Streamline and Rainy Day Recess

One of the most dreaded phrases in teaching is "rainy day recess". Whenever I heard that phrase I would either plan to give my students free time or I would show a video.

At the start of the year I make my own rainy day video file using resources from Discovery Streamline.

In the short (5 minute) video above I walk you through the steps of how to search and download videos appropriate for a rainy day recess from the Streamline site.

Setting up a "rainy day recess" video file is easy and can be done one weekend afternoon. Once you have the videos downloaded and saved you have it for the coming years.

This is also great for computer lab teachers/assistants to have in the event of a computer malfunction during lab time (which happened recently in one of our schools :)

BrainPop

BrainPop is an educator tool to help enhance instructing in the classroom. Topics are divided by subject. Search for a topic you want, i.e. Christopher Columbus, and students get a short video with cartoon hosts Tim and Moby about the subject. Following the video you can give a quiz on the subject - either graded or review (and bonus you can integrate with the Promethean ActivExpressions and votes!).

I first saw this in an 8th grade math class and even though I had heard the lesson, when I saw it reviewed by Tim and Moby on BrainPop the lesson "clicked".

You can sign up for a free 5 day trial through their website. There are several "free" videos you can access as well.

My team (fourth grade teachers) split the cost with our state money - approx. $45 each (otherwise a classroom subscription would be $195). You get three logins and even though there were four of us, we never used it at the same time so it was never a problem.

Definitely a resources I would check out.

ActivExpression with BrainPop

This is a quick tutorial that I found on YouTube that shows how to use the ActivExpressions with BrainPop.

Animoto - General Information

I am a huge fan of the Animoto website. I used it frequently in the classroom to showcase field trips, specific projects, and for end of year projects. It is great for parent presentations! It is very easy to use with lots of options, including the ability to upload video clips.

The sample above is a long video (under the 10 minutes max) that I made by stringing and saving three songs together in MovieMaker. We showed at the end of the year awards ceremony to rave reviews.

Math - Animoto

This is a copy of a math project that was done with Mrs. Maroney's fourth grade math class at Mossy Oaks Elementary. We broke her students into three groups. One group went with the teacher, another group went with the math coach, and the third group went with me. This made the project very manageable.

I used my personal camera and the other two groups used borrowed grade level cameras.

We started at the school's math word wall and looked at all the terms we could use. This gave students a good starting vocabulary. The math coach put together forms that the students filled in as they took turns taking pictures. They had to list the picture and the math association with it. The students in the group rotated the camera. Each group took a certain area of the school (my group had the hallway, library, and large playground).

I put the pictures (79 total) into PowerPoint, which allowed me to write on top of the picture and put in the outlines (I saved the final project as a jpeg and uploaded to Animoto.com - a subscription to the site is $30 and completely WORTH it! I think they have a free educators license but I purchased it for personal projects) . In hindsight I should have had the students do the part in the computer lab involving PowerPoint. I think they could have handled it and it would have been more meaningful and taught them some of the features in PowerPoint. Oh well...next time :)

All in all the project turned out well and the student enjoyed being out of the classroom.

Video - "How To Download Resources Packs"

Short four minute video on how to download, save and open resource packs in Promethean Planet.

Promethean - ActivExpressions Setting up Database