Life's Just a Stage-So Dance!

Learn About Smart Boards Here! Mr. Clarke is available 24/7 on this Pageflake; he’s got Smart Board information and truly useful links-even for Primary School teachers all right here-along with a page of Education Tips, Technology Tutorials-tons of good information and ideas!

I can’t tell you what an awesome resource this is for teachers like me! I have a Smart Board and I’ve been to the classes that my school offers to teach us how to use them, and everything makes perfectly  good sense- until I get back to my classroom.  I take notes, but somehow I seem to forget most of the interesting things the IT Staff shows us how to do-and I like to differentiate instruction-relating Dance to Math, Science, Language Arts, Social Studies, Music, and Visual Arts–which isn’t difficult if you teach Dance as a Fine Art, and not simply as a healthy alternative to “regular” PE classes.

Now that I’ve got Mr. Clarke’s Pageflake to refer to, I won’t feel quite so helpless!  Now if I could only wave my magic wand and make time stand still for about a week-or maybe a month- so I could try everything out!

SUPER VOLUNTEER IDEA!  Want to learn about Smart Boards?  Got some time to kill?  Talk to the teacher about an upcoming unit of study and do some research for him/her.  Find and load some appropriate activities on the Smart Board for your child’s teacher too-you can load activities while everyone is at lunch and recess, or put everything in an online folder that the teacher can access on his/her own time; your teacher will be so grateful!

Here’s some ideas I got from Mr. Clarke for using the Smart Board in the Primary Dance Studio in the private school where I teach-but these ideas will work in all kinds of classrooms:

1) Illustrate and write a book as a class. Use the record feature to narrate the text. We made up a story about a statues that came to life when they heard magic music floating through the sculpture garden at midnight.  We can record it-with music- on the Smart Board.

2) Diagram activities.  We’ve been making “Movement Maps” in the 3rd Grade Dance classes-a form of diagramming-drawing out the floor patterns and directions we want to move in, and deciding which verbs and adverbs to dance!

3) Teach steps to a math problem.  Dancers count-most often to * but how many math problems can you make with movement, i.e. four jumps plus 4 slides =8 movements that can be performed to 8 beats to a bar of music. Try it!  Can you make up 6 + 2= 8, or 4=2=2+ 8?

4) Have students share projects during Parent/Teacher/Student conferences.  Our kids aren’t here during the conferences but there;s no reason why the Smart Board can’t play videos we’ve mad eof some of the dances they’ve been creating in class.

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Image via CrunchBase

How many Bookmarks have you got?  Any idea how many you really use?  Thought so!  Reduce your guilt and share them-someone else might desperately need something you bookmarked in an idle moment and never bothered to visit again!  But do take the time to share a few notes about what you’ve bookmarked, and put on some tags-because that’s what turns Delicious into a really useful search engine for everyone!

I’ve been using Delicious since learning about it last summer (the first time I got involved with k12learning20-  (The course I think of as of as: k12learning20.1, since I’m repeating)!.  By checking out other people’s links, I found several costume vendors I might not have known existed otherwise, professional development resources, lessons plans, you name it.  I was surprised to see how many thousands of people have visited the Quizlet Bookmark I put on Delicious.  It’s interesting to see which of my bookmarks are popular with other people-and which ones Never get looked at!

Today I went back and tagged some things “k12learning20″ that I hope other people in my “class” will find useful or interesting.

I used Delicious to keep up with some of my Flickr pictures for my web 2.0 slideshow project.  Posting the pictures to Delicious definitely made them easier to locate and to attribute-!!!  I figured that little tip out by myself out of sheer desperation after choosing to use a lot of pictures-it was really late at night, and it was taking so long to attribute things every other way I tried! When I started reading about Thing 15, I read that same tip on the k12learning20 page and felt really proud-for once I could say “been there-done that”-and all by myself too!

If you’re really into the social aspects of the web, it’s probably a good idea to stop and click right here to read what ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez has to say about your digital footprint and digital shadow.  Download the free tool that’s provided that will focus your mind in a hurry concerning how much of a presence you have out here on the internet, that you may not even realize!

Most of us are becoming “known” for so much more than just the sites we voluntarily click on- and while some of this is good (it’s helpful sometimes to have recommendations come to us already “personalized”)-it’s still something serious to think about!  Evidently very little of this information can be reclaimed once it gets out there-and it’s putting a huge burden on the IT professionals who’re charged with keeping information private.  Be aware!

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“That’s Not Cool”

The Ad Council came up with this online puppet show about “cyber-pressure” that’s really engaging.  Kids bullying each other via cell phones and social networking sites is a real problem, and I’m glad to have a tool like this that I can share with my rising 7th grader.

Instructify’s Bill Ferris wrote about a TED talk by Malcom Gladwell on the subject of Differentiated Instruction-where Gladwell compared students to different kinds of foods, mainly to get the point across that  since students come in varieties, (like “Basic”, “Spicy” and “Extra Crunchy”), they shouldn’t all be instructed exactly the same way (as if they were all just “Food”). Ferris seems to think that DI makes extra work for teachers but I disagree, and wrote him to say why.

Mondays with Merce are webisodes that are not to be missed-Merce is teaching.  And at age 90 that can’t go on much longer!  If you’re a Dance History buff, modern dancer, a choreographer, or a lover of modern art and/or the avant garde–or just someone who stands in awe of a 90 year old genius, who helped develop the computer technology that makes it possible for him to continue to choreograph today-you need to check out Merce’s website

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Interested in making your students into Storytellers and Collaborators with others around the world? -click this! My dance students in Grades 1 and 2 sometimes write their own 1-page Ballet stories to perform in class, and this wiki has given me some ideas about how to publish them-on a wiki!

Primary Math Wiki-I loved learning about this wiki-it’s simple, direct, and effective for Primary students.  I got a lot of ideas for making an educational wiki for, and with, my student dancers.  Not only could they use it at home for fun and for practice, but it could also serve as a demonstration or reminder) of how the activities we regularly do in dance class relate to other subject areas.  I actually contacted one of the teachers involved with this wiki and shared Pattern making ideas with her.

Check out this great Toolbox! To me, this is the most interesting page of Jennifer Doman’s-to find it you have to really look though, unless you use this link I created!  This wiki got a Cool Cat Teacher award so I spent a little time looking around-otherwise I would probably not have spent much time on her wiki at all as my first impression was her wiki was just a fancy online resume’.

I know I’m biased but One of my favorite educational wikis is MINE!

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