Grade 2 Webpage

Hello! My name is April Brown and I teach grade two at Harry Balfour School. This year I started a class webpage. I wanted to have a space where my kids and parents could visit to see what students are doing in the classroom. It's also an area where I can communicate with parents about hotdog days, pizza day, field trips or special events. I've posted video's of my kids working in class or answering questions or working on a problem. I've got a link to my eCommunity page on the website and a place where my students started to blog. I've got some different ideas for next year and my blog. I think I'll make it more interactive and have my students add more to it then just what we did this year.

All of this was a great opportunity for me to learn and connect with others. I also started a class twitter account in addition to my twitter account. I had the opportunity to connect with other teachers who are involved with technology. Twitter is a fabulous social networking site to converse with others who are interested in technology. My Twitter name is @maxxakahotdog and my school Twitter name is @2Bbrown.

ELA Year End Review & Prezi

Sandi Busch, Hythe Regional School

Among the many other web tools we used this year, the one my students and I glommed onto most was Prezi. Prezis are like powerpoints on steroids. You can include any information that you would on a powerpoint – word, pictures, videos, etc – but with some cool effects. And it is my belief that if I can use it, anyone can. It is amazingly easy to use and free if you are using for educational purposes, and because it’s a web-based tool, students could work on them from home or wherever they had access to a computer.


View a few of my students’ Prezis:

ELA Year End Review on Prezi

ELA Year End Review on Prezi

Student Presentation #3

Student Presentation #4

Moodle Glossary & Language Arts

Nicole Gillies, Peace Academy of Virtual Education

This year there has been a focus on the use of Moodle and getting all of our PAVE courses transferred over to the wonderful Moodle platform. I have recently been working on the Language Arts 8 site and found a very interesting way to use the glossary on Moodle. I will have the students put in their own entries as they read this particular novel study and I have put in some basic Language Arts words to start out. What I have discovered (or realized) is that you can go to Wordia and find an video (that you can embed) of a definition of particular word (s) and put it in the glossary along with the text definition.

Big Huge Labs & Vocabulary

Jen Clevette, Hythe Regional School

I love Big Huge Labs for a number of reasons

• Super simple for students to use
• No sign up
• With Moodle (and a roles override on a Lightbox Gallery) it is a cinch to have students share what they have created.
• They have lots of cool stuff, such as movie poster, trading card, and mosaic maker.

The one I used the most this year in my Social Studies classroom was the motivational poster. Student were asked to make posters of keywords that we used in our classroom. For each poster they had to include an image that best represented the word, the word and a definition in their own words.

The reason I like this one so much was that I got a good quick check for understanding, a great reference for students for the remainder of the year and a fancy bulletin board for me.

The only thing missing is a spellchecker!

Biology Key Concept Presentations

Guest Blogger: Tina Sauder, Savanna School

At the beginning of the semester, I assigned each of my Biology 20 students two of the key concepts from the program of studies with the idea that they would create a poster-like PowerPoint slide that could be combined with all of the other slides as a review slide show. It turned out that the process wasn’t as easy as I had imagined and the project was put on the back burner after the first unit.

By the last unit, it was looking like we could finish the course with plenty of time for review and I knew I wanted to do something with the whole key concept idea. What we ended up with was each student preparing a 10 minute mini-lesson, using something other than PowerPoint, in which they could embed video, diagrams and short notes. Some chose to use Prezi or Glogster, while others used the SMART Notebook game-like activities.

The results were really very good and each student became an expert in at least two areas of the course. Together, the class decided what would be important to be marked on and, after content, they felt creativity was essential.


Sample 1

Digestive System on Prezi

Sample 2