Thank you, Carolyn. Again, my name is Dave Floyd. I'm an elementary tech teacher in Howard County, Maryland.
I will say I've been using Wixie before it was Wixie, when it was Pixie 2. It was the first time I started using it. I fell in love with the program and I've been using it ever since. So I was reminiscing about that before I got started on getting this together.
I'm really excited. I love integrating Wixie whenever I can into different class projects or using it for student choice. So these are some projects that I've done.
Some are things that I've sort of thrown together for ideas, just to sort of inspire you for using Wixie more in your classes. First, I want to do is I want to piggyback on the last meeting with Heidi talking about choice boards and all the templates. There is a really great template with a choice board in Wixie already made.
That has lots of different options for you to use that you can use with the kids. Lots of really cool templates already there made for you to use. Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to do that.
There goes my computer again. Give me one second. My computer has been acting up on me.
I apologize. Let me try this one more time. This is what happens when you don't hook up an extra monitor often enough.
So, again, Heidi was talking in the last webinar about how the templates are already there for you. And I just sort of took a nice little screenshot of the templates. And you can see you have all of the different STEAM areas and folders already there for you to pull from.
I love using them and just taking them and editing them and making them my own. So, without starting, I'm going to start with the scientists, the science, and some of the different things I've done. This is, I think, probably hands down one of my favorite things that I've done.
And I know I used it last time, but having the students do an animated life cycle or plant growth is awesome. I've done it with kindergarten. That was the plant life cycle going from the seed to the flower.
And then I did with third grade a life cycle of an animal. And they got to choose the different animal. They would do the research.
They had a Wixie organizer they used. And literally, they draw the picture. They used the duplicate page tool.
And then they made small changes. And they just continually duplicated it until they finished. And in the end, they had a really nice little video.
My ones that finished fast, I would show them how to go back, add some music to it, change the transition speed. So they had a really nice little almost movie at the very end. One of my favorite activities.
And I did it with kindergarten starting probably middle of the year. And it was a great project for them. This is one that I did this year.
I did a third grade climate zone project. I had some time in between. I met with our third grade team.
And found out that they had two lessons where the students had to create a picture of one of three climate zones. So I thought that was the perfect opportunity to integrate Wixie into a science class. These are some screenshots of some of what my students designed.
You can see some like to use the background. And I didn't show them. They found the change background page image.
And they added, this student added the ice background. Some drew and then used the different painting tools. And it turned out to be a really good project.
The kids really loved it. They were super excited to share with their teachers what they had done. And the teachers actually used it as a science grade.
And I used it as a technology skill grade for my students. This is Jasmine. Hopefully it will play.
It's not going to play for me. It did earlier. But what I had them do is not only create the image, but I also had them, I had them record their voice and record the facts that they used.
I don't have an animation project readily available. But if you want, if you email me, I'll send you one. I know I have some.
This one, I don't know why it's not playing. It worked for me earlier. But the students did research.
And once they did their research, they had to find three facts about that climate zone. And then I had them record their voice, discussing the facts that they created, talking about the animals. And one of the things that I did is I created in Canvas, that's what we use for our students.
I created a list of the animals available for each of the climate zones based on what was already in Wixie. And it was nice. There's a folder already made in Wixie for the students to use.
Maybe I can come back to this one at the end. I know I can play it when I'm not in show. I'm not sure why it didn't want to play for me now.
This is something I sort of put together tonight. I was thinking about choice boards and things that I've done and the different templates that are already available. So in this I've created, these are links to the different Wixie templates.
So one of the science lessons in fourth grade was creating a code that they had to share with other students. And in my example, I created one where I used emojis and stickers to create a message for the students. And these each link to different things.
So I could start here with the engineering design process, have them work with the group, open the template, ask that question, how can I create the code, imagine what they would do. They would brainstorm different ideas. They would come up with a plan.
Then when they got to the create, they could come over and open up my link here to the plan your code and start creating the code. They could add their classmates that are in their group as a teammate so that they can work in teams. They can work simultaneously.
And then at the end they have a reflection log. So this could be just like a one-stop place for the students to get started and then work on the project. I will use this.
I have not used this yet. I've used the coding piece, but I have not used this linked page with my students. But this is something I will be using with them at some point.
One of my fourth grade, the last two years I was teaching fourth grade and one of our science lessons was they had to create a solar oven. So I gave the students a choice. They can design in Google Slides.
They can design in Wixie. So this was one of my students. She created this.
And what I love about using Wixie is it gets them some graphic design. They're using some of the tools to design. Annalise here, she took and she put a sticker of a box, but then she drew and then she used arrows and labels and put everything in that she needed for a diagram for science.
So another great way just to pull in a little bit of everything together. On to technology. Again, being a technology teacher, and I know I see some of my Howard County technology teachers here, you know, we're always looking for different ways.
This year for my digital citizenship, and I have to give a shout out to Lindy, she made the capes for me for my kids when I needed something for them. And this was talking about cyberbullying, you know, at the end, sort of a culminating activity of tying in everything we discussed about digital citizenship. And these were two of my students.
They created their digital superhero identity card. That was a template. I edited it to make it my own.
And they did a really good job coming up and being creative with how they portrayed themselves as a digital superhero. Yes, they changed the opacity. I love that.
I love that they did that. I showed them. I just did a quick piece on that.
They can change the color just by using the slider. They can change the opacity so they can see through. It was really cool.
The kids had a blast with it. They took their Chromebooks. I showed them how to just go into tablet mode.
They took pictures of each other. I had some of them, they stood their Chromebook up and they just took their own picture. You know, this was unprompted using the, like I was flying or anything.
It was just such a fun project. One of the things we do with kindergarten and first grade is planning a path with our Bebots. And I love this because they can use the paint tool.
They can draw the direction they need to go to get to the yellow triangle. Then I cloned each of these buttons and then they would drag and show the code. Then I would have them, I would put a mat out and I would have them come in.
They would program the Bebot to actually move to the yellow triangle so they could test what they created. So getting into some coding and some building of the code in itself and trying to test and debug if they made any mistakes. This was one of my favorites.
I put this one together for my kindergarten as a culminating, first grade, sorry, as one of the culminating activities. Programming a sequence to get their Bebot to do a dance. So basically all I did is I gave them the template.
They opened it up. They decided on what their dance was. They would come.
They got a Bebot from me. They would put the code in for the Bebot. They would bring it up.
I had the Bebot dance floor at the front of my room. They would bring their Bebot up and they would dance. I think next year I'm going to have some music playing in the background.
They brought their Bebots and they had them dancing. It was so much fun. It was cool.
I had two students. I have a couple of videos here. The one on the right, two students got together on their own and they said let's make our Bebot dance together.
So they coded together. So this is what they did. They did the same one.
I want to see what it looks like. They're bumping into each other. Look at those Bebots dance.
All right. And then I had the big dance floor where they were all just doing their own code, doing their own little thing. And one of the cool things with the Bebots is when they get close to each other, they actually make noises.
So it was a really fun way. And here you can see I embedded video. Students can add their videos to a Wixie page as well.
So other things that you can do is have the kids take their own videos with their Chromebooks and they can put it right into their presentation in Wixie. Another one of my poems, the student had to write a poem. I asked them to choose how they wanted to illustrate it, and she chose doing this.
And the fun part is the drizzle piece. I did not. That was her on her own how she came up with this.
So I thought this was really, really cool. I know this one was one that was allowed to be shared. This student loved using Wixie, so it was really cool how she did it.
This is one of my fourth grade students from last year. Any questions so far? I'm sorry. I don't know if I'm going too fast or not.
I'm going to keep on going. Let me find my cursor again. Here we go.
So art. And, again, this is all, like, tiny, like, design. Some things I've done in the past is I do storyboarding.
One of the art teachers at my school, she wanted to do stop-motion animation, so we had an app on an iPad so they could create their images in art. But what they did is they storyboarded in Wixie, so I gave them just a blank template. They used the stickers to storyboard.
They would type in some text boxes, adding speech bubbles, just getting the idea of what's going to happen in the story that they were creating. And I think the year we did, I think it was kindness, was the theme that they had to follow. So we did the whole storyboard.
We printed characters that they could use, or sometimes they even had props that they could use. And then they would take it to art class, and they did this video. Just real quick.
This is just a video that they created from. All the storyboarding for this was done. So, again, another way of integrating other classes into using Wixie to help get projects done.
And, again, they could use now, now we can add some video. We could add the video right into the project. So they could even do it in Wixie now.
This is one, and I may come out of this, because I don't know if it's going to work in show. I'm working with the music teacher. This is a work in progress.
She's doing, and the music teacher is doing, high and low sounds with the kindergarten. And they're talking and sorting different things by high and low. And I thought this would be a great, I'm still working on teaching them to drag and drop.
But in Wixie now, you can add tones. Let me do it. It's not.
I'm going to go out, because I want to show this. This is really cool. You can change the tone of an object in Wixie.
So I'm going to click, and if they click the speaker. So I edited the tone just by clicking the image. And you go edit, and you go to alt text.
And then you can put in, I'm not a musician. So I'm meeting with the music teacher tomorrow, and we're going to go in and add. And then we're just going to put tones in that are either high or low.
And then the kindergartners will listen to it and then sort that for me. So it works on the drag and drop, but it also ties in the, the music piece as well. Here I just did, I added this tonight.
So a low tone for the bass cello. So now they can do that sort. I'm just going to stay out of the presentation mode, just so you guys can see this.
Row, row, row your boat. Again, I don't know the notes, but you can get things for the students. They can play.
One of the things I was thinking about, if I would do this, is once I meet with the music teacher, I'm going to find out where these notes belong, and I'm going to mark the keys for the students, so the students can then start to play it. And we can do that in class as well. Math, the last few years in, in fourth grade, I relied heavily on Wixie, especially when we were virtual for using ways to, for the students to show their understanding.
I mean, we could use Paradex and things like that. I love being able to use Wixie because I can go in, I can easily look, I can make comments easily on what the students are doing as they're doing it. This is one I made for my fourth grade, our rising fourth graders last summer during summer school.
So, and this is now in the template library. So please take it and use it. But it was a great way for them to start working on division, you know, reading the problem.
They could highlight the text if they wanted to using the paint tool to figure out, okay, these are my words. These are what I need to help me and then start creating that math problem. And it was really, really successful in helping the students create division problems, start to understand what division looked like and how that, how it was tied to multiplication.
So it was a really successful project area and perimeter. And I'm just going to click on this. This is one that I did with my students when they were working area and perimeter, they went in, excuse me.
And they can now go through, they could look and see, they have a reference sheet that could help them and literally go through and work on area and perimeter and show me their work. So I can actually see what they were doing. I could comment and help them on that.
It was, it was a great way to be able to just to see the students work and, and help guide them, especially in that virtual world. It was really nice to have this as a tool. Other things I've done.
This was a math sentence I did with, I believe kindergarten where they rolled, rolled two dice for the first number, rolled two dice for the second number to try and create an addition problem. And then they could use 10 blocks to show their work and how they would get their answer. This was the first page.
Then there would be a second page where they would actually show the final answer. And then sometimes I would even have them create a story for that. There were 12 frogs on a log, eight more joined the log.
How many frogs were on the log? So I could even move it a little bit further for my, my students who are a little bit faster. So now they're taking just this simple math problem that they created. Now they're, they're illustrating that math problem just to show a deeper understanding of the problem.
First grade. One of the things I loved doing was pictographs. We would do this one as a class.
We would take a poll. I would record using tally marks on my board. And then I would create a pictograph of this.
Then the next class, I would give them a piece of paper, which had they could choose my favorite ice cream, my favorite candy, whatever it is. And they would write three choices. They would walk around the class.
They would pull their, their classmates. They would get a blank template for the pictograph. And then they would create their template.
And then create a pictograph based on their data collection. So you're tying in math, you're tying in a lot of different pieces to help them really understand what they were doing. And let's see, this is something that I love doing with my fourth graders is just working on place value.
And this could be modified to work on, you know, with lower grades as well. You know, putting a number in and then showing it standard word and then expanded form just to drive home as you're working through those different, different forms of, of numbers. And then the last one I have here, I built this as a, a guide for my students.
And then they had a page that was blank where they would then take a number. They would take a problem and they would break it down into partial sums and show me all of the different versions. So again, just tying it all together.
That's all of the projects that I had. If anybody has any questions, I know I can go back and show you my third grader here. And this is what I love about the recording.
Hello, it's me and here are four facts about the tropical zone. Fact number one, the tropical climates are very hot and rainy. Number two, the places you can find tropical climates are in Brazil and Africa.
Fact number three, the tropical climate can also be found near the equator. Fact number four, the tropical climate can also be found near the equator. And number six, So, you know, it was a great thing.
And I did listening to the students projects. I got to hear that like at the end, this is an extra fact. They didn't have to do a four fact, four fact, but she chose to do that.
And then it was really cool. How some of the kids really, really enjoyed doing it. It was great hearing their voice, tell their facts.
So that's all I have. Let me get my cursor up here and I can stop sharing. If anybody has any questions.
Dave, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to, before people ask questions, I'm going to go ahead and turn off the recording if that's okay with you. And that way people might feel more, you know, free to ask questions. All right.
