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!!!

Edmodo???

Is it possible for second graders to use Edmodo??? I kept hearing my middle and high school teacher friends talk about posting on Edmodo, so I decided to see what all the commotion was about. I set up an Edmodo group, signed my kiddos up, and sha-zam!...they are addicted!!! Really, they are going home, logging in, and posting. I am amazed at how excited they get when I give them a quiz on Edmodo. I can post class presentations for students to review at home, along with assignments and quizzes. There are so many possibilities!!!

Let Me Google That For You!

In January, I had the opportunity to attend FETC in Orlando, Florida. Now don't get me wrong, I love technology, but I felt like a fish out of water! Anything and everything you could ever imagine involving edtech was there. One word... OVERWHELMED! I collected a bag full of info and have stayed up late at night trying to get up-to-date with technology. This is a site that our group thought was funny. Any time someone asks you a question, you can go to this site and send the person with the question the link to the answer.

You can even get a shirt....

                                                           
For my constant stream of questions on how to get this blog thing going, I just tell myself...Let me google that for me! Gotta love Google!