The Great Mail Race

I plan to begin a project based learning activity with the 5th grade classrooms very soon. This activity is called the great mail race. Students need to develop a survey to send to another school in a different state. When this survey is complete, the students mail the survey to the selected schools and track which schools they contact and which schools respond.

We can develop a graph, a map, or both with this information. The surveys can be about the school in general or about the state. 5th grade works a lot with the 50 states, so my guess is that we will create a state survey with the cooperation of their homeroom teacher. I will update more as this project gets going.

Flat Stanley

This is not my Flat Stanley picture. I have yet to take many pictures, but this was a good example for this time of year!

I am in great hopes of particpating in Flat Stanley with all 3rd and 4th grade classrooms district wide this year. I just applied on the Flat Stanley Project website last night to be able to communicate with other Flat Stanley schools. If my memory is correct, there are around 10-12 schools in Maine participating and over 1700 schools world wide.

If you are not familiar with Flat Stanley, please visit www.flatstanley.com for the project details. I know that the CCS library has some Flat Stanley books, and possibly other district schools as well. I did just order a Flat Stanley collection to have on hand to share with students as I am introducing this project.

I am in hopes of completing type to learn very soon assuming that there are no snow days etc... and beginning this project in all 5 schools. Please let me know if there is anything that can be added for integration with this project.

Thanks,
Jaime

ACTEM Conference 2007

I started my day by going to the 20 Ways for Teachers to Use Google conference. This was full of information pertaining to Google. There are lots of free tools that I did not realize were included at the Google website. The website that highlights what this conference included is: Www.top20googles.wikispaces.com. The only disappointing part of this conference was that the Internet was down the whole time, so we had to have a lecture style demonstration. Sharon Betts did a wonderful job sharing even without the visuals.

The second session, I chose to attend the MEDMS update conference.
I learned a lot about the plans for MEDMS for next school year. MEDMS is the informational database used in Maine. MEDMS stands for Maine Education Data Management System. The new changes will be more formal most likely in November. I will share more then as nothing is quite final. Some of the changes will be very helpful.

My third session was Technology-Rich Project Based Learning. This session was presented by Jim Moulton. His website is www.jimmoulton.org, and his project based learning portaportal guest name is techpbl. I was very excited by all of the different ideas that Jim shared. There are a lot of project based learning ideas that can be included in many different subjects and can make great use of technology. I have already signed up for the Flat Stanley project and plan to use this with 3rd and 4th grade classes this year.

The fourth session that I attended was Web 2.0 for Elementary Teachers. This shared a site that shows great examples of blogs and wikis. As this was the keynote address by Will Richardson, this session was a great eye opener to what can be done with this type of tool. The wiki for this information is: http://web4elementary.wikispaces.com/.

One other note of interest that I have heard a lot about was the K12 Online Conference. This is a free resource. Check it out when you have a second! The site is just www.k12onlineconference.com.

Thanks,
Jaime