We had an amazing opportunity to watch a live interview with Sharon Draper, author of Out Of My Mind. We have been reading the book with thousands of students around the world. We were all able to ask questions through a google form put together by Mrs. Ripp. We all asked a question and waited to see if any would be answered. It was amazing to see Mrs. Ripp and Mrs. Draper! So many of our questions were answered! We also tweeted in more questions as we listened and thought of other things that we wanted to know. Mrs. Cobb's class joined us and they had some great questions too. We all had a great time! Thank you so much Mrs. Ripp and Mrs. Draper!
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Ms. Cypert's Class We had another great Skype call with Ms. Cypert's class this week! We all wrote about something that we would be willing to give up all of our free time to achieve. We also had to say why we'd choose that, and how it would make the world a better place. In the book we are reading together the main character Melody spends all of her time getting ready for the Wiz Kids Competition. We shared our goals and dreams with each other. It was fun to hear what they are working hard to achieve. Mrs. Cobb's class joined us and they shared their goals too. It is so much fun to connect this way. We really like Ms. Cypert's class, it is so huge! They are good writers and they leave us great comments that make us think. We enjoy learning with them! Thank you! Mr. Boylen's Class
We also had an chance to Skype with Mr. Boylen's class. We were having a wild wind storm here so the connection was a little rocky at first, but it got better. It was our first Skype with them. They live in Iowa. We learned something interesting that we have in common. In our class we come from many different communities to learn together. This is a bit unusual. We learned that the students in Mr. Boylen's class come from several different communities too! We all have long bus rides to and from school each day. Their parents have to do a lot of driving just like ours! Mr. Boylen had 2 classes back to back. A few of us stayed to talk to his second class for a little while. Our teacher said that next time we could work it out so we could talk to both classes. Thank You! We have had two twitter chats about the book Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper. It was fun to tweet. This was new for us. We talked with different classes about the book. Teachers would ask a question i.e..Q1 "What is your favorite character and why?" #GRAOOMM, and we answer A1____. Our teacher said that this is usually how teachers chat on twitter because it keeps things organized. We had to learn a few things before we started like we have to carefully choose our words because we only have 140 characters to say what we want to say. We learned that the way to say that you liked something was to "favorite" it by clicking on the star on that tweet. We also learned a few things once the chat started. We learned to introduce our class with the first tweet. We learned that we could answer a question, reply to someone else's answer, or both. We learned how to watch for tweets to us so that we could reply back. We learned that the chat can move quickly and it can be hard to keep up with all the questions and comments. We learned that sometimes when you are having a "side conversation" with someone you can miss a question or two. Mrs. Tharp says that is alright because it is about connecting and communicating with one another, not just answering all the questions - we could do that by ourselves. We learned how to end a chat. Finally we learned that it is a very fun way to connect with lots of students as one time! We connected with classes in: South Carolina, Ontario, Quebec, Wisconsin, and New York. Students from Austrailia were able to get online and answer the questions the next day. Their teacher, Mr. Sky, put it all together in a story. You can read what we are thinking about the book so far. We have to be the luckiest class in the Global Read Aloud! We were able to have back to back Skype calls! Of course it doesn't normally happen that way, but due to schedule changes and time zone differences it just happened to work out that way. We were beyond excited. We first Skyped with Mrs. McAdams class is St Louis, they were wonderful because they gave up their lunch to talk to us! It was so fun to talk to them about what they liked about the book. We also discussed our favorite characters. They were very friendly and fun to talk to.
Then we talked to Ms. Cypert's class in CA! We did a quick mystery Skype it wasn't hard because we both live in states on the ocean - just different oceans! Their class is VERY big, 34 students! We don't know how they do it! They are very nice and have been leaving fabulous comments on our blogs. They are thoughtful and encourage us to be better writers. It was fun to put faces with names! We haven't been able to keep up with commenting on all of their blogs, feel free to visit them. We know they would appreciate it! Mrs. Cobb's class joined us for both of the Skpe calls and so there were a few more of us. We all had so much to say. Only a few of us were shy. We are having so much fun connecting with other classes! We hope that we can talk to these classes again. We will have to because our teacher forgot to take a picture! It is really unbelievable because she takes pictures of everything! Now we have to talk again! We have just recently started the Global Read Aloud with over 120,000 other students! We were very excited for it to begin. Our teacher only showed us the cover of the book and the title, Out of My Mind, and then asked us to make predictions about what the book was about. Then we started reading. It is a very good book! Our predictions were off, but we were able to go back and change them based on what we learned.
We are connecting with other teachers and classes on edmodo and on our blogs. Everyone is busy posting and commenting! It is a lot of work, but so much fun. We have already Skyped with Ms.Bauer's class in South Carolina. They are also reading the book. We can tell our teacher has more things planned, and we can't wait to see what will happen next, both in the book, in class, across the country, and around the world! We had our first Mystery Skype of the year this week. We had fun and want to do more! We Skyped with Ms. Bauer's class. We discovered that they were in South Carolina, near Greensville. It was great to meet all the students in her class. One of their Principals, Mr. Champlin, even stopped in to say "Hello". We noticed a few things, some of them had a fun southern accent, and they have a bigger class than we do. We have a lot in common too. We like sports and music. Their teacher Ms. Bauer grew up in Lockport, NY! We thought that was amazing - it is a small world! We are going to be reading the book Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper together for the Global Read Aloud! We will be talking on edmodo about the book. It was fun to meet them before we started! Our teachers even tweeted about it. Ms. Bauer took a picture. Surprisingly, our teacher was so excited she forgot to grab the camera! We think it would be fun to Skype with them again to talk about the book. Thank you for a great time!
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