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!