Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Thing 14: Bitmoji Fun

I had a lot of fun exploring this activity. Bitmojis are becoming increasingly popular with students old and young. Because of this, I felt that there would be a lot of cool ways to use Bitmoji to catch students' attention. One idea that I thought of would be to create a bulletin board using different students' Bitmojis for my next year class. They could use them to illustrate different work they have done (i.e. a true story they have written, or facts they have researched on a certain topic) and use the Bitmoji as an attention grabber to get people more interested in checking out the work they have done. I also thought it would be a neat idea to use my own Bitmoji to label different areas of the classroom (i.e. where homework is handed in, classroom library, etc). I also thought that perhaps when we do our book fair at school, students could print out their Bitmoji and tape it near a book they may recommend to other students in their class/school. 

An idea that I found when exploring this activity would be to use my own Bitmoji as a way to respond to student work (i.e. the A+ Bitmoji above).  I am open to so many ideas now including decorating my door using Bitmoji, and even creating self-adhesive stickers with Bitmoji! How exciting!

One thing I am reluctant about would be allowing the students to search their own Bitmojis. I know there are some that are inappropriate for the age that I teach (9-11 year olds). Our school does have the Bitmoji website blocked, so I would need to take on the task of creating their Bitmojis and uploading a select few appropriate options for my students to choose from.

Thing 20: Social Reading and Book Stuff

One thing that caught my attention was Over Drive with the Public Library System. This is something I would be interested in using in my personal life, in place of Audible. Also, I thought it would be a fun new way to get students interested in books with the use of technology.

The second thing that I found interesting was Audio Recordings. I thought this would be a helpful tool for students to talk about a story they want to write, and play it back to help them write it. Often times it is easier to tell a story out loud before taking on the challenge of writing it down on paper.

I checked out the "5 Tips for Using Book Creator for Reading Responses" and got a lot of great information from this. Teaching in a fourth grade classroom I am always looking for new and exciting ways for the students to have opportunities to respond to the texts we are both reading in the classroom and they are reading on their own outside of the classroom. Daily Journals and Video Reflections would be a great thing to incorporate into our daily ELA time. This not only will aide in their understanding of the text, but also aide in their ability to write about what they are reading by recording their voice first, and replaying that so they can then type up a response in paragraph form.

Lastly, I noticed the Free Books to Title One Schools. I thought this would be an awesome way to get books in students home for both children and parents to enjoy. Instilling a love and interest in reading books at home would be a great way for students to follow this example and carry it back and forth from school to home.