Get to Know Your Community | Discovery Education

I take a turn "in the barrel" as the guest of Brandon Wislocki and Kristen Davis on Discovery Education's "Get to Know Your Community" video series.

We talk about a fun way my students have been mashing up Discovery content with Apple's Keynote, some Sketchnoting teaching strategies, and 20 random questions.

Apologies for the poor lighting and the Tom Brady/Go Blue informal apparel...well, at least for the lighting.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54nvKRerBp4[/embed]

Get to Know Your Community, introduces you to your fellow community members in a way that’s never been seen before. Each week, we will interview a new community member. You’ll get to know who they are, what their favorite Spotlight on Strategies is, and they’ll play 20 questions in 60 seconds. Each participant will see how many questions they can answer in 60 seconds. You’ll get to know more about each community member in a brief amount of time.

Check it out at: Get to Know Your Community: Andy Losik | Discovery Education

Use Google Slides as an online Academic Vocabulary Notebook

In Hamilton, part of our district and building improvement process includes increasing student academic vocabulary capacity.

John Marzano has laid out six steps for teachers to follow when introducing new content-specific words.

 

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="694"] Marzano's six steps  - fhsdvocabulary.pbworks.com[/caption]

In my elementary technology classes, third and fourth graders are performing step 4 now in Google Drive with a digital notebook.  All I did was adapt one of Marzano's notebook templates and created it in Google Slides. I made the deck public and kids created their own copies and shared them with me.

Kids write the definition in their own words, they rate their understanding of the word, and also find a non-linguistic representation of the word. The template I created makes it really easy for the kids to add and record their knowledge of the words.

Doing it this way takes advantage of all of the benefits of Google documents like ubiquitous access and sharing.

Find and create a copy of the slide deck here.  Feel free to use it and share it.

[caption id="attachment_801" align="alignleft" width="866"] Academic Vocabulary Template[/caption]

 

Thanks Flocabulary!

This year in Hamilton, building students' academic vocabulary has been a primary focus.

Thanks to everyone at Flocabulary.com for your fabulous videos that have made learning so much fun. Here is a little remix of Double Trouble to show you just how much fun kids at Blue Star Elementary had rocking out during lunchtime.