Social Bookmark Project

I was amazed at how many really good websites I found while doing this. I had heard people talk about "bookmarking" different sites, but now I know how useful this can be. Hope some of these websites will be useful to you!

http://www.delicious.com/fostera5143

Week 6

     There are two things that I would love to try in my classroom. These are the student response systems (clickers) and an ipad. The article I read about clickers was "Clickers in the Classroom: An Active Learning Approach" (http://www.educause.edu/). It was exciting to see research that shows clickers have the potential to benefit student learning. Students were excited about using the clickers and were actively participating while using the clickers. Teachers could use the feedback from the clickers to gauge how well students understood the material being presented and the feedback was instantaneous. Also, students can respond and participate, but do not have to risk being embarrassed by an incorrect answer. This study did not show any conclusive statistical evidence for clickers improving student learning, but it did show that student's level of interest and participation greatly increased. A large part of any teacher's job is to motivate students to want to learn and I feel clickers are just one way of doing that. As I begin a new science or social studies unit, I would like to use clickers to do a pre-test of what students know (or think they know) and then do a post-test to see how much they learned from the unit. I could evaluate my teaching and my unit based on the feedback from the pre-test and the post-test. With the younger students, we teach students how to poll their classmates and then how to take that information and turn it into a graph. I think students would love using the clickers to "vote" for their favorites and then they could use the information from the clickers to make their graphs. There are so many ways that you could incorporate clickers into your teaching. You could use it to have students study spelling words. For each spelling word, put up four choices and have them pick the one that is spelled correctly. You could give them math problems and have them choose which of the four answers is the correct answer. Divide students up into groups and see which group can answer the most questions correctly as a review for unit tests. They love anything like that that is in a game format. Clickers could make learning so much more interesting than the usual drill and practice we do so often.
     I would also love to try using an ipad in my classroom. I was amazed at how many apps are available to use with iphones and ipads. There are so many advantages to using an ipad in the classroom. Information is much more up to date with an ipad than with textbooks and students are much more interested in looking for information on an ipad than they are in a textbook. Students can use an ipad anywhere in the classroom and they can work individually or in groups. Students can not multitask with an ipad because it only operates one app at a time. Reference tools are available as students read to help them understand what they are reading. One of the best websites that I found for ipad apps was called Babble (Babble.com). It divided the apps up into age appropriate (baby, toddler, kids, youth) activities and then it also divided them up into categories of arcade games, educational tools, art & music, books & stories, etc.... There were so many educational apps that I would love to try in my classroom. Cricket magazine has a free app called Ladybug's Bookshelf. This is a free read along app that lets students listen to the story as the app reads it or it highlights the words as the student reads it. Super Why is an app based on the PBS series. It works on sentence completion, rhyming, spelling and missing letters. All of these are important skills that students need to work on in first and second grade. I also liked the Math Board and Math Bingo apps to use with my class for math practice. In second grade, we do a unit on the solar system. Star Walk is a really cool app that has a lot of astronomy information and it looks at the skies and points out planets and constellations. It rotates as you move the pad. There were apps for handwriting, phonics, reading, math, science, social studies. I think the ipad would be such a great tool to have in the classroom.


Reference:
Martyn, M. (2007). Clickers in the Classroom: An Active Learning Approach.
     Educause Quarterly, 30(2). Retrieved from  http://www.educause.edu/

Week 5 - Web 2.0

      I have really enjoyed learning about how to create and how to use blogs. I had read blogs before, but had never thought about using one in my classroom until taking this course. Now I plan to use a blog to communicate with parents about what we are doing in the classroom and to get feedback from parents as well. One of the blogs that I am following on my Google Reader is "What the Teacher Wants"  (http://whattheteacherwants.blogspot.com/ ). This blog is full of ideas that teachers can use. It has ideas for phonics lessons, birthday parties, making word folders, reading lists, getting organized tips, tips for using a blog with parents, and many, many more topics. Many of the ideas are geared for K-2, but could be modified for upper grades. I think it would give me some good guidelines for using a blog in my classroom. I would recommend this blog as a wonderful resource for ideas.
      Another Web 2.0 tool that I think is great for the classroom is the use of videos to supplement and enhance lessons and teaching. Two of the most popular video sharing communities are YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/ ) and Teacher Tube (http://www.teachertube.com/ ). Both of these have videos available on just about any topic you could want. Children today have grown up with educational television shows,  DVD's for entertainment and education, video games for entertainment and education. They are submersed with video from a very early age. I think by using the sense of sight and sound in teaching, students are better able to remember or record in their brain what is being taught. Videos definitely target visual and auditory learners. The great thing about YouTube and TeacherTube is that they have videos for all ages and grade levels and they are free. TeacherTube also has activities, lesson ideas, and assessments available to go along with the videos. The videos are easy to embed in a blog, a wiki, or a presentation tool such as Glogster or Prezi. I have included some reading and math videos on my wiki that I think first grade students would really enjoy using to practice letter sounds and counting. I have seen a glog used in a second grade classroom that had songs about the solar system on it. I definitely recommend these two sites for teachers to use in their classrooms.