Cues,+Questions,+and+Advance+Organizers

Welcome to "Are You Smarter Than A First Grader?" Yes, we did play this game using a first grade classroom, an AP Government Class, and Skype. The hot topic of the day was American Symbols. After a week long integrated study of American Symbols the first graders challenged the AP students to answer some tough American Symbols questions. Check out a video of our Skype chat on our first grade web page. We can be found at Bluffsview First Grade Web Page link on [|www.worthington-portal.org]. Look under our links tab for videos. (K. Cox at Bluffsview 1st grade)

I recently tried using the Stixy site on my SMART Board to have my 6th graders post their own questions and respond to others. They quickly figured out how to manipulate the color and font! I put up the site on the board with a sticky explaining what to do, a model note, and let the kids post during our morning independent reading time. Then we had a discussion about the questions they posted at the close of Language Arts class. Stixy is free and lets you save your Stixy boards, so you can revisit questions/answers. Stixy(Emily McMullen, Granby Elem.)

I teach first grade. I used bingo card maker and filled a card with vocabulary terms for our apple unit. I enlarged it and made a transparency of it for the whole class. If I had a smart board in my room I would have used that with an airliner. I asked the kids to raise a hand quietly when they heard one of the vocabulary words on the bingo card. I really had my doubts about how much content they would absorb, but I was surprised. I was amazed at how well they focused on what I was reading and how quietly they raised their hands when they heard a word! (Kath Schmidt, Wo.Pk.)

If you are interested in learning more about Wellness, I created a Portaportal about wellness. Go to [] sign in as guest of myrkowski! Have fun!

I used Inspiration to make vocabulary templates for a student as an advanced organizer/cue for social studies vocabulary prior to a social studies lesson. (Annette DiMauro, KMS)

Icue.com has great videoclips to use before a lesson, especially Social Studies. Atalbott, KMS



To cue my high school students to commonly referenced vocabulary terms, I used the Bingo Card Maker from the Teach-nology website link on portaportal to create a Bingo Card on Atoms and the Periodic Table. I plan to use this Bingo card with my sophomore BESS students when we review these concepts in class next week and with my freshmen PESS students when we complete this unit in a few weeks. As we work through this unit, I will give the students the Bingo cards and have them keep it out during class, listening for the vocabulary terms. I hope this will help them follow along in class and increase their ability to remember how these terms relate to each other. I am attaching a pdf file of this Bingo board (with several copies because I shuffled the words multiple times). I also plan to make another one for my sophomore's Biological Chemistry unit as well as other units that involve a lot of vocabulary recognition. (Kelley Chase, WKHS)

Students researched famous Ohioans and wrote biographies. After each typed biography, students made Wordles. We used these to check if the main words were words that needed to be highlighted in the report, or if these were unimportant words used too frequently. Kids enjoyed creating Wordles and sharing their “key words” with partners. (Lisa Earley, Slate Hill)

Luckily, a lot of what I plan is implemented twice (once at each school). After doing an initial presentation/meeting on MAP, with the purpose of answering questions and encouraging open minds), I then created a Prezi to show teachers what MAP could do for them on a daily basis through analyzing different reports. I think the technology was a good choice because it’s still novel, so people enjoyed it. What I like about Prezi is that it really forces you to summarize what you want to say because there is not a lot of room for information. Teachers are already too busy, and this presentation helped me to organize my thoughts, and give a clear and concise message quickly so that we could move on to, "What can this do for me?" Lisa Rogers, Instructional Coach