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...

Exploring resources on GCFlearnfree.org The Intro to Graphic Arts, Photoshop, and Digital Photography sections of the site were EXACTLY what I've been looking for! Although these resources are a bit advanced for my students, I can guide them through or use them for inspiration in creating a more age-appropriate resource. I can also add these items to my padlet so that students can reference them while they are independently working. I am excited to recommend this website to others as a great resource for learning more about the basics of using computers and technology. The range of subjects is wide and I love the simplistic breakdown in text and video.

I tried out Adobe Spark with relative success! I can see this as a nice tool for myself to create some instagram posts for my classroom account. I can also picture having students create kind images with this application. The site was easy to use on a chromebook which was a pleasant surprise. My one criticism is that the text boxes and font were not as intuitive as the apps the students typically use. After a few moments I was able to figure out the nuances; but I worry that this might cause frustration for some of my younger students. Overall, this tool rocks!