Learning Technology

I really enjoyed this class. The information that I gained is remarkable. I am so excited to try so many of these tools in my class. As a homeroom teacher I would love to useWikispaces in a novel study. I think it would be exciting for kids to respond to questions on a wikispace and see each other’s response. It would take classroom discussions to a whole new level. Since our classes attend one fieldtrip each month, I wouldlove to use voicethread and photographs to create a storybook of each fieldtrip. Kids could use pictures and put in threads containing their thoughts and facts. I am really excited to try out some of these tools and to gain ideas from social networking sites and my reader. Thanks so much for all of the knowledge and ideas. I am truly inspired.

I loved google docs. I am always emailing files to others and this would be such an easy way for me to share with others. So much of what we do is in teams and this would allow a team to streamline its filesharing. I found the documents easy to produce and easy to share. The uses for this are endless.

First, I would use this to keep in touch with the students in my Jr. Beta Club. I could create a spreadsheet with dates of meetings, topics discussed, money raised etc. My officers could then update the document and they could truly gain ownership over our club. I would then be able to check the document and I would not have to “marry” everyone else’s data.

Second, I would use this tool for the creation of weekly newsletters. Everyone could add to it and at the end of the week the gradelevel or department would have one amazing document. All members would be able to have input on the data in the newsletter without a ton of revisions.

Third, I would use this to allow students to monitor their progress on projects like science fair. It would allow me to oversee their progress without getting tons of emails and having to put all of the data together.

Like I said before, the possibilities are endless. I love this tool!

While I was checking my reader I found some great ideas for my counseling class. There was a post on the School Counselor Blog titled Integrating Drama and Art into Counseling Lessons. I still love the fact that it comes to me and I don’t have to go out and get the information. The article links you to another site with reader’s theatre and art projects relating to teaching tolerance and respect. The resources that are available are amazing. It would have taken me so long to sift through lots of sites to find a good site, but I found this so easily. I love my reader!

I was so surprised by the possibilities on social networking sites. I am a member of facebook and have only used it for keeping up with friends. In Classroom 2.0, I found lots of interesting information that would be really helpful for my professional development. As I entered I immediately found an article on resources for the classroom. How nice is it to have this information right at your fingertips. I also loved the forum section where you could get other teachers opinions on things that you are looking to do. Most of all I loved the group section. Whatever you are trying to accomplish had a group. These groups provided support so that teachers could truly implement anything they want in their classrooms.

Twitter was great too. My only concern was the security. If I were to implement the many ideas I had in my classroom I would want to know that I could limit what came to me. I loved all of the ideas though. Some of my favorites were to have the kids use location comments to learn about geography and distance. This would help to give this activity some real world connection. I also love the idea of doing a scavanger hunt on twitter, but I think this could be done through a Wikipage as well. Overall, I got lots of great ideas for the classroom and my own professional development and support.

Exploring YouTube opened up a world of possibilities for me as a counselor. I found a song called My Feeling Kids Song (and posted it to my Wikipage) that would be great to teach to Pre-K kids. There were so many others too that I could spend hours looking at all of the different possibilities for my lessons. Counseling resources are hard to come by and in just a short time I found lots of Sesame Street clips and songs. This will help me to enhance my lessons especially with my younger students. I was also able to find some great resources on conflict resolution. I did find though that if I added kids to the search then I got more appropriate material.

Here is yet another thing on the list that made me very nervous to do. I hate to speak publicly so the idea of creating a podcast totally scared me. I am amazed by how easy it was! This would be such a fun way for kids to take part in an author’s chair. I read part of a story called The Playground Problem and asked kids to meet in groups to discuss their solutions to the problem.You could also have them do research on a topic relating to areas of study and then create a podcast that gave their findings. The possibilities are endless. What a great and amazing tool!

I think that podcasts are amazing ways to share information with others. I loved exploring the itunes store and found the Power Search really easy to use. For example, I was wondering if Zoo Atlanta had any podcasts about happenings at the zoo since our 1st graders visit the zoo every year. I was not able to find any, but was able to find other related sites to share with students. I ended up subscribing to Storynory and Dragonfly TV. Storynory is an audio podcast that reads stories to children. This would be a great thing to share with the students in my class. Students could break down the elements of the stories in a center. I would also love to share these with my pre-k teacher. Dragonfly TV is a site where children explore and solve scientific dilemmas. This would be a cool site to put into a center for students to listen to and report on the scientific method. I also loved the itunes U. I can see myself finding some great subjects of interest to explore. Overall, exploring the podcasts was easy and has a lot of possibilities for the classroom.

The LibraryThing was really cool. Professionally it would be awesome to use this site for doing literature circles. I could use tag words to search for a topic and assign each small group a different book with a similar theme. For example, I did a search for the tags “children and friendship” and I got a huge list of suggested books. From there I could use the titles and reviews to narrow it down so I wouldn’t have to pre-read a huge amounts of books. This would allow my students to have their literature circles with different novels, but we could come together at the end and they could relate their themes and do a common project. Personally, I loved the suggester. It would make finding books I like so much easier. I am often overwhelmed by bookstores because I feel like I need a place to start. This site would give me that. As for organizing my own reads, Iwould love this feature. I would definitely separate them by school and personal reads. As a counselor I use a lot of bibliotherapy. This would help me to organize what books are great for each topic. Overall, it was easy to use and I look forward to setting up my own account.

For some reason this task really intimidated me. I am not sure why, but I was very leery of the delicious web site. Now, I love it! It was easy to use and made my favorites chaos much more organized. This is definitely a tool that I will use as we progress from this class. I am looking forward to having some time to add additional sites from my favorites on the computer. My delicious account is mostly bookmarks of sites that are academic in nature. I am looking forward to having this help with my personal life too. This would also be such a great tool in the classroom. Students could find sites that are bookmarked for them and teachers can find great sites from each other. It will streamline the whole process of getting multiple kids at the same place at the same time. The link to the wiki page would help so much with this. I love it and I am really starting to see how all of this technology interacts with each other and makes for a really great system.

While I was looking at my reader today I found a blog post on Instructify titled, My Footprints: What Online Tracks are your Students Leaving and I was intrigued. It was a post about a site that helps students recognize the importance of staying safe online. As a school counselor, I do a unit with my students on safety and we discuss Internet safety throughout the unit. This site would be a great way jumping off place for my students and me. Kids will relate to the stories of kids more than they will when I just tell them. Also, it amazes me how little students realize about how much can be found out with a little information given online.