Learning in Progress

By now, my kindergarteners and first graders are old pros at library centers.  Despite the increasing complexity of what they're doing, when I stop by their centers to give them brief instructions, I usually get comments like "We already know what to do!" and "Don't worry, we've got this!".  I've kept some of the activities fairly consistent, and have tried to add in a few new activities, especially in the Computer and Words center to mix things up for them. As with previous rounds of centers , students rotate through a series of six centers, completing a different center each week with their assigned group.  This way I know that they have likely had a chance to practice the skills at each of the centers in the six week rotation.  Each of the centers connect to Common Core Standards or AASL standards in some way, but up until this point, I haven't consistently identified "I can" statements for the centers, in the future my goal is to

These were the tips I sent out to my faculty today. The Augmented Reality discussion is fairly specific to a display in our building, but may be useful in generating ideas for using Aurasma.  For the Office 365 screencasts, they will be part of a series of screencasts I do to help both teachers and students in my building learn how to work with features of our new Office 365 accounts . Digital Citizenship   Gallery & Aurasma During the first semester in the library, students in grades 3-5 worked very hard at exercising a number of skills through Project Based Learning.   They practiced research skills, persistence in the use of technology, and learned about many concepts that will hopefully help make them better digital citizens.   Students made videos using iPads & iMove or Puppet Pals and Flip cameras and Microsoft Movie Maker, they created posters and made presentations to the class that we recorded live.   You can view the videos students made on the libr

Introductory Prezi I first started playing around with Augmented Reality (AR) and the Aurasma app a few months ago, and have been totally blown away by the possibilities that the app and the Aurasma Studio offer for a classroom teacher or teacher librarian, like me. The best way I can think of to describe Augmented Reality is that it's like a suped up QR code that combines a "trigger image," which is a static image, with an "overlay" of the creator's choice (I'm pretty sure someone else explained it in the exact same way, I just can't remember where I read it!). Trigger images can really be anything: a logo, a photo, a poster, a book cover, handout, etc). Overlays could really be anything - another image, an article, a video, a 3D component that brings the trigger to life.  When you hold a device that has the Aurasma app open over the "trigger image", the overlay automatically is called up and is in view, as long as you hold the de