Lesson that Inspires: SOAR

http://www.teachingideas.co.uk/

Yesterday during my web surfing, I ran across this awesome award winning animated film by Alyce Tzue. If you are looking for an innovative lesson to inspire your students before or after spring break, you need to consider this. Mark Warner has given many ways to incorporate it cross curriculum. I love the suggestion for music teachers. It only has music and students can create the dialog or play-script for a ELA activity. Check out other ways to use this animation in English, History, Design technology, Science, and Art. The full video is found on Vimeo, but I viewed it on Teaching Ideas which is another great website. I love how they use a literature book as a spring board for teaching. It brings me back to my days teaching in first grade. Story time was always a favorite, especially when you knew you were going to use the story to create. If you are interested, you can find out more about the making of this award winning film by visiting SOAR.

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Posted in Alyce Tsue, art, design, english, film, history, idea, inspire, lesson, literature, Mark Warner, music, play script, science, SOAR, spring time, teaching, write

Need Writing Help for ELA?

Thanks to Jenny Sawyer, who created the resource called 60 Second Recap, we have a great place to go for writing assistance online. The site highlights her books and is geared for students ages 14 - 19. She shares hundreds of 60 second Book Reviews that surely will inspire readers to read more. I can see where a teacher could share several of these during class and then require students to create their OWN 60 second review. Mrs. Sawyer gets funds by having book purchased from her site after viewing the recap. What a small reward for this awesome learning resource! She has links to study guides on many classics that are popular. What is great that you don't want to miss are her recap videos on each classic book. She is so passionate about her material during these clips; you can really see how easy it is to learn from her. She has a section called the Essay Coach where she shares the process in 4 steps for writing an essay. There you can see her book titles and she shares the introductions to each of them for you to get a feel about the books. If you want a snippet of her teaching style, check out this lesson on creating a thesis statement in four steps. I watched it and wish I were back in school so I could redo my English assignments. Do not skip out on her resource page, where she has 60 second videos on Literary terms, and how to create your OWN recap video. Don't take my word for it, check out Jenny Sawyer's website!

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Posted in book reviews, guides, jenny sawyer, lesson, Recap, revise, thesis, video, writing, writing workshop

Have You Heard of Zaption?

What is Zaption? It is a tool that makes video come alive with engaging and interactive video lessons created by none other than YOU! (That is unless you only use the ones in the gallery). Don't take my word for it, Take a  Zaption Tour. They have a gallery to watch some of the created Zappy tours where you can take video, clip it to include what you need for a lesson, add in questions or reading prompts to get your students thinking. This tool is well done and so user friendly. It reminds me of the one called EdPuzzle.

If you don't check out Zaption you will be missing out on an incredible tool that is FREE for a basic plan! They allow a 30 day test drive of Zaption Pro (look for the Take a TestDrive button). Zaption even has Pro Campus for those districts who have $$ floating around LOL. They provide an extensive Help Center with Five tips on creating your own effective Zaption Tour. Here is aYouTube tutorial on how to create a tour:



As if the web version is not enough, they have the Zaption app also.

Here is a sample one that I found on the History of the Christmas Tree. Not because I thought is was the best one; but it is one that is relevant to the season.   http://zapt.io/tqr8u3wf

If ;you are sold on Zaption, please use the referral link below, for a chance to win an upgrade or even a Pro Campus one.

My referral link: http://zapt.io/ru72tq928

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Posted in curriculum, digital media, editing, education, flip classroom, free, integrate, lesson, tour, upload, video tools, Zaption

QR Code Lesson in Math

Another one of our 5th grade teachers allowed students to experience learning with QR codes! Ms. Carrie Langley is a Math teacher and used the QR Code Treasure Hunt Generator on ClassroomTools.net. She said this tool made the process easy and was teacher friendly, saving valuable time upfront. She was able to provide her own Math word problems into the online form and it populated all the QR codes for her at once. She was then able to print them all, after enlarging them and post them around the school. Here's her explanation of the game:

"My class worked in pairs to hunt for QR codes I had posted around the school (10 questions). They started in my room with the instructions code to scan. Once they scanned the question, they solved the problem in Educreations and recorded their answer in Pages. They were able to save their answer sheet from Pages to their digital locker. Once back in the room, we even used MaxJournal to describe what we did in math today. It worked really well with my plus class".

Ms. Langley provided math word problems as a review for the year. A couple of example problems were:

1. The sum of the total degrees in a triangle and the number of eggs in two dozen
2. The number of students in our class minus the number of years you've been in school times the number of window in the cafeteria.

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Posted in apps, Educreations, iPads, lesson, math, MaxJournal, Pages, QR Codes