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.