Voki ..... More Tech Fun!

O.K.....so it's the end of the year and I'm struggling to keep my students interested in school. Last week my students had been so excited every moment of creating their power point presentations that I wanted to see the excitement on their faces again. So I came up with the idea of letting them create a Voki. This lesson turned out far more beneficial than I ever imagined! Again, I was AMAZED! To provide structure, I followed a similar format as the PPT lesson. This time each student chose an animal, used a book or encyclopedia to list three facts about the animal, then created an avatar/character for their presentation.
http://www.voki.com/mywebsite.php

Second Grade Power Point Presentations.....Wow!!!

I am so amazed by how much my little ones can do using technology. If it involves a computer or tablet, my kiddos can tackle it. I have witnessed the power of technology this year as my school system implemented BYOT (bring your on technology). Yeah....I was skeptical at first....didn't quite know what would happen when my students walked through the door with a plethora of devices, but we have muddled through the year and learned a little more day by day. Oh yeah, we learned by making plenty of mistakes, but by the end of the year even the most naive students were fairly proficient with technology.
First.....We chose a state to research. This is the foldable we used to organize the information on our state. We used an encyclopedia to research states.

Next.....When the first group of students finished, I had them gather around the computer as I demonstrated how to use the Microsoft Power Point program. They caught on very quickly and went to work creating their own presentation. Once a slide was created for each area on the foldable, I called them back to the computer to demonstrate how to copy and paste images to go with each slide.
As the other students finished they sat with a student at a computer to watch what was going on. Fortunately, we were also scheduled for the computer lab so we were able to save our presentations to our school's user drive and move to the lab to work.....Very nice since it was going to take FOREVER to complete twenty presentations on my five classroom computers. In thirty minutes, everyone had the slides made with images! Unbelievable!!!
Then.......The next day we made revisions and jazzed up the slides. By this time, my kiddos had discovered how to add special effects to the slides. One student added a hyperlink to a video of his state's song! Can I tell you that I was AMAZED!!!