Our Favorite Seasonal Digital Fun!

Geoguessr has been my favorite educational game for several years!!! It is built on Google Maps and takes students to virtual locations all around the globe and asks them to use the available clues to make an educated guess about it's location. It works in the browser on any device, and there is an iPad app as well. The game is so fun and very addicting! I encourage students to do internet research to discover more about what they are seeing in the images. This adds to the educational value of the game and also helps them reach high scores! Geoguessr isn't really a holiday game, but this is the time of year that I usually introduce it!

Kindergarteners love the 2004 book, The Christmas Hat by A.J. Wood! This is one of those books that makes students feel like they have been wrapped in a warm blanket! The pages are embossed with snowy texture. In the story, Little Owl keeps getting lost in the snow because he blends in with the white snow. Little Owl's adoptive parents give him a red hat so they won't loose him in the snow. The red helps his parents find him, but also helps the scary red fox to find him too! So Little Owl finds another use for the red hat!

This one is fun for everyone. The site gives students the option to building a family of legos that resembles their own family. There is a huge selection of options, including a variety of holiday traditions! Students love personalizing a holiday postcard for themselves and their family! It is super easy to use!

This week I had a little extra time with 5th graders. We were between projects, so I decided to show them one of my favorite web 2.0 sites, Tagxedo! I just knew they would love it as much as I do!! It is my favorite of all the Word Cloud sites!

Our theme was family traditions! I asked students to make a list of their family traditions. They were encouraged to choose whatever traditions they love most, whether it be holiday traditions or the simple everyday traditions that all families have!! On the Tagxedo site, students listed their family traditions, separated by commas. In order to make some words and phrases bigger, students entered them more than once. In order to keep phrases together, student put a tilde (~) between the words. They selected their choice of shape, color and font. The result was their own personalized word art!

This little known website is actually quite hard to find, but is my favorite snowflake maker. I like the connection back to the Polar Express Book! It makes fantastic snowflakes! Students quickly learn about negative and positive space when they have a few that fail. Try it yourself! (Thanks for my media specialist friend Kathryne Nguyne for sharing this one with me several years ago!

Email: cathy.knutson@isd194.org
Website: http://ohekidstech.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @KnutsonCathy