Nutrition Prezi Projects

Fourth grade students recently studied safety and nutrition as part of their science curriculum.  In looking for something new to do with this unit, the classroom teacher and I collaborated on using Prezi to come up with interactive presentations.

Here is one example:

This project went smoothly.  A few things I did to help the project along were to:
- create one Prezi account under my username that we all used.
- found the plate pictures ahead of time, as there are so many variations out there.

A few things I was surprised about included:
- how easy Prezi was to use for kids.  (My first Prezi, it took me awhile to wrap my head around how the tools worked - not them!)
- how small students wanted to make their supporting sentences.  We even lost a few because they were so little!
- Prezis must be made public for parents to view them when embeded on your website!

Elementary Book Trailers

Just as we are finishing the 2012 year, fourth grade students have been busy finishing their book trailers using Animoto.  Students choose a book they had already read that was available in our school libraries.  They then planned out what they were going to say about the book to get students interested in reading but not give away the whole story.  (Many kids wanted to give a summary of the book, which included the ending so lots of re-writing was done after the first try.)  I gave students a planning sheet that looked like this: 

After students were done planning, we used our subscription to Britannica ImageQuest to find images that would illustrate our sentences. 

We used Animoto to create our book trailers.  Here are two but check out our full set of trailers on our school webpage. 




We also had a few students go further and create a book trailer for a series of graphic novels.  You can see those trailers on this page, also a school webpage. 

Students said they loved making these videos and the second time was a lot easier than the first (for those who had time to work on a second one).