October/November 2014 Edition
This month in tech news from the classroom: Lower School reading presentations get a multimedia upgrade; students hone their vocabulary and math skills with a pair of fun web-based programs; and sixth graders create cool claymations inspired by stories read in English class.
Read on to learn more about the exciting ways teachers and students at CAIS have been using technology!
Math and Pinyin Learning Made Fun with Interactive Apps
Looking for a fun way to differentiate math practice in your Chinese classroom? Consider trying the Honeybee math app! First graders are enjoying practicing their math skills with this new app. Students can choose their own difficulty level, ranging from basic addition and subtraction through single-digit multiplication and division problems. In addition, students can practice in different learning modes, with or without a time limit. Best of all, students can create problems for themselves and check their graded results at the end.
Learning Pinyin is fun with our newly introduced best friend Monkey King Pinyin app! Touring with Monkey King, first grade students learned pronunciations, tones, and written forms of all Pinyin initials and finals. Students were highly engaged in learning as they sought to overcome all the difficulties to help Monkey King proceed in his Journey to the West.
Take a Trip to SpellingCity!
How can we make learning vocabulary more engaging and
effective? In third through fifth grades this year, the answer is: SpellingCity! After several successful years of use in sixth grade Humanities class, SpellingCity has now found a home in the Lower School as well. Bringing a new level of excitement to word study, SpellingCity allows students to play fun games that teach them word spellings and definitions. Teachers, too, are big fans of this new tool, as it provides the flexibility to introduce students to new word lists or have them revisit old lists and work with the words in a new way. Even better, our full classroom sets of Chromebooks make it possible for teachers to seamlessly integrate this web-based tool into their classroom instruction.
effective? In third through fifth grades this year, the answer is: SpellingCity! After several successful years of use in sixth grade Humanities class, SpellingCity has now found a home in the Lower School as well. Bringing a new level of excitement to word study, SpellingCity allows students to play fun games that teach them word spellings and definitions. Teachers, too, are big fans of this new tool, as it provides the flexibility to introduce students to new word lists or have them revisit old lists and work with the words in a new way. Even better, our full classroom sets of Chromebooks make it possible for teachers to seamlessly integrate this web-based tool into their classroom instruction.
Multimedia Poetry Presentations in Fourth Grade Chinese
Reading presentations took on new life in fourth grade Chinese classes this year thanks to the addition of an exciting multimedia project! After composing their Chinese poems, students began work on iMovie presentations. Selecting images from a shared image folder created by teacher Lucy Sui, students inserted both their poems and images into iMovie and set their poems to music. By rehearsing their read-alouds, they were able to adjust the iMovie clip length to match their reading pace. Check out a few highlights from the students' multimedia poetry reading below!
Chinese Poem Recitation with English Slideshows 
How do we celebrate Chinese, English and technology learning in one project? Check out our fourth and fifth grade classes' poetry reading projects! Students wrote poems in Chinese and then translated their poems into English. Next, using Google Presentations, students created slideshows with English translations of their poems and selected backgrounds and images. During the presentations, students recited their poems in Chinese with the English slideshows as their backgrounds. Student worked together in teams with one student advancing the slides as another student presented. To see some sample slides from two students' Google presentations, click here.
When Fifth Grade Met Sixth Grade...
When Fifth Grade Met Sixth Grade...
"What will life be like in middle school?" is a question that is at the forefront of many of our fifth graders' minds. To help answer this question, our fifth and sixth grade Chinese teachers collaborated and developed a clever idea for a project to help our students bridge the gap between Lower and Middle school. In Chinese class, sixth graders created Keynote presentations about their classrooms, teachers, curricula, schedules, and so on. Then they visited fifth grade Chinese classes and introduced their slides to their fifth grade buddies. After the presentations, our middle schoolers patiently answered any questions their fifth grade buddies raised. Click here if you, too, are interested in learning about what sixth grade is like!
Learn to Make Ninja Stars with Sixth Graders
Writing a "How-To" expository essay in Chinese can be daunting. However, our sixth graders are determined to tackle expository essay writing skills in Chinese class! Not only did students write and illustrate step-by-step instructions on how to make origami ninja stars, but they also created tutorial iMovie videos to help others replicate the process. You will be amazed by how our students accurately used advanced vocabulary such "fold in half", "meet center crease", "crease and unfold", and "line up the edges" in Chinese. If you don't know how to create a ninja star, see below to find out!
Middle School Mathematicians Excel with IXL
Looking for a tool to help reinforce students' foundational math skills, or perhaps provide extra practice with newly introduced concepts? Look no further than IXL! Middle School math teachers Kaicy MacLeod and Scott Muir are using this web-based K-12 math practice tool to help build their students' skills. "The power is in the reinforcement," says Scott. "Students get instant feedback on how they did." IXL features worksheet-type practice in which students complete an individually customized number of problems until they demonstrate mastery. In addition, teachers find that they can use IXL both for remediation and enrichment depending on students' individual needs.
Sixth Grade Cross-Curricular Stop Motion Animation Project
This fall sixth grade teachers Jake Sproull, Jeri Countryman and Peery Sloan collaborated to develop a cross-disciplinary project that rolled humanities, technology, and art into one! First, in technology class, students learned techniques for creating stop motion animations using the iStopMotion iPad app. Next, students transferred these skills to art class, where they used a variety of techniques and materials (such as clay, tin foil, fishing line and paper) to animate scenes from stories inspired by ones being read in English class. Check out an example of the students' work below...and find out what happened when the three little pigs encountered the big bad wolf!
Upcoming Technology Professional Development Opportunities
Increase Student Learning with Mobile Devices and the Best, New Apps (Grades 6-12) - Sunnyvale, CA, December 9
IntegratED PDX 2015 - Portland, OR, Feb. 25-27, 2015
Teach Through Technology - Harker School, San Jose, CA, March 7, 2015
Annual CUE Conference - Palm Springs, CA, March 19-22, 2015
Leadership 3.0 - Redondo Beach, CA, April 16-18, 2015
