WE WON!!!

I am thrilled to report that due to our fabulous mini-unit on Health and our awesome Animoto project below, we WON the iMac for the Library from Playnormous!!!

Special thanks to the great people at Playnormous.com for doing the giveaway!

Here are a couple of pictures below of our new computer (the kids got to pick the cool skin on it) and our proud group of PGPers who worked hard to learn about health and wellness and come up with quick and easy things to say for the very limited Animoto text!

We've got some great units planned for the 2nd half of the year. Stay tuned to the blog for more information as we learn and expand our thinking together! Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

Playnormous Entry - November

Contest Entry

For the past few weeks, we've been trying to win a new iMac for the school library. We did a short unit on being healthy, and using the health games from Playnormous.com, we learned more about making good eating choices and adding exercise to each day. Above, you'll see the animoto of our learning experience.

We are really hoping to be the November winner of the Playnormous.com iMac!

Carson's Animoto

Cael's Animoto

Drew's Animoto

Joseph's Animoto

Ava's Animoto

Wendy's Animoto

Riley's Animoto

Claire's Animoto

SUCCESSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!

We are SO EXCITED to share the above projects to you using Animoto. We brainstormed things we liked, took pictures of them around campus, and learned a new program - Animoto! We added pictures, music, and the website mixed up the slide show for us. Aren't they AWESOME?!?!

We think they're pretty cool!

Enjoy!

Animoto Frustration Day

We haven't posted here in a month. Wow! Has it been that long?! For the past 3 weeks, we've been working hard on an individual Animoto project like the one you see below. Each PGP student created a brainstorm list of things they like to do. Then, they took turns taking digital pictures of those things all around the school. This process, with only 1 camera, took quite a bit of time, but we finished our photos on Wednesday, and today was supposed to be Animoto Creation day. Each student was going to make their OWN animoto from start to finish. However, that's not exactly what happened.

Several of our older computers didn't seem to have the right program installed with the right settings, even though all computer are set to work the same way! ARGH (as Drew said!) Luckily, Cael and Carson's computers worked beautifully. Miss Lee is going to have a tech person come and fix the other machines so everyone can finish their animoto next week!

It was a day of frustration, but also of learning with lots of "ughs"!

More soon!

Miss Lee, Carson, Cael, Joseph, Ava, Drew, Riley, Wendy, and Claire :)

Animoto.com

Getting to know each other, part II

You'll see above the cool slide show that is posted in a post by itself... this is from an awesome website called Animoto. Using animoto, a few pictures, some text, and a selection of free music, it takes about 15 minutes to create this moving, exciting, and super fun slide show. Forgive the typos in the animoto - I was trying to get it done quickly to show the kids and I didn't proof it before hitting "create"!

Enjoy!

Getting to know each other

One of our first technology activities this year was to use a fun, free website for image manipulation called Big Huge Labs. It's a place to make fun and school-related quick projects... everything from "baseball" cards to "magazine covers"... we did a "name badge" and offically marked the beginning of PGP.

It's a free site with no requirement to log in. Play around if you want to! The link is here.

PGP Blog Purpose

The purpose of this PGP blog is to provide a place to store and explain some of the technology projects we do during PGP. I thought it might be a good idea to provide the blog to you (the PGP parents) so that when your kiddos come home saying we did a project and it's on the blog, you'd know where to go to find it!

This blog, while public in the sea of millions of blogs out there, does not have any identifying information other than a photo of your child and maybe a first name here or there. The district supports us using blogs as means of communication and project display. I feel completely secure posting our projects here, and hope that you do, too. I have made the blog unsearchable on the internet and through blogger, so the only way one would know it exists is to know the actual address of the blog.

From time to time, I'll post what we've been doing in PGP and provide the actual project or a link to it when available. Feel free to leave a comment or 2 if you like!

Enjoy!

Miss Lee :)

Welcome to our Blog!

This is the blog for PGP that we're going to use for Valley Oaks Elementary!