Since I am teaching a 4/5 combination class this year, and 8 of the students are my old students, I have had to throw all my usual first week projects out. (Which by the way is incredibly liberating; you should try it!)
The first week of school, or more accurately the first actual 7 days of school, will therefore be a great chance to integrate tech into my classroom and get my students ready to participate in the Global Read Aloud.
So what will we do?
- Using Skype, parents will be invited to call us in the classroom at the end of the day so we can share what we have been doing.
- Using Wordle, students will think of adjectives to describe themselves and parents’ adjectives will be added as a surprise. These print-outs will go in lockers.
- Voki will be used to create book hooks describing one cool book they read over the summer.
- We will write a letter to ourselves about our expectations for the year using Future Me. We will plan to receive them back the last week of school.
- Wallwisher will be used and shared with parents to showcase something we learned in class.
- We will blog about something we hope to learn and post in our kid blog.
- Voki will also be used to introduce another classmate to the class.
- We will use Google Earth to look up participants in the Global Read Aloud and then do pins on a world map in the classroom.
- Digital Cameras will be introduced by having them go on a scavenger hunt in my room and having to photograph the “treasures” – these will be posted on VoiceThread as a guide to our classroom for parents to see.
- We will use Animoto to come up with our hopes and wishes for the year letting each child add a picture and a sentence.
- Wordia will be used when students have to come up with the definition of student, classroom, community, teacher, and school. We will tape and post our own definitions.
How will you integrate technology into your classroom? How do we get the kids excited about using it and how do you make it purposeful and not just technology for technology’s sake?
Pernille Ripp 
This is a fabulous start to your school year. Quick question about Voki- when the students finish theirs, how do you save it and share it? I see that they are prompted for email addresses. Is there a way around that? THANKS!
I will be using an email set up through hotmail for this. That way students won't need their own email address and they can still access the Voki. I hope that helps.
Sounds like a fantastic first week of school!
I will be teaching the same students I had last year. They were 5th graders last year…..and are now 6th graders. Last year we started a book review bloghttp://room23bookreviews.blogspot.com/They have really enjoyed writing their book reviews. They ABSOLUTELY love it when they get comments. We will be continuing our blog this year. I also have a class twitter that I started right at the end of the year last year. I hope to use that a lot more this year to show parents how we are spending the day. twitter.com/msbruscaI am also planning on doing the Global Read Aloud of The Little Prince. It is my absolute favorite book!!
Awesome ideas! Definitely great ways to weave in tech in there. I'm getting excited just thinking about it, and I'm not even a student — I know you and your class will have a fantastic school year! I hope you don't mind that I borrow some of these ideas! 🙂
Miss Cheska, Please take as many ideas as you would like. That is why they are posted after all. I am excited to see if I can pull it all off and get the kids excited about being in my room as well.Thank you all for your very sweet comments.