End of the Journey

The semester has come and gone and now that it is over, I can actually say that I am more tech savvy. There have been many feelings of frustration, satisfaction, and accomplishment throughout this journey. Overall, I have learned a whole lot about technology in this classroom from simple things such as blogging, all the way to more difficult things such as creating a website for my classroom. I have been able to become way more familiar with tools that I knew little about, iMovie for example, and I have been introduced to tools that I had no idea that existed that will make my future classroom much more enjoyable and engaging. Before this class I had no idea why technology was so important, and after learning about all of the tools, I have realized how easy it is to engage students that much more by fun activities that also help them learn. There are still many things that I will work with to become more familiar with, Glogster, Wordle, TimeToast, just to name a few, but I will definitely be practicing my skills so that I can implement these web 2.0 tools in my classroom. This was a fun class that did teach me a whole lot, not only about technology, but patience as well.

Classroom Website

I have finally completed my classroom website and it feels so good! It is so nice to be able to look at this website and see all of the work I have put into this semester finally come together. I am kind of amazed at all of the projects we have done because I forgot about some of the projects and assignments we had until I go back and see them. This semester really flew by. I learned a lot while creating this, so much that I was able to help my sister create one for her class that turned out great as well. I really like that we had to put resources on the website because those will be sources that I can use forever in all of my classes. This was my favorite thing to create this semester because its so "real life." I will be able to use this in my future classroom and change it as necessary. I learned a lot about managing a website throughout this semester and how to edit the template, layout, sidebar, etc. I have learned how to embed all sorts of artifacts which is awesome because before this class I would have just put the link to it on the website.

I think this tool should be used by all teachers and schools so that parents and students can know about their teacher, keep updated with school, assignments, and have those additional resources and examples provided. It is a great way to enhance communication between the teacher and parents/students. I highly recommend it for every teacher!

Digital Story: A Day in the Life of a Student

This week I finished creating my digital story using iMovie. I have used iMovie twice before because I had to edit videos of me teaching for another class. I did it find it easier to use this time since I was a little familiar with this tool; however, I'm still not absolutely great at it. I don't like that it saves automatically and doesn't allow you to save it because it makes me nervous that it isn't going to save and my progress will be lost. Good news: it all saved and didn't go anywhere. I think this is a tool that can be used in the classroom to create things such as virtual field trips or other educational activities. I would not use it as something for the students to use and create movies. It was fun getting to take these pictures trying to determine what qualifies as living "a day in the life of a student." Also, during the lecture for this tool I learned how important copyright laws are, and through some classmates, learned how many pictures are actually copyrighted. Crazy. Below I have embedded the digital story I created, enjoy!

Digital Diagram

My digital diagram in the process of being created.

This week in class we spent a lot of time learning and creating digital diagrams. I am in the process of creating one about land biomes. I had no idea that such a tool existed, but I love it! My favorite thing about this tool is how easy it is to use. Most tools that we are having to learn, such as flipcharts, are so difficult, but nope, not this one. This has been something fun to get to explore and mess around with because it allows you to get very creative with it. It gives you the options to decide everything from the shape of the bubbles you want, the type of line you want (dotted, thick straight, right angled, etc), pictures, colors, and so much more! This will be something I will definitely use in my classroom. It can be used for younger grades by you creating it for your class and handing it out to them for the students to be able to look it at. Also, if the technology is available, you can allow your students to create them as an assignment for a topic. The only thing about that is I would make sure to be very specific with my instructions and have a very specific rubric so the students would know exactly what to do and not get carried away with it. There isn't really anything that I dislike about this tool, except maybe the simple fact that it costs money to have the software.

StoryBird

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This week in class we learned about StoryBird. This was a cool tool, but definitely not my favorite. I'm not a very original or creative person, so it is beneficial that this tool provides their own pictures, but not beneficial that I am requires to create a story. However, I remember in Kindergarten that my classroom had books and they were written about us (mine was a dinosaur book all about Jordyn!) and I thought that was awesome, so creating a book for the class that they each help with and having it published and put in the room would be a super fun activity for smaller ages. As someone discussed in class, I don't exactly see a point in this tool for older students, but as previously stated, it could be a lot of fun for the younger ones. I also do like its really safe, but don't like that you must have a teacher account to embed the story you create, what about all of us regular people? Either way, I will probably still play around with it just to see what all I can do with it and work on my creativity skills! ;)

Animoto

Well, I really enjoyed the Animoto presentation. I was not at all familiar with this web tool, but think it could be very fun to use in a classroom, or any situation. I would definitely pay the 5 dollars a month to get to use it for longer than 30 seconds. Like Laurel said during the presentation, I do think it is more of an attention grabber to present the information rather than to teach something from it, so thats how I would use it in my classroom. For example, if teaching a lesson about voting, you could show pictures of the nominees, an electoral collage map, the flag, pictures of the polls, etc. Then, in class, teach a lesson on each and tell your students all about it. The music playing could be the Star Spangled Banner or something, so the kids would immediately be interested! It is so easy to use, how do you not love it? Putting the information you want to share on there with some slides, music, and text is so easy compared to using a slideshow in PowerPoint or another tool. I thought these girls did an excellent job presenting this and showing us how to use this.

Active Board

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I really liked yesterdays class learning about the active board. I am terrible at working those so it made me feel like I would be more comfortable next time. I've learned from being in my placement as a pre-intern and working at an elementary school how common these are becoming in classrooms and not knowing how to properly use one could really hinder a teacher from being the best by incorporating technology and staying up to date in the classroom. I am excited about being able to create my own flipchart. I think it is an awesome tool that can be incorporated for any age groups because of all the features. One of my favorite features so far just by learning, without playing with it a lot and creating my own, is the lock tool. I'm glad that Anisa asked the question about getting everything to stay in place. That obviously makes it a lot easier to enhance the flipchart. I also like the fact that you can set it up to cheer for you if you get the answer correct. That is exciting and kids will be able to cheer along with it, which is awesome. Anything to encourage and motivate students is considered top notch. I am anxious to begin creating my own to learn all about all of the tools and features involved with the interactive white boards.

Scavenger Hunt

The scavenger hunt in class was fun. I liked that we got to do an activity like this in order to learn about  digital images. It definitely made it more engaging and fun getting to go outside and through the buildings looking for the objects, nature objects for my group. It also let us try and get creative with it, well, as creative as possible for the small amount of time that we had. While it was a really fun and interesting activity for us to partake in, I would have to adapt it in several ways to include it for my students in a future classroom. One way I would do this is by only allowing them to use objects in the classroom, rather than objects outside. Another way that I would have to do is make them pick up the items and collect them in a bag (or something of the sort) since my students won't necessarily have camera. I also won't be doing this for a technology class, so my students would be collecting items to go along with whatever we may be learning. I really enjoyed this one and I am anxious to start editing the photos for the project.

Wordle

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Although I missed class on Tuesday, I have used Wordle before and was a little familiar with it but I did go through and read about it from this class. I think that it is a cool Web 2.0 tool that can be fun when used in the classroom. Kids will like it because it can take boring words and spice them up a bit. Although, I am not sure what great benefits there are from using it. It is kind of distracting, so like I said, for something fun, but I wouldn't use it for something that I really needed the students to focus on. I feel like if I really needed them to focus on something and there was a word cloud, they would be too focused on it and not enough focused on the lesson. Something I really like about Wordle is how easily it can be used. I am envious of how simple it is to create a word cloud using this tool when it is not that easy to create a glog using Glogster. I will continue to start observing lessons to see if I think Wordle could be incorporated because I am open minded about this tool. One thing that I don't like about this tool is how you have to keep up with a URL if you ever want to delete what you created. It tells you to save it, not to share with anyone, or lose it so that you can delete your word cloud if you ever decide to. I think there should just be a button that allows you to edit and delete, just my opinion though!

Web 2.0 Tools

At the beginning of the Web 2.0 tools class I was feeling a bit overwhelmed with our requirements for the assignment, but after talking it out and examining the Glogster website, it is really cool and exciting.  Glogster is the web 2.0 tool that my group is researching and learning how to use. I have done a little bit on the website so far like figuring out how to add your picture and edit your profile and seeing what kind of backgrounds and 'walls' you can use to design your poster. There are so many tools in Glogster such as presentations, portfolios, projects and classes that you can use in order to keep everything organized. I am anxious to experiment and research it more and get to play around with my own artifact so that I can see what all this web tool has to offer! I think this tool would be beneficial in the classroom for students to create posters on topics I assign them. For example, I could assign students to groups, assign each group a planet, and have those groups create posters about their planet. Sounds fun to me!

Inquiry Based Research Activity--Pluto is a planet!

I really did enjoy this activity, I thought it was fun to get to work with Anisa and plan out a lesson for third grade science. I actually enjoyed refreshing my memory about the planets and learning that Pluto is still indeed a planet, just a dwarf planet. I think inquiry based research activities could be very beneficial in the classroom because kids love this stuff. They love getting to search the web and complete activities on the computer and learn at the same time, its an excellent source for getting students involved and actively engaged.

Something I realized with this activity was how important it is to get the formatting and instructions correct on the worksheet. Ive only made one worksheet before in one class so I wasn't exactly sure how explicit I needed to be, but I learned during this. I learned approximately how many questions you should have per age group, how clear the directions should be, how the website shouldn't be cluttered and easy to read, including age appropriate readings. Overall, this was an exciting activity that I hope to be able to incorporate in my future classroom.

WebQuest

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Exploring WebQuest this week was very beneficial. I wasn't aware how common WebQuests actually are and incorporating them in your classroom is a fun way for students to learn. I don't remember any of my teachers having us do these. Putting the fun aside, this tool requires the students to think critically, an important task for students to achieve. This activity also encourages teamwork, something I believe to be crucial in a classroom. Students should be able to work well together.

In class we were in a group of 4 and we were each given a specific assignment. I was in charge of seeing if the activity was group friendly or if the work was to be done individually, which is considered a bad WebQuest. The other three were responsible for checking the layout and technology part of it, if it required higher order thinking, and the efficiency of the activity. As a teacher, I will have to do this before assigning WebQuests to my students in order to see if its too lengthy and wordy, if it does or doesn't require you to think, or if its even easily readable and the links actually work. I think this is an activity that students will enjoy and benefit from.

Website Evaluation

Well, I have definitely never evaluated a website before this assignment. I didn't realize there were so many things about a site that should be taken into consideration before recommending it for use in the classroom. This assignment made me realize how crucial it is to see if it is even up to date, something I probably would not have even noticed if I wasn't required. This assignment allowed me to get a feel what it will be like evaluating websites for use in my future classroom. I think the most important characteristic of website evaluation is the accuracy of information, so how reliable the author and publisher are. I chose to evaluate Funbrain and it was published by Pearson, a publisher I have heard about for years because of school textbooks, so I know it was reliable. I am glad that we had to do this so I will know what to look for in the future for my classroom in order to provide the best websites to my students.

Expectations for Course

In this course I am hoping to learn an enormous amount about how to navigate smoothly through different tools on the internet. I am excited and eager to learn how to use technology so that I will be up to date in my future classroom with different tools available for my students to use and access. I think it is important for teachers to stay updated with technology because in today's society 'everyone's doing it.' Using the internet is a convenient and easy way to communicate and stay connected with your student's parents, and updating them on your classroom.