Sentence Structure with Stop Motion Video

Sam and Clare, two students in Mrs. Pongratz's Senior English class, energize grammar with their creative stop-motion animation video on sentence structure.


The power of publishing to the web means real, live, instant feedback. Within an hour of publishing their project online, these were comments received via Twitter about it:

A Visitors' Thank-you

Letter from Louisville Public Schools:

"Katie and Staff and Students at O'Neill Public Schools,

Thank you so much for taking the time to share your 1:1 program with us last week. We learned so much and were so impressed with your progress. It was great to see the process in action. Thank you again,

Shureen and the Tech Team"

iGeography

Mr. Hostert's 7th graders use their Macbook to learn U.S. Geography in a number of ways.

• iPhoto: Tagging images with "Places" and adding geographical information to each image for later review.

• SMART Notebook: Using the Gallery items to create maps and study guides for learning the original 13 colonies

• Internet: For review games such as from http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/web_games.htm
  

The more ways we practice, the more we learn!

Collaborative Flashcards

In Mrs. Pongratz's English classes, learning vocabulary is a full class effort. Students create PowerPoint slides on individual vocabulary words, complete with definition, derivatives, and visual image, etc., then save their slides as pdf files and submit to Angel. Mrs. Pongratz downloads the student-created flashcards, and using Adobe Acrobat Pro combines the individual student files into one large pdf. This is saved back to Angel for the entire class to download and study from. What a great use of a simple technology tool, Mrs. Pongratz. Thanks for sharing!

Download an example here.

Student Shares Sign Language via iWeb project

Douglas shares his knowledge of sign language via his iWeb site for Mr. Peterson's class. Click on his Blog and subscribe to his videos to learn the alphabet and more!

http://ops.esu8.org/~douglassidak/Douglas_Sidak_Sign_Language/Welcome.html

Another mode to "touch" foreign language practice

Spanish classes at OHS have started utilizing O'Neill's new iPod touch cart to deepen their foreign language practice. The iPod touch is a portable handheld computer which can run many applications with the touch of a finger. The iTunes App Store has many educational apps available for download that run on these devices (and not on laptops). Mrs. Brown purchased apps from the 24/7 Tutor series with which students are able to see, hear pronunciations of, and play educational games with Spanish vocabulary words. This additional avenue of experiences with technology enhances the learning of our students and reaches other modalities and interest levels. The iPod touch cart will be shared with other O'Neill teachers and classrooms throughout the school year. Stay tuned for other exciting applications of this newest learning device for O'Neill Public School students and teachers!

Collaborative Writing Continues

In Mrs. Troester's 8th grade English class students are not only writing, peer editing, and revising within her classroom, they are doing it with students across the state. The following link is from an article written by Mrs. Troester and published by the University of NE- Lincoln about O'Neill's participation in the Nebraska Writing Project last year. This year the project has been expanded to more OHS classrooms and is producing more and more positive results. Congratulations to our 8th grade authors, editors, and peer reviewers in this project!

http://www.unl.edu/newp/news/2009/On_Line_Writing_Forum.shtml