What I learned at school today

I had a wonderful idea last week. Well I thought it was a wonderful idea. For a final unit assessment task the students and I were going to make a video. I could see it clearly, children excitedly story boarding, planning and shooting a video about living and non-living things. Me, showing them how to put it all together using Movie Maker. It was going to be great. I asked the school secretary if we had a digital video camera and was pleasantly surprise when I was handed a newish looking box. It was a JVC Everion - the thing even claimed to feature one touch YouTube downloads. I was pretty excited, everything seems to be in the box. Well almost everything. Whoever had used the camera last had forgotten to return the SD cards but no worry that was easy enough to fix. I went through my pre-tech project checklist before launching the video making assignment: Did I have all the cords, cables, dodads and programs needed to create a video? Did I know how to record a video with th

I made a fun discovery today.   Wordle is a fun way to make work choice posters for or with your students. It can be used to create a visual list of synonyms for students to use in their writing. Here is one I made this morning for the word  "grand" in French. Wordle allows you to create word clouds for many URL's and it also allows you to enter your own word lists. Wordle lets you to customize the size, font and color of the words. Steps for Making your Wordle Word Choice Posters:  1) Choose a word that students are over using in your classroom. 2) For French words visit:  http://www.synonyms-fr.com/  and enter it there to get a list of synonyms. Copy the words by highlighting them, and then typing Control+C.     In English you can visit:  http://www.synonym.com  to get a list of synonyms.  Copy the words by highlighting them, and then typing Control+C. 3) Go to www.wordle.net and select "Advanced" tab. 4) Paste the words into the first b