Thing #12 Web tools

So, I had so much fun exploring many of the tools listed in Thing 12. I had the most fun with befunky. I took a picture of my dog (he won't mind being on the internet), and changed it! I spent a lot of time playing with this site, and had to share it right away with my family and friends! Here's a little bit of the fun I had with Miles' picture!

This is the Original.

This is the "pop art" version

This last one is the "old timey one" I did a couple of things to the original to make this photo look like it was taken a long time ago!

Now, that was all fun, and I think we can use befunky.com when our students are learning about long ago and today. They can even create their own picture, and make it look like photos would after 50 years! The callenge with this site is making sure the students are following directions. There are so many cool things to do to photos, that it would be easy for students to get off task. A solution to this challenge would be to have this assignment done in small group, so that the teacher has more control of what they are doing.

I had so much fun with Wordle that I had to share! This gives itself more to classroom use than befunky.com because it essentially is a word wall online! I thought that this would be a lot of fun for my first graders. We could create two word walls. One at the beginning of the unit. So the students would list words and things that they know about a specific topic. Then we'd create a second wordle to show what we know after the unit. It is a great visual for the students to see how much they have learned about something. Here is an example of a wordle I made about George Washington Carver:

There are many different designs, fonts, and colors to choose from! I also like that once published, it comes with an html code, so I can embed our wordles in the class blog for the parents to see what we've learned as well! I've learned that the more parents know about what's going on in the classroom, the less emails you get from them! :-) Plus this is something that the kids did and can be proud of! They will want to go home and share with their families what they have learned about George Washington Carver, or whatever they are studying!

Field Experience

1.Teacher Blog Help
2.I helped a team teacher add documents, pictures, and other attachments to her class blog.
3. Standards: TF-I.A, TF-V.C, TF-V.D
4.Spring 2011
5.2 hours- after school
6.A description of the population involved:
• Race/Ethnicity: White
• Subgroups: Teacher
• Role/Grade Level of Faculty/Staff: First Grade Teacher
7.Reflection:

• What did you learn about technology facilitation and leadership from completing this field experience? I learned that it takes a lot of patience! I had to try my hardest to not take over and do it for my team mate, which a lot of time, I try to do.

• How did this learning relate to the knowledge (what you must know), skills (what you must be able to do) and dispositions (attitudes, beliefs, enthusiasm) required of a technology facilitator? As a technology facilitator, I must know what I am being asked, and what is the easiest way to show and teach what I know. I need to be able to explain the teachers in the easiest terms for them, so they do no get frustrated. I must have a positive attitude when it comes to helping others and not get frustrated when them when they don't "get it". I must be positive and let them know that they CAN do it, and it's not as hard as they think it is. The team mate I was helping in this field experience was so afraid of technology and thought everything was too hard. As I was showing her what she wanted to do in her blog she kept saying, "is that all?" and "it's really THAT easy?". It was great telling her, yes, it's really that easy!! :-)
  

HTML Codes

I was so excited at Thursday's class. I had heard of HTML codes, and was frightened by them. Even when I had a Myspace account, and I "used" codes to change my background or add music to my page, I just copy and pasted. I had NO idea what I was doing and I didn't really pay attention. After Thursday, I realized how much fun it is to create webpages from codes! I even went home and played around with codes on my home computer. There are still a few things that I still can't figure out, but I'm not scared of the codes anymore. Actually, they make sense when you think about it. I am excited about learning more tags and doing a lot more when I create my portfolio. I've always used templates on my blogs, but now I can explore the codes more to really personalize them! :-) I really had a great time in class and I'm looking forward to all the great stuff I can find about HTML tags online!

Thing #11 Slide Show- Wild Animals Edition

So, I decided to make my slide show about animals, and I wanted to include animals that we do not see that often, like Ocelots, Snow Owls, and Tarsiers (which are the cute little animals with BIG eyes!). Here's the slide show I made about Animals, this is the beginning of what I will work on for my First Graders when they study animals in the last nine weeks.

Where these pictures came from:

Picture 1 (Elephant): http://www.flickr.com/photos/drxeno/2901314548/

Picture 2 (Flamingos): http://www.flickr.com/photos/kjunstorm/2222367956/

Picture 3 (Gorilla): http://www.flickr.com/photos/davelau/1386573487/

Picture 4 (Lion): http://www.flickr.com/photos/http2007/4698944027/

Picture 5 (Ocelot): http://www.flickr.com/photos/ana_cotta/2521898117/

Picture 6 (Penguins): http://www.flickr.com/photos/drxeno/2900469607/

Picture 7 (Snow Owl): http://www.flickr.com/photos/drxeno/2900470023/

Picture 8 (Tarsier): http://www.flickr.com/photos/abufaiqa/4409689350/

Picture 9 (Tiger): http://www.flickr.com/photos/fpat/3410439596/

Thing #10 Flickr

So, when I first started to "explore" Flickr, I got overwhelmed! I knew I needed to find pictures that I could use, so I went to the "Commons" when I was exploring Flickr, however the pictures there were not what I was looking for, and I was getting bummed about this assignment. I didn't want to just pick pictures because I had to, I really wanted to find pictures I could use for this assignment, but also for my classroom. I'm all about "killing two birds with one stone". So, I got off Flickr for the night, and tried again today. I'm so glad I tried again, because I explored more and found "Creative Commons"! That's where I needed to be, not just "The Commons". I must say it was then I started to get excited about this assignment! There were LOTS of pictures for me to choose from, and when I put in a search for "animals" since we're learning about them soon, I got what I was looking for! I used the slide show option and then starred or added some pictures to my favorites, then once I was finished (I got bored before all the pictures were finished- there are a lot of CC pictures!) I went to my favorites and picked from those, which ones are the best. Here is my favorite!http://www.flickr.com/photos/kjunstorm/2222367956/

Thing #9- Creative Commons

So, I must admit I have not seen the CC on any of the websites that I visit. I even looked around for sites that may have CC on it. But no such luck. After I post this I'll find one, now that I'm not looking! :-) I must admit, I "borrow" images from the web all the time! I used to (before the county made changes to our computers) put images of what we were studying as the backgrounds to my student computers. I think that creative commons will help students when working on their projects. First, they are allowed to take music, videos and other medias and modify and change it to meet their needs. This is something they have not been allowed to do before creative commons. For example, they may want to use a video, but there is a chunk in the middle they do no need, if the video has the Creative Commons license that allows them to change and modify the video, the student can do it. Same for teachers. There may be something that you want to add to your powerpoint, smartboard notebook, or other media file to support what you are teaching. Now, you can do it more freely. This even works well if our students want to publish their projects on the web, they can and allow other people to use their ideas.

Besides pictures of the kids, and the activities that we do in the classroom, I do not publish anything to the web. The pictures I add to the web are done so that the parents can only see them, to protect the privacy of my students. However, I think that if I were to begin publishing on the web, that I would get a creative commons license because I think that Creative Commons is the future! The web is a great place for collaboration and sharing information. Currently everything is "all rights reserved", but soon, I think most sites will be "some rights reserved"

Thing #7 - Wikis

So this was really my first experience with Wikis. I have been interested in them, but a little scare of how they would work in my classroom. However, after reading Vicki Davis' blog, Wiki Wiki Teaching, it helped me to see all the possibilities there are out there in the wiki world! One of my favorite parts of her blog was where she was describing the students' excitement of creating the wiki and using it! I can't remember there ever being a time where I was so excited to go to a class in high school. It's amazing to see high school students so excited about something and learning at the same time! This blog was really inspiring and even though I don't teach high school, it got me thinking of ways I can use a wiki in my classroom. I know how excited my students get over Voki, Xtra Normal, and movies we make as a class! So I'm sure they would love being a part of creating a wiki.
Most of the Wiki's I chose to check out were ones created by elementary school students, so I could get some ideas of how I could use a Wiki in my classroom, and I definitely got some great ideas! The first one I looked at was Kindergarten Counting Book. I was really curious how a wiki was used in a Kindergarten classroom! On this site, they took pictures of a certain number of items until they got to 100 items. I thought this was a big undertaking, and it looks like it might have been, since there are some numbers without pictures. However, it could still be in progress. I think this is a great starting point to building wikis. If i would changed anything, it would have more student involvement, meaning maybe have a student write the number they created and maybe a sentence using that number (depending on how far into the year, of course). I would maybe even allow future classes to build on, and add their number items so there are more than one picture of 1 item. I felt as though this had a lot of teacher work, and I would have like to see more of what the Kindergartners could do with numbers!

A really great wiki that I saw was Mrs. Kubler's 4th Grade Reading Group. I loved going through the discussions on this Wiki! It was so great to read the students' questions about what they think will happen next in the story, making predictions! What I really liked about this wiki is that it was for a reading group, so it makes it more intimate and special foe those students in the reading group. I think having a wiki for a small group like that helps shyer students feel more comfortable expressing themselves and their opinions freely! I also thought this was a great tool for the kids reading the book because it has the Word Wizard which is a resource for the readers to find meanings of words they may come across in the book. It also has a section for the students to summarize what they read, called Wrapper Upper. Summarizing is a great comprehension skill, and this wiki made it fun! I don't think there is much I would change on this wiki, I think this is a great example of how a wiki can be used to make learning fun!
Since Dr. Seuss has a birthday coming up (March 2nd), I had to see what the Salute to Seuss wiki was all about! This was pretty amazing! There were pages added from classes all over the country and from other Countries (New Zealand)! There's a place for teachers to upload pictures of their Dr. Seuss celebrations and activities. There is also a page where teachers could find worksheets to go along with Dr. Seuss books. There were also book reviews where the students (with the aide of their teacher) can write a review of a Dr. Seuss book. What I would change about this wiki, is to make it more available to other teachers. It looks like only the creator of this wiki was able to add and make changes to the information on the wiki. To make it a true collaboration, I think she should have made it open to other teachers to add their activities, worksheets or book reviews. I think that would make this wiki a "go to" place for teachers looking for Dr. Seuss related activities.
Looking at all the wikis really got my mind going with ideas for my classroom. The first thing I thought of doing was creating a wiki on all the Historical Americans we learn about in First Grade. There are 6 different Americans the students learn about and I thought it would be great if we could create a page on the wiki for each historical American. The students could create items (drawings, writings, etc....) to go under each historical American they learn about, that way, at the end of the year, they have a great collection on these Americans! I also like the idea of having a book discussion on a wiki, in First Grade, many of the books we read are picture books, but we could do an Author Study, and create a wiki where were read, review, and create activities for that particular author, like Kevin Henkes. There are lots of ideas for using wikis in the classroom. I can't wait to begin mine!!