Learning to Teach

We started talking about classroom management and tools. I noticed that there was a website listed www.online-stopwatch.com that I already use. My students use this in Forensics class often. When the kids work on practicing their speeches, they use this as a tool. I like it because you can choose to either use it as a stop watch or have a countdown. I thought the polleverywhere.com was a really fun tool and I could see myself using this in my classroom. There are so many things that you could ask in a poll. Off the top of my head, I could ask who the most influential United States President is. It would be interesting to see who the students select and that could lead into a class discussion. I also looked at Primary Pad with Lisa. I thought this was a cool tool because you could see who added what to each document. They highlight each author’s additions in a different color. Then I got to look at Voki.com. This was a fun site to record my voice with an avatar saying it. I can see...

I had a pretty stressful day because of the middle school musical that I am a part of. So to de-stress I played around with Youtube search stories. It was really easy to use and it did make me feel better. Enjoy!

I have known about wikis for awhile but I have never used one in my classroom. I can see how to use one. I teach social studies for 8 th graders and we do a lot of projects. I have trouble anytime I have kids do a group project because of attendance issues or if groups need to meet outside of class. I can see how wikis can solve some of these headaches. I created a diigo account today. I decided to go with diigo instead of delicious because delicious needed me to create a yahoo email account and I already have five email accounts and I do not want to add anymore than I have to. I can see myself using this tool because I have two different laptops that I use consistently. Now I can see my "favorites" at either computer. I can see how I can use this in class. I can bookmark certain sites that are credible that I would like my students use for projects or research. I also learned what RSS meant (really simple syndication). I knew very little about RSS but now I realize how...

In my classroom my students have been instructed to use soundzabound more than any other site for music. That is because I didn't really know of other sites out there for them to get music and soundzabound was one of their Novell applications so I knew it was school approved. My students use music in their projects to enhance the individuality of their work. Soundzabound is easy to use but it doesn't have the most popular songs or artists on it. I know that my students use other sites for that music but I wonder about copyright issues. After exploring on these other websites I see that there are more options for students. Personally, I use itunes for my music but I also have an app on my iphone for Pandora. This assignment was the first time that I used music.aol.com and I liked that one a lot as well. Weird to think that I used to have a huge boom box and had to use the antena and the spin dial to look for the right radio station in hopes that it would be playing ...

I decided to take this class because I was interested in learning new ways to integrate technology into my curriculum. I was pleased with the first class because I was able to work at my own pace. I also liked how we were able to share with each other a little background about ourselves and why we were there. I think I can learn a lot from teachers who don't the same thing that I do. I got a few great ideas from others in class last time. I like the idea of students using blogs to publish their writing. I know that a lot of teachers at Asa use this already and I can tell the kids take more pride in their writing. They don't want to have a bad piece of writing up for all of their friends to read. They want to put out their best work. For the future I am excited to learn more about different web 2.0 tools that I can use in my lessons and for all of the help/support I will get from everyone in class.