Hello Waukazoo Families!
As I was reading the Waukazoo newsletter,
I came across Mrs. Whitbeck’s technology notes and I thought, “Hmmm! That’s not what we’re doing!” Mrs. Whitbeck and I follow the same
curricular guidelines and we share ideas all of the time, but we don’t do
exactly the same thing at the same time.
So…Mrs. Croel-Perrien was kind enough to share my news with you! I may send notes bi-weekly, or it may be once
each month, but I definitely want you to know what your child is learning about
in Technology!
Some children have said they are having a
hard time getting to Moodle from home.
Moodle is a website that districts can manage and teachers can
create. I love the fact that it requires
a password and lets me create groups. To
get to Moodle from home, go to moodle.westottawa.net. (You can just click on that link, or you can copy
and paste the link. If you add “www,” it
won’t work. If you Google it, it’s hard
to get to the correct Moodle site.)
After getting to the correct site, your child will need to enter his/her
user name and password.
Once they get to the correct site, your
child can click on my name and scroll down to find assignments and learning
websites. Our keyboarding goal for the
end of the year is:
4th Grade: 10 Words per Minute
5th
Grade: 14 Words per Minute
At the bottom of the Moodle
course, there are some fun typing sites that will give students extra
practice. If students haven’t quite
reached their words per minute goal and they only practice with me, they probably
won’t make the gains we’d them to make.
If they practice a few times a week for 3-5 minutes at a time, their
scores will improve a great deal!!
Several of those sites have short activities that will give the kids a
words-per-minute score. (And, they’re
fun!!)
Your child has uploaded projects in Moodle
that he/she can share with you! If they
click on the name of the assignment or the forum, they will find the document
they’ve uploaded. Recently, they experimented
with creating a new animal! (Technology
is so much fun!) They used the site
“Switchzoo” to create an animal. Then they
used the “print screen” function to copy the animal and paste it into a Word
document. From there, they formatted/cropped
the picture to get it just the way they wanted it. They did some creative writing to tell us how
their mixed up animals got that way. This
is a very creative group!
This week, they used a web tool called
Google Story Builder. They experimented
with the tool to see what it can (and cannot!) do. If they finished a story, they created a
hyper link in a Moodle forum so they could share their story with us. Next week, we’ll use Story Builder to create
a story using characters from the American Revolution.
** I’ll be at the Waukazoo
conferences on Tuesday evening from 5:00-8:00.**
Please stop by the computer lab. I’d love to meet you and talk to you about
your child’s technology time! You can
also reach me via email at obrienp@westottawa.net. I’m in different buildings throughout the
week, so it’s hard to reach me by phone, but my home-base number is 786-1484.
Thanks so much and have a great
week!
Mrs. Pam O’Brien
No comments:
Post a Comment