YouTube in Kindergarten

Hi Everyone,

This is Mrs. Lowe tonight. I want to share about how I use YouTube with my Kindergarten students.

First, I have to tell you how much I love YouTube! Kindergarten students have a lot of wonders and I don't always know the answer or the answer has already been perfectly described and recorded by someone else. YouTube gives us nearly immediate answers to many of our wonders. It allows us to access experts in many fields. It is a source of songs, dances, stories and even animated books.

Just this week we got to see the inside of the International Space Station and learn how the astronauts brush their teeth in space!


All of that being said, YouTube is not always an appropriate place for 5 year olds. I believe they should never search for videos themselves. There are MANY links and advertisements that are not child friendly.

In our classroom I always freeze the screen on the SmartBoard or turn it off while I do a YouTube search. This way the students will not see anything inappropriate that may come up.

Once I have found the video I am looking for, and previewed it, I use a website called www.safeshare.tv This website allows me to easily cut and paste a link from YouTube and view it without any of those advertisements or suggested videos at the end of the clip.

In our classroom all YouTube videos are shown using SafeShare.tv. This way I can be sure that my students are not going to be seeing anything unexpected during or after the video.

This year I have found an another wonderful resource that uses both YouTube and SafeShare. The resource is called Symbaloo. 

It is a place where you can store and access your online bookmarks. It is also a great place to share online resources. We are very lucky to have access to a Symbaloo webmix created by the lovely people at #kinderchat and managed by Matt Gomez. The web mix includes links to alphabet songs, interactive books, math games, videos, and much more! We use this site almost daily in our class! You can check it out by following the link.

Kinderchat Symbaloo

How do you stay safe on the internet?

Skype-o-rama!

Skype is one of our favourite tools for learning! We use it to talk and learn with people (and animals) from all over the world. This is a map in our classroom of all of the connections we have made through Skype and blogging.

Today we got to use Skype twice!

In the morning we talked to Mrs. Harrison and her class in Ontario. Earlier this week we watched their We Can See Spring video here. They watched our winter book. They asked us lots of questions about what Spring is looking like here in Winnipeg. Then we got a chance to ask them questions about their signs of Spring. You can see the whole We Can See Project by visiting the blog here.

In the afternoon Mrs. Lowe and one of our student's moms surprised us with another Skype call! Her job is writing stories for a newspaper. She told us about what she believes that good writers do. She said that great writers have to be good observers of what is around them and also read lots of books to get ideas!

After our visit we worked on our own list of things that great writers do. We have made this list several times this year but we keep changing and adding to it. Right now, this is what we believe great writers do:

The teachers at Stevenson have been working on developing
 their own beliefs about what great writers do.

Do you like to write?
What do you believe great writers do?

Twitter in Kindergarten

Hello Readers, it's Mrs. Lowe writing tonight. I want to talk about TWITTER!

When I first started using Twitter, I thought it was basically Facebook, but with only the status updates. I joined up and began using it to follow friends, celebrities and athletes. I mostly tweeted about where I was hanging out, working out and what I was eating. 

Last year I started noticing more and more teachers joining Twitter. At first I was hesitant to begin mixing my personal and professional life. I was worried that I wouldn't have enough to contribute and I didn't want to have to hide my personal life.

This summer I did some major re-design in my classroom which inspired some serious reflection on my teaching beliefs and practice as well. I wanted to share some of my thinking and found Twitter to be an excellent place to share and learn from other teachers. I also learned that all of those teachers are real people too.

Before I knew it I was forming a PLN (professional learning network) of teachers from all over the world.  Teachers post links to articles and resources. We share projects we are working on in our classrooms.  We are able to ask questions and get almost immediate feedback. We are able to meet online at designated times to discuss current topics in education. It is an outstanding source of professional development and community that has changed my world as a teacher.

Throughout this school year I have noticed more and more teachers opening Twitter accounts for their classes. I have seen Early Years students using Twitter to reflect on their learning, share their experiences, follow what other students are doing in other classrooms, collaborate on projects with other students, ask questions and get feedback and more!

My Plan

In the next few weeks I hope to begin using Twitter with my kindergarten students. We will begin with an introduction to Twitter as a form of “micro-blogging.” Each tweet must be 140 characters or less. Like on our blog, we will compose our tweets together and talk about what is safe to share and what is not safe to share. We will follow some of the classrooms that we have met through blogging and Skype. Our Twitter feed will be displayed on our blog so that all of our readers can see what we’re up to, whether they are on Twitter or not.

Over time, I would like to see my students composing and posting their own tweets (with teacher supervision). I hope that my students will continue to have opportunities to write for an audience and a purpose. I hope they will begin to learn about what it means to be a responsible digital citizen. And I hope that through Twitter we can continue to expand the walls of our classroom.

If you would like to see an example of Kindergarten students using Twitter, please check out this blog post by respected Kindergarten teacher, Devon Caldwell. 

Tips and Tricks for Tweeting in Kindergarten