The Greatest Stories Never Told: Showcasing Our Gifted Classrooms Through Social Media & WebTools

It has been quite a November! This year I was fortunate enough to attend the 60th National Association for Gifted Children Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana to share my love and passion for technology. It all started with our little class blog that was created to share projects with parents and community members. However, it grew to be a space where we were able to showcase our learning as well as collaborate with other classes around the globe! If you would like to check us out, click here.  And in case you missed it, I have included a recording of my presentation. Thanks to Quicktime, I was able to record a screencast.

 It was an exhilarating experience to be among the brightest minds in gifted education! What was most exciting was actually meeting folks I have been in communication with on Twitter. So it was no surprise that there was to be a #gtchat TweetUp during the conference. Here are some pictures of this event.

Left: Group Picture, Right: With Lisa Conrad, #gtchat moderator extraordinaire! 

Tremendous Trio!: With Ginger Lewman & Lisa Conrad. 

And who could forget, Ian Byrd! He was our Twilebrity at the conference! 

Animal Research Poems

It has been a busy Fall! It was time for a recap of what we have been up to in my classroom. Last term we have been working on research and organizational skills. As part of our district-wide themes, we focused on endangered animals, however I felt that my students needed a creative way to showcase their learning. Instead of settling for the typical report, I wanted my students to write poems. I provided several templates to get them started. The poems challenged my students to be flexible and figure out ways to incorporate different information about their animals in new and interesting ways. Some students struggled with the open nature of the poems, especially with poems that required them to think from the perspective of their chosen animal. As a final step, I had some students use Pages to showcase their poems. I taught them to use the poster templates and modify those for their  poems. Overall, I am very delighted by their final products!