New Web Excitement!

I attended a fantastic technology class, this week at the Genesee ISD! It was called integrating technology for grades 3-8. I found out about some fantastic new web tools and can't wait to use them with students. I appreciated how positive the instructor (Floyd Braid) was. He had lots of great ideas for how to use technology when you only have one computer in the classroom, etc. He was an excellent instructor who moved easily between teaching his lesson with us as students and analyzing techniques with us as teachers. This was a worthwhile investment of time to be sure!

Thing 23 Now What Do I Do?

This has been an amazing journey for me! I thought I had some technology skills (and I did) but I had no idea what was available to me both personally and professionally! The exercises I've completed and the applications I've used have truly been life-changing for me and for my students.

My thinking on teaching has been greatly influenced by Charlotte Danielson's [I put that link in, isn't that cool?] work on the four domains of teaching, so I'll sum up my learning using her basic framework. Just in case you aren't familiar, two of the domains are visible: classroom environment and instruction and two are invisible (but critical): planning/reflection and professional contributions.

The potential to contribute professionally is obviously all around me. I've been sharing what I've learned with staff and community members both in my program and out. I've offered to lead a portion of our first staff development session in the fall to share some of the tools I've found useful. The best sharing, though, comes from making time to sit alongside a teacher and help them get their own accounts, pages, blogs started. I hope to make time to do that, this summer with a couple of my colleagues. Having this blog to look back on and remind myself of potential uses for these tools will be extremely helpful.

Many of these tools will assist me in planning for the upcoming school year. Enhancing my website with links to relevant material for students, adding widgets that make my site interactive and putting enough of the right kind of information on it will make it a "must visit" for my students. This will enable me to put some of my long-term planning, which I've gotten good at in a shareable format and let the students take on more responsibility for managing their learning.

The other area of planning is for student use of the tools. I wrote an entry about www.kidblog.org and am piloting that with a class, now. I've discovered a lot, including that I will require correct spelling and grammar! I also assume that the young people intuitively know more about technology, but many of my students didn't understand title versus post versus comment boxes. Having a month or so to try this out has been invaluable and will improve the experience for next year's bloggers.

Students will benefit from being able to use the flashcard site. I'll benefit from being able to check some work on line. We've transitioned to teaching, so I'll continue in that vein. The Wiki presents obvious possibilities for student writing and collaboration. I like the idea of posting assignments, quizzes and tests for students. They have planners, but they only work when open :)! I think I will also make use of the calendar feature on my website for this.

With greater on line options for students, I see greater possibilities for individualizing instruction. Taking the example of the new student (from a previous post), I anticipate being able to direct him to materials that will be appropriate for him and help him to catch up. Some of my students blog posts indicate interests that I can perhaps link to materials that will interest them.

The classroom environment may change considerably. My schools have computer labs, but I've largely stayed out of them. Now I can anticipate scheduling 1-2 sessions per week in the lab so that all students have access to the tools we'll be using while at school. I've had one student respond to a blog question by doing his own research above and beyond what we've done in class. I'm hoping this kind of motivation will be contagious and Spanish will be a class they think of first rather than last when doing homework. Hey, a teacher can dream!

One of the biggest challenges is for me to keep practicing with these tools and adding others to my repertoire! I'd love to have a follow-up opportunity through Wayne RESA. I will certainly use these as much as I can on my own, but having a session and a deadline can be very motivating! My most regular source for what's new will most likely be Delicious [I couldn't help myself, before this I didn't know how easy it is!] Thanks for the opportunity to improve my teaching!

Thing 22-My Very Own Wiki

For all of the times I've sighed when my students didn't follow directions... I posted this without the link to my Wiki!

Senora Keith's Wiki


Setting up the Wiki was very easy and intuitive! I discovered that the inserting process was also easy. However, because I didn't click save, my objects didn't look like they inserted correctly and I took a couple out before I settled on one. This actually led to another problem. I left the slide show in because I liked it, but the phrase above it is misspelled, so it's going to have to come out. I can't have misspellings, typos, etc. in anything I publish. However, I do want to show this as a finished "thing" so I don't plan on changing it until next week. Creating a link was so easy! I linked to my school district web page. This made me think of another use for a wiki--job hunting! I'm in search of a full-time elementary position. I could use a wiki for my professional documents (on-line portfolio, anyone?) and link to my website or other supporting material on the web! This excites me!

Another great function of a wiki, in my opinion, is staff communication. In my program, Shared Time, we are a group of just over 30 teachers who drive all over teaching students all kinds of subjects on all different schedules. A wiki would be a great electronic bulletin board to reach us with info. We currently are encouraged to drive to the office 2 times a week to check for memos. I think I'll do my part for the environment and suggest this to my supervisor.

Thing 21 Wikis

Again, I was excited to find something I already had experienced. It was especially funny to watch the video, because my Wiki experience was while planning a trip to Traverse City with several friends. We rented a house together and coordinated our menus, what we would bring as far as soap, toilet paper, etc., and what activities we might want to do while we were there. It turned out to be a great experience and we were definitely well-planned.

I was inspired by the classroom wikis about classwork. The Hanalee Book Wiki was great. I liked reading the chapter summaries. It made me want to read the book. My language students could create summaries of grammar rules, with examples that would be useful as they study for quizzes and tests. We just got a new student at the beginning of the 4th quarter. He has had no Spanish experience and the rest of the class is almost halfway through Spanish 1 (they finish next year as 8th graders). He's got a lot of catching up to do and a Wiki would be a great resource.

I think this would also be helpful as a planning tool for school open houses, staff meetings, and field trips. I especially like the ability to limit access to a group and being able to track old versions.

Thing 20 Podcast Subscriptions

This thing took a very long time! First of all, I had to download iTunes. I like the language programs I found on epnweb.org. I found ReVerb Spanish to be quite helpful and I would recommend it to students. I think I would use this resource in a lab setting where I could keep an eye on the students. I think once they found out how helpful the language pocasts were, I would trust them to use them on their own.

Personally, I subscribed to This American Life on iTunes. This is a program I have missed since WDET keeps changing its programming. I used to listen to it on Sunday mornings, before church. Now I don't know when they air it. I don't need to find out, though! I will now get each episode automatically.

I can see a staff development use for this tool. I think to hold the teachers' attention, a video or vodcast would be better, but recording and saving sessions for teachers who have to miss a session would be valuable. The other value to that would be relistening to a podcast of a session as a way of following up, checking my progress in implementing a new teaching technique. Further, teachers could share podcasts as part of material for a professional learning community.

I'm looking forward to continuing to enjoy podcasts, myself and sharing them with others, both in teaching and out.

Thing 19 Learning about Podcasting

I think one of the most exciting things about Podcasting is how new it is. So many of these things have been in use for a long time, that I feel slow about catching up.

I listened to a few different podcasts. The first was Grammar Girl's tips at grammar.quickanddirtytips.com. She explained further vs. farther. I'm inspired to do my own Spanish grammar tips. Actually having the students do them would be even better. I had been thinking about videos like the ones that explain podcasts, google docs, etc. Their style is simple and it would be simple enough to be accomplished (although I know nothing is as simple as it looks after editing)!

The podcast I most enjoyed were the storynory.com stories. I love to read aloud to my students and since I've been teaching Spanish for the last few years I have very few classroom opportunities to read. I do get to do story time at the bookstore where I work on Saturdays and that definitely fills a hole for me! I know that copyright would be limiting, but perhaps my students and I could write some original stories to read and record.

I clicked on Dan's math for the masses, but from his list it looked like he was speaking to a more educated mass than that to which I belong :)!

I wanted to try a student podcast and ended up with digitalvoices.wikispaces.com, listening to Britnie's speech on being yourself. It was sweet, but the navigation was definitely not as polished. It was good to see a realistic representation of what students would do.

My husband reminds me that his radio station WSDP, which belongs to the Plymouth Canton School District has regular podcasts of their community focus segments. I plan to subscribe (I'm assuming that's Thing 20 :)). I've been sharing this journey with him, maybe he could get the podcasts on epnweb.org.

Thing 18 Slideshare

Madrid

View more presentations from Victor T.

I found a beautiful slideshow of Madrid on Slideshare.net!

This was inspirational! There were such beautiful slideshows. I think this would also be inspiring for students. The coolest one was a show about Vienna, Austria with all of the captions in Spanish! I love the evidence for my students that people from all over travel to other countries and learn about new cultures.

I would love to have students post slideshows of their own on the site. I think accessing other student work and sharing ours would be a great use of the site and encourage improving the quality of the presentations.

Thing 17 Flashcarddb

I think I may have just found a life-changing website--not just for me, but my students!

I mostly teach Spanish (some world language sections). For my Spanish classes, I require flash cards for vocabulary terms. There are 2 sections of vocab per chapter. Most classes do 5 chapters each school year. This is of course 10 sets of cards. You'd think I was asking them to perform feats of great physical and mental strength. On a personal note, they are a pain to check and I usually just flip through their stack, making sure I see some of the current words.

This website has changed all that! Anyone can set up an account and the email is optional! I could require them to email me their cards by a due date. Oh, joy! My quick glance can now take place on my schedule and not during class time! Typing them in will (hopefully) seem more fun to them.

Another time this site might be helpful is during summer school. Because we have the students for such a short time, I think searching for and using the math flash cards would be more effective than creating them.

I can't wait to share this site with my students tomorrow!

Thing 16 Google Docs

Hallelujah! Finally something I've already been using :)! I didn't know why I received the Google spreadsheet awhile ago, but I edited it and added my name, district and hobbies. I've been using Google docs for agendas and minutes of meetings at church. I also use it for prettier invitations to various activities at church.

I really liked the video of the educators explaining more benefits than I've been getting from my use of Gdocs. I noticed when I was looking at the spreadsheet, tonight, I was the only one from the group on it. I also noticed the last update. This is fantastic for collaborating and accountability.

I do recognize the problem of linking student email accounts to the docs and I'm not sure how to overcome that. I wonder if Google would consider creating a student version?

Thing 15 RSS Feeds

Thank goodness that cleaning up an RSS feed is easier than cleaning house ;0! I definitely needed to revisit the RSS. It's not a habit for me, yet. I love the popular education bookmarks from delicious. That will be a timesaver. Coincidentally I got an email telling me about a new site, hoodamath. I haven't checked it out, yet but was intrigued to get an email from the company that started it. This web marketing is pretty new to me, too. I've always been inundated with the Amazon suggestions, but this email kept stressing the free website. I'll be looking for the catch.

Because I read both Detroit papers on line, daily, subscribing to their news feeds did not appeal to me. I have ditched my magazine subscriptions, though so the U.S. News education feed was a natural to add to my Bloglines account. I am committing myself to checking my account on Monday mornings. This is a late start for me at work and I should have time after reading the papers!

What I'd love to help students do is set up an account and then monitor it for relevant current events topics. Because of the potential for inappropriate content, I'm going to let that idea percolate for awhile.

Thing 14 Delicious!

I have 11 bookmarks and growing! Right now they are mostly for my personal use, but I noticed on the set up video the coolmath website that I used a lot for summer school. I added that and will put a bunch more math ones on before summer school starts at the end of June! I really appreciate being able to look at others bookmarks and the popularity of sites. Knowing that others use and like sites is like having a lot more friends to advise me on what's good and what might be a waste of time.

Perhaps a ranking system would enhance this site. Popularity is a good measure, but so is a more evaluatory measure.

Students would certainly benefit from seeing others' lists. I can also see creating a class account and preloading it with sites I know to be safe and informative. We recently did reports on Spanish speaking countries. I recommended Yahoo kids to the students. It was the only site that had every country on it. It also had all of the information they needed for the report. I would have assumed that National Geographic would have been better, I would have been wrong!

The portability for both me and students is also a great feature. Being at home and having a bookmark at school is a frequent and frustrating occurence. This site eliminates that.

Thing 13, Social Bookmarking & Tagging

This is fantastic! I've had a very hard time using my favorites effectively and just got excited about putting sites on the toolbar. This seems like a smart, intuitve way to collect the best sites for a wide variety of interests. It also seems like a great way to do research for school projects. Students often express frustration that they can't find any websites with useful information and always default to wikipedia. This might give them a few (!) more resources! The most exciting part though, is searching other folks' tags! This seems like the most efficient way to find tried and true information on various interests. I'm jumping right over to Delicious and setting up my account now!

Thing 12 Widgets

I found widgets fun and easy (at least on widgetbox and google gadgets). I found a Spanish and French word of the day that would be perfect for my teacher website. I'm looking for ways to make the site more interactive and just plain more interesting to visit. I think polls would be a fun way to get a quick response to assignments and just general feedback. I am concerned that some of the students would vote multiple times and skew the results. The only way to find out is to try it!

Thing 12 There's a widget in my blog!

Here's a fun widget I found on widgetbox! I think it's very addictive!



Enjoy!

Thing 11, Commenting on Blogs

Commenting on blogs is easy and mostly fun. I picked blogs whose names interested me. I wonder if I would get more comments if I had an English title for my blog? I enjoyed suggesting helpful sites or offering encouragement. I didn't like that on one blog my post would be visible after approved? What is that? If someone posted a comment that I didn't like I would delete it, but wouldn't have to approve it, first.

I am approving all writing on my class's blog on kidblog.org. I'm doing this in a parochial school and I don't want to take any chances. I've signed in the principal, the homeroom teacher, and my supervisor as guests. They'll be able to read everything, but I'm not sure if they can post or not. The kids gave me their user names and passwords last week so I could set the account up, this weekend. I was reading down the list and one of the boys said, "You won't like my password". He was right, I didn't like "poop123". However I had to agree it was easy to remember! On Monday I hope to get in the lab so they can try out their first assignment!

Thing 10-Part Deux, Downloading Video

This is my 3rd attempt to write this! I don't know what's going wrong with my internet or the websites, but now is not the time!

I downloaded the Eclipse movie trailer. I did this mostly to torment my husband who I keep threatening with the possibility of having to go to the movie with me!

On my way to finding that, though I stumbled across a bunch of old Electric Company and Schoolhouse Rock videos. This gives me the idea to create Spanish videos to teach grammar concepts. Ours would be rather simple, but the process of writing them would be great for solidifying the knowledge in my students' minds.

The other thing I liked about saving a download to a flash drive is the back up I have for when the internet is slow or down! Youtube is not blocked for teachers in my district, but there are a lot of extraneous clips and comments that can be seen on the screen. This downloading option changes the game completely!

Red Pyramid Preview Video, Thing 10

I've read Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series and am excited about this new series coming out on May 3rd. I get to host a party for it on Saturday May 8th at the bookstore. At a party we had for the Lightning Thief movie, I was authorized to read chapter 1 from the upcoming book. 30+ kids from 6-12 sat in rapt attention. It was a well-written, gripping story. I've since learned the author writes for adults, as well. I'd be curious to check out those books. This video trailer is from Disney Books.




The video is nowhere near as exciting as chapter 1 was. I'm really looking forward to the book!

You Tube, Teacher Tube, Thing 9

OK, YouTube is not new to me. I started using it last summer. Mostly I just check out videos that others post. Today I began rating and commenting. My biggest complaint is that some of the videos have pretty loose associations. For example, the education category contains a video that is someone's favorite top 5 detention notes. It was funny, but not very uplifting to see the worst of my colleagues. Yikes! Teacher Tube had a few videos I might use, but what it really did was motivate me to say, "Hey, I could post a better video than that!" Now the challenge is to actually try it.

I did share a video to my fb account. That was fun! I'm looking forward to embedding and linking videos!

Kidblog.org

I just attended a district tech workshop today for the site: kidblog.org. This is a safer alternative to get students blogging! No email address is required for the students (the teacher needs to provide his/hers when setting up an account). Teachers can set up multiple classes and enter the students' user names and passwords. After entering their log ins, teachers can even change how the students are listed! Posts and comments can be screened by the teacher before they are posted, or not. Teachers also set who can view posts or comments. There are only 2 color themes, but students can drop in photos and links to jazz up their entries. The student comments about blogging were amazing. They talked about how much they enjoyed it and how they'll miss it. They were in a class that taught blogging, but talked about how they wished they could blog in all their classes. This was totally motivating to me to get a class blog started!

Thing 8 Flickr Time Wasters

Oh, My! It's a good thing that I can only sit in front of a computer for so long, before my neck and shoulders hurt! The games and fun you can have with flickr know no bounds! I love spelling my name and want to add that to my web page at school. I added a widget to my flickr account. I played sudoku and I created a motivational poster, which uses a photo from our honeymoon trip to England. I am so excited about uploading and sharing my photos! I saved an image of Curious George. I'm planning on adding him in to a photo or two!

Thing 7 Flickr

Wow! I signed up for Flickr as part of my 23 things awhile ago. Today I uploaded photos. How cool! First of all it was easy (so easy a caveman could do it :))! Secondly, it's very easy to group, label and tag photos. I'll have to watch the comments, I tend to be wordy. I can see some easy applications for my students. First of all, I could search and collect photos of Spanish-speaking countries' culture and technology. My ethnocentric students think all countries are way behind the U.S. in terms of modern conveniences. Not true and the pictures will prove it! Sometimes they will label photos with vocabulary or captions. They could easily collect photos from Flickr to do this project. The one problem I am concerned about is the ability to find inappropriate photos. I need to think through the supervision of this tool before I turn students loose on it!

Thing 6 My Old Camera!

While exploring flickr, I found this fantastic photo! I had this very same camera many, many years ago! I was so excited to take pictures and I still have a few of them. If I remember correctly you had to buy a flash bar to put in the slot on the top. The film came in packs of 10. You didn't need to shake the pictures, but we all thought it helped them to develop faster and did it anyway. How ironic that I'm exploring the latest web technologies for use in my teaching and I come across this antique. Actually Polaroid had a program when I was first teaching in which they sent cameras and film (the flash was built in by then) and lesson plans for engaging students in photography. Their photos could inspire poetry or essays, geometry lessons, the possibilities were endless--at least until the film ran out! Now, of course, students can use their phones to take pictures and the film never runs out! It really does open up a whole new world of expression...

Reflecting on "Thing 3"

Wow! I've been reading other blogs and am amazed at the wide range of bloggers out there! I signed up to follow a blog but they haven't written much, yet. I've really enjoyed the teaching ideas featured in a lot of the blogs. My favorites though are the humorous reflections on teaching. The stories make me think about my own students and classrooms. Teaching brings such joy and meaning to my life that I'm eager to talk about it and read about it. It's great to interact with other teachers and discover that the ups and downs of classroom life are universal!

As I checked/changed settings on my blog, I found the permissions tab. Up to 100 authors?! Awesome! This would be a great feature that would allow my Spanish students from one school to communicate with those from another!

I'm glad to be teaching in such a great time with technological progress moving forward at light speed!

New Phone!

I've just been trying out my new cell phone. It's amazing how each new phone has so many more features than the last. The helpful salesperson and the store had already transferred my contacts from my old phone to the new one. As I was playing around with the tiny instruction book (I remember when they used to be gigantic!) I noticed the voice command feature. I said, "Call Mom." The phone asked, "Did you say, "Call mom"?" I replied "Yes" and the phone started dialing. Amazing!

I heard about a cool class assignment a Spanish teacher gave to her students. She had them take a video camera home and tape the various vocabulary items while they named them in Spanish. It wouldn't have been too long ago that the need for multiple video cameras would have been challenging. Now, many students would be able to use cell phones for the assignments!

I'm eager to start exploring the many features and applications I now have easy access to! I've already ran the battery down, so most of that will wait until tomorrow!

I'm a privilege to teach!

Today's title comes from a quote from one of my students. He said this yesterday. I'm a day late getting it posted on my facebook page, too! Actually, I really enjoy my students and think that sharing our senses of humor makes the class a lot more fun. Over the years I've developed a very serious persona and students can do and say things that crack each other up, but never get a glimpse of a smile out of me. Once in awhile, though, a student will say something that takes me completely off guard and I let loose with a hearty laugh.

This fall, October 22, 2009, to be precise, one of my students was advocating for his incorrect homework answer. Because I teach Spanish, there is always the possibility that more than one expression will work as an answer to a question. Students are encouraged to offer alternatives and to challenge me on any assignment if they feel their answer is deserving of credit. On this particular workbook page, there was a picture of a floor lamp and a teenager standing next to it. The boy was taller than the lamp, prompting the students to write "El es alto." (He is tall). One student wrote, "El es inteligente." (He is intelligent). So, my student (TC) was explaining why his answer was equally valid. He pointed out the boy was wearing glasses (a definite plus for this, four-eyed, Spanish teacher). Rather than let that stand alone in making his case, however he had to offer more evidence. The boy in the picture was slouching with his hands in his pockets. TC offered, "Smart people put their hands in their pants!" Well, that did it! The whole class started to laugh. I actually had to wipe the tears from my eyes! I knew I wouldn't want to forget this story so I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote it down.

Since then, I've taken to pulling out my pocket calendar to write student quotes/anecdotes. That way they are on the same date I hear them. Students get excited when they've said/done something "quotable". I always post them anonymously and friends get a kick out of stories that remind them of their own school days, either as students or teachers.

That same hour, another student tried repeating TC's famous line. It didn't work, the mask was back on and I sternly informed them that the comment was no longer funny. Of course, I was still laughing on the inside, where it counts!

Thing 2 First Post

I haven't started a blog because I didn't think I'd have time to keep it up to date! Now, I'll have to see if I can!

I recently read an article about technology in the classroom. The featured school was doing really cool things with ipods and cell phones. Since my schools normally ban these things, I think it may be more realistic for me to start with other tools like blogs and wikis. I have done projects with students where they create the review tools for tests. Changing something like that to a wiki would be an easy and logical place to start.

Because I teach middle school students Spanish, incorporating technology would be a way to add some interest to say, conjugating verbs. I have shared web addresses with students that have games available to practice and alternate explanations for grammar points. I'm always willing to admit that someone else may be better able to explain something than I.

Students have found Google translator on their own! The problem with that is they are not always careful about the information they input and so the answer doesn't come out quite right. I've likened it to using a calculator. If the answer you get is "way off" you might recheck your input. Unfortunately, the answer from the translator is either not "way off" or they just don't have enough knowledge to recognize that it is not correct. They always feel so cheated when the answer is wrong!

Speaking of calculators, I've been teaching long enough (19 years) that they were one of the first technologies I got to use with my students. A 5th grade student came up to me many years ago and asked a simple question, like "What is 73-39?" I answered, "34", then asked, "You have a calculator in your hand, why didn't you just use that?" "Oh, I did," she replied, "But I wanted to make sure it was right!" Now that I teach middle schoolers, I seldom worry that they'll think I'm the source of all knowledge!