Week 9

I’m sure that you’ve all heard it before, but omg what a week! I am still reeling off of last week’s events and on into my own life where my commitments seem to be piled so high they can touch the jet that just flew overhead. I neglected to respond to a peer on Sunday and furthermore I neglected to post this blog last night! My apologies to my classmates and instructors for missing these deadlines.

I just went for a walk this morning with a new friend and fellow teacher from my school. Initially, I was a little afraid of the whole get to know you conversations, not sure if I might say something wrong. Normally I wouldn’t worry about a thing like that to much except that my last year of teaching at a charter school really took a lot out of me; I was harassed on a daily basis and my two boys that attended the school were equally targeted. As we were walking and talking though I was re-energized and excited at all of the possibilities that surround us as teachers! We touch so many lives and it is often the little things that we do that mean a lot to our kiddos! We also were talking about wiki’s and blogs and she suggested one way to use these tools would be to set up one for our classrooms where parents can retrieve information and communicate with us without the need for extra paper. Hmmmm, there is a spark in my brain now and I think that I would like to set this up for my grade level.

Any thoughts?

Week 8

Okay here is my blog tonight. I have had an emotional day as a variety of events unfolded before me. First, this morning I was told that there had been a shooting related death of a mother of two children who attend school in the San Tan area. Of course not knowing these children personally didn’t matter to my heart! One of the children is in my son’s class and was not present at school today, so my son has not spoken to me about this. I feel so many emotions about this incident; it is so close to home. I am angry, sad, mortified and have anxiety. The anxiety stems from what on Earth I’m going to tell my son when he asks me. Next, I spoke with my friend who shared some troubling news, and then I had to teach of course which was wonderful!!! I felt happy when I saw pictures of my students paying attention to my instruction, furthermore I felt happy when I asked my principal for feedback on a walk through and it was positive. See what I mean? Emotions all over the board!

Now, as for the try it assignments, I must admit that I had a good time with the assignments. It is often fun to play around with technology. I must also admit that I do not have this available to me, nor do I think that I would have the additional time required to play around to make it perfect for my students. I feel that I give a lot to my students with a variety of media and tools and that as busy as I am to try to utilize or acquire the technology to utilize these tools would not be something that I can do as it is extremely time consuming.

Blog 7

This week I have introduced my students to concept maps, it worked out great! We had a great time coming up with the names of family members for our map. I hope that I can do something really great with Kidspiration that will maintain my students’ excitement for this new concept.  Emily said that Kidspiration works really well and she seemed excited to use it. I can honestly say that I have downloaded the free trial, but regrettably I have not looked at it yet. I am finding myself exhausted and really needing some extra sleep, oh well.

Ah digital stories bring smiles to my face. I am excited to create a story for my students to watch and listen to. I’ve been working with different ideas such as things that represent me, my family, travels and favorites. I have also thought about retelling The Three Bears in a special poem that I recite to my students, this would bring it to life for them and since they know the story they can participate in the telling if you will. Perhaps I can put pictures together of events from this school year and have my students participate by narrating the story of us as a class.

Good Times!!

Blog 6

Okay, so I’ve been very busy with parent teacher conferences and my school does not have a fall break so in my “spare time” I’m supposed to work on my try it assignments, complete a mid-term, and be a wife and a mother. Can you spell uuggghhhh?

I get nervous about trying new technology sometimes and this would be one of those times. I have gotten great feedback about Kidspiration and so I’ve downloaded the free trial. I have begun playing around with it for the content mapping portion and it appears to be user friendly. I sure do hope so because I’m not feeling very tech savvy these days!

So tonight I also downloaded Microsoft Movie Maker. The video examples seem to demonstrate the ease of using the program; again hopefully it won’t be deceiving! I will be using that product to create a digital story. I think that the digital story scares me more than the mapping because mapping is easy when you have a concept or idea. I do not have any idea on the digital story. Are we able to use an existing story or do we have to create one? Am I to create a story to instruct my students or just a story to share for fun?

Fun times, I tell you!

Blog number 5

Okay, so I should be telling you all that I’ve been working on the technology “try its” but honestly my life has been very busy and I’m feeling overwhelmed. I know that I’m not the only one who must juggle many balls into the basket. For the last two weeks we have been assessing our students like crazy as well as teaching our current curriculum. I have to say it’s very challenging to complete all of my responsibilities for my career as well as my scholastic responsibilities. This week we lose one day and we’ve had early dismissal for two days, which makes it challenging because we are still assessing, teaching and doing parent conferences. I just got home and realized that I needed to blog.

I have not worked on the “try it” assignment but intend to this weekend since we have a two day fall break. That should give me a little bit of “free time” to focus on my technology tools. I am excited to try out the sites and I’m hoping to learn some ways that I could use these tools in my classroom! My children are always excited to try out new ways to learn and have fun.

Blog Number 4

It has really been a long hard week since my last blog. I used to think that I was technology savvy and I guess that I am to a degree but all of this blogging, story web and digital stories really has my brain aching. Some of the articles that I read to complete my paper were dry and not very interesting so my brain kept slipping into Heather land which must have been more interesting than those papers. Anyway, I was able to find some more interesting information through blogs as well as a fantastic web site. I haven’t tried out this new information that I have gained but it is not far from my mind. I read another post that mentioned the digital stories is similar to PowerPoint. If that is the case I know that I could make that work for me. I haven’t had the opportunity to test out the websites but I will be doing that soon! Especially since we have another assignment that involves trying out these tools. I know that by trying them, it will do one of two things; make me love it so much that I spend every available hour implementing it or hate it and shy away from it because perhaps it will be too cumbersome! At any rate, I am excited yet anxious at the chance to try it out. The reason I chose these two technologies is that I thought it would be more relative to the grade level I teach. I thought that I would be able to put the practice to use a lot quicker than some of the other technology tools. Only time will tell, until then I will keep plugging along and trying to come up with ways to incorporate this new literacy into my classroom.

9/29/10

This week in Language Arts nothing new has occurred in the way of technology. My students are practicing blending letter sounds into words and they are doing such a great job. I have introduced letter magnets and a cookie sheet as a center activity. My kindergartners just loved rearranging the letters in an effort to make words.  I recently found out that I can borrow a projector from the library to use which will connect to the web as well as play dvd’s so I am anxious to find out what I need to do to get that technology into my classroom. Another student mentioned the ease of bookmarking with Delicious that way she only needs to pull up that website instead of trying to email links from home to work, etc. I think that is a great idea and I am glad that she shared that. I would have made it to that thinking eventually but now I am that much further along. Another idea that I would like to pursue is to provide a list of web resources that my parents can use to help their children with their studies and some websites that they can explore with their children to just spend time together. If my families have the resource of a computer I want to make sure that I can assist them in finding meaningful learning activities that would support and encourage the success of their child.

Week of 9/20/2010

Okay, so I was challenged to come up with a way to use this “new literacy” in my kindergarten classroom. Thank you for that by the way. My first thought was oh my goodness that is just one more thing to do! My second thought was, “where on heaven or earth am I going to find the time to actually think about how to use this “new literacy”?” I know that this is an amazing concept and one that many people will benefit from, it just seems stressful to me to try to figure out how I will use or implement this. So, as I continue to tackle one thing at a time, first things first. In an effort to not completely stress out I will do what is in front of me and prioritize my class, my life and anything else that I can prioritize and this challenge will be on that list! It may take a bit for me to actually make it here; however I will leave no challenge untouched! Lol

As for the web addresses for grants, thank you very much! I’m not quite sure how that all works but I will add it also to my list of priorities. Thank you so much for your thoughtful comments Tracy and Laura.

First Official Post - 9/15/10

Okay so I have been reading about “new literacy” and it is so exciting to see how much technology would benefit our students! I love all of the ideas, from blogging to virtual fieldtrips, texting, using bookmarking websites, etc. What bothers me is that most of our schools do not have the money to make this available in our classrooms. My district is one of those districts that does not have enough money to make all of these things available and given that we are located in Arizona, I don’t know if we ever will. All of that aside, I teach kindergarten and quite a bit of what I read I just don’t imagine using in my classroom. I do think that my team as well as the rest of our teachers would benefit from learning about this “new literacy” and may even brainstorm ways that we can include this in our classrooms. I certainly see this being a valuable tool for upper grades and I know that this would excite the student which then creates more learning. I also see that parents may benefit from becoming aware of the varieties of sites there are that would help them to help their children become more successful students.

I Did It!

Well, I did it! I actually created a blog for my Language Arts class. It was easy as this site did all the work. Now comes the hard part, creating an entry each week relating to my learning. On second thought that should be pretty easy to write what I'm thinking, look I just did!