As of November 16th one student has already completed my challenge of beating level 226 on typingclub.com and won one of prize drones!
3 more left!
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We are already 3 months into the new school year and this is the first blog update I have made!
If a blog falls in the woods does anyone read it? Haha, well anyway... The year has been going smoothly so far. The 4th and 5th graders completed the new Architecture unit I created and we built cube based house designs that we sketched out in Minecraft. Most students did not finish, but after 2 weeks of building I realized there just is not enough time in a class period to complete any complex project within a reasonable amount of time, unless it is a group effort. I will try to post screen shots of the house designs that students made in the 4th and 5th grade art gallery later. The Art Gallery is new and updated! Click on Art Gallery 2018 to see what is new. I have uploaded hundreds of pictures from from kindergarten and 1st grade art we have completed. Take a look because I am again very impressed with how the 1st grade Abstract art projects turned out. We have been using typingclub.com in 3rd throught 5th grade and it is very fun and engaging. I have officially announced there is a prize for the first 4 students who can complete level 226 on typing club without looking at their hands! The prize is one of 4 Micro Drones that i ordered last year. Lesson ideas for the near future: Data compression lesson with Super Nintendo emulation practice Programing 3 - Space Shmup scratch tutorial with Beepbox and Piskel integration Eclipse lesson and eclipse art This year is already nearly finished! Its funny how fast it creeps up and suddenly here we are with another beautiful summer ahead.
I have updated the Art galleries with a huge amount of student work!! Go check out some of the student's projects, I uploaded many more art pieces from k-2nd in Tux Paint. Also, i have uploaded 4th and 5th grade art in the form of screenshots of their 3D sculptures and Animated pixel art GIFs like the ones below. I also plan on uploading the files of scratch video games that the 4th and 5th graders made in my class. I still am hoping to do a paleontology lesson for 3rd grade by the last class of the year... We will see if I manage to prepare it on time. My goals of becoming better with Gimpshop and FL studio have utterly failed! However I have learned Paint.net and taught several photo-editing lessons to 4th and 5th. FL studio is a big goal and I hope to learn more about music production over the summer so i can teach it next year. I will most likely never see the 5th graders again! :-( Because of this I am trying to fit in as much awesome and inspiring content I can into the last few classes. The computer hardware lessons was a big success, and even though 30 minutes is a very short time to try and take apart and put together a computer, I believe it was still a fun yet different flavor of lesson than I usually give. For next year I plan on changing how I teach Keyboarding. Instead of using Typing.com I am planning on changing to using Typingclub.com This program seems a lot more engaging and allows me to track every students progress more concretely. If you wish for your child to get a head start, sign them up on www.typingclub.com and practice over the summer! Its pretty fun to try even for adults. Have a great summer and see everyone next year! -Kyle Wow... I guess its been quite a while since I have updated this! Lots has happened since I last posted to this blog, To sum it up, each grade has done lots of unique work.
First things first! I have updated the Art Gallery again! new Kinder, 1st, 2nd, and 4th and 5th art is online for you all to check out! I really want to have the students do more art and creative projects by the end of the year, but I also have finally made a functioning Paleontology fossil bed! The 3rd graders have already completed the Paleontology unit I wanted to make, and sadly it still is not up to my expectations. Studying dinosaurs and ancient life should be one of the coolest units, but I need to fine tune it more for next year. One more paleontology lesson awaits somewhere in the future in which I will have 2nd or 3rd graders actually dig out real fossils from artificial sandstone. Maybe towards the end of the year. The other exciting thing that happened was how successful my choose-your-own-adventure Powerpoint lesson turned out. The 4th and 5th graders had a great time spending two periods making their own creative stories in Powerpoint and I plan to have many of them present their work to the class in the next few days. For the future, I will be doing another powerpoint focused lesson dealing with Inventions for 2nd and 3rd grade in the next couple weeks. I still have yet to begin the Animation unit, which students very much enjoyed last year. My goals for the end of the year for myself are to become more proficient with Gimpshop, a free Photoshop style program, as well as FL studio. If I can do that, I will be able to teach some very interesting lessons to the 4th and 5th graders that I dreamed of doing last year. I guess that's all for now. so far it has been a very exciting first (ish) year of teaching tech for me! -Kyle The first month of the 2016-17 school year is almost over already!!! So far things have gone smoothly for the most part, I will be teaching my 5th session of Technology class this week. So far I have started the year with lessons on basic computer parts and control for Kindergarten, and plan to get deeper into manipulating the technology lab homepage as well as introducing a web based reading game called "Teach Your Monster to Read". First and Second grade have been studying city technology and working on art in Tux paint. 3rd and up have had lessons on endangered species technology and have just begun typing practice in with the web based touch typing program "Typing.com." 4th and 5th grade have practiced making google slide presentations as well. My goal this year is to have all 4th graders reach a typing speed of 15 WPM and all 5th graders reach at least 20 WPM.
I have many new ideas for this year in technology and I hope the students are as intrigued as I am. With a full school year, I now have time to complete more complex units and follow through with ideas that I never got to do last year. Some new ideas I have for small units and lessons are: Teach your monster to read Building skyscrapers Game design with RPG maker and Scratch Electronic music production Medical technology Coding with minecraft turtles Coding with CodeCombat Soon i will begin teaching 5th grade TAG enrichment class once a week as well, I have not decided what that will entail as it might change depending on what the students want to study, but it might involve storytelling. Till next time! -kyle The year is almost over! Time flies when you're having fun. Since last post, I have finished teaching many concepts I wanted to explore including Quad copters, Introductory programming, and pixel art! The pixel lesson turned out to be one of the most successful next to the Pivot animation. basically everyone had fun creating tiny pixel sprites and even animating them a bit.
New*** I added a gallery of all the saved Pixel art I could find onto the Art Gallery page! It was too complicated to save the files by name, but I bet the students can find their own creation. Other than that, I finally started teaching Minecraft to 1st grade and Kindergarten as I promised that they could play it by the end of the year. Over the last couple months the classes have been earning points that equal free play time on Minecraft on the last day... But for them to be able to play, they first have to learn how! I hope next year goes as awesome as this one did. I think on the final day of classes I'm going to pass out some hand-outs that have links to some of the fun and creative programs the students have learned so they can practice over the summer if they want. -Kyle Its been quite a while again since a post on here, and since I am about to start having 5th grade begin their own blogs it only seems fitting that I post on my own too! The website unit is progressing steadily, some students are finishing much faster than others. This will be the third day of making websites today and hopefully most students will be able to finish or at least come close to finishing. Since Last post I have finished a transportation Unit in Kindergarten and 1st grade and have moved on to Programming. This is going to be exciting as I have never considered teaching Programming to students at such a young age, and so far they are enjoying it. Fourth grade has taken a break from website making to begin a special Oregon Trail journey in Minecraft. The teacher who made the Oregon trail map had been working on it for a long time and finally posted it at the perfect time, right as they were beginning their unit, I'm excited for next week when they will actually be able to walk around in Independence Missouri and buy supplies for their journey. Second and third grade are still focusing on typing but are having fun in Minecraft as well and most of third grade has begun a famous landmark architecture project in MC. Second grade is still getting the hang of just using things and digging in a Paleontology map.
Little update, only students in fifth grade were able to come close to finishing their websites this week. I was surprised more were not closer to finishing by the end but I think the reason why is that everyone is just having too much fun customizing their own special site. It would be great if the tech class periods for 4th and 5th grade were 1 hour long instead of just 30 minutes! Good news and bad news! Bad news is... so far I still have not begun the computer hardware, quad-copter racing, programming, animation, or music with technology lessons for 4th and 5th grade! I don't think I'll have enough time by the end of the year to cover everything! Each time I begin a new project with the students It simply takes much longer than I expect. The good news is I now have a functional Art Gallery with images and art from the entire range of grades. The kindergarten art is really cool looking! -Kyle Dear Everyone, Things are going smoothly. Its been about a month and a half since the start of the technology class and things are progressing steadily. So far, i think the most successful lessons have been the introduction to Minecraft via dinosaurs for 4th and 5th grade and the intro to animation lessons for 2nd and 3rd grade. I look forward to delving deeper into animation later, but at the moment I am focused on setting up a typing routine and typing accounts for all older grades. So far I have succeeded at several lesson ideas, however most of the time the lessons themselves seem to take longer than I anticipate and span two weeks instead of one. It makes me wonder if I will have to trim my ideas down by the end of the year eventually... Due to popular demand, this next week I plan to finally start 2nd and 3rd grade on the path to using Minecraft in lessons. Over the past month or so I have tested using the program in older grades. It will be interesting to see how this all works out as it is a very new and experimental experience using this game as a teaching tool, especially for younger grades. I plan to send home a letter to parents detailing the topics we have covered so far and some of what I plan for the future. Speaking of the future, my plans for lessons and units still include: Website Building Computer Hardware Quad-copter building/racing Music with technology - quantized Programming with scratch Minecraft Architecture Area and volume Programming with computercraft World of Humanities / Oregon trail Video Editing Blogging -Mr K. I am testing out the effectiveness of this blog page with a post and a cool medieval digital image. Everything seems to be in good working order. Weebly is extremely user friendly.
Some of my current ideas for potential lessons/units this year include:
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AuthorKyle Kertay, technology teacher at Markham Elementary Archives
November 2017
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