Thursday, February 20, 2014

Hanging Out with Illustrator Rafael Rosado

Illustrator Rafael Rosado was scheduled to visit Blackland Prairie on January 28th, but weather forced him to reschedule.  Because he lives in outside of Texas and couldn't rearrange his schedule to return to visit us, he joined us this week via a Google Hangout.

Mr. Rosado is the illustrator of the Texas Bluebonnet third place book, Giants Beware.  During the hangout, Mr. Rosado showed third and fourth grade students how he creates his drawings and gave them step-by-step instructions on how to draw, Claudette, his main character from Giants Beware!  








Monday, February 10, 2014

Hanging Out with Connected Classrooms

Mrs. Masters' 5th grade class was recently chosen to participate in a Connected Classrooms Google Hangout with The Wilderness Classroom.

During this Hangout, students were joined by Dave and Amy Freeman, wilderness explorers and dogsled guides, from their home in the Northern tundra of Minnesota.  The Freeman's took the students through an introduction of what it takes to be a dogsled guide, how to prepare for a trek, prepping the dogs, how the dogs live, and more!  Mr. Freeman will finish up with a virtual dogsled ride using Google Glass.
Source:  The EdReach Network.

Because they were chosen as participants, Mrs. Masters' class had the opportunity to ask questions of the presenters and, the case of the Google Glass demo, experience the virtual field trip first hand.  Connected Classrooms is a Google+ Community that organizes virtual field trips (VFT) and makes them available to classrooms throughout the world.
Here is the link for this VFT - Connected Classrooms:  Dogsledding Through Glass with the Wilderness Classroom.

We look forward finding more VFT's for our students to participate in...thanks to Mrs. Masters' class for showing us how easy and fun VFT's are!