5 Ways to Teach "Green" That You May Not Know

Along with 500+ other teachers, I have pledged to go paperless tomorrow in honor of Earth Day. Though this is a worthy cause and certainly gains awareness, there are many other things teachers can be doing on a daily basis to make our classrooms more "green" and set an earth friendly example.
Here are 5 great suggestions for teaching green that you may not know:

1. Use old stuff in new ways. Old junk around the house can have creative new uses. Bubble wands make great "word finders," (early readers run the wand along the sentence and read the words as they "appear" in the wand.), baby formula containers spruced up with some decoupage make excellent pencil/marker/crayon tins. When we got a new dishwasher I salvaged the utensil basket from the old one to use for my guided reading materials. (Bonus- the holes work great for clipping my question cards on it!)
2. Digitize Your Classroom Library Check-Out. This could be a post in itself (coming soon!), but it is quite easy to use free tools on the web to streamline your classroom library checkout. Forget wasting paper (and time!) having students write things down or make up little book cards- go digital and save some trees!
3. Stop Making Posters. Aside from the fact that posters are (in my humble opinion) stupid (when was the last time you had to make a "poster" in corporate real-world?), they are a huge waste of paper- ditched in the trash as soon as they are presented. Save paper and have your students do alternative projects. Use websites like Glogster or DabbleBoard to illustrate points. If you simply must make a poster...at least save it and use the other side for future projects.
4. Teach Students to Take Notes. I am so very frustrated when I see students find something from the internet they want to use for a project, and what do they do?! They print the page! Hello! Wasting Trees! Students need to be taught how to paraphrase notes from information they see online, as well appropriate cut/paste techniques, so they don't just print three pages of a website when all they really want is one or two facts.
5. Ditch Daily Worksheets. Lots of teacher's do daily warm-ups, printing off unnecessary paper for practice (especially when they aren't even collected). Even those teachers conscious enough to use 1/2 sheets or print double sided could still easily eliminate the paper use by writing the problems on a board (white or smart, your choice) and having students use personal marker boards (a blank page put in a sheet protector works great as a makeshift marker board) to complete the problems.

And as a bonus thought- stop printing out "extras" for students who can't keep track of their papers. If you have 25 students- print out 25 copies. If they lose it ask them to hand copy the information from your master onto a sheet of paper. Once or twice of doing this and they'll remember to keep track of papers. When we continue to give kids extra copies for their carelessness or disorganization we are teaching them that it is okay to live in a disposable society where we can always get more of something. It's not.

Please feel free to comment with your suggestions for teaching green!

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5 Awesome Ideas For Using Google Search Story Creator In The Classroom

If you haven't already heard, Google/YouTube just came out with their Search Story Creator, a way to create search stories (If you haven't seen this before check out the famous Paris Love Story sample- which was also featured as a commercial during the Super Bowl this year).

Or view a sample that I created.

Search Stories are REALLY easy to create and a GREAT assessment tool for kids! Here are 5 awesome ideas for using them in the classroom:

1. Describe a character's point view. They (Students) can pretend they are a character in a story (maybe their current I.R. book) and do a search story from the perspective of that character. Have students explain why they choose what they choose, and why the character would search for that. This is a great way to see if they really understood the story.
   
2. Introduce a new unit. Create a search story about a "mystery" topic to show to students and have them guess what the topic is as a way of introducing your next unit. If you are going to be studying the solar system your search might include, "milky way" "debate over Pluto" etc.
3. Ease first day of school jitters. Making a good search story involves having a strong last line. Create a search story where the first 6 searches are from the perspective of a student who is nervous (like: "how to make friends" "what does cafeteria food taste like" "too much homework" etc.) and have the last line something positive (like: "my teacher is awesome" "Mrs. Jarvis is great") or something similar. You could also do a search story to share with students about what you did over the summer or how you prepared for their arrival.
4. Make a mini-biography. After learning about a particular person students can create a search story from the perspective of that famous person. What would Abraham Lincoln searched google for? Maybe a map of Georgia, a book about natural remedies for child illnesses? Possibilities are endless. This is more creative then having students recite facts about a person, and requires much more thinking!
5. Illustrate a how-to speech. Forget the old "how-to speech" about how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Students can illustrate in a search story the steps necessary to complete a task (what someone would need to know in order to complete the task): balance a checkbook? search for "free checking", make a sandwich? search for "characteristics of a french baguette."

Search stories can easily be done with just a few computers, because you can write your 7 searches (everyone has 7 search fields) on paper and then share the classroom computers to enter it in the creator (takes 5m tops!). The site has a selection of music clips that you can choose from- this is easy enough even for younger students.

Once they are created they are uploaded to YouTube (you have to have an account for this but students could just post to their teacher's account).

Let the creativity flow!

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Free Tech Tools

A mad dash to the main theater after the poster session I wanted to see was a no-show, here to see a session on free technology tools led by Rushton Hurley “teacher, trainer, nonprofit guy” & Google Certified,-- and once again I'm in a packed PACKED room! Already the presenter is much more dynamic than the keynote, which is great- I need a wake-up! Ugh…network issues again…back to typing on word. Here are my notes on this presentation:

xrl.us/freetoolsday

Xrl.us/nvnews

·         The key to technology is “you gotta play with it.”

·         Five minutes into this session he already has us laughing and joking- awesome!

·         Words and finding them

o   Urbandictionary.com (I’ve used this before- OME, it’s crazy.)

o   Google page- advance search, click on different types of files- search for powerspoints, pdfs, etc.

o   Don’t have kids create powerpoints- have them find them, evaluate them and choose the best and what they would do to change it.- FREAKING AWESOME IDEA!

o   Google books- get free books, add your own library to keep track of your books, some kids will do better by reading them online!

o   Google scholar has cited by link, related articles.

o   Google Docs- things you can do with your excel, he showed a cool example of adding countries to the spreadsheet; with fruits it will pull up chocolate too because it thinks it’s flavor.

o   Always ask “Kids we just pulled this information off the internet, how will be evaluate it?”

o   He has choose their own homework assignment each week (have guidelines for the kids) add it to google forms.

o   Wikispaces.net very edu friendly- if you request to take the ads off they will for education.

o   Google sites- google’s version of a wiki- add free

o   Look up self-grading quizzes on youtube

o   Tag galaxy- search for flickr photos (don’t do photo searches in front of the kids)

o   Flickr- cooliris.com

o   Google maps- my maps, still excellent if you can’t use earth.

o   Jamendo- everything is creative commons licensed, music sharing sites.

o   Zamzar, use to convert files, show you ads, but it’s free! You can convert a url to a pdf, video download, etc.

o   Google sketch-up, 3-D modeling program, dot changes to blue to find the midpoint, showed an example of creating a house, add shadows, download sketch-ups that others have made.

o   Always ask- is it accurate and how do we know?

o   Freshbrain.org- showed example of student made video on scouting, awesome.

o   “THIS STUFF MATTERS.” Kids love to see each others’ projects.

o   Nextvista.org is his nonprofit website.

o   Check out the website- more tools available.

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Streamlining Teaching Processes

The beautiful New Orleans Ballroom is the site of the last breakout session I’ll be attending at ICE. A full house to see “Streamline Your Teaching Processes” led by presenter Daniel Rezac, yet another Google Certified teacher here at ICE. Here are my notes on this presentation for using Google Aps:

·         Use your google docs/spreadsheet to create a table where students walk in and add their name to the a seating chart.

·         I’m thinking you can do an easy attendance everyday using google forms

·         Lesson planning using the google presentation- add your lesson plan info, standards, etc. to your powerpoint, you can print out the notes to give to your principal, add extra information or differentiated learning into the powerpoint for students to reference individually.

·         Google calendars can be embedded right into teacher sites.

This is a good presentation, but at this point I’m not hearing anything new to me so I’m going to dash!

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Keynote Robert Marzano

Weird. I’m sitting in a huge conference room, in the back, standing room only, to watch renowned education leader Dr. Robert J. Marzano, author of Classroom Strategies That Work. I can’t actually see him through the sea of people so I’m watching him on Ustream (on mute), as I’m listening to him live. This is truly a tech conference! Here are my notes from this presentation:

·         In one of his research groups he cited a 17% educational gain by using technology in the classroom vs. the non tech classroom.

·         Sharing research/data about how much better students do with technology. I’m not sure if I’m just tired, or not in the mood for a data talk but I’m not really “feeling” this presentation.

Note: Okay, I always feel rude leaving a presentation, especially with such a great speaker...but I'm just not able to focus right now on the data talk.

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