Jenny’s summer blog!

The blog that I have grown to like the most in my Google Reader is Third Grade–Once More, With Feeling! This blog is written by a third grade teacher with lesson ideas as well as practical ideas for the classroom.  Since I will be beginning my first year with third grade, this blog has been particularly helpful to me.  Over the last few days, I have been contemplating how to have my students organize their binders.  Well, today, my google reader showed me a blog entry called Organization Binders for Third Grade.   What timing and what good ideas!  I am really glad to have my google reader helping me out through this summer!

In this task, we were asked to explore at least one web tool of our choice. I looked at a few.

The first tool I looked at was 30boxes (http://30boxes.com). This website is primarily an online calendar. On the one hand, I could see this being handy, but I also really like using my pencil and paper calendar. It can be set up to include to do lists, contacts, and things like weather. Pretty cool, but I’m not sure if I’ll actually use it. Plus, I like having a pencil and paper to-do list so I can take it anywhere.  However, it could be cool to embed in a class blog to mark upcoming events.

Gliffy (http://www.gliffy.com/) was pretty cool. It is a collaborative concept mapping tool. You can make floor plans, flow charts, and a lot of other types of diagrams. I could see this tool being really cool in a corporate, business office. A drawback is that the basic version is free, but you have to pay for a lot of the cool features. Since I have Inspiration, I probably won’t use Gliffy. It seemed a little complicated to use

Now ToonDoo (http://www.toondoo.com/) looked like something that could be really fun for my third graders. I’ll want to play with it more before having them create any projects, but it is definitely a resource I want to hold on to. You can create your own comic strips, including characters, setting, and speech bubbles. This could be great for book reports or other projects!

I’ll definitely want to hold on to the Thing 14 tool list for future reference.

I was pleased to see that the stretch task was to download and use Skype. My sister is leaving on Wednesday to live in South Africa for two months, so Skype will be a great way for us to communicate through the internet for free! I have been meaning to download Skype, so this was a great opportunity! My mom and my sister both have Skype, so I tested it with my mom.

For this task, I went to the K12 Online Conference and listened to a speech from the Obstacles to Opportunities section called “Me, blog? No way!” I think that having online speeches and presentations is a great way to assist in professional development.  So often, teachers and administrators avoid going to conferences because they are out of town and thus very time consuming.  However, if one could attend a conference or seminar simply with the click of a button, I think that many would.

The speech I listened to discussed the importance of teachers understanding and keeping up with new types of literacy that are being introduced as technology develops.  As the speaker said, if teachers aren’t careful, they may end up teaching literacy history rather than modern or future literacy.  Technology is a constantly evolving means of communication.  I think that this topic was particularly relevant as I have been completing this course.  This course has made me very aware that the students I teach are growing up with many different types of literacies, not just reading books and writing papers.  In order to keep our students engaged, we must continually work to “stay with the times.”  I am very glad I am taking this course to help me do this.

In this task, I learned about ways to make online slide shows and how to embed them in wikis and blogs. Rather than making a slideshow of the mountain pictures I found on Flickr (posted on my wiki), I chose to make an online slide show of pictures from my trip to Europe this summer. That way, I can also share my pictures with friends and family! I used www.slide.com to make my slide show. It was free and really pretty easy!

Friends and family, enjoy our pictures! The music is just for fun!

image by agelakis

In this thing, I learned about the photosharing website Flickr. I especially liked learning about the Creative Commons section of Flickr. Ever since learning about copyright laws and Creative Commons, I have been concerned where I would be able to find usable resources on the web, especially pictures. I was so glad to find out that I can use Flickr for many pictures.

Part of our third grade curriculum is the study of mountains. I found a number of absolutely stunning pictures of mountains on Flickr, including the one I’ve posted above.

I think that there are many great uses for Flickr in the classroom. I particularly liked the idea of children using pictures they see to write stories or poems, or children finding pictures to help them illustrate a concept (such as the difference in word meanings). I think that I will enjoy using Flickr because I am not terribly artistic and I will be able to find many images to support my teaching without having to create the images myself!

I also really liked the Spell with Flickr feature. Check this out! I feel so high-tech!

Wow. I had never heard of Creative Commons before today. I had never even thought about it! I have probably seen the CC logo on websites before, but never noticed it because I didn’t know what it meant (the same way I never noticed RSS logos before!). Creative Commons is a pretty impressive idea, though. Because of copyright laws automatically protecting every new creation, it is hard to use those works for further creativity. It is also difficult to find out if the creator of the work is all right with you using his or her work. With Creative Commons, a whole new world of creativity has been opened up. I especially like that the creator of a work can specifically designate how they are willing for their work to be used.

I think that using Creative Commons is a great way to help teach students about copyright laws and plagiarism. Students need to learn that it is not ok to use an author’s work without permission from the author. Creative Commons automatically gives that permission from the author. I think that, as Creative Commons becomes more mainstream in educational use, it will shift the way that students conduct research and create ideas. Rather than learning to work from scratch, they will learn to build on other people’s ideas.

I think that using Creative Commons in the classroom has benefits and drawbacks. Clearly, it will save students (and teachers) the time of creating every material from scratch. However, the act of creating original work is an important part of learning, and I would hate to see students lose their abilities to create individual original works because they become accustomed to creating works based on other people’s original work.

To date, I haven’t used much digital, audio, and video content from the web that hasn’t come from a site specifically recommended by my school. I also haven’t shared much content on the web (except on the Trinity website) because I did not know how. However, after taking this course, I plan to both use and share information on the web regularly. I am glad to know about Creative Commons as a source to help me find information that I can use, as well as a place where I can share my information.

To be honest, I have never put too much thought into who owns my teaching materials. I guess that I own the ones I have specifically created for my class and my use. In some ways, Trinity owns the textbooks and other materials that I use. But do the authors of the textbooks and materials also own them? That is an interesting question… I’ll have to think more on this.

In this thing, I was asked to make my own wiki page.  I am glad to have learned how to make my own wiki page, although I got pretty frustrated when trying to insert some of my own pictures.  (They kept inserting WAY too big and making the whole page freeze.)  Hopefully, as I play more with creating and editing wikis, this will become easier.

Here’s my wiki page!

When I started thing 8, I was totally intimidated by the concept of a wiki. In fact, I knew almost nothing about them. As I’ve learned more about them, I am beginning to think that wikis could be a fantastic teaching tool. Because creators and editors of wikis must collaborate so much, I think creating a class wiki project could be a really neat way to include every student in my class in a unique, class-wide project. I really like that wikis encourage shared knowledge construction. To me, a wiki is another form of online conversation.

I really enjoyed looking at various classroom wikis. Most seem to be organized with a toolbar along the side to help readers (and, presumably writers/ contributors) organize the content of the wiki. Some wikis seem to be created almost entirely by students collaborating with each other. Other wikis are more based around photos taken by teachers collaborating with each other. Other wikis allow teachers, parents, and students to all collaborate and construct shared knowledge together.

I have heard and read about a number of instances where wikis are used with older children (grade six and higher). Because I teach third grade, I wanted to look at clasroom wikis of younger children to see how I might be able to use a wiki in my class.

One wiki that I looked at was Go West! This was a wiki made by third graders studying Westward Expansion along the Oregon Trail. I was really impressed the fact that third graders had clearly been the ones to contribute to this wiki. They compiled facts, games, timelines, drawings, and other materials about the Oregon Trail and combined their information in one source. The wiki is really impressive and very detailed! It seems like some of the students did writing for class and then included it on the wiki. I think that this is a great way to continue to include in-class work in a wiki. I would love to do some kind of project like this for a unit that we will study in the upcoming school year. I wonder if the teacher did the initial set-up for the wiki and then had kids “fill in the blanks” or did the kids create new links as they came up with new content areas?

A different kind of wiki that I looked at was Primary Math. This wiki was very different from the Go West wiki because it was created by various collaborating teachers. Teachers posted pictures of their students doing math activities (for example, creating patterns around the classroom). Then, teachers were able to share activities and ideas with each other. I would have liked to see more writing and explanation of activities on this wiki rather than just pictures.

I really enjoyed looking at the Room 15 wiki. It really provides an interesting forum for students to share their work with each other, especially various writing pieces. I also was interested to see that the teacher provides additional resources and help for students, including math and technology tutorials. It seems like this wiki serves many purposes and is very user-friendly.

Another wiki that I really liked was Salute to Seuss. In this wiki, students from various classes got information about Dr. Seuss and his books and compiled it on this wiki. The information presented was very cool and informative. Some of the wiki content includes activity ideas, weblinks, book listings, and book reviews. What a great way to collaborate!

A final wiki that I really enjoyed reading was Schools in the past. In this wiki, first graders interviewed their parents and grandparents about how schools were different in the past and then compiled the information in categories. This wiki was presented in a much more simple way. There were no links in the sidebar leading to different categories. Each category was on the homepage. Even though the presentation of the wiki was simple, the content was very rich because students contributed different information. I wonder if the first graders did the writing, typing, and organizing for this page or if their teachers or parents were heavily involved? I also noticed that this wiki was not as much a collaborative effort as much as a compiled list by all of the students.

I enjoyed reading Vikki Davis’ blog post Wiki Wiki Teaching. She explains how she started off simple while having kids use a wiki by having them define words in groups of 2-3. This might be a great way to help get kids comfortable with the concept of using a wiki while still creating a meaningful learning experience. She also gave very good guidelines for student use of wikis which would be very good to use. There were many interesting ways to use a wiki in the classroom presented in this blog post. Now I just have to figure out how to adapt them to a third grade level!

Wikis present a couple of issues for me. Do wikis eliminate or reduce face-to-face interaction among students? Isn’t that face-to-face interaction crucial for the development of social skills? Are we creating a different kind of “social skill” by introducing students to wikis?

Although setting up a wiki still seems a bit overwhelming to me, I think, overall, it would be a great instructional tool. I would absolutely love to create a class wiki for a project in the upcoming school year.

Feeding my reader was fun! I decided to subscribe to a bunch of teacher blogs with teaching tips since next year will be my first year in the base classroom. I’m hoping that I can use RSS to go quickly through the tips and resources to find ones that help me! This will be a huge time saver for me next year!

One blog I particularly liked was Third Grade- Once More, With Feeling! I really liked this blog because it is written by a third grade teacher and is designed to give teaching ideas to other teachers.  For example, a recent post was a song about numerators and demoninators.  In the margin of this blog, there are teacher resources, parent resources, and labels.  I think that this blog and all of the related links will be very helpful for me next year!

Ok, I have to admit it: I had never even HEARD of RSS before I started my homework this week. Now my head is spinning. Honestly, RSS seems to be an amazing tool that, once I get the hang of it, will speed my web-searching up a lot! It really is amazing how I I will be able to save time by bringing my favorite websites and blogs to me. I also think I am really going to like being able to use my reader to scan articles and posts for information that I want. This way, I won’t have to read everything. I feel so high-tech!

I was intrigued by Vicki Davis’ post on the Techlearning Blog about the blog by ps233techteacher, so I went to the site. The ps233techteacher blog shows an animated video created by students about Harriet Tubman. The children did all of the animation, narration, and production. Amazing! What an fantastic video. I highly recommend it! I would love to have my students be able to create something like this. One thing I particularly liked about this blog is that it was designed not only to show off the student work, but also included student reflections on the learning process while working on this project. Here are some of the student reflections:

Amber: “I really enjoyed working on this animation project. One reason was because me and my partner both communicated with each other pretty well so we were able to finish the work that we did. Me and Halina both did a equal amount of work so it was fair.While we worked on our animation it was fun because we actually got to learn some things about the history of Harriet Tubman.I thought we did a very good job.”

Halina: “I liked the animation a lot. In the beginning we had trouble, as we moved on we got better at it. I enjoyed working with Amber. I like to do animations now.I wish to do another animation with Amber because it was easy for us because we agreed with each other. If I could do another animation it would be about my experience doing my first animation. I had a lot of fun.”

What a cool project!  I think I am going to really enjoy having Google Reader to help me track websites and blogs more efficiently.