Skype in the Classroom, Global Read Aloud, Sign-out Procedures

Global Collaboration

For the month of October, we will focus on the "Global Collaborator" and we will focus on tools that provide students with the opportunity to engage with people and places outside of their own community. 

1.  Skype in the Classroom

Skype in the Classroom brings other classrooms and destinations into your classroom.  The key to Skype in the Classroom is the Microsoft Educator Community, which allows safe and curricular driven experiences to connect with your classroom.  Please find a step by step video on how to register for the Educator Community on the Pennridge Around the World website crafted by Erin, which does a fantastic job reviewing experiences that have been really successfull in the past.

After much trial and error, we have found that regular Skype works much more effectively with classroom connections.  However, it is not possible for new teachers to sign up for a regular Skype name.  In this way, we have created a Skype username for each school to use for these connections.  Chris will send out an e-mail with this login information at the start of next week.  If you have a username that has worked please feel free to keep using it!

Pennridge teachers have had some great success with two different types of connections:

• Author visits - fantastic for making connections with literature, speaking to an author allows students to ask questions about a book from the source as well as learn from a writing professional firsthand.

• Zack Bush - Made for Me
• Sarah Sullivan - Passing the Music Down
• Pat Collins - The Deer Watch
• Fiona Burdett - The Gadoomfs
• Josh Lacey - The Dragonsitter Series
• Tricia Brown - Charlie and the Blanket Toss
• Peter Raymundo - Third Grade Mermaid

• Field Trips - Skype in the Classroom allows students to visit with people from places classrooms could seldom experience before.  Although there are trips that will connect to all different subjects, these trips are especially powerful in extending the Science and Social Studies curriculum.  If you are looking for a specific topic, please let us know and we may be able to help out.


• Fossil Lake: A Trip into a Tropical Ecosystem of the Past
• History of Slavery at Monticello
• A Virtual Field Trip to Ancient Corinth, Greece
• Discover Jurassic Fossils at Dinosaur National Monument
• Connect with Ancient Civilizations through Art & Architecture
• Debating Yellowstone's Big Issues
• History Mystery Skype at the Abraham Lincoln Library

2.  Global Read Aloud

Next week's book is You Hold Me Up by Monique Gray Smith, Illustrated by Danielle Daniel.  You can see the author read the book on YouTube here and about the author note here to get a sense for how the author uses the text with students.  In addition, this book can also be found on EPIC! 
 Please know that you can participate as much or as little as you would like, and to contact Chris or Erin if you would like to be partnered up with another classroom at Pennridge to talk about the book.  Remember to share you pictures and/or stories in this Google Drive folder!

Week 4's book is A Day with Yayah by Nicola I Campbell and Julie Flett

3.  Signing Out 

With the new windows update, it is important that students use the logout button as it is pictured to the right and stay away from switching users.  When too many people are logged in, it creates a logjam of users that impacts the performance of the machine.  In addition, laptops should be shutdown when being stored.  A quick suggestion:

• Most of the time students should click on the start menu, choose the profile icon in the start menu and choose "Signout."  

• If it is at the end of the day, students click on the start menu, click the power button, and then "Shutdown."

Congrats to the many students and classrooms who completed the EPIC! Book Fall into Reading Book Challenge!