Wacky Web Tales

While doing my research I found a website called Wacky Web Tales. (http://www.eduplace.com/tales/). I think that this is an excellent site for teachers to integrate into their classroom. On this website there is a whole bunch of stories for the students to help write. It has a place were you can review the parts of speech to help you fill in the blanks. Along with this if you click on the kids place it has a spot where you can pick a subject. After you pick a subject you pick a topic. Once you have picked your topic it has questions, ideas, and experiments for the children to try. I think that this is a great learning site. I think it is a great way to involve students in every aspect of your teaching. It even has state specific questions. I think that this site will allow students to have so much fun learning. I played on it for a while and really learned some interesting things. I would definitely use this site in my classroom. You could use it as a whole class or as individual students. This website is a great way to integrate technology into the classroom!

Digital Cameras

I read an article called “Using a Digital Camera in the Classroom” it was written by Deborah Duncan. The website I found this article on is http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~toh/image/DigitalCameraUses.htm. This was a great article about the many ways you can use a digital camera in the classroom. This article had ideas for all subjects as well as for librarians, field trips, and many more. One of my favorite ideas is “elementary teachers (K-2) can use a digital camera to create an ABC book. Working in groups, students are assigned a letter of the alphabet. They complete the phrase "__ is for ____." Using different manipulative (cereal, marshmallows, legos, colorful paper cutouts, candy, game pieces) they form the letter on 3' X 3' pieces of colored paper. The kids can add interest to their letter using colors or makers. Then take pictures of their creation. In MS Word or Works, insert the picture and their chosen caption under the picture. You can then bind the book for the class. If you take pictures of each student at the 1st of the year, at Christmas and around the end of the year, you can send these pictures home to the grateful parents. At the beginning of the year before you send the pictures home, you could put the pictures in a notebook so you can learn the student's name and put them on the board so the other students can learn each other. You can play games with them almost like flash cards to learn each other's names. Use them when you study the 5 senses, for sight scan their picture, distort them and then have the student find their face.” I really liked this idea because the kids could learn a lot from this and still have a lot of fun.
Before I read this article I did not think it would be very easy to have a digital camera in the classroom. Now I see there is so many ways to use the technology while teaching any concept. I would defiantly love to have a digital camera in my classroom. I think that it is a great way to get students engaged and motivated in their learning.

My Beliefs

I think that technology in the classroom is an essential technique for teaching children of the future. I think that all students need to realize what is out there for them to use and to create things. We need to create students who are able to create new technology for the future. In order for them to do this they need to be experts in the current technology.
I also think that using technology is the best way to teach students. It allows them to be engaged in what they are learning. Technology is the best way to activate all of the different learning styles. This allows every student to get a better education. With technology students are able to go places that they would never be able to other wise. I think that technology has its place in every single classroom.

Lessons Learned-

I thought that the videos and websites were very interesting. I learned a lot of information from them. I learned that we need to introduce technology to students at a young age in order to help them in future jobs. I also learned that there are some schools out there that base all of their learning around technology. The school finds ways to help the students learn through being interactive. I also realized that it is important as a teacher and as a parent to learn some of the shorthand that students are writing. This protects them and helps use be able to see what they are writing and talking about. However my concerns on this subject are that students will begin to write short hand all of the time and will not care to learn how to spell. Students need to be able to write effectively in order to get jobs and to appear smart and professional.
I thought that these reading and videos were very eye opening. I especially liked “Why Integrate.’ I thought that this was very educational and eye opening. I was astonished at how many different ways that we use technology. One thing that I found very interesting was how in the future a computer will be smarter and able to compute better then the human population. This is just so amazing to me. I also found it very interesting that China will become the country that speaks English the most. I would have thought that it would always be the United States.

Strengths and Weaknesses-

When filling out the UNI survey I soon realized that most of my answers were apprentice. The reason being is because I have used these items before but have not had a whole lot of experience in the classroom in order to teach these items to students. There was however a few items that I need more experience before I could even try to teach them to students. Those were using spreadsheets, graphic organizers, and what to do if I get a trouble shoot error.
The goals that I have as a beginning teacher are to use spreadsheets in my personal life so that I can help students use them in school. I will learn about graphic organizers and the many purposes they can help me teach in the classroom. I will also learn about many different trouble shoot errors that can occur and how to fix them. This will help me if I have a student that has a problem I can help them fix it.
To help me with my goals I have found a website that will take me through a tutorial for excel spreadsheets. The website is http://www.usd.edu/trio/tut/excel/. This website will take me step by step in preparing a spreadsheet and the different ways to use them. I also found a website to help me learn how to solve some of the basic trouble shooting errors and how to fix them. It is http://www.troubleshooters.com/tuni.htm. This will help me to help my students when they have problems.

WebQuest week 2

We are now on week two of our webquest. I am really enjoying working together as a group to develop this project. It is so much fun to listen to everybody's ideas and to see how everyone comes up with things that will make our project that much better. I think this is how having teachers that you team up with would be very benefical. If two teachers tought the same subject they could work together to create ideas that would benefit their class. I think that working in teams is a very useful strategy to learn.

WebQuest

This week we learned about webquest. I think that this is a very good thing to learn how to do. I think that webquest could be very fun and educational in the classroom. I think that students love to do something different and that webquest are a great way to get students engaged in their learning. I am really excited to learn more about how to make and design webquests. I think that this will be a very good tool to use in the classroom.

Technology Interview Reflection

Reflection
Write a reflection that includes, but is not limited to, the following:
1. What did you learn from this interview? This interview helped me learned a lot about how many different ways there are to get the technology that you need into your classroom. I also realized that the socioeconomic status of the school and the children really effect what is in the classrooms. It was really good for me to see how the economic status affects so many things.
2. How will this experience affect you as a teacher?
This experience will affect me as a teacher by allowing me to know that there are so many different resources available for me to use. It has allowed me to see that I need to become friends with the media center staff as well as the technology coordinator so that I can learn more about what is available in my school.

3. How did this experience change your thinking about the use of technology?
I learned that any difficulty may be due to the availability of the technology at the school. Once it is in the school the resources are available to all teachers. Through this experience I changed my thinking by realizing that it is not hard to get access to technology from the school for use in the classroom. With technology being so easy to get access to, it would be easier to use in the classroom and engage students in a technology rich way.

Filed Work #3

This week we played another digital story. It was on pyramids in Ancient Egypt. It was a great way to start our lesson on pyramids. The kids really seemed to enjoy it and get into the subject. I thought that it went really well with our lesson.It was a great way to introduce our subject to the class. I would definitely use another digital story in our classroom.

Field Work Week 2

This week in the field we did a webquest with the students. The students were put into groups of five. Each group had a different role that they needed to fullfil. The students then went to the computer lab and completed their web quest on king tut. After the webquest the students needed to write a paper as a group on weather or not King Tut was murdered. The students then typed up their papers. This activity went really well. The students really seemed to enjoy. The teacher said that he really liked how well we intergrated literature with our lesson. We also had our supervisor come on the day that we thought this lesson and she did not have enough good things to say about it. I was really proud of this lesson and am glad that it went so well. I think that I will try to use more webquest in my future teaching.

Field Experiance

My first week in the field is almost over now. I was really nervous and excited going into it but now I am just excited. It has been a lot of fun! I have learned a lot about teaching this week. First I learned that you have to adapt and change lessons almost every time. The things that you thought would work really well and be lots of fun you could just tell that the kids were not enjoying it. I have learned that you just have to adapt to those situations. This week we used a digital story in one of out lessons. The kids seemed to enjoy it and I think that it really helped to engage them in the topic. It has been a fun and exciting week and I hope that I learn as much next week as I have this week. We are also doing a web quest next week so we will see how it turns out.

Google Sites

This week we learned how to use google sites. I thought it was a little bit diffcult at first but once I learned it seemed to be fairly easy. I think that this would be very useful in the classroom. I think that it would help the parents know what is going on in the classroom everyday. I think that it would be benfical to both me and to the parents. It would help elimanate some questions that parents would have. Parents would also be able to see what announcements and upcoming events that would be happening. I think that now that I know how to use it I will get great benfit out of it.

Audacity

This week I finished up my digital story. I used Audacity to mix the narration with the music. I did not like Audacity at all. I thought that it was diffcult to use. I have used other programs in the past the were much easier. My problem was I would go to record something and then it would say that there was a problem with the program and close and I would have to re-record it. Also there were places that I wanted to split the voice so I could have a bigger space between the portions and I could not get them to split. So I had to record each section seperatley so that I could move them where I wanted them. I do not think that I would use this program in my classroom. I think that there are easier progrmas out there that allow you to do more things. I don't think that this program would be easy for children to use. I think that I would find an easier program that they can do more to there story if the choose to do so.

Digital Story

I have been working a lot on my digital story this week. I have completed my story board and I think that it would be a good idea for me to teach my students. I found it very useful for doing my digital story and think that it would help my students as well. I will now be able to do my digital story a lot faster becuase I have everything laid out. I think this will be very effective for students because it will help them to organize their thoughts so that they can get their digital stories done exactly the way they want to.

Photo Story

This week I downloaded photo story on to my computer. I really liked the way that it worked. It was very simple but also lots of fun. I made a short video of pictures of son. I put it on my personal blog and everyone has commented on how well they liked it. I also saw that you could make thank you cards and put them on a DVD and give them to people as your thank you card. It would be very useful in the classroom because it is so easy that the kids could make their own projects. I think that it would be fun to have the kids use photo story to make projects to their moms and dads on fathers day and mothers day. They can record their own little cards with their personilized messages on them. It would be a fun thing for the students to be able to utilize.

Google Sites

This week I learned about google sites. It was really fun to learn how to create a website. I think this tool would be very useful in my classroom. I could design a classroom website for my students and parents to look at. I could put Pictures of projects that we are doing. Or to list homework that the students need to complete and any up coming assignments. That would allow the parents to know what is going on as well as the studenst. I think that it would also be fun to have the students create there own webpages. Then have the students share their webpages. We could have a different student share their page each day.

Google Docs

This week I learned about google docs. I think that this is going to be a very useful tool to have while going through school. I think it will be useful in dong group projects. The reason being is that everybody has different schedules and different lives that it is sometimes hard for everyone to get together at the same time. However with google docs we will be able to work on the assignment when we have free time. I also think it is a lot easier than trying to e-mail the paper your working on as a group back and forth to each other. It gets confusing when you have four different people working on your paper and then you get your e-mail back and they all changed differnt things. I think doing a Wikki will elimante a lot of this stress that is not needed. I think that I will use this tool for a long time to come!

Google/ Blogger

Today we learned how to use blogger and google. They both seem like they will be fun to learn how to use more and can be very useful tools. In the classroom I could use blogger to create a blog for the students and the parents to read. I could write things that we did in the class each day so that if the parents ever wonder what their child is doing all day in school all they have to do is look at the blog. I would also be able to post events and projects that will be coming up. Google mail seems like it would be very useful. It has alot of tools that seem to be pretty neat. I don't know a whole lot about google yet but I will play with it and see what I can figure out. It will be fun to learn new things and see how I can use them in my classroom.