Meet Liberty! #GlobalPal

Meet Liberty!

This special bird is one of our classroom mascots. A mascot is a person or thing that represents a group or organization.  Liberty is a bald eagle which is the national bird of America.

Liberty is on a grand Twitter  adventure! Today, he started his Global Pal flight that will take him from Los Angeles, across America, and over the Atlantic Ocean on a journey to England.


We will chart his journey using the 
Twitter hashtag: 

#GlobalPal

✈ Liberty is on his way! ✈ #globalpal @cmonaghan11 @jasmineshannon0 @YollisClass pic.twitter.com/ojxXkCkdKl
— Linda Yollis (@lindayollis) January 24, 2015

Liberty's first Global Pal stop will be a rural community in Middleham, England. He will be learning along with Mrs. Monaghan and her English students from A Room With a View. 

Before Liberty left, he enjoyed some time with Mrs. Yollis and her students. Ella showed him how to keep her hands on the home row when learning to type. Liberty's talons, or claws, did NOT seem suited for a keyboard. 

Liberty reviewed the skill of division with Tabitha. 

Photo by Mrs. Yollis 

Liberty thoroughly enjoyed watching the students play outside during recess. The air temperature measured  75˚ F (24˚C), and he pondered what the weather was like in Middleham, England. 

Photo by Mrs. Yollis 

It is winter in the northern hemisphere. However, we have very mild winters here in southern California. In addition,  Los Angeles is 35˚ N and 118˚ W. while the coordinates of Middleham, England are 54˚ N and 1.8˚ W. How will the differences in latitude affect Liberty? 

Although Liberty has enjoyed being with Mrs. Yollis and her students. There is one fellow she is glad to be liberated from! Buck, the Yollis' cheeky Labrador retriever, took a real liking to Liberty! 

After staying a few weeks in England, Liberty will head to the southern hemisphere. He will stay with Mrs. Shannon and her new baby Oskar in Darwin, Australia! Last year, we worked with Mrs. Shannon on a different Twitter project. 

Guess who is on his way to our classroom? 

Meet Snappy!

(The green alligator, not Oskar, the cute baby.) 

#oskar is 3mo & ready to be a global ed kid! His first project is #globalpal @lindayollis and @cmonaghan1 BYE SNAPPY! pic.twitter.com/4DbyqarK2r
— Jasmine Shannon (@jasmineshannon0) January 17, 2015

Follow Liberty's journey via the Twitter hashtag #GlobalPal. There will be at least one tweet a day! Follow Snappy's Adventures in Mrs. Yollis' class! In the spring, we'll welcome Jolly George from Middleham, England!

Here are some of the things that might tweet about:

Our food

Our location

Our pets

Our hobbies

Our favorite games

Our weather

Our families

Look out for the traveling trio on Twitter with 

#globalpal!

What should Snap see while here in our neck of the woods?

Global Vocabulary A-Z Project!

Educational blogging offers many rewards! 

The collaborative learning connections that can occur when the classroom walls are flattened are rich and engaging for all learners, teachers included! 

Here is a slide show documenting an international vocabulary building project between our third grade class in California and our blogging buddies in England, A Room With a View. This fabulous A-Z Twitter project was the idea of  Catherine Monaghan. This literacy project integrates dictionary skills, Twitter, Google Presentations, and blogging.

Here is a blog post about the project.

Enjoy!

What was your favorite word?

What do you think of this type of global project?

Students and friends, use a high-level word or two in your comment! Let's keep learning!  

(Use html code to bold your word.)

Educational Tweeting!

I love to learn alongside my students. A few years ago I started exploring the educational value of Twitter. I created a classroom Twitter account (@YollisClass) and started thinking about how we could use it in the classroom. 

                      

Our first tweet was September 2, 2010!

I've used Twitter to define concepts. 

Here students tweeted out the 4 types of sentences. Students enjoyed tweeting these out and had access to the sentence types in the Twitter feed.

Students then took turns trying to tweet out example sentences! 

The class used Twitter to chronicle a Mystery Skype call! 

This week, my class has been exchanging tweets with a fabulous class in England, Mrs. Monaghan and her class 2! 

Mrs. Monaghan wrote a post about our Twitter exchange on her Room With a View blog! This British class is experimenting with having a class Twitter account too. 

Our exchange started with this math tweet. My third graders are learning about multiplication and arrays. My class shot a photo of an array in our classroom. The array was our fish bulletin board. As you can see,  there are 2 rows of ten fish and a bottom row of 7. Next, we used Skitch to annotate the photo. We invited other classes to share an array from their classroom. Here is the tweet:

Mrs. Monaghan's class (@class2middleham) tweeted this tweet to us! Like us, they used Skitch to annotate their photo.

 

And then they tweeted this screenshot of an array from their blog sidebar! 

We looked forward to tweeting back. Each time we included their @class2middleham Twitter handle so our English friends would be alerted about our new array. 

Mia's birthday cupcakes were the most delicious of all the arrays!

I added a fun twist when I created a collage array using my adorable dog, Buck! :-)

 

          You can find our Twitter feed in the sidebar of our blog. 

               From there, you can scroll through past tweets.

Are you using Twitter in your classroom? 

If so, join our Hip Hip Array fun!

How do you use Twitter with your students?

What advice to you have to make our Twitter experience meaningful and efficient?