is posted on the Internet can be seen because we literally had 8 viewers the second that I pressed “tweet”.  Many more viewers came in and out of the document while we worked.  The kids really liked knowing that they had an audience watching their poem come to life.

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The students also loved watching the lines magically appear on the screen from all of the classrooms.

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At the end, I called us all back together and read the poem aloud.  It was amazing to hear how creative their lines were!  To close, I invited students to spend some time in their classrooms revising the poem.  There were several lines that were very similar so it was a natural follow-up to spend time deleting or combining lines.

Many students seemed interested in writing this kind of poetry in for our media center poetry contest.  Students have 2 more weeks to submit a poem.  I’m sure I’ll be reading several more list poems in the future.  Here is our poem as it looked at the end of our hangout:

 

Foam Letter U letter N Vintage Sticker Letter D letter E R

 Vintage Sticker Letter M letter Y

Britten Shopping Centreletter EFret Saw Letter D

Under my bed

you will find…

 

Three old pacifiers from when we were babies.

Two pairs of stinky, dirty socks from my last soccer game.

A box of last years Christmas wrapping paper.

Last night’s dinner that I didn’t like.

My little brother.

A pair of destroyed Jordan’s.

My shiny diamond.

A toy skeleton that I bought last year for school.

Old, yucky trash.

A little brown shoebox with really old seashells.

My tiny puppy.

A Kidz Bop 25 CD.

Motorcycles, cars, crayons, American Girl Dolls, and stuffed animals.

A peach, toy train track,

Hidden laundry like dirty jeans and shirts.

New, blue jewelry I just bought.

Cheetah printed sneakers.

A very old picture of a dog I drew.

Old chewing gum.

Brown Pokemon cards covered in dust.

moldy, blue  roller skates that don’t fit anymore

thousands of stuffed animals that belong to my dog

three feathery pillows that my dog chewed up

a beach ball that popped on a pointy shell at the beach

old shark teeth that are at least 500 years old

nasty, dead cockroaches smooched onto the floor

old baseball cards

five old socks, moldy carrots and clementines, and an old water bottle

muddy shoes from playing outside on the last rainy day

a scratched torn up bookbag that my cat ripped apart

a wrinkly gum wrapper

the teeth that I lost in kindergarten

some thank you cards I was supposed to send to my relatives last year

lots of old baby toys

big mushy bags of clothes I don’t wear anymore

crumply old pieces of paper

red and white basketballs

a black old tissue box

a humongous collection of cars

posters of basketball and soccer players

a nerf gun

the toon collection of children’s comics

a blue light-up yo-yo

a cow stuffed animal

pizza leftover from my sleepover

a huge broken clock

two bags of books

canvas travel bags

two huge blood shot eyes

old notebooks

a big fluffy stuffed animal

old scratched CDs

toys in a tank

a big fluffy gray cat

an annoying brother

old baby suitcases

books that I didn’t even know I had

crumbs from a cookie

dead cockroaches waiting for a pet to eat

an old collection of cricket heads

 

It’s amazing to discover

what’s under my bed

 

 

 

 

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#GeniusCon: Topic Selection and Question Development

question development (9)We’ve been having so much fun participating in #GeniusCon.  Haven’t heard of #GeniusCon? Visit this archived webinar to learn more and read the post about our first steps.

After students left the library for our kickoff session, they spent time in class reflecting on our chalk talk, writing in their notebooks, and fine tuning their topics.  Today, they came to the library with their topics ready to work on question development.

We started with an overview of what happened since our last session.  I shared tweets from Sherry Gick, Matthew Winner, Peter Reynolds, and more.  I also told them how their work had been featured in the #GeniusCon webinar.  Their eyes lit up knowing that their work was already making a difference!

I framed our session for the day by talking about how questions help us think about what we need to know about our topics in order to focus our research.  We did a practice session asking questions about a topic that I could do for #Geniuscon:  Teaching all of my lessons from home.   At the moment, I’m not really doing this topic, but I wanted to choose something that might raise some eyebrows, and it really did!  Students began asking questions about my topic, but as we progressed they started to ask questions like “how would you feel if you didn’t see us anymore?” and “what if we needed help with something in the library?” and “Wouldn’t you miss being here?”.  This topic did exactly what I wanted because it allowed us to have a conversation about our chosen topics.  I told them that it wasn’t our jobs to tell one another that our topics aren’t possible, that they’re wrong, or that we need to pick a different topic.  Our job is to push one another’s thinking through questions and to support one another even if it means we disagree with topic choice or we feel personally that a topic is “impossible”.

We spent a bit more time brainstorming questions for my topic with partners.  Here are a few questions that they came up with:

  • What lessons should I teach?

  • Do I know anyone that will be interested in learning from home?

  • How will I do it?

  • How many students will I have?

  • How many lessons from home can I teach?

  • What happens if someone needs help checking out and I’m not here?

  • Why would I want to do this?

  • How would people know how to connect with me?

  • What if the Internet doesn’t work?

Next, students logged into their Google Drive and created a document with their topic listed at the top.  Then, they started a bullet list and began adding their own questions.  After all students were set with their doc ready, we began passing the laptops around the circle and asking one another questions.  Students looked at the topic at the top and read the question already generated.  Then, they thought of what questions they would add to the list for the researcher to consider.  I’ll admit that this part was difficult.  Even with our lively opening, students had a hard time generating questions.  Several adults had individual conversations with students to support their question development.  These conversations were critical.  At different times we had me (the media specialist), the classroom teacher, a gifted teacher, a tech integration specialist, and and early intervention teacher supporting students.  Here are a few topics with the questions generated.

Taking Tablets Home:

  • can we for a week?

  • or for month?

  • what happens if you break it?

  • What do students do if they don’t know how to use it?

  • what happen’s if somone needes one at school and you forget it at home?

  • how long?

  • what if people don’t have internet at home?

 

More Playground Equipment:

  • what equipment should we get?

  • how much equipment?

  • what   kind?

  • what if there’s not enough space?

  • isn’t it expensive?

  • why do you wont to change the playground?

  • will we be kind on it?

  • is the play ground equipment safe?

  • who would pay for it?

At our closing, students got their own computers back, read their questions, and shared their documents with me.  I told them that it was ok if they didn’t understand a question or if they even disagreed with a question.  We closed by once again asking “Why are we asking questions and not jumping into answers?”  We framed the idea of thinking about what we need to research.  Next, we will spend some time developing a research plan.  We’ll brainstorm where we need to look for answers and begin our search for answers.

 

 

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Student Book Budgets 2012-2013 (Part 2)

The lists are done and the orders are placed!  Twenty-seven 3rd-5th graders have worked very hard during their lunch time for the past week to create lists of books that are grounded in the results of their school-wide reading interest survey data.  Rather than type everything out here, I’ve made a screencast that shows you the survey, the data, the focus categories, and the final lists.  I invite you to listen:

I’m very proud of these students.  Although, doing this during lunch across multiple times and groups of students was literally and figuratively very messy, I liked the overall results.  As always, some amazing moments happened along the way like:

  •  A student standing up and telling the whole group not to think of themselves.  That they needed to keep in mind all of the students of the school.
  • A male student taking a stand for princess books being on the list because he personally heard from multiple students who desperately wanted more of those books in the library.
  • A group of 3 fifth graders debating whether or not to cut a graphic novel off of the list because it cost $26.00.  They talked for 15 minutes just about that one book.  They read reviews, considered popularity, examined quality, and checked circulation statistics for other books in that series.  (They decided to keep it on the list!)
  • Several students repeatedly went into Destiny to search for how many books we had in particular categories, which books were lost in a particular series, and how many copies we had of certain books like Wimpy Kid.

I’m thankful for Capstone Rewards, too, because I helped out some of our tough decisions by using $500 of free book credit to bump up our budget from $1200 to $1700.  Even with that bump, some very tough decisions were made to cut books that would have been equally as popular.  I look forward to seeing what this group comes up with to market these books to the school and how fast they get checked out!