A Story Before Bedtime

Guest Blogger: Terry Hildebrand, Bezanson School

The web site is called AStoryBeforeBed.com. It is a site with many on line books for ages 1-9. You can record the books orally and with a web cam there is a picture of you reading the book. There are some free books to practice on to just try the site out. You can purchase a classroom licence for $99 and a school licence for $499.00. This give you the ability to record about 29 books unlimited number of times. Lots of classics and old stories that children love. They add to the site often.

Here is an example of Xavier and the Wind:

How we are using it:

1. I first found this site as a free app for my I-Pad under educational sites. It allows me to read books for my grandsons and then e-mail the books to them and they can hear and watch Gramma read them a story before bed.


2. We presented the site to parents at our literacy night as a place they might like to take their children to read a story on line and send it to grandparents, uncles, aunts - etc.


We had a few students demonstrate the recording of a book. You can practice it several times before actually submitting it. Once it is submittted it is your book you can send it to multiple people.

3. We are using it now in our school to have students read stories, record themselves reading and then send them to family or fellow students. For the younger students we received e-mail addresses from their parents so they have control over who the stories are sent to.

Importing Flash Animations to Notebook

Guest Blogger: Tina Sauder, Savanna School

I love PD days and see them as a way to continue to network with my “people” (other science teachers) and I always leave sessions having at least one ah-ha moment that jump-starts the creativity in my classroom. This year, my PD role has changed from teacher as learner to teacher as facilitator. I have been working with junior and senior science high teachers to show them how SMART Boards can be used in their classrooms as part of their everyday practice.


We began our sessions by using a web polling application (polleverywhere.com) to see where everyone was in terms of availability to SMART Boards and their experience using the Notebook software. Most had boards, but fewer were using the software. I was glad to know I really did have something to offer (I truly had my doubts when I first said I would do this!) and we got to work. The material covered was basically the same for the junior high group as it was for the senior high group, but the thing that had the most impact was learning how to import Flash animations (those that end in .swf) from the web into SMART Notebook. For science teachers, there is a bonanza of Flash objects on the web that make teaching topics like diffusion, osmosis, the circulatory system and titration so easy. We spend so much time mining the net to find these animations it is very discouraging find that when we go back to them again the next year using a saved web-link, the link is often dead. By bringing the Flash object into Notebook, once the file is saved, it will always be there …no more dead links to deal with!


I made a video showing the steps for saving Flash objects into Notebook from Internet Explorer. There are other ways to do the same thing in Firefox and Safari that are much easier, but most of us have Explorer as our default at school. I am certain that teachers of other subjects will have as much use for this how-to as science teachers do.

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.

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