Alphabet DVD

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December 2010

December tends to be a blur for me. Actually I think it begins around Halloween and then the speeid proportionally increases as I get closer to my Christmas progam. So considering all that, it is a small miracle that I am writing this post with a relative sense of calm.

Speaking of the upcoming Christmas season, I was perusing Smart Exchange and came across some very nice lessons for Christmas there. My kindergarten students really enjoyed the December Hidden Pictures. Not very fancy but I am always grateful for someone who has taken the time to create something like this that I can use. Teachers are so generous when it comes to sharing their ideas. I am constantly amazed at the amount of material that is out there. Thank you!

Another tidbit for Christmas:
I have my sixth grade students do some research on a Christmas carol. Among the list of sites I send them to for information Christmas World is one of my favorites. They have a nice list of carols which includes information and background about the carol. The students will create a mini poster about the carol. Once completed we will sing all the carols they did their research on. It is a fun way to learn about some of those songs we sing or hear during December.

Well I don't know if I will get another post in during December. The program is next week and I have much to do yet to be ready. So for now, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Exciting Skype Event

This has definitely become a monthly posting. I just cannot keep up with all of it. But I do have a very exciting thing to report on today. Background first: This summer at Podstock in KC, Kansas, I met a teacher from Omaha, Nebraska. Barb is a third grade teacher at a Catholic school so we had lots to share. After many conversations and shared ideas, we decided to have her class join our school in our annual Saints game held at the end of November. We sent her the information on the saints we were studying and then skyped her class into the game. I had the SmartBoard set up so we could see her class. (noot the best picture but you get the idea!) There were a few glitches with sound but it was great fun. We look forward to doing more things like this.

Here is a link to Barb's audioboo about the event.

October 2010

I have not been very good at making posts recently. It seems once school starts my life spins on super fast speed. Christmas program is fast approaching, TMEA and TCEA are in February. Catholic Schools week before that and then it will be Young Authors Day, Art Fest and Graduation.

So here is my link for today- just saw this one and think it is valuable. This comes from one of my daily reads Free Technology for Teachers. If you don't already read this blog you definitely need to bookmark it. Richard Byrne offers more ideas and links than you can imagine. Wonderful, wonderful resource for teachers. In a recent post he shares the link to Open Educational Resources. It is "a place for educators to post lessons and lesson materials that others can use. There are thousands of lessons organized by content area and grade level. After you've made your initial selections of content area and grade level you can refine your search by lesson type, material, media format, and usage rights." (Byrne)

As a fine arts teacher, I naturally look at the lessons for that area. It is common for lesson plan sites to not have many fine arts lessons that I find workable. However, at OER I was able to find a number of lessons that really are nice. The ease of search makes OER a new favorite of mine. I highly recommend this site and thank Richard Byrne for sharing this link.

September 2010 links

It might be a better thing if I make my posting goal once a month. That way if I have more to say it will be a bonus. School has consumed my time. I suppose this is good since they do pay me for that. But I have felt guilty not spending time making any posts. I have had some good links come by my computer screen lately but have not had the opportunity to share. Hopefully anyone who sees my posts also reads many other blogs.

Here is a very cool one for today to start us off. Coming from BBC is Dimensions. The quick description from their site says "Dimensions takes important places, events and things, and overlays them onto a map of where you are." Simply put, that sums it up.

To use this in the classroom: It would give students a grasp on the relationship of events to their own place in the world. They(we) often cannot imagine the enormity of something that doesn't happen in our neighborhood. This brings it all home.

Looking back at the First Week of School and 2 great links

We have finished our first week of school and I was exhausted by the end of Friday. I was lucky though to end the day with a very pleasant group of 4th graders. A nice way to go into the weekend. I would have to say the first week went rather well. My kindergarten class this week was a nice surprise also. In fact, I recorded them singing a song and place a clip on my St E Music Wiki. Take a listen!I always enjoy seeing our students come in with their fresh out of the package uniforms. You could see that some shirts still bore the marks of manufactured pressing and folding and knew they opened the wrapping that morning. Their attitudes were as fresh as their new uniforms and we teachers greeted them with smiles and our own "fresh and rejuvinated" outlooks. It felt good and comforting. A good omen I think.

I don't think I shared this site yet, and cannot remember where I first saw it listed. I am sure on one of my favorite blogs so I appologize to the original poster. I am always on the lookout for free music or sound effects and this one is very cool. Free Nature Sounds lets you mix and create a variety of nature sounds that you can link to or export it as a wav file. Very nice.

And if you were not aware of Monkey Machine this is another online drum machine but great fun to use and create drum beats. I used Monkey Machine when my class of 6th grade girls created a math rap. Very easy to use with lots of options.



This week will be a full week. We will have our first student mass on Friday. Each week a different grade/homeroom prepares the mass. 8A will do this week so that means lots of singing for me. Time to talk about proper singing and posture, breathing and so on. I need to find or create a singing "checklist" for the SmartBoard. I'll have to do some research and see what I can find. More to come!

Inservice, Meetings and getting ready for the First Day!

This was our "official" week back to school. It was a week filled with meetings and pages of information. The best day of the week of course was Monday which was my day. By that I mean, it was my day to present technology to our staff. We had quite a bit to cover and I wanted to show them some cool tools also. We did a quick review of Discovery Education, Thinkfinity and the ever important presentation on Copyright in the Classroom. Besides all of that we were able to do a quick "look-see" at Edmodo, Google Timeline and Wonderwheel, Batchgeo and we ended with Voki, everyone's favorite. I was excited to see many of our teachers want to set up their own wiki space for their classrooms. They are also wanting to use as much technology as they can. Today one of our teachers was working on a bullitin board and created a word cloud. I love seeing their enthusiasm and willingness to learn.

Unfortunately the bulk of the rest of the week was devoted to meetings. Not that they were all that bad, it is just hard to focus when I am thinking of all the unfinished things I have to do before the first day with students. I understand that we must have these meetings prior to the start of school to prepare our teachers for any new requirements within their schools or districts. The problem I see is that teachers do not have enough time to prepare their classrooms (basically redecorating every year) and plan those new and exciting lessons for the first week of school. It seems they must do all of this on their own time. Coming to school a week ahead of the required start or staying long into the evening.

My intent is not to whine and complain. It is the nature of the beast. This is just my observation of many years of first days of school. I also offer no solution since there is not simple way to resolve this. I hope though that administrations recognize this devotion and remember when their staff might make requests.

End of Teacher Tech Camp

This has been a great week. Our teacher students this week were so awesome. They had wonderful ideas on how to use all the new technology tools we introduced them to. One of them, Brian, was immediately embedding widgets and such on his classroom website. It was great to see everyone so excited. Ideas were popping up everywhere!

One of the reasons this week went so well was that our students (the teachers) were all eager to learn. They were excited about something new. This is how we want all of our students to be. It doesn't matter if they are teachers coming to learn new computer skills or young students coming to learn new skills. The instructors were also excited to teach and I know that made the difference in how the week went. Is it that hard for us to bring that excitement into our own classrooms? Now that August is here and we are all heading back to our schools, we need to keep that energy going. You cannot start the year with a ho-hum attitude and expect your students to be happy and ready to learn. I love summer and could live in perpetual summer but I am ready to start the school year. My brain is churning with new ideas and I am looking forward to trying some new things with my classes.

So here are some goals for my year:
1- keep an updated wiki for all the things my students do during the year
2- kind of related to #1 since I will need to keep my students active to have something to put on the wiki!
3- all grades, not just 6-7-8 will do some sort of project with technology- not sure what, yet, but they will!

My favorite tools to use for this year will be VoiceThread, Voki, Wikispaces, Edmodo

Check this out from Larry Ferlazzo: (one of my favorite blogs! This man is awesome!)
“Only Connect” Is A Great Game For The Classroom
Only Connect is a BBC game show that also has an online site.
There are sixteen squares with words on each one. The player needs to use the words to create four categories of four words each. It’s a great game that helps develop the higher-order thinking skill of categorization.
The online game is too difficult for all but advanced English Language Learners, plus you only get three minutes to complete it.
However, the idea is a wonderful one for the English Language Learner classroom (and even mainstream ones, too). Students can create their own, and then can exchange their creations with a classmate, who in turn can try to solve them. All students need is to make sixteen boxes on their paper.

Day One Teacher Tech Camp

Today was the first day of our tech camp in the diocese for the teachers. I think we had almost 50 in attendance. I was part of  the team that presented copyright and Prezi. Copyright is so dry, I really hope I didn't bore anyone too much. Prezi went ok I suppose. It is a fun tool and everyone seemed to enjoy it. In fact, we changed the way we do some things and I think the whole day went  well. I especially like how we let them break into groups and discuss ways to use the tool and then we had a wallwisher for them to post their ideas or questions. Good ideas all around.

Tomorrow we present Edmodo (that's me) and extended uses in Discovery Education. I think that once again it will be a good day. It is so wonderful to see all these teachers who are so eager to learn new things. They are a wonderful group to teach. I would like to believe that there are more teachers out there just like this group. They just have never been given the right opportunity to learn and grow.

Barking Voki Dog

There are too many things I should be doing but I had to make a Voki barking dog. Long story, but he is so cute.

Get a Voki now!

Preparing for Tech Camp

This week has been tiring. We have our diocese teacher tech camp next week. It is a wonderful program started last year to introduce the teachers in our diocese to different technology tools and how to integrate them in their classrooms. I am one of the lead teachers and will be helping to present 4 tools. I will be helping with Prezi, VoiceThread, Edmodo and Audacity. I have spent many hours this week preparing and I am beat. I have a habit of putting in far too much time when I prepare a presentation because I am never satisfied with it. At some point you have to stop. For me it is usually when my head hits the keyboard.

My ISTE magazine Learning & Leading came in the mail yesterday. Among the great things in there was an article by Adam Salignam and Leah Armelagos called Conquer the Blank Page in the Classroom. They shared a site called Piclits. This is a web 2.0 tool that gives students prompts for writing. It supplies you with a picture and a word bank to pull in words. The site does, however, require registration to share, save or email.

See the full PicLit at PicLits.com

SmartBoards

The problem I have with the internet is that it feeds your adult ADD. What I mean is that it keeps giving you just one more thing to look at or explore. I am trying to finish up my work for our teacher tech camp next week and somehow I ended up on a SmartBoard blog. This isn't a bad thing because Teachers Love SmartBoards is a great resource for those of us with SmartBoards in our classroom. I spent nearly an hour exploring all the wonderful things here. Lots of links that will have you wandering and experimenting for hours! (like me) So enjoy some smart fun!

Doing this blog thing and an easy to use poll site

I have been thinking about my goals for the coming school year and there are many of them. Perhaps too many. One of my goals after returning from Podstock 2010 in Kansas, was to get on this blog writing ball and keep it rolling. Now that I have started I feel like I am finding some comfort level with writing. I spent a considerable amount of time yesterday locating all of my blog posts from my graduate work and moving them to one blog page. I finished late last night and feel like I accomplished quite a feat. I had these posts in three different places so bringing them all together was a bigger job than I imagined. I couldn't just export and import because they were in these different places. So copy, paste, click click click was what I did. Unfortunately I did not copy them chornologically but they are grouped by the course. I need to go back and put tags though on most of them and it will make it easier to search and find things.

Our teacher tech camp is next week and I need to work on the presentations that I am a part of. Those will be Voicethread, Prezi, Edmodo and Audacity. Shouldn't be too hard. All my favorite things to do. Once I finish these I will put them here for anyone to peruse.

So I was looking for a good link to put up right now and found Flisti. I found this on one of my favorite blogs Free Technology for Teachers by Richard Byrne. Apparently with Flisti you can create a poll without ever registering. Kind of interesting. But one word of caution, a reader of his blog posted a response saying that the ads on the response page seem to be related to the words in the poll so you might need to be careful of what words you choose. Still, it looks pretty cool and is very, very easy to use.

Dogs or Cats?

dogs

cats

or View Results

Create your own poll at Flisti.com

Pick Six

I was reading a new friend's (Tim Holt) Plurk post today which led me to his blog Intended Consequences v 2.0. In it he discusses a story he heard about women choosing only 6 outfits to work with and so on. But the idea was to simplify your choices. So he offered the challenge of what would be the six essential web sites you would use for a week. He extended the challenge to also ask what 2 electronic gadgets would you choose for the week. He made some interesting comments in this post in that there is so many web tools for educators to use that often we are overwhelmed and paralized by the profuse offerings available. I couldn't agree more with this thought. It can become so frustrating when discovering all that is there you tend to feel like the kid at Baskin Robbins that really just wanted chocolate but finds the other 29 flavors equally enticing and what to do?

So given this challenge, what six websites would I have to have for a week? Let me try this:
1. my email
2. plurk or facebook? tough one there...(social networking)
3. It really isn't fair to pick my google reader is it? Although it does streamline my reading. (ed blogs)
4. kxas.com (news)
5.
6.
wow, so I really could live without alot.
Choosing two gadgets, much easier:
1. cell phone
2. laptop
I don't have many gadgets so that narrows my list quickly.
Well it certainly is a lesson in using less. The harder question I would have is as a teacher to select the short list of must have websites to help be more productive in the classroom. So here it it:
1. Edmodo (where my students and I live)
2. Voicethread
3. Podomatic
4. Wikispaces

So how would you answer these questions?

Saturday at the Amon Carter Museum

My husband and I decided to make a visit to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. I don't remember if I have ever been there before and if I was, it was many many years ago. We went with the intent to see a special exhibit they had on Ansel Adams. That was worth the trip itself but this museum also houses an amazing collection of artwork by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell.

Among all of this I learned about a style of art called trompe l'oeil. This is French for "deceives the eye". The paintings are created in such a way that they appear three dimensional. Very cool. One of my favorite paintings was by William J. McCloskey titled Wrapped Oranges.

It was a pleasant visit and much to see. The museum website does offer some teaching resources. This museum should be on everyone's must see list when visitng the Fort Worth area. And as a bonus, their admission is FREE!                                                                                                                           

 

Working Late

Ok- So I have this meeting tomorrow to plan and prepare for our Teacher Tech Camp in August. I've come across a very nice site that is related to the 4teachers.org sites. It is called Web Poster Wizard. Simple in design, easy to use and could be a nice tool for lower elementary students. You follow the prompts, fill in the info, add links and a picture and you are done. I really liked this one for the simplicity. Glogster is such a fun filled tool with lots of bells and whistles, but this one is nice and neat. Here is the link to a sample poster I did as my dog. Teachers can set up a class with a code for students to access and then they can manage it from the teachers home page. Pretty cool.nimo

Here is another one. Reminds me of Animoto. This one is called Clipgenerator and here is one I made using pics of my dog.

A New Beginning

Well we shall see. I am making another go at blogging. I've been given a variety of advice on how to keep up with this. So we will see how this goes.

I just returned from Podstock 2010 in Wichita Kansas. I didn't know anything about this until a great friend and mentor (Paul Wood) said to me "you should go". And so I did. First let me explain Podstock. It was a two day technology conference with about 100 people in attendance. I had two goals in attending. One was to pick up some new ideas and tools to use and bring back to share with my colleagues. The other goal was to make some personal connections with people that are passionate about education and using technology to make education better. Did I achieve those goals? Absolutely! The people I met were amazing. Intelligent, giving and truely interested in education. I made some fantastic new friends. I have some exciting plans for the coming school year. It was a great two days. And Wichita was a pretty cool little town also.

So what did I learn? Let's start with Plurk. That was one thing I had to jump into real fast at this conference. Everyone here was on Plurk. Plurk is a social networking site very similar to those you may be familiar with such as Twitter or Facebook. Plurk allows you to have conversations under your posts and the format is more linear. I guess it is alright. I really don't care what social network site I use, I just would like to be able to access it at school. I am guessing that Plurk will work for now. Eventually I am sure it will be blocked. But it would be so nice to throw questions out there when I am stuck. I don't have a nice network in my building of people to talk to so my new Plurk friends would be very helpful.

There were many discussions about tools but a few that I really liked are below:

Lit Tunes

Lit Tunes makes connections between literature and songs. There is a great data base of stories and songs that could be paired with the themes of the book. There are lesson plans and some wonderful links also. This one is worth checking out if you teach literature especially.

Flocabulary Here is another for the language arts teachers. Flocabulary is hip hop in the classroom. This is a commercial product but there are some free teacher things on the site. It might be enough to inspire you or might be just the one thing you need.

So there are my two for the day. I generally only like sites that are totally free but when a site offers free things for teachers I'll give it a point for that one!

Welcome!

I've become frustrated with some other personal blog sites so I am going to try and pull everything over to from my other blog attempts to this site. During my masters classes in Instructional Technology, I was exposed to so many different tools and methods. I will discuss and share what I have learned and maybe you can find something here that is helpful.