Super Typers

When third and fourth grade students come to computers, they practice keyboarding for 15 minutes with the program Type to Learn. Each year I keep track of how many lessons they finish. This year's scores are the best ever! This graph shows the average lesson finished for each grade each year. Before 2008, students had 50 minutes of computers each week. In 2008, it was reduced to 40 minutes. Since then, they have had 60 minutes each week! That extra time with each class means we can spend more time practicing typing, among other things, and is why I believe the scores have increased. Why the dip in 2010 for fourth grade? They were in second grade the year I only had 40 minute classes. Second grade is when we talk about and really learn the different keystrokes. Congratulations to this year's third and fourth grade students. You worked hard and that will really pay off!

Kahn!

Kahn Academy is a web site that started out with math tutorial videos. Now it also has self-paced exercises where students can navigate a "knowledge map" and earn points and badges. Parents and teachers can even sign up and be a coach. It would a great enrichment tool for fourth grade students and up.

TYP Kindergarten and Fourth Grade

Thursday, May 19, is Teach Your Parent night for students in kindergarten and fourth grade. Students may bring in adult guests to teach. Kindergarteners are going to teach about the painting and drawing program Kid Pix. Fourth grade students are going to choose what they want to teach. The event runs from 5:30 to 7:30 pm.

Calculator Chaos

Fourth grade students are trying the web site Calculator Chaos. The students have a "broken" calculator with only a few buttons that work. The have to find a way to make all of the numbers appear on the screen before time runs out. If they make it, they can put their time up on the SMARTboard.

Copyright on the Web

This week fourth grade students are using the resource Copyright on the Web to learn about and discuss copyright laws and how they pertain to school projects.

The 50 States

After six weeks of work, the fourth grade web page project for this year is up! Each student researched, wrote, illustrated, typed, and formatted a web page about one of our states. Click here to go to the main page and then click on the links to see the different pages. I am really proud of the kids, especially how hard they all worked!

Great States Web Pages Coming Soon

This week marks the start of the fourth grade web page project. Each student chose a state for the subject of their page. They researched and recorded interesting facts about their state. Next week they will write a paragraph from those facts. The following two weeks will be spent working on artwork for their page. The week after that will be for typing it up, and lastly one more week for the finishing touches. All in all, this will be a six week project, barring any snowdays! Check back here by the end of February to see the final results. Click here to see last year's pages: The Winter Olympics.

Graphing M&M's

Fourth grade students recently used spreadsheets for the first time. They used the program Microsoft Excel to create a graph of how many M&M's they got. Student entered their data into cells, selected the information, and chose what kind of graph they wanted.

WikiCES

A wiki is a collaborative web site that users can modify. To learn about wikis, the fourth grade students are going to contribute to and edit the WikiCES web site.

Computers Are...Wordle

Wordle is a web site where you enter text and it makes it into a "cloud." Words that are entered more often are shown larger than words that don't occur as much. Here is a Wordle cloud made from a project I did with fourth grade. Students had to think of things to finish the statement "Computers are..." I copied and pasted their results into Wordle, removed their names, and out came the cloud! If you are going to print your cloud, please keep clicking Randomize until you get a white background.

What's in a Name?

Fourth grade recently reviewed the three ways to get around on the Internet while researching names. First they used a link to go find an acronym for their initials. Then they searched Google for an anagram web site. Finally they used the adress bar to go to a designated baby name web site to find out what their names mean.