Soft Technology

Join me and my awesome friend Nikki Vradenburg, tech integrationist for Montana PBS, in a Seesaw webinar! This webinar will focus on Seesaw basics and is geared toward beginning Seesaw learners. Webinar will be held from 3:45-4:45pm on Wednesday, November 8th and will be worth 1 OPI renewal unit. Step up available, but no MEA Trade. Sign up below! Loading...

I am so impressed by these teachers' reflections after reading Teach Like a Pirate by Dave Burgess. It's been a super fun book club! Hope you'll join us for our next one!

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In Mrs. Podoll's 2nd grade we used Erintegration's awesome idea for creating student avatars using the app PicCollage Kids . Allowing students to customize their avatars for use in Seesaw and other programs that require a profile picture gives them ownership of their journal, as well as helps protect student privacy. Plus, this was a really fun activity for learning how to use PicCollage Kids and encouraging student creativity. Read this post on the PicCollage Educators blog to find out how to make them. Continue reading to see some more amazing examples from Mrs. Podoll's class! Love the creativity shown! How to Change Seesaw Icons: When students were finished, they uploaded their completed collages to Seesaw. To make these the student icons in Seesaw, the teacher downloaded each image using the three dots, then in the Manage Students settings we were able to change each student's icon. Watch this quick video to see how:

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Love these awesome technology #growthgoals shared by TILT Phase 2 teachers! These were created using the Seesaw activities feature.

I shared an idea on Twitter where teachers could upload templates for high frequency words into Seesaw , and have students "rainbow write" the words using the drawing tool in Seesaw. My amazing friend Sara Malchow used Keynote to create a whole bunch of awesome templates for rainbow words, which you can access here . She also gives directions for adding these to Seesaw, where students can copy & edit to complete the rainbow words. However, using the new Seesaw update with activities, you can not only share these, but save to your activity library to use again and again. Keep reading to see how! The new Seesaw activities feature is great and will make sharing these activities out with students so easy. However, when you have a similar activity (like rainbow words using different high frequency words), I would suggest writing the student directions in a Google Doc, where you can then copy and paste them into the Seesaw activity without having to retype each time. If you sim

Run ... don't walk ... and UPDATE YOUR SEESAW APP! The new activities feature is a game changer for your classroom. Choose from the Seesaw library, or create your own. These activities are then saved in your activity library to easily use in your other classes. Excited to use this new feature! Click the image to learn more.

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I love using music in the classroom for a number of reasons. I have previously blogged about using songs for comprehension and you can read about them here - CLICK HERE. After listening to the latest song released by Harry Styles, 'Two Ghosts' is definitely a song you could use and discuss with your pupils. Here is a lyric video: I would first play the song all the way through and ask the children what the song is about - It is about a relationship ending and both leaving as very different people.  Then consider the lyrics in more detail: Same lips red, same eyes blue, Same white shirt, couple more tattoos, But it's not you and it's not me, Tastes so sweet, looks so real, Sounds like something that I used to feel, But I can't touch what I see. We're not who we used to be, We're not who we used to be, We're just two ghosts standing in the place of you and me, Trying to remember how it feels to have a heartbeat. Consider the first line, who is he singing a

There was a lot I took away from #ReadingRocks_17 last week. The keynotes from  @TeresaCremin  reminded me of how important Reading for Pleasure really is. As she stated, the research shows Reading for Pleasure has the biggest impact on children's success when they grow up. The website she mention ResearchRichPedagogies , has some great information for how to promote Reading for Pleasure in your school. These awesome sketch notes from @Cazzash picked up the main points from her keynote: Realised the original photo is a bit blurred. pic.twitter.com/0LtXRgFW2h — Caroline Ash (@cazzash) October 14, 2017 It was the same with @MaryMyatt's keynote, a lot to think about echoing a similar message. Again here is another sketchnote from @Cazzash: That was fantastic @MaryMyatt #ReadingRocks_17 @_Reading_Rocks_ pic.twitter.com/ZFq9cpcHrx — Caroline Ash (@cazzash) October 14, 2017 A big message from the day was emphasising how important it is for teachers to be readers. I completely a

Fall is such a busy and fun time of year, and I know my kindergartners were always super motivated to learn when I could somehow incorporate one of their favorite holidays - Halloween - into my lessons! They love the excitement of Halloween and it helps them to become engaged in so many learning activities. Using the app PicCollage Kids is a fantastic and easy way to let your students illustrate their Halloween costumes and share with the class, and this simple activity could be tied to many different concepts in your classroom. To make the collages, have students open PicCollage and use the photo tool to take a  selfie. All you want in the collage is their face, so they should then double tap their selfie and carefully use the clip tool to trim around the image so they only have their face. Pinch and drag the image so it’s the right size and positioned above the middle of the collage (they need lots of room to draw their costumes)! Next, have them use the doodle tool to draw their co

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The latest ReadWritePerform teaching pack is now available: The Storm: A Personification Pack challenges your students to read and deconstruct texts describing a storm, then write their own description and perform it as an interactive multimedia eBook. The writing focuses on developing personification and multi-sensory description to bring the storm to life in the reader's mind. Along with John's exemplar text, we also use the brilliant book - The Mousehole Cat written by Antonia Barber and illustrated by Nicola Bayley. This is the stunningly illustrated story of the seaside village of Mousehole Cornwall, where Mowzer the cat lives happily with old fisherman Tom - Tom who rocks the rocking chair just right, and catches fresh fish for dinner every night. Their life is a happy one - until one terrible winter, the Great Storm-Cat comes clawing and snarling and leaping at the harbour walls, so that no boat can go out to sea to fish. Soon, with Christmas coming, there is no food le

I had a wonderful time on Saturday at The District CofE Primary School at the second Reading Rocks conference. I want to thank Heather and the staff for all their hard work organising a fantastic event. I was very lucky to be able to host a workshop all about ReadWritePerform . You can see my workshop and how the RWP approach works: I was also very lucky to be interviewed as part of  @RussellPrue 's live radio broadcast. You can listen to the interview here: It was nice to have the opportunity to sit and listen to other inspiring keynotes and drop into  @SmithSmm 's brilliant workshop. What was great how the messages from the keynotes and workshop I attended complimented the key messages from my workshop.

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Did you know you can add labels to a post in Seesaw, have your students copy & edit the post, then they can access the labels and move them around on their own copy?! Super cool for word scrambles, word sorts, and labeling images. After they copy & edit the post, they just need to select the label tool in order to open it and be able to move the labels around. See the example below! And if you like this pumpkin example, you can access the image here for use in your own classroom. (Choose File > Download As > .jpg to create an image that you can upload to your Seesaw class.)

One of the most exciting new features of Apple's iOS11 is the new ARKit and the possibilities with this new feature. The downside, as I discovered last week, the new AR apps will only work on devices with A9 or A10 chips. After installing these apps on most of our school devices, I quickly discovered they didn't work and had to change my plans quickly.  My Year 6 digital leaders did, however, get to try these apps out on my iPad. First, they started with the app AR Runner . The app used AR to create checkpoints which you run to as a way to complete different challenges. It is a great way to combine technology with PE as the children are timed when completing the challenges. Word of warning though, make sure you have decent cases on your iPads as no doubt there will be a few accidents when your pupils are into the game.  The Year 6 pupils all had a few attempts of completing a challenge and collated their scores on a Google Sheet.  Using another Augmented Reality app - Graphment

Year 1 are learning all about the human body. Today, we used technology to enhance this topic further. First, we used the brillaint Virtuali-tee app from Curiscope. Click here to read more about this app . To order a t-shirt, click here. Year 1 loved learning about the human body today through Augmented Reality! Thank you @curiscope_official! A post shared by Lee Parkinson (@ict_mrp) on Oct 12, 2017 at 9:24am PDT Once we had explored and discussed the different parts of our body, the children all took turns wearing a green t-shirt and used the camera to photograph each other. They pupils then used Doink Greenscreen to create a picture that looked like we could see inside their body. Once the pupils had uploaded their pictures to Seesaw, we used the explain and reflect tool in Seesaw to label the major organs.  Finally, with the help of our Digital Leaders, some children were able to record a video explaining how some of our organs work, see the video here: The children loved using the

Make word scrambles for your students! They click copy & edit and then unscramble the sight words. This same technique can also be used to pre-make labels, place them on top of an image in Seesaw, and have students arrange the labels where they belong.

These interactive sight word QR codes I made last year were a hit, so here's another set, this time featuring ABCs. The QR codes were created in Seesaw by adding a screenshot of each letter and graphic, then using the microphone tool to record my voice reading the letter name, sound and word. Once posted, Seesaw automatically generates a QR code that even has the image in the middle! Genius! These QR codes can then be printed and attached to the back of alphabet cards to create an interactive learning experience for young learners. After I generated each post and QR code, I pulled all of the QR codes into Google Slides so I could resize and print. Here's how I got the QR codes. If you'd like a copy of the Google Slides with these QR codes, click here . If you choose File > Make a Copy you can create your own copy of the Google Slides and resize for your purposes. Because I tagged each post into an ABCs folder, I could also collect all of the posts into one PDF and print

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Overclocking guide is here!!! Z370 AORUS GAMING 7 and Intel Core i7 8700K overclocked to 5GHz!  

Are you guilty of any of these?

I created these visuals to help students as they complete projects using the free tool Adobe Spark video. This is available as an iPad app, or can be accessed from Chromebooks or computers via spark.adobe.com . PLEASE NOTE: A sign in with Adobe ID is required before students begin working. I usually sign young learners in under my Adobe ID so all of their projects are synced to my account and I can view their progress. This also makes sign in much easier. You'll only need to sign in once, then it should remember the account information. Click the images to download PDF versions of these visuals.

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