Fourth Grade Teacher Blof

Expert Blog II (The Tech Savvy Educator)

2008-06-04T00:31:00Z

Another blog I chose The Tech Savvy Educators. One recent post was about document cameras. The author posed the question, are they worth the cost? Personally document cameras have changed the way I teach! With only two computers in my classroom, thank goodness I have a projector. Also, the document camera easily allows kids to show their work. Kids often offer to share their work and the class can easily see their work via the document camera. Also, when kids bring in an item to share you can pop that under the doc camera for all to see. The great thing is that you can still pass things around later, but I have no problem now with kids being distracted by things being passed around during a discussion. I no longer have to plan ahead on what I want to copy on a transparency. We all remember times when you wish you had a transparency of something that you did not think you would need. Also, unlike the overhead the doc camera is in color. I can place picture books under the camera and all can see. I buy books all the time about subjects I teach. For instance, I have a beautiful book on Mesa Verde. I can easily share these pictures with the kids and we can have a class discussion. I would never want to lose my document camera! Another entry on the blog discusses a great idea of creating a self portrait on the computer. I love this idea because next year I will be a technology specials teacher at my school. It is a new position. The author here too is a specials teacher and brings up the difficult task of keeping the kids engaged at the end of the year. Plus finding a project that is flexible is important because of the amount of specials time that is lost at the end of the year due to field trips and field days. The free painting site download can be found at http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html . Another idea that came up was the idea of kids creating a video or using writings or drawings to form a technology time capsule. This time capsule could contain the student’s thoughts and ideas of where they see technology going in the future. I know when I was young I thought for sure I would have robots doing all of my house work like the Jetson family did. Unfortunately, that has not yet come to fruition.

Expert blog analyzed ---EDTC613 Topic One continued.

2008-06-03T16:21:00Z

One of the blogs that I checked out belongs to Andy Carvin, internet activist, hosted in conjunction with PBS. I read about VoiceThread and Slide Share on one of his blog entries. A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold various types of media. It allows others to comment using voice, text, audio file, or video. It also allows group conversations to be collected and shared. Interestingly enough, someone replied to my last blog about the same thing. VoiceThread may not change the way a power point presentation is delivered in person, but can radically change how it is delivered online. Slide share is a site that allows one to give traditional slide shows online community features. These online presentation tools can change how students and teachers interact online. They can create a dialogue. One teacher replied to Andy stating that his kids are adept at creating Power Point presentations and that he plans to add VoiceThread so that they can use that in a book talk. I think that is a great idea. Another response came from a teacher who has a wiki on how to use VoiceThread in the classroom. http://voicethread4education.wikispaces.com/ This wiki has great ideas that I can use next year with the kids! Other entries on this site included information on gigapixel photography, This allows one take to digital panoramic photos. Another blog entry was about the woman who cyber bullied a girl which resulted in the girl’s suicide. Another entry was regarding New York ’s ban on mobile phones in high schools.

Regis EDTC 613: Teaching and Learning Using the Internet Topic 1

2008-06-01T00:18:00Z

The term Web 2.0 came out of the collapse of the dot com era. Web 2.O is the next generation of the internet. It is what the internet has become. The whole idea of me providing my responses to the class questions on this blog is very Web 2.0. Web 2.0 ushered in resources like the wiki, Google, Napster, Ebay and various personal networking sites. Web 2.0 impacts my teaching in several ways. One such way is in how we go about doing research with the kids. In the classroom we often use Google to do a search on a topic. Wikepedia is also a well known and used research tool that we use. One huge change is that I no longer use any kind of DVD or VHS to show the kids educational movies. We use United Streaming and then a projector to show movies on the white board. The TV in my classroom had become obsolete. Another way that Web 2.0 has changed my instruction is through the use of a blog. Towards the end of the year I introduced the kids to a blog. I created a highly protected blog for the kids to use. I would pose questions like journal questions, writing prompts, and reading comprehension questions on the blog. The kids loved it. We would look at the responses on Fridays to critique them. The initial blogs they wrote were weak. With some modeling and critiques the kids were posting quality blog responses. I love to play music for the kids. I simply log onto my XM radio account at school. Then, I have a plethora of choices of commercial free music to play for the kids. For instance during writing I like to play jazz. The great thing about XM is that I do not have to purchase any CD's. I have a choice of five different styles of Jazz music to play during writing. With a click of my mouse I can switch to classical music for math. How cool is that? Web 2.0 for me has opened many more doors than Web 1.0. In the future I would like to incorporate a pod cast into my lesson plans. I would also like to do something with video that I can then upload onto my blog.

BLOGGING WITH ELEMENTARY KIDS

2008-04-08T16:05:00Z

Now that I have my very own primitive blog, I would like to try blogging with my fourth grade class. We are studying space right now and I thought that might be a fun subject to blog! Any suggestions out there in cyber land of how to and not to get this started. I want to start out with a class blog and then have kids post replies form home.

First day with a blog

2008-04-06T21:30:00Z

To think that long ago I did not even know what a blog was! I am currently working on a Masters in Instructional technology. I am currently working on a paper entitled Wiki and the Blog--here is an excerpt. "Many years ago if I heard the title of this paper, I would assume it was a fairytale about some sort of Hawaiian totem pole and troll- like character named Blog. But now it is 2008 and wikis and blogs are well known tools to many, yet ironically still not recognized words in my spell check. This paper will explore what a wiki and a blog are from a forty something school teacher with a lot of help from the internet." If any of you have any wisdom to share about wikis and blogs, let me know! By the way...what on earth is a tag?