ThirdGradeFun

One of our very first assignments in this MultiMedia Tools for Education class was to record ourselves for fluency! I was left speechless and frazzled at the same time. Flashbacks kept coming into my mind...I hated (still do actually) when my dad pulled out the old VHS tapes and popped them in for my kids to watch. I hated the sound of my voice then and all I could think is great, I’ll be tortured by the sound of my voice again! The best advice from Mr. Hegedorn was to basically get over ourselves! And you know what? He was right! My first assignment in which I had to record myself took longer than it really should have. I recorded my assignment at least 10 times! I kept hearing myself and thought, ‘Wow! Is this what my poor students listen to everyday, yikes!’ The funny thing is, it’s only the sound of your voice. It’s not like you had to record yourself! But of course, I spoke too soon. Unfortunately, there were some assignments that I had to record myself! 😞 Anyhow, ...

The Wow Factor When I heard that our assignment was to create a movie trailer for a book or to introduce a new unit of study, I thought to myself, ‘Is this professor out of his mind! I can’t do that!’ Then looking at some examples helped ease my jitters. Those jitters rose back up when I heard that most people like to use apple apps to do this sort of stuff. I’m not an Apple user but I know a couple of kiddos in my house that are! I was excited about the topic. Native Americans. My students were about to start reading a nonfiction piece called The Athabascans:  The Old Ways and News Ways. Then they would read a fiction book called The Year of Miss Agnes. We had also read about different Native American tribes in Social Studies so I figured I would do a book trailer for the Athabascans. I used the iMovie app for Apple. It is a pretty cool and simple app. It comes preloaded with a few movie trailers or you can start from scratch and make your own. I think find the pho...

Audio, Video, And So Much More! It wasn’t easy to think that I arrived to work at 7:30 a.m. and that my day wouldn’t end at 4:05 p.m. but 8:00 p.m.! However, as I think back to my experience in this class, Multimedia Tools in Education, I can truly say I had a blast and learned so much! An article that stuck with me was the F-Shaped Pattern of Reading by Kara Pernice. It talked about how eye tracking research shows that people scan webpages and phone screens in various patterns, including the pattern of the letter F . This made me realize that I personally scan webpages this way. Realizing this, it makes me rethink how I layout information for my students or the manner in which I present the material in class. I had many conversation throughout this course with my classmates that helped make a difference in my learning and teaching. We discussed pros and cons about audio usage in the classroom, using videos in the classroom, pros and cons of using audiobooks in the ...

photo credit: pixabay The title says it all, Collaborative Web Tools in Technology. I felt like that is exactly what we did the entire 8 weeks, collaborate ! It was great to hear other’s ideas and to have discussions with my peers and to know that I wasn’t the only one experiencing difficulties with technology or that I wasn’t the only one that didn’t know how to use certain tools. It was also nice to hear fresh ideas. I think I’ve grown as a connected educator. I am definitely more cautious on choosing the right tools for my students. I am becoming more responsible in teaching my students about digital citizenship. So responsible that when I mentioned to the computer teacher that I was using lessons from commonsense.org to teach my kids about digital citizenship, she was like, “nooooo!” It was quite funny. She praised me for doing so, but she asked me to let her know which lessons I was doing because she also had some lessons planned from the same site.   I will ab...

photo credit: vimeo SFX Tech It's difficult to imagine that 3 years ago, teachers in my building were sharing tablets on a cart. What a pain that was! We were divided into 2 groups: those that embrace technology and those that can live without it! I was somewhere in between. I wanted to use and incorporate technology in my classroom but some teachers hogged the cart or on the day I finally got the cart there were so many issues. Either tablets weren't charged, keyboards had keys missing, or internet connections was down or slow! So sometimes, I would get discouraged and give up.  Last year, I finally got my own class set of Chromebooks. This was an exciting day for my class. But now that we had them, what could I do with them? Well I was glad I had taken a summer workshop through my school district titled, Google Boot Camp. Some of the things showcased spiked my curiosity and I wanted my students to have some experience in a 21st century classroom. So through some mor...

Over the last few weeks, I have been taking a technology class on Collaborative Web Tools in Education. Wow! There are so many new ones to choose from. I was a bit skeptical at first because sometimes the more options one has the more overwhelming a task can become. One thing, I have taken away from this class is that the tool you choose should serve the purpose of your objective for your lesson! When we were asked to evaluate a few tools, I would say the majority of the people in the class selected tools from the Google G Suite for educators. As teachers, I would say we find two things most appealing: 1) items, tools, PD, etc that are free and 2) user friendly tools.  Surely there are other things to consider but on our salary, free is always good and there aren't enough hours in day for us to take on another task, so user friendly web tools really make a difference.  Since so many of us were (or still are) Microsoft users, the shift to Google tools and apps wasn't ...

Makerspaces in Education accessed 9/29/17 https://www.flickr.com/photos/gforsythe/26621503902 Flipped teaching, coding, QR scanning, virtual reality, and makerspaces. What are these? Technology trends in education. Makerspaces are one trend that I have read about throughout my tech courses. So what is a makerspace? Let’s take a look at this short video. So why have a makerspace? In a world where we are creating educational zombies as Marc Teusch points out in his video, the question should be why not? These spaces create peer collaboration, critical thinking, building things. In these spaces, your product is not an end of unit project. You are walking into these spaces with a problem you would like to investigate, you brainstorm a solution, you build some type of prototype, you try it, and reflect on whether or not it worked. What happens if their plan doesn’t work? They start again. Failure is what drives students to persevere. Do you think this trend is ...

Foundations of Educational Technology So here we are at the end of our 8 week course. What a journey! I wasn't sure what to expect, as this was my first online course. However, I think that having two (I would have preferred 3) in person sessions, meeting my classmates and the instructor really helped with the online collaboration. My favorite part of our in person sessions was the escape room experience with Breakout EDU. This was a great example of the 4 C's: collaboration , communication , creativity , and critical thinking . As we move towards teaching 21st century learners, we too must make a change and adapt to a 21st century classroom. This course on the foundations of educational technology reaffirmed many ideas that I came across as our district began to implement the use of technology into the classroom. The biggest idea that was validated for me, is that we should be using technology to enhance student learning, as it was explained in the SAMR model . Substitut...

Hi All,  Hope everyone enjoyed their 4th of July festivities! Which by the way I know it's suppose to be a celebration but I usually get the blues because then I start to see the "Back-to-School" signs! 😞😓 Then I start to worry about all the things I haven't accomplished, that I said I would do during "my time off". Let me tell you, when you have children, "my time off" isn't really mine!  Moving on...A few weeks ago, I had to explore a plethora of digital resources for my Ed Tech class. The instructor had a video link to how to make a screencast . A screencast is a video recording of your computer screen. You can narrate a video to explain an assignment or make some kind of tutorial. This tool can be used to implement flipped teaching. I found that screen-cast-o-matic was easy to use. If you sign up with your google account, logging in is easy. Check out this short tutorial to create your own screencast! Another digital resource I...

Wow, so on my last post I discussed PLNs (Personal Learning Networks). Although there are many different tools that can be used to connect to different networks, I have found Twitter to be quite fascinating. I was a bit skeptical at first, as I thought of Twitter as a platform for a younger audience. I possibly got this idea from my teenage kids that laugh at us adults that use Facebook. Anyhow, I have explored Twitter and have begun following many of my favorite groups that keep me up to date with strategies and politics on education. I like that I can instantly retweet something or I can view something and share the link externally via text message or email with my coworkers that are not on Twitter. Although my goal is to get them to sign up! 😉  So you might be asking yourself, who should I follow on Twitter? Here are a few of my favorites, so far: Kasey Bell @ShakeUpLearning has great resource and lots of Google ideas/strategies to help you in the classroom. EduTopia...

June 23, 2017 Have you ever caught yourself saying something like, "Don't forget to bring your CFAs to the PLC and an example of your modifications you used with your IEP students." Well in the education world there are so many abbreviations /acronyms that we use when we speak or write. I joke that we are no different than our students! In my tech class, I learned a new term...PLNs. A personal learning network or PLN is a tool used to share and collaborate with people all over the world at any given time. There are platforms like...are you ready for this?...Twitter! Yes, you read that correctly, Twitter. I always thought of Twitter as a social platform so I didn't feel it was necessary to have an account as I already used other social platforms. When creating a Twitter account became part of an assignment for my tech class, I was a bit hesitant. Now that I have an account, I am amazed at the amount of information that can be shared on there. There are also great c...