Professional Development Grant

I recently had the opportunity to attend ISTE's (International Society of Technology Educators) national conference in Atlanta. One of the perks was chatting and meeting new people. I happened to meet the teacher pictured above while waiting for a session on how to create games/advanced actions in PowerPoint (great session by the way!). We bonded over her nails (hence her hand position in the picture - they were Jamberry Nails and a friend of mine started to selling them so they stood out :)

While we were chatting she said that she wrote a grant to attend the conference (she was from Oklahoma). Apparently this grant (Fund for Teachers) paid for EVERYTHING...including her laptop, laptop bag, etc. She wrote everything she would need for the conference into the grant (I want to say the total grant she wrote was for $3,000). This was super impressive. She said in the grand scheme of things she thought small. Apparently a person wrote a grant to study programming using Scratch software...in Spain!

She is blocked for applying for another grant for three years but she said watch out in year three :).

Sadly I am ineligible to apply for a grant because 50% of your direct instruction time needs to be with children. I'm close to that number as a tech coach but not quite there. At the moment (and I know I am thinking "small" in terms of location) I would love to attend the professional development offered through the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta. They were featured in the Promethean booth at ISTE and I was super impressed by the demonstrated lessons and use of technology (one day...sigh! #ihatebudgetcuts).

The grant cycle opens up in October but I thought the summer was a great time to start thinking BIG in terms of what might be of interest to teachers (Galapagos anyone?).

Here is the link to the site for anyone interested - http://www.fundforteachers.org/

Comments

Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition Activity

I saw this activity at a science conference years ago and haven't had a chance to use it in a classroom until this week (mainly because I didn't teach weathering, erosion, and deposition). It is a great way to reinforce the definition of the weathering, erosion, and deposition in a highly kinesthetic manner. Basically you break the students up into groups of three. One group is "Weathering" another group is "Erosion" and the third group is "Deposition". Add tape to the back because you are going to stick them to the forehead of the children in each group. The "weathering" students get a sheet of paper that is their "rock" they will be breaking down. At the start of the activity the "weathering" students will start ripping tiny pieces of their "rock" and handing it to the "erosion" students. The "erosion" students will be running their tiny piece of "rock&

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.

Bill Nye Songs with Lyrics

At the end of the Bill Nye videos he always has a fun song that goes with the episode. You can find many of the songs as stand alone videos on YouTube. This came in handy because today I am teaching a lesson on layers of the atmosphere and found a song from his Atmosphere video on YouTube titled "Fresh Aire." I really wanted to remix it and put the lyrics on the video (so the kids could sing along and see how the lyrics matched the lesson). The first thing I did was found a site that has all the Bill Nye lyrics posted used my YouTube downloader ( see instructions here ) and downloaded the song. I then imported the video into Movie Maker Live and used the caption feature to put the lyrics on the different frames (cutting and pasting from the lyrics site into Movie Maker Live). I saved the video and reposted to YouTube so other teachers could use the video with lyrics (the finished video is posted above). The process was pretty easy and I am thinking about doing it for more

Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

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