I wish to welcome all new and returning students back to another wonderful year of learning at Busan International Foreign School.  May your school year be filled with lots of laughter and learning and a decent helping of technology.  

This year marks the grade 5 classes are piloting a BYOD within the elementary.  To kick things off we held a workshop with both parents and students to go over our media agreements.  

Over the past couple of months the students have been working on creating e-books using Book Creator on the iPad.  Currently they are in the process of creating non-fiction books based on an animal of their choosing.  It has been great to see how comfortable the students are with operating the program.

During the 2013-14 school year the Grade 2 classes piloted using Weebly as an E-portfolio program.  At the start of this year the program was expanded to include all students in Grades 2-5.  This was a major undertaking for the students, staff, and parents.  Last week marked our official unveiling of the E-portfolios to the parents during out Student Led Conferences.  It was great to see the students showing off their work and talking with their parents about what they have been doing in class. 

For my elective during this term I decided to try something new and exciting and offer Coding as my elective during this rotation.  Coding has received a lot of press in education as there is currently a tremendous need for people who know how to code.  Coding, for those who may not know, it the process of writing in computer language a command or program for a computer.  There are many different computer languages.  One of the most evident is HTML which is the basis for the majority of all web-sites.  Google has a wonderful that explains HTML 5.
 

In the elective we are exploring Code.org, which offers free coding courses, to schools to learn the basics of coding.  Once the students have completed their unit on Code.org, we will begin to explore Coding programs like Scratch and Kudo to create their programs.  So far all the students have been enjoying themselves and are eager to learn more about coding.  Please note all resources are free.  

Word clouds are a very interesting tool in education.  They allow you to place text into any shape that you want.  Recently I have been looking for one that allowed me to create an account, use custom shapes, and allow me flexibility in how they look.  My search ended when I came across Tagul which allows me to do all of that and more.  Below you will find one made using our Student agreement.

Currently the Grade 2 classes are learning about electricity.  In order to help them understand the concept of circuits I had the students experiment withLittle Bits and Light Up.  

When I introduced the Light Up Kits to the Grade 2 classes, I gave them very little instruction.  After about 15 minutes of experimentation, I called the kids up to the carpet.  During our question time the students were able to explain how they got the kits to make a sound and light up.  The students were also able to explain to my the difference between a closed and open circuit.

I then had the students explore the Little Bits kits.  These kits allowed the students to explore how they can control the energy flow of the circuits.

 

Happy 2015 everyone.  I hope you all had a good break and are ready to get back into the swing of things.  This week saw classes get back to work and they dove right in with their use of tech.

This week the grade 3's started their unit on resources.  As part of their introduction to the unit, the teachers asked them to create a slideshow using the app Explain Everything.  This app allows the user to create presentations and record them to be uploaded to other services.  This is a great tool to enable students to share their thinking.

Ms. Eksteen was away for a day attending a workshop.  With the power of technology she was able to trouble shoot a few problems that happened.  

Grade 2 has started to create stories using the online program Storybird.  This drag and drop tool allows students to easily create stories using the images provided to prompt them with their stories.  The kids are loving this project.

Last week the Grade 1 students started to use Voicethread for their current unit on Signs and Symbols.  This week, I was able to join Ms. Emily's class to work with them to explore the iPad version of the application.  The students loved using the iPad version.  It was great to see their enthusiasm and smiling faces as they listened to the comments by their peers.. 

Last weekend I was lucky enough to attend TEDxBusan.  During the break time they had several activities including a demonstration of the Oculus Rift.  This is a very cool device that fully emerges the user in a virtual world.  I had the opportunity to try it out and it was very fun.  

Over the past several weeks the elementary classes have started to use VoiceThread.  VoiceThread is a powerful tool that allows users to create conversations around a piece of uploaded media (video, audio, and pictures).  The grade three classes used this tool to respond to videos about different heroes.  Grade 4 have started to use the tool to reflect upon a piece of work they have completed in music.  Grade 2 used VoiceThread to analyze pictures depicting holidays using a Visible Thinking Technique.  Finally, the grade 1 students have started using the tool to help them explore signs and symbols in their current unit.

All of the students love this tool and are having a lot of fun learning how to use the tool to enhance their learning.