Miss Smith's Dynamic Learning Blog

      The design process is not easy! Creating a new idea is difficult for students and teachers alike. I was inspired by the inventor of the Chemex Coffee Maker to create my Pretty Powerstrip. I enjoyed learning about Peter Schlumbohm's process of inventing a coffee maker at a time when aesthetically pleasing style held as an important feature was a new idea.        Powerstrips are something that everyone has around their home, schools, and offices. The design has remained largely unchanged since its' invention. My idea was to design a more attractive powerstrip available in a wide range of colors. The plug areas would snap on an off easily so that you would have just what you need, and no unsightly unused or overused plugs.        I decided to create an infographic to display the product and also a brief summary of the process behind the idea.

I chose to complete the screencast activity with a lesson that I am teaching this upcoming week in my 4th grade technology classes. The students in my classes will be logging into Typing Club for the first time. I am thinking that by showing them the process with this screencast it will eliminate most of the questions about what to put in for usernames and passwords.  I chose Screencast-O-Matic to create this short screencast. I found the user interface to be really easy and loved that you can set your own capture frame. I didn't have to close out of my many tabs open for working on this course just to shoot my short instructional screencast! I anticipate using this screencast tool for my technology students as it is easier to do it once and record it than to try to always recreate it on the fly. I teach so many sections of the same class that this will definitely be a time saver. I am also thinking that I will most likely embed the videos into a slide show for each le...

I have loved using PiktoChart to create this infographic! I am particularly excited to introduce this tool to 6th grade, whom I think will love to use their Chromebooks to create these images as a visually interesting way to display their ideas and information. The three tech tools that I chose to highlight are new-to-me discoveries that I have just begun to explore.

This week I was finally able to use my set of Sphero Sprk+ robots with my students. This is a new piece of technology that I had seen at the MassCUE conference last year. I wrote a Cape Cod 5 mini grant and paired that with a PTA grant to buy a set of 10 robots. Since that funding was secured last March I have struggled to get the robots paid for by the school district and shipped by the company. Ultimately, I was unable to get them by the end of the school year. The robots finally arrived over the summer and I have been working to collect enough ipads to actually use them. This week has felt like such an achievement as the students used my hodge-podge collection of broken ipads, old cell phones, and recycled kindles to used their knowledge of block coding to control the devices. The first challenge that I gave my students was to make their robot move in a perfect square. This is a sort of pre-test to see where their computational thinking skills are as well as their manipulati...

As a member of several art-teacher groups on Facebook and Instagram, I love getting ideas from art teachers in other parts of the US and internationally. The sharing of ideas has greatly impacted my own teaching and continues to do so on a regular basis. When I was able to attend the National Art Educators conference last March it felt like I was seeing old friends, even though I was just meeting people for the first time in real life. I have loved learning more about global collaboration through this course. I am signed up to receive the Connected Classroom emails and each one is so tempting! If I were a classroom teacher I know I would be so into the Mystery Skype experiences! My main struggle that is keeping me from jumping in with both feet is time. I see so many students, but only once a week. If I were able to schedule a mystery skype, only one of my many classes would get the experience. I had considered video taping it for other groups, but that completely defeats the p...