Third graders at Holladay have been learning about the relationships among organisms in aquatic and terrestrial food chains (SOL3.5), so today, students in Ms. Haley’s class created animations with Loopy to illustrate some of those relationships. First, we reviewed the different ecosystems: forest, desert, arctic, freshwater, ocean, etc. Then, students chose one ecosystem and typed the name of it in Loopy using the Text tool. Next, they used the pencil tool to draw a circle to represent a plant. If students didn’t know a plant that lived in their ecosystem, I showed them how to ask Google using the microphone. Next, students added an animal that eats that plant. Again, they could use Google for research. A great feature of Loopy is that it can show positive or negative relationships with arrows. We drew an arrow from the plant to the animal and discussed whether it should be positive or negative. It’s positive because more plants would mean more animals since they have a bigger food source. Then, we drew another arrow from the animal to the plant and made it negative (click the box in the upper right corner). It’s negative because more animals would mean less plants since they eat them. Students could continue adding animals to their web and using arrows to show the relationships between them. Finally, we pressed play and explored what happens when we change the population of each organism (by pressing the up or down arrows). We saved our animations as weblinks and shortened them with bitly. You can see them all here.

Third graders at Holladay Elementary have been learning all about cycles: animal life cycles, plant life cycles, seasons, and the phases of the moon (SOL3.8). Today students in Ms. Ambrose’s class used a website called Loopy to demonstrate how one of these cycles works. First we reviewed the steps in each cycle and pointed out that most of them have four parts. The students could choose which cycle they wanted to illustrate. I explained that a cycle is kind of like a circle because it continues around and around. Then we went to Loopy and I showed them how to create each step of the cycle by drawing circles and labeling them. The students could also change the colors of each circle. Next, we drew arrows to show the order and relationships between each step. We discussed why the order was important. Could the steps happen out of order? The way Loopy works is you click up or down arrows in each circle and see how having more or less of that part influences the other parts (it was designed to study simulations). So it illustrates life cycles best. If there are more eggs there will be more butterflies or frogs, but if the number of eggs goes down, so does the number of adults. You can change the relationships, too, by making the arrows positive or negative. That would be great for illustrating food chains and food webs (if there are more predators, there would be less prey – a negative relationship, but if there are more prey, there would be more predators – a positive relationship). When we were finished, we published our Loopy projects, and it provided a link to shorten with Bit.ly. We shared our links on Schoology, but you can see them all here.