Seeing Double…

Monday Morning Message ~ 4-18-2011

My fifth grade students come to me with little/no keyboarding skills.
Their paragraphs are indented with anywhere from one to twelve spaces.

And the fonts and colors… Yikes!

I give them a choice of three fonts and three colors.

Fonts from which they may choose are Arial, Calibri, or Century Gothic.

The colors they may choose are black, black, or black.

Once we have learned to use the “Tab” key to indent,
I teach them about the space between the period at the end of the sentence
and the capital letter at the beginning of the next sentence.

The stress here is:
ending punctuation and
capitalizing the first word of a new sentence!

In typing class, we were taught to type two spaces between the period and the next letter. Lately, I have been hearing otherwise and thought, before I “misteach” my students, I should do some research.

Everything I read said, “Yes…” to dropping the double-space and moving to single.

I was a reluctant reader, though, and wanted some rationale.
I felt like I was “selling out” just because someone decided it was the thing to do.

Then I stumbled upon a post on “Good Design” by Alissa Walker.

In her post, Alissa explains that today’s text editing programs take into account the width of each letter, and adjust the spaces accordingly. When we were typing with typewriters.. (and that IS my history…) the keys were each the same width, and there would be more space on each side of an “l” than an “m”. Thus, a double-space between sentences made the separation more clear.

Now it made sense to me. A logical reason is something I can accept.

So now I can teach my students, and explain why.

And it only took me a few years weeks to reteach myself to single-space.
The “carrot” was the extra time I would have to do something fun!

If you are on “Spring Break”, even if it is for just a few days, make sure you take time to have fun, too…

How to Make a Little Book

by recesstec tips writing

Monday Morning Message ~ 3-28-2011

This is not necessarily a “technology tip”, but we thought using a piece of technology can give you several ideas for your week.

We LOVE this “Little Book”, and we can think of countless ways to use it in our curriculum.

What better way to “show you how” than with a video?

(Consider that our piece of “technology”.)

There are several tips here, in addition to the “Little Book”.

YouTube is more than funny videos that are posted on Facebook and sent in emails. It is a very valuable resource for us as teachers, and in our personal lives.
Consider using videos for your students’ “How To” projects. It is a great way to motivate students to write “Steps in a Process” papers.
If you don’t have access to a video camera, consider using digital photos and creating a “stop-motion” video using Windows MovieMaker or Photo Story 3.

As we “spring ahead” into the final days of our school year, continue to push your students to learn and grow to be ready for next year, but don’t forget to make it fun!

*Note: We would LOVE to hear from you in the comment section how you might use this “Little Book” in your curriculum.

Once Upon A Time…

by recesstec tips writing

Monday Morning Message ~ 3-21-2011

Here is a quick way to motivate your students to write fairy tales.

Using the “Insert Drop Cap” option in Microsoft Word, students can easily add a special look to their stories.

In simple steps, students need to:

1. Type their story using Microsoft Word.

2. Once the story is typed, highlight the first letter and choose
a. “Insert”
b. “Drop Cap” choosing “Dropped”.

3. Highlight the dropped cap letter and change the size, the font, and the color as best suits the student and the story.

The video below should help answer any questions, and is best viewed in full screen.

Have a great week!
Spring has finally arrived, so here’s hoping recess is outside for you and your students!

Taking the Shortcuts

by recesstec tips writing

Monday Morning Message ~ 3-7-2011

It doesn’t take long to learn some valuable “shortcuts” that will save you and your students time in the lab.

Basic to student instruction and use are the usual shortcuts keystrokes for:

Copy (Ctrl+C)
Paste (Ctrl +V)
Cut (Ctrl +X).

We teach these to our students in the first week, and find they catch on quickly and grow to use these instead of the “Pull-down Menus”.

One more you can add to their/your repertoire is:

Tab (Ctrl+T)

This allows the students to quickly open up another tab and to work side-by-side when researching and collaborating. By allowing them to use additional tabs open while on the internet, they can save the tabs on the bottom for files/folders they need to access on their computer.

With 30+ computers to shut down every evening, our students use another quick shortcut that gets the job done quickly.

Shortcut to shutting down computers:

To close all windows, press (Alt+Space Bar)
Together (Ctrl+Windows Key) with left hand and (Up Arrow) with right hand.
Hit “Enter”, “Enter”.

Your lab has been shut down, and you can rest knowing your job is finished for the day.

If you are living in the State of Illinois, enjoy your Pulaski Day off, if your district observes it.

Shannon has to work today, but I am lucky enough to have the day off before I return to our first day of ISATs. If you were able to finish yours last week, enjoy your return to normal. We will start in with “Day 1” on Tuesday.

Regardless, have a great week!

Is Anyone Listening? (Part 4 of 4)

by recesstec classroom management email tips writing

Monday Morning Message ~ 2-28-2011

Your Distribution List is made, and you are ready to send out your first note.

Remember, you promised your parents that you would keep their email addresses confidential!

It’s easy and the secret is…

Bcc (or “Blind Carbon Copy”).

The benefits of sending emails to recipients using the Bcc Option is that it

1. keeps addresses confidential;

2. protects recipients from receiving spam; and

3. protects recipients from receiving a reply when
someone accidentally selects “Reply All”.

When writing your note, address it to yourself using your school address.
Next, choose the Bcc Option, and use the Distribution List contact name as the recipient.

Another benefit of using this option is that you will also receive a copy of your note, in addition to the one that is in your “Sent Folder”.

One more reminder:

You might want to use the day/date as your Subject.
This also helps parents keep track of notes/reminders.
If your note contains important information or deadline reminders, you might want to use that as your subject to get their attention.

You are now on the road to being heard, and more important, they are listening!

Have a great week!

Splitting the Text

by recesstec SMARTBoard tips writing

Monday Morning Message ~ 1-24-2011

We have found a great hidden tool within the SMART Notebook 10 Lesson Activity Toolkit. Called the “Text Splitter”, it will split up sentences into words, or words into individual letters.

After you have placed this little tool onto a new page in your Notebook document, simply highlight text from a document or from the Internet, copy it, and paste it onto your page. Next, drag it into the text splitter window. Choose to split it into words or letters, and your text is instantly interactive.

Do you already have spelling lists typed in a Word document? Now you can drag each word into the “Splitter” to instantly separate it so your students can respell it.

For another idea on using this tool in a Language Arts lesson, watch this quick little video. To get the “big picture” we suggest you watch it in “Full Screen” mode.

We welcome any comments to share how you might use this new “BFF”.

Blogging Maniacs

by recesstec Blog reflections writing

The start of school is behind us and we are into our 2nd week. I introduced the students to our class blog which is being hosted at www.kidblog.org and I have been amazed at how excited and focused they are on their writing. Not only are they generating thoughtful posts on which they are experts. They are also generating thoughtful comments on each other’s blogs. Now I have never been an expert on writing by any stretch. But I do know that in the past I have struggled to get kids excited about writing. By weaving technology and writing together, I have been successful at getting a much higher level of buy-in from the students. This is year is no different. Plus, they are writing for fun. Fun…that’s right…fun. I am only requiring the kids to post one entry on his or her blog each week as part of the overall spelling grade. Most kids are posting more than that already. My daughter included. Not because I asked her to. Not because she wants to impress me. Not because she wants to have the most entries in the class. But because she WANTS to post. She wants to have content on which others will comment. The comments of the other kids and the feedback received by the parents of the other students in my classroom are driving her to want to post more work. Will this be a phase? Will it get boring and end soon? I have no idea, but I am enjoying it while it lasts!

If you want to head over to www.mrsssmith.com and check out our “student blog” link on the homepage, I am sure the kids would love to have even more comments.