Soft Technology

Viral crazes, you either love them or hate them. As a teacher, it is probably the latter. There is nothing worse than trying to explain the past progressive tense and spying a pupil trying to perfect the latest dance craze.   We've had everything - dabbing, bottle flipping, even the Harlem Shake... remember that? The latest seems to be the Floss Dance. My pupils have been doing it so much they seem to have forgotten how to walk, they just floss everywhere. Dentists up and down the country must have been buzzing when they heard there was a floss craze. "FINALLY, people are taking our recommendations seriously" I could hear them cry. Imagine their surprise when they realised it turns out to be an awkward, Dad dancing move. The look on their faces! In the past, with some of the crazes, I have used them to great effect when it comes to writing in class. I truly believe children will do their best writing when they are writing about something they are truly engaged with. One o

Over the weekend, I finally managed to watch the film - The Greatest Showman. One of the songs stood out to me and straight away I thought, this is a must for the classroom. If you have followed my blog, you know I am a fan of using music for reading comprehension and you can read some of my other posts here . The film tells the story of PT Barnum and his circus. "This Is Me" is a fight song for people who are not accepted by society. It is sung by Lettie Lutz after she and the rest of the circus troupe are barred by Barnum from an after party following Jenny Lind's performance. The bearded lady refuses to be cut down by the fact that the showman is embarrassed by them. According to the song's writer, "It was really inspired by the group of oddities in the film, and what they came to represent and what [director] Michael [Gracey] talked about them representing," Pasek told Billboard. "People who had lived in the shadows their whole lives and for the fir

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Check out this great FREE app from Greg Tang, author of The Grapes of Math . Ten Frame Mania is the latest Greg Tang Math game! Play it to learn and exercise your number sense. It helps you understand the cardinality of numbers, how to play with them, and how the different numbers work together. It’s concept is so simple, yet addictive and fun!

Using Classkick for Instant Feedback June 18th 8:30-11:30 Lincoln Center, room 308 REGISTER HERE Let's TACO 'Bout PicCollage June 18th 12:30-3:30 Lincoln Center, room 308 REGISTER HERE Seesaw Activities, Folders & Skills (for intermediate to advanced users) June 19th 8:30-11:30 Lincoln Center, room 308 REGISTER HERE Seesaw Basics (for beginners to Seesaw) June 19th 12:30-3:30 Lincoln Center, room 308 REGISTER HERE All of these courses are worth 3 OPI renewal units. Don't forget, if you are planning to use any of these courses for step up, you'll need to complete the step up request form online at bit.ly/BillingsPD . Nikki Vradenburg, Teacher Liaison for PBS Montana, also put together a great list of summer PD opportunities in Montana and surrounding areas. CLICK HERE to view her list!

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I've been creating some Easter-themed activities for Classkick . Click on the images below to grab a copy that you can use as-is, or edit and adapt to your own classroom needs. Remember to check the Classkick YouTube channel for quick, helpful tutorials, or email me if you have any questions.

Let your students create these clever bunny collages as a way to publish a writing project, and become familiar with tools in PicCollage EDU . To create this, have students use the web search tool to search for grass, bunnies, chocolates, etc. They can double tap the grass picture to set as the background of their collage. Remind them to add "png" to the end of the image search to find images with transparent backgrounds. They can use the FREE Easter-themed stickers in PicCollage EDU, the doodle tool, and the text tool to add additional details and words to their collages. When finished, have students save to Seesaw to share!

Use this adorable FREE directed drawing activity from First and Kinder Blue Skies and let students draw digitally using an app like Doodle Buddy or PicCollage EDU. Then, they can add to Seesaw and use the text tools to write a poem, tell a story or add a reflection. Super cute and simple St. Patrick's Day idea! CLICK HERE for a bunny directed drawing that you can use for Easter!

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A few years back, I put together an eBook - 15+ ideas for the emoji keyboard in class.  The eBook shared some useful and inspiring ideas for how to utilise the emoji keyboard. I have since blogged about using Bitmoji in class.  This is another great tool that allows teachers to turn themselves into a cartoon and then create images such as these to share with your pupils: I have just seen a blog from Mr Hill who shares some more ideas for Bitmoji, you can read it here. More recently, there has been a new tool that seems to have dominated every social media platform and that is GIFs. To define a GIF: An animated GIF is an image encoded in graphics interchange format (GIF), which contains a number of images or frames in a single file and is described by its own graphic control extension. The frames are presented in a specific order in order to convey animation. An animated GIF can loop endlessly or stop after a few sequences. GIFs seem to be everywhere and for the past few months, I have

See, Learn and Talk is a unique application to facilitate speech and language development in young children. An experienced and certified Speech-Language Pathologist who has been working with children for 20 years has designed this application in order to provide concrete support for language development to parents, fellow speech and language therapists, ABA therapists, educators and Teachers of Speech and Language Disabilities. Billings teachers, submit a help ticket to have this app installed on your iPads for FREE!

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The FREE app Draw & Tell is an absolute favorite for letting students tell stories and explain things they know in a fun, engaging and creative way. Students are able to use stickers, drawing, voice and even add their own photo as a background. I love the moveable stickers for telling math stories or making characters move. The images or videos easily save to Seesaw to share with others. Check out some of these fun creations from Mrs. Parisien's first graders, who just learned Draw & Tell today! After using Draw & Tell, your students may also be interested in the Duck Duck Moose apps Princess FairyTale Maker and Superhero Comic Book Maker . BOTH FREE!

Today I worked with one of our Year 3 classes and I eventually had the chance to try out a new app I've been desperate to use - Figment AR . I first heard of this app after reading a blog post from the brilliant @ICTEvangelist . You can read his blog post here: Figment AR For Story Telling And Re-Living Field Trips In IOS   The feature in the app which I was immediately drawn to was the portals feature. This allows you to place a portal within your world. This portal allows you to travel to any 360° image. There are a couple of pictures included but you can also add your own. Straight away I knew this would be something that would inspire some amazing writing in my class and today I finally got the chance to have a go with our brilliant Year 3 pupils. But as I always discuss on my CPD and INSET the big hook was what they were going to do with their writing which was to bring it to life and create their own movie! As their topic is linked to space, we decided to use a 360° image of

Check out this great collection of FREE math apps for young learners! Variety of apps to help students practice number sense, greater than, less than, equal parts, measurement, and much more!

Classkick is a fantastic FREE tool that lets you share assignments with your students and view their work in REAL TIME, while providing immediate feedback. It's amazing! I adapted the Valentine's Day double digit number activity I did for St. Patrick's Day. This is a fantastic hands-on activity to introduce your students to Classkick. Click the image to copy the activity and use with your students. Mrs. Bishop adapted this activity to differentiate in 1st grade. Click the links below to use her adaptations in your room. Lucky 2-Digit Addition with Regrouping B-L Lucky 2-Digit Addition with Regrouping A-L Lucky 2-Digit Addition with Regrouping O-L

MontanaPBS will host PBS Edcamp Billings, MT, a participant-driven professional development event for PK-3 educators. Participating educators will have the opportunity to collaborate around common goals and challenges through topics they select on the day of the event. Edcamp participants will walk away with resources and ideas they can immediately integrate into their classrooms. PBS Edcamp Billings will be held on Saturday, May 19, 2018 at the Lincoln Center from 9:00AM to 3:00PM. This is a free event, open to all Pre-kindergarten through grade 3 teachers, administrators and pre-service teachers. OPI Renewal units will be available to all who attend! What is Edcamp? Edcamp is an unconference; a participant-driven professional development event for educators. Unlike a typical conference, Edcamp educators decide the session topics on the day of the event. CLICK HERE to register. BPS teachers, PBS Edcamp is available for OPI renewal and Step-Up Credit. Be sure to complete the appropria

One of my favourite new discoveries at BETT was the app Seeing AI. My good friend, Julian Woods ( @Ideas_Factory ) shared this with me and I am really impressed by how accuarate and quick it is. The app is described as a free app that narrates the world around you. Designed for the blind and low vision community, this ongoing research project harnesses the power of AI to open up the visual world and describe nearby people, text and objects. An app which has is considered a talking camera for the blind, it has the potential to support pupils in lots of ways in the classroom. This short little video gives a quick demonstration to how the app works. The app is free and just click the app icon above to download it.

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I have blogged about the power of music in the classroom and have previously shared a number of songs which can be used in the classroom, especially for reading comprehension. You can read them here.  The song currently at Number 1 in the charts - These Days by Rudimental feat. Macklemore, Jess Glyne and Dan Caplen - is another great song which can be used in class. Here is a link to the music video: Here are the lyrics with some suggested questions: I know you moved onto someone new Hope life is beautiful You were the light for me to find my truth I just wanna say, thank you Who is the rapper speaking about? Are the couple still together? How do you know? No - moved onto someone new. How does he feel towards his old girlfriend? He still likes her - wishes her well Is this always the case when people split up? Open to discussion Do you think he regrets breaking up with her? No, the relationship helped him grow. Why is he thanking her? He recognises that she helped him on his journey to