Literacy Project

I am mighty impressed with myself! I created a weebly website for fifth grade Literature Circles as well as a blog on the site to respond to assignments and collaborate.

The site has information on each book the students can choose, information on the jobs they will fill as members of each group and tasks to be completed for each week in their group. They will post their responses, questions, and a final review of their books as individuals. It was far easier than I expected and I loved the fact that you can have a blog and website in one place, this was by far the best feature! I was disappointed to find that to use some of the cooler tools, you have to pay. But I guess this is the case for most fun sites these days. The blog took me a few to figure out, but I was already able to post. While I don't have a class, I feel that this would be elementary level friendly and easy to use at home or in school for students!
Check out My Weebly for Literature Circles!!

Technology Focus

I found myself in an interesting technology situation yesterday. Throughout my Grad School career, I have taken enough courses to have a "focus in technology" along with my initial focus in Reading and Language Arts. When speaking to my adviser, I was told that I could only have one focus. Now to me that just seems wrong, seeing as I have taken the courses to satisfy both focus areas...but that is not the point. I was faced with deciding which path to take....technology, which is beginning to be a huge part in the classrooms or reading and language arts, which has always been buzz-word worthy.

Googleimages

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To stick with traditional or stretch for what is coming.. In the end, I opted to stick with my original Reading and Language Arts Focus. My reasoning for this was that technology is a constantly changing area. I could specialize in it now and it may or may not get me a job. But in 10 years, would it be as beneficial to be as R&LA in a job interview? Would what I learned still be relevant or would                                                  my degree be outdated?   I'm sure we will not just be blogging and skyping as we are  now. Why I can't have both I don't know, but in the face of making a decision, I felt that technology wasn't in my best interest long term.
                                                                 Thoughts anyone?

Skype...it's a whole new world

Here I was, thinking that I was pretty tech savvy. I mean I had dial up internet when I was in middle school and I was IMing with the best of them in high school. I got my first cell phone when I got my drivers license and it had no texting or camera functions. I felt the frustration with my parents for not having a clue about creating email addresses or facebook. The past few months of educational technology revelations have left me feeling old and I suppose much the way my parents felt when they had to ask "what is myspace"? When skyping...yes skyping the other night with high school seniors enrolled in an online girls school, I was left amazed with not only their literary abilities, but their ease and comfort with technology.There they were on the screen conversing with a room full of teachers or soon to be teachers as if they did it everyday. I found myself shoving myself out of my comfort zone just to ask them a question. Even though I question students every day, I found this hard. To think that students in high school are feeling that this technology is second nature is amazing to me. They skype and blog and have twitter accounts and google-docs and wikispaces and use them well. I have these things now and still don't use them well. These students were connecting with people worldwide on political issues! When I was a senior in high school I think I was pretty proud of myself when I figured out PowerPoint! I was also impressed with their answer to a question about elementary students and technology. They did not respond the way I thought they would, instead they pointed out that many of these technologies might be too advanced for kids in the k-5 level and should focus of different types of learning strategies. My fear has always been how much is too much? I often wonder how many more advances we can make before we are "plugged in" completely and it was nice to hear teenagers speaking to balance. While I am not yet comfortable with skype and while I could probably enjoy it with friends, it will take some getting used to if I want to connect with people I am not familiar with.

The Journey of a Digital Story

Well, the time has come to post my final version of this digital story. A few months ago I had no idea what anyone was talking about when they said narrate a digital story. Sure, I had made movies for fun to music, but my voice to a movie? This was new to me and it seemed that NASA level technology would need to be figured out to accomplish this.I never would have imagined that narrating this would be the easy part, only 20 minutes or so of sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop and microphone. It only took me 5 tries to get my timing down. And I remembered the wise words of my professor, saying save each attempt because it might be better than the next 5. I opted not to include music with the voice because it might be distracting. The timeline was helpful, especially when picking my purpose and getting my thoughts together in terms of the narration. How do the slides relate to my topic? To the next frame? I used the provided 
Storyboard googledoc  

to lay out my project. It was an interesting project that proved to be challenging but also a great learning experience. Here is my final version: An introduction to me!

My Video

This video is a project for my technology class. Because I do not have a classroom of my own yet, I decided to make an introductory video for my future students. Teachers always give their speech about who they are and what they like to do. I did mine using Movie Maker on my laptop. The only tricky part was the narration, and the only part of that which was difficult was finding a microphone. It took me 6 or 8 tries to nail the narration, but I think I am happy with it. My only question was whether or not to add music as well. This was not difficult to do overall, and I would use it in future classroom applications.

Snowball Effect

I would like to credit this class with my current addiction to blogging. I have recently started a food blog and I am so motivated and inspired to keep up with it and make it engaging and interesting for others. While I do not share this enthusiasm with my grad school blog, probably because I do not yet have a classroom, I can see how I could become very engaged in it should a classroom find me next year. I also love that I could have students contributing to the blog. Now that I am balancing two blogs at once, new questions have arisen... I have to have the same "About me" info on both blogs because they are linked through the same email address..does anyone know if this can be changed? I have also spent more time looking for different layouts and gadgets, a task that, for my first blog consisted of " well that will do" for my background and picking assigned gadgets. Having the freedom to run my own blog about my passion has been the best way for me to use what I have learned in this class and expand my knowledge and experience base.

Interesting Thoughts

I was reading a blog by a peer who was discussing the use of cell phone text messages to students... The program Remind101 lets teachers remind students of assignments etc via cell phones.This issue caught my attention... Rubi's Blog made good points when questioning this program that I agree with. She questions whether parents would be on board, I'm sure some would be fine with this, but I don't think 100% of parents would be on board. I also don't think that ALL students have cell phones, and it is hard to implement a new program without a technology being fully accessible. Of course this is hard to believe since my k-5 students have better phones that I do.. My main concern is if we as teachers are giving our phone numbers to students. We can have seperate social networking sites for work and friends but we don't usually have seperate phone numbers. Since this technology, at least in my mind is more geared for middle to high school students, my concern is about protecting the teacher. If students have a phone number, who is to say they won't begin texting to ask what you are doing over the summer, what movie you are seeing...why you are out sick and they have a sub (I have seen this text sent in the middle of a school day to a teacher...why they are on the phone I do not know). With so many teacher-student stories in the news, I don't think this move would be appropriate UNLESS the program hid your number. Even though, I don't particularly care for this idea, I am sure teachers are doing this and it is working, and that this is the direction education and technology are going.