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Jessica's Blog

Reflection #9

This past week I volunteered in a second grade classroom at Holy family. I was there for a math lesson and a part of reading. Mrs. Leach is very good and effective at using the technology in her classroom. For math she used the SMART board to introduce the lesson and have the students participate in some group problems. Then she had the students work independently on their math problems. Once the students were finished under the document camera she would write a problem on a piece of paper and have one student some and show how to solve it while the other students had their eyes on the SMART board, following along. The way she executed this lesson kept the students engaged. I think what really helped the flow of the lesson was that she is fluent in the technology she had in her classroom.

The reading lesson she used the document camera to do a read aloud so students could follow along and see the pictures. I think this was very effective because, students stayed at their desks and could see the pictures and follow along while she read the words. Next they used the SMART board for a worksheet, where students would come up and move different items in the correct column. All the students wanted to participate and move and object on the SMART board.

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Amber's Blog

Reflection #8

This last Wednesday I went to my school where I was placed just to observe and meet the students. There many different things that I observed and learned. The second grade classrooms at Seattle Hill Elementary are all in one "pod". There are three classrooms altogether. At the beginning of the year they asses the students on their math and reading and based off of these assessment they dived the students into three groups, High learners, right on track learners and low learners. In the morning they have Math and reading, during these times the students just know what room they should be in. In one room there is the high learners and in another room the right on track and in the next room will be the low learners. This way the teachers do not have to prepare something for every lesson for the high and low learners they are all in one room. The students don't know why they are in one room or another during this subject. In other words they don't make it known to the students that they are high, low, or right on track learners. Also, another thing is that one teacher does not always get the high learns or low learners they have a different group of kids for each subject. I thought this was very interesting.

Word, Excel. and PowerPoint

Word

• Clipart
• Boarders
• Different fonts
• Templates for different projects
• Word Art
• Online resources
• hyperlinks to web pages
• Tables

Excel

• formatting the Cells
• alphabetizing
• number order
• formulas to find the answers for talbes
• Clip art
• boards

Power Point

• different templates
• backgrounds
• different fonts and shadows etc.
• Clip art
• Graphs/tables
• animation/ sound

There are many different projects that students could do to learn how to used these Word, Excel or Power Point

• type up a book review on word using a font and clip art with boarding if wanted
• have the students research an animal of their choice and make a power point with interesting fact on their animal
• have students use excel to make a graph for a math problem or have them create a table by entering the equation to find the answers.

Reflection #7

I couple weeks ago, I was watching the Today Show and a segment came on saying how some students are using their technology skills to bring the news to their school. I though this was very interesting because it was right after we learned about the flip video in class. I went online and looked up the segment and sure enough these students were using a flip video to record their news clips. Every students in this 5th grade class had a part to play in making this production happen. Some students were the board casters, while some tapes the footage and other edited the clips and put the final product together. This is just one great example of how technology can be used effective in the classroom and inspire learning.

Blogs for Educators

The first Blogs I looked at was "Free Technology for Teachers". I spent some time reading on different entrys and they had some neat free resourses for schools and classrooms to use. The entry that caught my eye was the "Tiny Chat Launches Tiny chat TV". This entry is about a new stream lineing website that is completly free that allows you to have a live feed on a website. How cool is that. This could be used for workshops or even videoing students presenting projects so parents could tune in and watch. I think this would be a great technology to learn more about and how it could be used effectively in the classroom. according to the blog entry it is easy to set up and use.

Free Technology for Teachers Blog : Tiny Chat Launches Tiny Chat TV


The second blog I looked at was "Emerging Internet Technologies for Education" this was an interesting blog. Right now this blog is doing a comparison with SMART boars and Polyvision eno Whiteboards. The previous week they took a close look at the SMART boards and what they offer for the classroom and just general functions. This week they are focusing on the Polyvision whiteboards. Since we have SMART board here at Northwest, I though I would read the entries that were about the Polyvision boards. They entry I found most useful was "Polyvision eno Whiteboards: A Great alternative to the SMART Board". This entry had many great comparissions to the SMART board and told why many districts are choising these board as an alternative to SMART boards. One of the first reasons is that they are a little bit cheaper. Second being, there are no cords involved. It is set up wireless to work in the classroom. Third, to mount the board on the wall you simply can just put it over a regular white board because, there are magnets built in. These are just a couple of the reasons that caught my eye. This would be useful for me to know as a teacher because, I may not have a SMART board in my classroom some day it could be Polyvision white board and the things talked about in this entry would be good to know as background knowledge.

Emerging internet technologies for education Blog, PolyVision eno whiteboards: A great alternative to the SMART Board

Online Learning Experience

Leading the Change Beyond the Stacks: Using emerging technologies to strengthen teacher-librarian Leadership

This was a great session even through it was talking specifically to teacher-librarians. It had many great ideas on how to use new technologies with students and still promote reading and different books. They talked about many of the different technology they use and how they are engaging students to read. One way they did this was by creating "Meet the Stars" which students would read books they selected and voted on them. There were many different step to this depending on their grade. Another point they made was teaching students to use the online resources such as Google to find information but teaching them to find out if it reliable or accredited sources. Also, they are teachings students who are fluent in technology to think critically and the difference between the two.

Leading the New Change Telling the New Change:Leverage Points for Inspiring Change Orientation

David Warick was the teacher of this session and it was very good. He talked about how the school are changing very fast and what worked for his generation (30 years ago) won't work for the future generation. Because our students will be growing up so different even from how we grew up. He also talks about different programs and how his son learned how to use garage band a music editing program when he was never taught how to us it. Also, he brought up the point of when he was a student he had no idea what teaching would look like today. He asks what will teaching look like in another 30 years and what will we as teachers be teaching our students to prepare for jobs in the future.


Reflection: There were many good point brought up in both of the sessions I attended and both had very different but some similar points. The similar points were how new technology is influencing teaching and we as teachers need to be fluent in them. Also, how we need to integrate these technologies into our teaching to keep students engaged and interested in learning.


The online experience was very different what I thought it would be, in a good way. I had never thought about attending a conference on the internet. But I think it is a very effective way so that many people can attend without even leaving their homes. One of the conferences that I attended was done through skype and that was very interesting to see how he maneuvered through the different programs he pulled up while he was talking. Over all I learned many great things and experienced an online conference.

Technology Project Plan

My project is called "Day in a Life of a Fourth Grader" I will follow the 4th grade class around at Holy Family Catholic school and find out what fourth grade is all about. I have permission from the Principal but, I will need to get permission from the fourth grade parents to video all the students in the class. I will be using the Flip-video and using Imovie maker to edit it and put all the clips together. This project will high light different projects the 4th grade does throughout the day and interview 4th graders as well.

I couldn't use free recorder to record my plan, because it is a windows based program. I used photobooth which is already on my computer to film a video/podcast of my plan for my final project.

Comments Part 2

Jenny Teixeira

Flip Video - Reflection #6

This was a great learning experience, on how to use a flip video. It was so easy to film the different scenes in our movie. also, the uploading the clips on the computer was very easy and straight forward. Once our clips were on the computer we could rearrange them in any order we wanted them to play in and add in a title slide and credit slide. Finally, we added music to our video which was also pretty easy and chose the volume of how loud we wanted the music to play. This video provides many good laughs and was so fun and easy to make! The part of this process that took the longest was uploading it on to you tube.

Mission impossible 37 Staring: Jessica, Amber and Heather

ENJOY