Classroom Blog!

After going through my online course, and reading through the textbook I’ve found that there are so many resources that are available for teachers to use in their classroom.  As someone who loves using technology in the classroom, I still was shocked to see the amount of stuff that was available.  I’ve found myself bookmarking page after page in my favorites to use when I return to work from my maternity leave.

We need to expose our students to as much technology as possible before they leave our safe little environment and head out into the real world; where they will be surrounded with endless means of technology.

Podcasting is the new hip thing to do, in any realm of the known universe.  If you look in the iTunes store section under podcasts, you are going to find podcasts that range from someone reading common children’s stories to the latest in medicine. What a wonderful thing that this has become.  As a teacher it makes for a WONDERFUL tool to use in the classroom on some many levels.

For instance there is a podcast that is entitled: Great Speeches in History.  By downloading one of these podcasts, students in your classroom will be able to hear speeches by people such as Winston Churchill, Babe Ruth, Martin Luther King Jr., etc. . . We talk about these speeches in our classroom, but by actually having them accessible for our students to hear makes such a larger impact.

Another great podcast that I’ve found is Matt’s Today in History. I like to do, “Did You Knows” with my students.  Meaning asking them if they know what happened on a specific day in History.  A lot of the times, my two minute edits that I do during my reading class pertain to an event in History.  This podcast would allow me to give the students more information about the topic of the day.

Now being an elementary school teacher, I can think of lots of ways that my kiddos can use a podcast in the classroom.  With the technology that is available to our students, having them create a podcast would not only be fun, but easy to store for future classes to listen to for help.  When we have our students create things for us, we generally want to keep good ones, bad ones, and okay ones to use for examples later.  However, finding a place to store them safely and remembering where we put them can be a struggle.  Having the students create a podcast as a book report, state report, well. . .  any sort of report really can easily be downloaded on a a computer put into a folder and used later.

Now, where I can really, and I mean really, see a benefit for podcasting in the classroom comes with the middle and upper grades.  High school teachers are doing podcasts of their lessons, uploading them to their websites, and then the students are able to download them for later review.  One word: BRILLIANT!!!  I only wish that some of my teachers would have done this.  How much easier would that be instead of pouring over pages and pages and pages of notes? On top of that, if I’m sick at home I’m not going to be stressing over who’s notes I can copy from.  I was generally the one everyone else got notes from.  If I was sick, I was in trouble, and going to be out of the notes.

Very simply put, this is a great tool for teachers in the 21st century, and it needs to be something that we implement somehow in our classroom!

I sat for several days, trying to decide what workshop to do. I finally decided on the Dreamweaver MX 2004 Intro Workshop. The main reason why I picked this workshop was due to the fact that my husband and I purchased this program last spring for his personal business so he can build his website. He has taught himself how to use it, but I’ve found it rather difficult to understand. On the web, I have found several websites that have templates set up to be imported into Dreamweaver and then have the ability to edit and make it your own. However I wanted to learn how to make my own website from scratch.

After sitting through and learning about everything from inserting links to using/creating your own template, I feel better in designing my own website for my students that has what I want, not spending hours on the internet trying to find a template that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg in order to use.  On top of that I like to change things frequently, so paying $80 on a template that I might want to change in a couple months doesn’t really appeal to me.

I  wish that I had the time to sit through the other DreamWeaver workshops, because I learned a lot!

I’m stuck at home on bedrest for the rest of my pregnancy (which is only 2 weeks).  It’s been tough to leave my students, but I’ve been monitoring my class from home through our remote access server.  We have a monthly Benchmark test that we take.  The kids took this last Thursday.   The students have been putting their answers into our server all week, and today I saw 100% participation.  So now I can see how well they did. Last month our class got third in the school for most improved class.  Grades 2-8 take this test, 4 classes per grade.  So needless to say I was pretty excited to see they got third place!

From December to January we had a 10pt gain in Language Arts, 8pt gain in Math, and 3pt gain in Reading.

Now!  From January to February we remained the same in Language Arts (better than dropping), 13pt gain in Math, and 14pt gain in Reading.

They only thing I can’t see are the individual scores.  I use Mozilla FireFox here at home, not Internet Explorer, so I can’t get to the individual scores.  Hopefully one of my fellow teachers can bring those scores to me here.  I’m so excited for them. These Benchmarks help prepare the students for the MAP in the spring,  if the students are scoring at an 87% then they will be scoring proficient on the MAP.

I miss my students but I can see that I’ve done what I needed to in order to prepare them for the test this spring.  I’ve been worried since I’m out the 6 weeks before the big test.  But I’m confident that they can do it!

This was a very interesting short video.  I have to say that it is something that we as teachers are facing on a daily basis.  It truly is.  It mentioned in the video that some of the majors in college didn’t exist  5-10 years ago.  This is so very true.  I’ve seen first hand experience in this area.  When my husband starting college, he designed his own major, Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing.  It was an experimental new program.  When he graduated from college, it had become an official major, and was in the college handbook.

This means that in our classroom, we are trying to prepare our students for things that do not exist now, but in a matter of years, maybe even months will be mainstream.  It’s a difficult task that we hold in our hands.  We are the ones molding the minds of the kiddos, and we have to prepare them with the skills that they are going to need to figure out the things that have not been invented yet.

In order to help our students learn these skills, we as teachers need to learn the skills.  We have to be the examples for our students.  They see their teachers learning these “21st century” skills, then they are going to see that yes it is important, not because they say so, but because it will help to be better learners.

After reading the teach42 blog about www.keybr.com I went to check it out for myself.  Talk about an awesome FREE tool that our students can use in the classroom.  I must have spent about 15 minutes practicing my own typing.  What I found interesting about this particular website was the fact that it not only had real words, but also had nonsense words.  I actually found typing the nonsense words to be very frustrating, even though I have no problem with typing.  I realized while I was doing this activity that I can type words very quickly if I:

1) Know how to spell them.

2) Know what the words are.

With things that we are familiar with, our hands tend to know right where to go, because let’s face it, we’ve typed the words probably hundreds of times, some words thousands of time.   Using words that we don’t know (nonsense) it truly makes our brains think about where the letters are.

On a slight side note:

I knew that there were free programs like this out there for our students, but I didn’t realize to what extent.  There were several comments in the blog about other free typing sites that students can use.   My students do not get a lot of exposure to the internet, but I can see myself signing up for the mobile computer cart, and letting my kids have a good ‘ol time practicing their typing.

If you’ve got a few minutes, check out the website linked above.

Also, here’s the direct link for the teach42 blog.

I actually used a blog for my classroom last year. I taught 7th grade in a rural school district and almost all of my students had access to the internet. A lot of the times I would upload assignments for students that were absent, as well as to keep my parents informed. This year it is slightly different. I know teach in an urban environment where my families do not have access to the internet on a regular basis. Most go to the library on the weekends to use the computers there.

Another thing that I did last year was to have my students actually write the end of the week blog posts. Here they would take turns telling parents what we did, and what we have coming up in the next week. The kids actually enjoyed doing this, and were disappointed if their name didn’t get picked for that week’s entry.

I think blogs overall are a real asset for educators. Not only can teachers keep parents informed, but other teachers can see what we are doing in our classroom, as get ideas, and give us tips for our classroom practices.

Welcome to the age of technology!