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.

Willie

This week we had a chance to complete a web-quest like activity to determine information about the tall-tale Willie. I personally enjoyed this activity a lot! First, it wasn't that complicated which means those with few technology skills could use it. Second, it was interesting! It required creative thinking to solve the problems, using knowledge from many subjects including math, social studies and even art. Third, for some it may require using other resources (whether those be classroom books or online resources) which builds on resource skills. Fourth, it was great to incorporate another type of technology into the last part of the lesson where we drew our version of Willie using drawing software. Because of these reasons I could really see myself using this in a future classroom. I think it would be really interesting to do an example for my students like we did in our class (I could see it being a really interesting form of assessment!) and then having a project for them where they create their own. It would definitely lend itself to a greater 'theme'. I know some schools have an apple them where all subjects are related to it. Then the students could have the clues come from a variety of subjects. Just another great way to incorporate meaningful technology into the classroom.

Article: Struggling Readers and Technology

I read an excellent article today that I'm really excited to share with you all. This article from the journal The Reading Teacher, entitled "Stories About Struggling Readers and Technology", is by Rebecca Anderson and Ernest Balajthy. The article gives four stories of this type. I found three of them to be particularly pertinent to our class and/or situations... I'll save the best for last!

First I'd like to share about the section 'Recreational Reading'. In this section a teacher, Mark, is called in to help out his local church in an effort to save their after school reading program. This reading program seems to have all the right elements (including funding) that should make it successful: two rooms in a community center, comfortable atmosphere with beanbags and comfy chairs, a library of trade books, computers, internet access, a software program called Accelerated Reader (www.renlearn.com/ar), and 10 volunteers to help for 3 hours each afternoon. The big problem that Mark identified with this situation is that they were relying too heavily on the software program to do all the work. After a student had read their book they would then complete a quiz on it through the program. The staff had not been properly trained in how to best develop reading and literacy. "A computer-based test is not a replacement for well-considered reading activities...A key component in blending technology with books is the maintenance of community building"(Anderson & Balajthy, 2009). So in the end they needed to use technology as part of their program, not the whole thing, which is also incredibly important for classroom teachers to consider as well.

A second section discussed the use of blogs in coordination with struggling readers and preservice teachers. A teacher realized that many of her minority students had little experience with quality literature depicting different ethnicities. She created a blog page for 25 different titles over the summer and then paired two students and a preservice teacher to a book and therefore to a blog. Throughout the course of reading the book the students and the preservice teacher (both reading the book) had an online literature circle. There were guidelines to the blog but the students took a creative spin to make it their own. I thought this was a great idea. In class we've been discussing the use of lit circles as student to student through blogs but I love the idea of using preservice teachers!

The final section I'd like to share is about electronic texts. The teacher in this selection realized she was going to have a very wide variety of readers for her next school year and little to no funding. She then spent her summer finding electronic texts to meet the needs of her students. She found the students' reading levels, found different electronic book sources and then determined the levels of those books. I've included her list of websites below. I thought this was a great idea, especially in the times of no funding!

International Children's Digital Library: www.childrenslibrary.org
Between the Lions: pbskids.org/lions
*Classics for Young People: www.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/storclas.html
Project Gutenberg: www.gutenberg.org
Talking Book Library: www.talkingbooklibrary.net/Matrix.htm

*I tried all the sites and for this one you need an account.


Anderson, R, & Balajthy, E (2009). Stories About Struggling Readers and Technology. The Reading Teacher. 62, 540-542.

IPTV

Last Friday we had an excellent guest speaker from IPTV. During this interaction I learned a great deal about what IPTV and IPTV.org have to offer to the teacher. For starters, I think it's brilliant that they have such an organized and bountiful website. I can already see the possibilities for my future classroom. For instance, for a young class I may choose to use Healthy Minutes as an excellent tool for integrating reading with science/health issues. Another great tool for young students might be to use the interactive 'game' with PBS Kids Island. I could really see a lot of students getting into the idea of seemingly playing video games when they're actually learning great reading strategies and phonics skills. Our speaker also mentioned the Kindergarten/4th grade buddy reading program with "Martha Speaks". This program would make an excellent addition for a school that doesn't currently have a buddy program in place. I really enjoyed buddy reading when I was in school (on both ends- I felt cool being read to by an older student and also loved helping out a developing reader) and feel that this is something I might like to continue when I'm teaching. For the nostalgic, PBS has brought back "The Electric Company" as an outstanding tool for teaching phonics and phonemic awareness. So essentially during her talk I learned all about how I could utilize PBS and IPTV. I mentioned here some of the great tools for students or for teachers to use with students, but there are also great opportunities for profressional development and extended learning for teachers. The only problem is a website so bountiful with information is bound to be slightly confusing. I feel I could only begin to take advantage of all it has to offer after hours of playing around on the website. Otherwise, I feel iptv.org will be a greatly beneficial tool for me in the future.

This week's websites

We learned quite a bit of new 'technology' in just a few days this past week. I'd like to touch on my favorites in this blog.

First- WORDLE! Oh my, what an amazing tool; one that I'm so disappointed I didn't know about during my student teaching. This tool puts words in a very visual, if not artistic, format. I've included an example of a wordle I might have my students create in my classroom. For this lesson I would have student create a wordle word cloud for rhyming words/word families. For younger students we might make this as a class, or possibly make the list as a class and then each student could make their own. For older children each child, or pairs of children, could each receive a different family and make a word cloud. I could also see the potential of this lesson to be used as an assessment. For my worlde example I did the 'at' family. The possibilities are endless! (ps... fun website- I was trying to find additional words to rhyme with at and came across www.rhymezone.com- this might be fun to use with tuttees instead of purchasing a rhyming dictionary!)

Second, COMIC LIFE! Gosh, yet another excellent tool for the classroom. In class we used it in correlation with one of our favorite books. This program was particularly useful for one of my new favorites- Hinky Pinkys. This is a student made book where they wrote rhyming riddles. I really saw potential for comic life to be used for making hinky pinky pages. In the book the answer to the riddle is upside down at the bottom of the page- not always an easy task to accomplish in Microsoft Word. However words and pictures are very, very easily manipulated in Comic Life, not to mention how easily adaptable the formats are to the original hinky pinky pages. I looked up the website for Comic Life on http://www.eusd4kids.org/edtech/xapps/xapps_comic.html that we were told we should go to during class. There are some student examples and I've included one in this blog. These student used the book stellaluna and created a summary with comic life. They also evidently used digital cameras. What a technology-filled lesson!

Note: I love blogger.com! While writing this blog I accidentally 'x-ed' out the tab- gasp! However the blog auto saves :-) 5 stars!

Blogging

So it turns out I'm one of the last people to blog! I guess that's because I'm skeptical of this approach. I really love technology and throughout student teaching I truly saw how useful it could be. I saw how it can be helpful to teachers and students; be used on it's own and in coordination with other subjects. However, blogging is a whole new 'genre' of technology, one that I'm not particularly sure how to use. I know how to use software and I know how to use the internet, but I'm not as skilled with using something that is so un-structured. At this moment I see the potential of blogging but feel it may be more useful for my purposes to give students blog subjects.
There's so much freedom involved with blogging that I'm overwhelmed and don't know where to start... hence why I started my blog with a blog about blogging! Still, I'm open to new things. I would have never thought all those years ago when we were learning how to 'type' in elementary school that in the near future computers would be such an integral part of education. Because of this I'm willing to try blogging and give it all I've got. Still... I'm really interested to see how I deal with the lack of structure... here goes nothing!