Washington, D.C.

Doing the internet safety

I spoke with my spouse about Internet safety. The conversation was both valuable for planning and easy because we agree on many points. Some points we agreed upon were 1. we will have one desk top computer which will reside in a public area. No laptops until students are headed to college. 2. Chat sites will be off limits, but our kids may chat through their e-mails. This will limit their conversations to people they know from school. 3. No virtual/reality games, our kids will not live life vicariously, we expect them to live the life they want.

Some other points that came up were - providing a good model for internet use, having open discussions about using the computer and internet, having internet competent kids, having a good support network so our kids will have somewhere to turn to in case of an emergency.

Internet Articles

What article did you choose to read for your fourth article?
- Fighting Internet Filth by Mario Hipol
What were the most important things you learned from the readings?
- That playing on the internet to simply waste time is a bad use of the internet! Not only that, but it increases the probablility of running into inappropriate material. Also, that we need to educate our children about giving out personal information online.
How will what you have read influence your actions as a parent and/or teacher of children and youth?
- As a parent, I would invite my children to sit with me while I'm on the internet, that way I'm providing a good example for internet use. As a teacher, I need to be up to date on internet games and tools, otherwise student's will disregard anything I say about the internet because "She just doesn't understand."
How can you use what you have learned from the reading to have a positive influence on family and friends?
-Invite my husband to share what he's reading with me, that way I show interest and don't isolate his internet use.

Two Best Ideas

1. Using clickers to chart a student's progress
2. Using a powerpoint to introduce vocabulary for guided reading

Powerpoint

Here's my powerpoint. It shows the triumphs and tragedies of teaching with technology - it's pretty awesome.

IP&T Powerpoint

View more presentations from d3b7a.

Smartboard

I didn't take any pictures while using the ELMO, so a couple days later I taught another lesson, this time using the Smartboard. I tried to do an interactive math lesson where students were working at their desks with manipulatives and one student would go to the smartboard and write the answer to the problem. Follow up was a worksheet - the objective was doing division with skip counting.

Technology Ideas

So... I used an ELMO in my lesson today. It went really well. I used it for a shared reading activity. We read a poem as a class and then did an adjectives activity with the poem. I also used it to project sentences on the board for the students to add adjectives to. ELMOs may be sweeter than SmartBoards...haven't used the SmartBoard yet, but I'm going to soon. Good Luck everyone.

New Discoveries

Since entering the practicum, my partner, Megan, and I have fallen in love with smart boards. We've also learned how terribly "technology" like (tempermental) they can act. Our teacher has done writing and math activities on the smart board that were interactive for all the students to participate in. This was great because it required great classroom management and the teacher needed to be on top of the technology.

We also have a document reader (elmo) in our classroom. This is neat to watch. For opening time, the teacher starts by using the overhead projector to display the self-starting DOL and then switches to the document camera to have the students come to the front of the class and share their strategies for the math self-starter. So, she uses the projector and the elmo in the same opening, and they're both useful.

Watching our teacher has made us very excited to use the newer technologies.

Virtural Tour

http://sites.google.com/site/differentcommunities/my-files. This is my tour of rural, urban, and suburban locations.

Content Information

The content is standard 2 - Students will develop a sens of self in relation to families and community. Objective 2 - Examine important aspects of the community and culture that strengthen relationships. Indicator B - Compare rural, suburban, and urban communities.

The pedagogy is making observations from the pictures on google earth to create a standard for each type of community. Then to apply that standard to an unknown community.

The technology is Google Earth and its paroramia application.

Week 7

Location	Activity	Google Earth Content
1. Salt Lake City, UT	Make observations about the location using the panoramio view. How many cars are there? Are there any yards? What other things do you notice?	Graphic Web panoramio, polygon highlighting city blocks
2. West Jordan, UT	Make observations as above.	Graphic Web panoramio
3. West Weber, UT	Make observations as above.	Graphic Web panoramio
4. Nephi, UT	Using the observations from above, identify if the location is Suburban, Urban, or Rural	Graphic Web panoramio
Details of image overlay / path / polygon:	I will include a polygon over the Urban location, otherwise we will use the panoramio view at each location.

ABCs concept video

Here is my video, after some sweat and tears it has successfully posted to teacher tube. Enjoy. It's the ABCs. Also, make note of the awesome music.

ABC Storyboard

Our content areas include standard 1 objective 2, standard 8 objective 6, standard 6 objective 1.

Our pedagogy is an ABC storybook, this fits the content because the students will be developing language and vocabulary while creating a story of common household items.

The technology we will use is photostory, it's a good fit because the students would be able to collect photos and compile them into a book, and while doing this develop their language and vocabulary skills.

TPACK

1. The content area I focused on was teaching students about the seasons. Specifically, it addressed standard 3, Objective 1.

2. We used several pedagogys, they included acquiring data about the inside and outside temperatures and then classifying areas based on the temperatures we found.

3. The technologies we used allowed us to chart the inside and outside temperature with the thermometer and gather temperatures from different areas of the world for the students to classify. It was a good fit because it made the material easy to access and in a format that would be convenient to early learners.

The Tech Savvy Teacher

We are honored to have our classroom nominated to write an article for the Tech Savvy Teacher. We strongly support the use of technology in the classroom. The following is a science experiment conducted in our kindergarten classroom using thermometers and Google Earth.

Kindergarten Standard 3, Objective 1 - Investigate changes in the seasons. We taught children how to identify the seasons by observing known weather and comparing to unknown locations.

This objective for kindergarten requires students to observe and identify the seasons. Our goal to reach this objective was to measure the current temperature in Utah, which are typical of winter, and then measure the temperature inside, and have the children classify different areas of the world's seasons based on the inside and outside temperatures. This lesson would take place after an initial introduction to the seasons and their characteristics.

We used a thermometer to measure the temperature inside our classroom, we found the inside temperature to be 80 degrees F.

(chart of classroom temperature, measuring inside temperature)

After measuring inside the class, we moved outside and measured the temperature of the snow. Outside the temperature of the snow was 30 degrees F.

( measuring snow temperature, chart of outside temperature)

Following a short discussion that linked the temperatures to the seasons, we put together a PowerPoint presentation with weather pictures from all over the world using the Google Earth application. Here are some examples:

Hudson Bay, Canada

San Francisco, CA

Norway

After each student identified the season of the different picture based on its temperature we would classify them as a group. An extension of this activity would be to have the children sort clothing items into what season they would be appropriate for. These activities help the students understand that the world experiences different seasons, in different places, at the same time.

Awesome technology

TPACK was a great break down for seeing steps in planning. It would allow a teacher to analyze 1. what's my objective, 2. which skill am I going to use to achieve my objective, and 3. what awesome technology is available for my use. Each of these steps are critical for a efficient lesson planning process. Streamlining the process in this way makes planning much easier for beginning teachers.

I played at the microbe zoo and it was awesome (I need to stop using that word). When you clicked on different exhibits it would break down what it was teaching, and if you clicked further it had real pictures of the different bacteria. You could explore about dirt, or ponds, but I explored about the snack bar. In the snack bar it talked about food that's produced with the help of bacteria. Really interesting!

More patience

It would help a lot if there were 1) a definition and 2) an explanation for what a RSS reader was on the "Adding a RSS feed" page. It was my first time using the RSS feed, although I've known they existed for a long time - since the official Twilight web page added one. But, I've always had enough time to browse all the website - never needed a RSS feed to show me what's new. It was very informational to find out that Firefox and Google provide readers for you to use. It would have saved me a lot of stress if I was told that the blog is the reader so I just add the gadget and link to the feed...sometimes I need things spelt out.

Another tiff, what's everybody's usernames for the delicious website? Mine is d3b7a so you can add me as one of your friends. And my e-mail for the book club is debrabee@gmail.com. Will you all add a comment to my post so I can add you all as friends.

Otherwise, I loved learning about the copyright information. Plus, I found losts of websites I think will be useful for the future. As a side note, I made a group on Facebook "the future elementary teachers of america" and have links to all the awesome websites there also.

What I know about technology...

So this will probably be pretty short.  This is my first blog on my first blog.  I have several e-mails and enjoy surfing the internet.  I recently worked at an awesome Child Development Center where I was thought of as very technology-savvy because I created an e-mail for my classroom and sent pictures out to the parents.  (I know, pretty awesome) I'm proficient in most programs, but...

The greatest thing I learned from technology is Patience!