January | 2012 | The 21st Century Educator

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McKinney Community Media Event

January 31, 2012 in Featured News, Letters alive, Logical Choice, Media Hit

So, Let me tell you about my day…

The day started at 5:00 AM at Lawson Earl Childhood Center in McKinney, TX. Holly, the school’s librarian and tech integration guru, met us in the dawn’s early light and gave us the grand tour before introducing us to the school staff.

Her focus, her passion in education is to reach the kids in a way that leaves a lasting impression. The way she chooses to reach out is through technology.

Today, she orchestrated an event to showcase how students from her school are using Letters alive®.

Take a look at what LeaAnne Daughrity, our senior Instructional correspondent from Discovery Education Blog fame, had to say:

Herman Lawson Elementary School in McKinney ISD spent the day showing off how kids are learning these days. Many of you may have heard of the term Augmented Reality. Well, that’s exactly what the kids are experiencing. Letters Alive is a letter learning program that uses flashcards with document style camera called a 3cam. When the flashcards are placed under the camera, they truly come alive. As you can see in the picture below, the letter “g” becomes a giraffe when held under the camera. While this smile act seems really neat and excites the kids to learn, it becomes truly meaningful when the letters go into card sentences. Simple sentences with cards can be created such as The giraffe can swim. If the animal doesn’t agree he will shake his head no. You can also hold a video card over the sentence and a live video of a giraffe in the wild will show up and the students can see the animal in its own environment. This is especially helpful to those children with very little references to build on in their life. Holly Hammonds, the LMS at Lawson shows us how this technology is utilized effectively and how the kids learn with it.

Lawson was the first elementary school in the state of Texas to try out this software and really make it work for her school students. The implementation of this was so exciting for everyone involved, so much so that it sparked the attention of Good Morning Texas, CBS’s Morning show and ABC Dallas news. With so many exciting things in the works, Logical Choice and Letters Alive promise to be a company to watch!

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Kylie’s Little Broadcast Journalists

January 29, 2012 in Blog Contest

My mom was an early childhood teacher for 30 years and inspired me to go into teaching. She always
had such great creative ideas! One of the ideas she had was for small group guided reading lessons.
My mom would have students hold a marker up and pretend that they were broadcasting for a radio
show. The student’s enthusiasm was palpable as they read. They were more expressive and more
fluid in their reading, when they were “play pretending”. To upgrade this idea to the 21st century, I
bought a few recording mics from Amazon (only $15/microphone) and started recording and loading
my students “broadcasts” onto the computer. We create their broadcasts, and make them available
for the parents at the end of each week. The parents love it, and students couldn’t be more excited to
hear themselves reading. From a learning value perspective, the enthusiasm and emotion students put
into the reading helps to increase their fluency and leads to greater comprehension. When they hear
themselves, they also get to hear how they pronounce words which is really helpful for our ESL students