Computer ABC’s

Keyboard shortcuts are important skills to learn, and I wanted to highlight them a bit more in the lab by creating some displays. I did what any self-respecting Technology Facilitator would do – I Googled it.

I stumbled across this photo by arvindgrover:

Which referenced this fabulous set of posters of Mac shortcuts organised by letter of the alphabet:
Alphabet Line 08

Which led me to create this version for Word 2007 (which is what we have in the lab).
Computer ABCs

I hope you might find it useful – I learned a couple of shortcuts I didn’t know about in the process!

Computer ABC’s

Keyboard shortcuts are important skills to learn, and I wanted to highlight them a bit more in the lab by creating some displays. I did what any self-respecting Technology Facilitator would do – I Googled it.

I stumbled across this photo by arvindgrover:

Which referenced this fabulous set of posters of Mac shortcuts organised by letter of the alphabet:
Alphabet Line 08

Which led me to create this version for Word 2007 (which is what we have in the lab).
Computer ABCs

I hope you might find it useful – I learned a couple of shortcuts I didn’t know about in the process!

Lingt Language

Our Chinese teacher Wendy Liao has been at it again – she’s found another excellent site for language learning – Lingt Language.

Here’s what the website has to say about the potential uses of Lingt Language:

Create online assignments that make engaging and assessing student spoken performance as natural as giving out a worksheet.

Make oral exams that take a fraction of the time to administer and assess. Perfect for IB and AP preparation.

Offer targeted feedback to individual responses to maximize student improvement.

Incorporate video and images to create media and culture-rich exercises.

Archive all your assignments and student responses to reuse next time and track individual improvement.

In our elementary school context, Wendy has come up with a unique way of marrying Lingt Language with Voicethread to create a multimedia reflection and learning experience.

Wendy wanted the students to learn and remember the Chinese Characters for various countries, and do this in a way that helps to contribute to the learning of others.

The students selected a country, then tried to come up with a story to create a mental picture, or visual association, that will help others remember the Characters in that country name. They recorded their explanation on a Voicethread, which included all the countries they were studying.

[As an aside, Kim Cofino has a great blog post explaining how making connections to visual cues helped her when she was learning Japanese, which is worth checking out]

See example below:

Following that, students were then directed Lingt Language to answer some comprehension-style questions. A specific link is created for each class page, so you can link directly to the task. In order to answer the questions, students needed to view  the Voicethread as a whole, and learn the country names that their classmates had investigated.

Students could either type or record their answers in the Lingt Language site. The other great thing was that Wendy could either type or record her feedback to the students – isn’t that fabulous?

Here is a copy of the  Lingt Classroom page that Wendy created for the Grade 4’s:

Highlights

1. It is a user-friendly interface which is easy for the students to understand
2. No log-in is necessary for students to enter responses
3. The ability to record voice or type – this is fantastic for students and teachers alike.
4. Teachers can mark and give feedback online, in both oral or written form.
5. Responses can be organised either by student, or by question, meaning teachers can analyse results and check for group understanding.
6. The potential for learning becomes 24/7, not just limited to the hours you are in a classroom.
7. Great way to assess and support children according to their individual needs.
8. It is an excellent way of collecting evidence of student-learning, particularly for student-led conferences.

Things to think about

1. It requires the latest version of flash, so school/home computers may need updating
2. Feedback is emailed to students, so students will require their own email address, or an address of a parent to receive feedback from Lingt Language.

Lingt Language

Our Chinese teacher Wendy Liao has been at it again – she’s found another excellent site for language learning – Lingt Language.

Here’s what the website has to say about the potential uses of Lingt Language:

Create online assignments that make engaging and assessing student spoken performance as natural as giving out a worksheet.

Make oral exams that take a fraction of the time to administer and assess. Perfect for IB and AP preparation.

Offer targeted feedback to individual responses to maximize student improvement.

Incorporate video and images to create media and culture-rich exercises.

Archive all your assignments and student responses to reuse next time and track individual improvement.

In our elementary school context, Wendy has come up with a unique way of marrying Lingt Language with Voicethread to create a multimedia reflection and learning experience.

Wendy wanted the students to learn and remember the Chinese Characters for various countries, and do this in a way that helps to contribute to the learning of others.

The students selected a country, then tried to come up with a story to create a mental picture, or visual association, that will help others remember the Characters in that country name. They recorded their explanation on a Voicethread, which included all the countries they were studying.

[As an aside, Kim Cofino has a great blog post explaining how making connections to visual cues helped her when she was learning Japanese, which is worth checking out]

See example below:

Following that, students were then directed Lingt Language to answer some comprehension-style questions. A specific link is created for each class page, so you can link directly to the task. In order to answer the questions, students needed to view  the Voicethread as a whole, and learn the country names that their classmates had investigated.

Students could either type or record their answers in the Lingt Language site. The other great thing was that Wendy could either type or record her feedback to the students – isn’t that fabulous?

Here is a copy of the  Lingt Classroom page that Wendy created for the Grade 4’s:

Highlights

1. It is a user-friendly interface which is easy for the students to understand
2. No log-in is necessary for students to enter responses
3. The ability to record voice or type – this is fantastic for students and teachers alike.
4. Teachers can mark and give feedback online, in both oral or written form.
5. Responses can be organised either by student, or by question, meaning teachers can analyse results and check for group understanding.
6. The potential for learning becomes 24/7, not just limited to the hours you are in a classroom.
7. Great way to assess and support children according to their individual needs.
8. It is an excellent way of collecting evidence of student-learning, particularly for student-led conferences.

Things to think about

1. It requires the latest version of flash, so school/home computers may need updating
2. Feedback is emailed to students, so students will require their own email address, or an address of a parent to receive feedback from Lingt Language.

Spicing up Parts of Speech

In Grade 1, students have been completing a unit on poetry, and learning about parts of speech. Let’s face it: parts of speech are not the most engaging and exciting topic of study for kids, so finding a way to make it enjoyable was high on our list of priorities.

We found the perfect vehicle for spicing it up – Wordle!

The Grade 1 teachers talked about -ing words in class (verbs), so students came to the lab with a sound understanding of the topic. We decided to make -ing poems so the students could demonstrate their understanding of -ing verbs, and present their understanding in a visually appealing way.

We initially used Microsoft Word to type the poems up, because it meant we had a back-up plan in case we needed to change the spelling or formatting of our Wordles. I asked the students to type the title -ing poem three times (to make it larger on the final wordle), and their name three times as well (so we could easily identify the finished Wordles). Following that, the students typed in as many different -ing words as they could.

We thought a minimum of 15 words would make a reasonably good-looking Wordle, but challenged the students to come up with as many as possible. This provided teachers a lot of useful information, including:

• Who understood the task;
• Identifying any misconceptions students held
• The level of vocabulary students were typing;
• Students’ spelling abilities;
• Which students have sound keyboard knowledge, and which students don’t;

We then moved on to introduce/reinforce some important technological operations and concepts in the process of making our Wordles, including:

• Ctrl + A = highlight all
• Ctrl + C = copy
• Ctrl + V = paste
• Capitalisation methods – Shift + letter, or Caps Lock on and Caps Lock Off
• Awareness of the spell check function in Microsoft Word

We used Jing to capture the finished Wordles, and they are now being displayed in the class.