Blogging in the Classroom

There are endless possibilities when it comes to blogging in your classroom. For me I really see the benefits of using it as a reflection tool. I was never really asked to reflect much in my primary experience and I think that's made it harder for me as an adult. Not that every student from my classroom needs to be an avid journaler, but I really think self-reflection is an important tool to have under your belt. Being able to honestly evaluate yourself will make you a more successful student and life long learner. However, I recently noticed the video option on blogger.com. This got me thinking about the ease of use of flip-videos and I began to imagine the possibilities. I think self reflection for me is a much easier task to discuss verbally and we want to accommodate many different learning styles in our classroom. On television we are bombarded with reality shows where they have the characters talk directly to the camera in a 'confessional' style. Why not try this in our classroom? Or at least give students the option to discuss their feelings on a book, or about whatever topic you want them to journal, with text-blogging or video blogging?! There are absolutely times when I feel writing is an important task and blogging is a great way to work on this skill, but there are times, or students, where the task would be more easily accomplished with a video.

Video Book Talks

Oh the days of 'Reading Rainbow'... I definitely felt reminiscent of those good old days last week when we did our video book talks! All I could think of as we were working is how much I would have loved to do this when I was growing up. I really loved to read and was definitely hooked on reading rainbow. I always wanted to share with others how great I thought a book was and how I thought they should read it (I'm still like that). Having students make their own book talks is so great! First, using the flip cameras is genius. Easy to use, easy to upload! Then they just piece them together using iMovie (I also think this activity might work nicely as a mini intro to iMovie, much like how we used it in class). Add a little music, edit and you're done. I could really see this being used in my future class room if we were going to blog with another country across the country. Maybe each week we choose our favorite read aloud, make a book talk and try to persuade the other class to read it. Or after a student or student group has read a book they create a book talk on it that we watch as a class on Fridays as 'Friday Flix'. I could also see this being a great project for upper elementary, middle and even high school when they're working on persuasion... 'read this book because...'. The possibilities and uses are endless!

Great website!

Yesterday I was looking around for a good technology game to build on some skills (particularly long vowels and ending sounds) with my tutor. He's eager to use the computer and I thought this would be a good way to work on skills in a different way than we usually do. I was checking out www.sqooltechs.com/sqoolsites.html. I was looking in the readquarium section at the games associated with long vowels and end sounds and found a few games that were okay. However the game I really liked was from a bbc website so I did a little digging. I came across a gold mind! If you go to www.bbc.co.uk/schools/students you'll be directed to the bbc students page. There are some excellent tools on this homepage, but if you look on the left side there are two headings: primary and seconday. From there you can choose your subject. I chose literacy in the primary grades. Now you have several excellent tools at your fingertips! I personally enjoyed 'words and pictures' with the captain picture because it dealt specifically with learning phonics and offers games dealing with CVC words, consonant clusters, long vowels, and high frequency words. I also found success with selecting 'games' from the left menu. There you can enter a more specific age range and again pick your subject. Although this site offers similar games as readquarium I found them to be of higher quality and more specifically met my needs. I hope you all find the success I did- and I hope my story pushes you to look further... one web 2.0 tool can certainly lead to infinitely more!

Note: BBC is a British broadcasting channel and therefore spoken words are with a British accent.

Teacher-Created Electronic Books

This week I read an article title "Teacher-Created Electronic Books: Integrating Technology to Support Readers With Disabilities" by Rhodes and Milby from the journal The Reading Teacher. In this article they discuss using electronic books as an assistive technology for students with special needs (because this meets with the IDEA guidelines). With this approach they focus on the importance of retelling and rereading to improve on fluency and comprehension. They suggest this series of events to use e-books (a traditional sotrybook with multi-media effects) in your classroom:

1) Read book to student(s)
2) Students retell book while teacher records natural language
3) Teacher creates a slideshow with text on each page
4) Teacher inserts clipart/pictures or, a better option, student produced digital photography on each page
5) (optional) Create animaltion effects to move from one slide to the next
6) Record narration for the slide show (teacher can record or students can)
7) Teacher intros book to class
8) Students watch/listen to story during literacy centers or free time.

The authors feel that e-books in this regard are much more effective at helping all students as opposed to the traditional book on tape method. Not only are the students more engaged and committed to the book, but the visual aspect is particularly useful for students with disabilities. It's important to note that many e-books are available for purchase, however "teachers, with minimal effort, produce books that are directly related to curriculum using simple slideshow software programs such as Microsoft PowerPoint, which is available to most classroom computers"(Rhodes & Milby, 2007).

Rhodes, J.A., & Milby, T.M. (2007). Teacher-Created Electronic Books: Integrating Technology to Support Readers With Disabilities. The Reading Teacher, 61, 255-259.

Flip Cameras

Yesterday we had the opportunity to work with the flip cameras from the CTLT. Let me just say, I'm totally sold! I am very impressed with the ease of use, the sleek design, the convenience of the usb drive, the loaded software, and the lack of a tape. It is so impressively designed that I am completely hooked and want one for myself! But more importantly I want one for a future classroom. I think if I had access to one of these cameras I would be much more likely to integrate video use into my classroom. I love the idea of having students create something original and I think videos a really motivating way to do that. However, (as we saw in the clip yesterday) full out video cameras are incredibly cumbersome! They need to be charged constantly, they need a tape/dvd, they are large, they have a big tape, and they're rather complicated. Needless to say, the flip is the opposite of these things. I am so impressed and will definitely be purchasing one of these in the future.

Keyboarding

On Monday we discussed the teaching of keyboarding at the elementary level. I think this is a topic that has always been on the 'back-burner' in my mind. Whenever we plan for technology lessons (particularly when planning them for our future classrooms in our college classes) we are always able to assume our students have the background knowledge we need them to have. However, welcome to the real world! Chances are in elementary school a good portion of the children will have little knowledge of technology, let alone keyboarding skills. There are many programs that don't require keyboarding but it's a huge obstacle for most programs. In class we discussed the pros of teaching keyboarding and the one that stood out the most to me is the fact that keyboarding is such an integral part of society. Many job application are online and require typing not to mention that the majority of our societies communication requires keyboarding knowledge. Therefore, regardless of whether or not we want to teach it, we must teach it. It's important for us to become familiar with our school's program or find one that works for us. I also really like the websites we found yesterday to help practice those skills. It never hurts to make learning fun!

Digital Storytelling

When we started this class Dr. Schmidt told us that our digital stories could only be 2-3 minutes long. I was really nervous because I didn't think it was possibly to have a beginning, middle, and end of a story in that short of time, let alone that it would allow you to connect with your audience. However, on Friday when we watched the examples I was astonished at how much you can accomplish in 2.5 minutes! I'm eager to try my hand at this new technological tool. I'm particularly interested in making my digital storytelling a personal narrative so I can truly connect with my audience. With the idea I'm planning to use I'm not sure I will be able to add in a dramatic question- there is definitely a 'question' but I don't know how to build my story to make it come to an end as the question is being answered.
As for my future classroom use, I think using iphoto was a great way to make digital storytelling a little less complicated. For a large, more time consuming project I could see using imovie, garage band, etc... but for smaller projects it seems as though iphoto makes a better choice. I particularly like how we came up with our captions. My group's photos made me incredibly nostalgic and our captions made a point to address this feeling. Overall, I'm really excited to try my hand a digital storytelling and am eager to use it in my future classroom.