Follow up to Richard Sherman Tweets

With the Middle School students I had a great opportunity to discuss a hot topic buzzing in our city. The Seattle Seahawks defeated the San Francisco 49ers and made their way to the Super Bowl! The whole city and the school were excited and overwhelmed with Seattle Seahawk pride. However, the game was over-shadowed with a post game interview by Richard Sherman. Many of you are aware of what he said, but some may be surprised with the fallout afterwards.

Here is the interview:

After this interview, the reaction on social media was absurd. It provided a great opportunity for Middle school students to see and discuss how social media is allowing us to communicate and react to information instantly. I wanted to raise students awareness to how social media works and how it can affect people.

The twitter reactions can be seen on my post here.

After looking at those tweets and having a conversation about how things you say can make people perceive who you are, even if its on Twitter, we watched a video about Richard Sherman's reaction to people on Twitter. 

I want students to be aware of the effects social media has on our lives. It is a forward thinking technology, but does it allow for people to continue thinking backwards?

Twitter Reaction to Richard Sherman

Richard Sherman majored in communications at Stanford. A monkey could get a 4.0 majoring in communications.

— Rusty Rim Jim (@Jamespryatel) January 23, 2014

Richard Sherman is a great player. But that was classless. #Seahawks #Niners

— Mike Greenberg (@Espngreeny) January 20, 2014

Richard Sherman, you sir, are a thug. #clASSy

— Caitlin Hunnicutt (@cait_hunn) January 20, 2014

Great play. Congrats to the Seahawks. I can't stand Richard Sherman though #Idiot

— Brandon Crawford (@bcraw35) January 20, 2014

Richard Sherman is one humble monkey #gobroncos

— Mike Hudner (@MikeHudner3) January 20, 2014

Richard Sherman is an embarrassment to the NFL, Seattle, football and, alas, his family. No class.

— Ron Mott (@RonMott) January 20, 2014

Richard Sherman deserved to be caged like a monkey.

— Kris Bartlett (@bartlett_kris09) January 20, 2014

Richard Sherman is just another classless thug though. #Seahawks

— TheRealJMang0 (@JMang0) January 20, 2014

Richard Sherman is an angry monkey.

— Munson™ (@mikemunson21) January 20, 2014

W2 - Experts with Doodle Buddy

I wanted to make sure the students became experts with using the app Doodle Buddy in Kindergarten. I am starting to get ambitious with this group of K's because I want them to create a book on the iPad. But before all of that we need to take those "baby steps." A couple of things we had to overview was how to change colors, brush types, brush sizes, and adding text. The students are getting better at all of these skills. One last thing I made sure was they understood the difference between holding an iPad like a "portrait" vs holding the iPad like a "landscape." These skills will come in handy when I ask them to draw and save in image as portrait. Oh yeah! They learned how to save an image to their camera roll.... It might be too difficult for them to do all of these steps, but we will see!

W1 - Fourth Grade

Students in fourth grade have been Computer Programming since November of 2013. We have used apps such as Daisy the Dino, Cargobot, and Light Bot.

I introduced a more creative programming app called Hopscotch. This app allows the users to control objects or characters and command them to do something. The previous programming apps that I listed already had goals and objectives, but Hopscotch allows the programmer to put in commands to make your character do whatever you wanted!

In this lesson I showed students how to make a character move and rotate 30 degrees. I then had the students figure out how to make their character move in the shape as a square. After students were able to do that on their own, I showed students how to make their character draw lines, soon students were exploring their own shapes and drawings! It was great to see how excited they all were to just get in and program. It was extremely important for me to show them simple tasks, and allow them to explore and learn on their own!

W1 - Third Grade

Teaming up with the third grade team I was informed they wanted to do a project involving saving pictures from the internet onto the student's iPads and using those pictures in an iMovie.

It's great to have the big picture, but with third graders I had to make sure the students knew how to do simple things like opening the app Safari and typing in a web address.


I used direct instruction to show the students how to open Safari, type in the website kidrex.org, search for pictures of wolves, select a website link, select an image, and save that image to their photos. This process of instruction and then letting the students practice took about 15 minutes. Once the students saved one photo of wolves I had them save photos of biome animals and plants that they researched.

After the 15 minutes was up, I showed students how to find the photos they just saved in the Photos app and create a photo album of their photos to separate their photos from everything else in their Camera Roll.

W1 - Kindergarten

As a start for the new year, I wanted to introduce the "Doodle Buddy" app to my Kindergarten classes.

First the app was introduced to the students and I wanted to find out how many students knew about this app already. Surprisingly, not many students have used this app before. I set 7 minutes on the timer and told the students to explore what every single button on the app does and their functions. I also told the students that they needed to figure out how to draw, change colors, erase, and change the backgrounds of their drawings.

After the timer was up, I reviewed and asked the students what they found out how to do. They showed me and the rest of the class which buttons did what. It was a great way for 5 year olds to learn how to use an app as well as teach me and others what the buttons do! Their final task was to draw a memory they had from Holiday break and use the text function to label what their memory was!