Touch Ipods!

Alright, I am an ipod junkie. I have had three ipods in the span of five years. Man, do I love my music. I have been telling myself for years that touch ipods are stupid and that they aren't something that i want. Well, thank you Ed 421, because now I want a touch iPod. This is such a cool piece of technology that is growing every single day because of all the applications. I know that it is unlikely that my classroom will have a set of touch iPods, but they can be used in so many different ways in a classroom. There are so many different eductional applications that can be looked and enjoyed.
I think that this is a great way to let kids explore the different applications in the world (with some supervision of course). Also, Touch iPods can be turned into clickers, so you can get immediate feedback on any questions that you may have for the class. This can work perfectly for informal assessment with multiple choice questions.

Also, touch iPods could make podcasting a possible tool in the classroom, and probably a pretty affective one. The reason that podcasting wouldn't work is because most people don't have iTunes or the resources. This would make it possible, at least in the classroom.

iPods open new worlds of possibility: I want one!!

Podcasts

I am not a huge fan of podcasts, just because not all students are going to have access to them because not everyone has itunes, which is what is needed so that students can see it, and it seems kind of pointless in class because I could just talk to the students on my own.
However, I do think that podcasts would be a good project tool for students to use. I think that podcasts could be used in a lot of areas for a lot of reasons. For example, when I made my podcast, I just read "I know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou and put pictures in to make a point. I think that podcasts could really help with fluency when it comes to students reading out loud. I am particularly thinking about ELLs when I say that reading out loud and being able to hear their words can help them work on fluency.

I think that podcasts are a fun technology thing, but not something that I can see myself using in my classroom just because it seems like a lot of work for something that can be just as effective in another context. I am glad that I learned how to do it, and I think that if the occasion occurs I will definitely use it, but in general, it isn't something that I particuarly enjoy. Gotta try everything once!

Do all Websites tell the Truth?

Answer: Definitely not. There are websites in the world that are so fake but look so real. Case and point: google Martin Luther King or just type in martinlutherking.org. people usually think that .orgs are very reliable websites, but in this case, it is definitely not. .orgs just mean that it is a nonprofit organization. Not an organization that is reliable, but just a non profit organization. If you go to the bottom of the main page of martinlutherking.org, it is created by stormfront, which is a "white pride world wide" group that created the website to trick kids into thinking that Martin Luther King Jr. was really just a horrible person. Imagine that a child would come across this website and believe that it is true.
It is important to teach kids about websites and teach them ways to check to make sure that the information they are looking at is all credible. I think that this is a big problem for a lot of students. You can never start too young when it comes to teaching kids about credibility.

google mapping

Now, I LOVE google maps. You can spend hours on there and never even to get to know everything that there is to know.

For a classroom, Google maps could be used for pretty much any kind of subject or project. If you are studying shakespeare, you could google map all the different locations in britain that were important. Google Maps could really be helpful in history. For example: looking at important points of hte Oregon Trail, or looking at Volcanoes, or any number of things. It can help give students an idea of the distance for different locations especially when it flies from one location to another.

Google maps is a good to look at the geography of a country and can be used as an anticipatory set for a lesson. Also, you could have the students do a google map set about their lives where it goes from their house to school or where they were born or where their favorite place is. This is a good way to get the students involved with different applications.

Movies Movies Movies

This past week, we have been making 30 second commercials in class. Who knew that it would take so long to make 30 seconds look good? I was put in charge of editing, which I have some limited knowledge of thanks to my brother Austin and his amazing stop motion skills. We had to make a commercial about a product, and in this case, my group used Jet Puff Marshmallow Fluff. This particular can was super old and had developed a yellow puddle of jelly type substance at the bottom because of its many years of unuse.

Making videos is super fun, and a challenge, but can be a really good way for students to find a new medium to explore education. For instance, my brother Austin, does a lot of videos for school projects because that is how he likes to express himself, and they are super amazing, and something that really interests him. I think bringing different mediums into the classroom is a good idea, and can really help students find fun and different ways to express what they have learned.

I also feel like it would be cool to have a video at the beginning of some units to get the kids interested in what they are going to learn. I feel like this would be extremely helpful in areas such as language arts and social studies. Everybody likes to watch videos, and I think that it is a good way for students to collaborate.

If your school has the resources, it would be fun to have the students get into groups and make video projects for different units. Once again, this would get them working in a team in a different type of medium and it would be a great way to have fun.

I like videos, even though it takes forever to make one, in the end its all worth it.

Putting the Picture Together

The last week in class we did a lot of work with photoshop. I have definitely have worked with photoship before, especially in high school back when I was on a newspaper and had to do layout.
The assignment in our class was to take a picture off the internet, scan a photo, and take a photo of our own and put them together into one believable picture. I took a background picture off flickr.com of a park bench with a statue on it. I perched a friend of mine on top of the statue by take a picture, cutting it out on photoshop and putting it in. I finished off by scanning a bird and put it in there, as well as some text.
I think that it's really helpful for students to have basic knowledge of photoshop, and it would be a fun way to put pictures of your class in history, or inside a book. it could really brighten up the room and keep it interesting. I think that it would be a good way of getting kids excited and really using technology to my advantage.

Thoughts on Web 2.0

Just so everyone knows, this is my very first blog ever. And I feel like this may not end well for me, since this is going to mean endless entertainment.

Of course, I knew what Web 2.0 was before today, I just didn't know that it actually had a name. The work that we did this morning in class on go2web20.net was really interesting because there are so many search engines and sites out there. Already, I am starting to think about the website unit we have to create at the end of this term, so while I was searching the website, I was thinking about how I could use some of these sites as activities for my students.

I am an elementary/middle school authorization, but at the moment, I am focusing more on the middle school end of that spectrum. If i do end up teaching middle school, I will be teaching Language Arts. The initial thought that I had for a unit would be taking a novel, and creating a website for that novel with activities that the students have to do and just different learning tools as they read the novel. I would use applications like Wordle, and have the students work in groups and come up with the most important themes and ideas of the novel. Another idea would be to have them write a short essay on the novel and then put that essay into Wordle and see what comes up. By sharing these, students would be able to see the important words and themes that other students have come up with as well.

Another application that I found that could be helpful in language arts would be to find an application that had a flow chart so that students could find all the main themes of the book, or even a character chart so they could identify main characters and then the traits and even look in the book for textual evidence to that affect.

Also, I really like the idea of the kids making a cartoon or a short movie having to do with the book they are reading as well. This could be a commercial or just informative. For instance, if the class is reading "Holes," the students could make a commercial using either video or a cartoon about how everyone should come to Camp Green Lake, or how to best dig a hole. This would give students the opportunity to think outside the story and get creative. I feel like this is the most important part of literature. Of course, being able to understand the text is important, but the critical thinking beyond the text is just as important.

Although, I don't know much about it, I think that using a wiki could be really helpful in a classroom setting because students could share their ideas about a novel, or even just share their own writing and put it up to share and even edit. In fact, I found some applications online where collaborative editing can occur between students. For instance, in the application, Etherpad, students would be able to look at each others work, make changes, and be able to high light and share the changes that they made.

I think that the most important part of Web 2.0 is the interaction that my students can have with each other, me, and the outside world (to a certain extent depending on the age). In other words, it is Web 2.0 that is opening up our world and making it possible to communicate and learn from each other as well as others from around the world, and it is a teacher's responsibility to bring this knowledge and communication into the classroom.