Thursday, June 28

Wow, did I learn a lot today! I particularly enjoyed visiting the NASA center via videoconferencing. I can see the applicability for my seventh graders next year. We have a new science teacher on our team for next year, and I plan to see if we can utilize the NASA site for both science content and language arts written reflections. Another really exciting idea was that of the QR codes. I think I'll insert some into my back-to-school letter for the parents. After reading last night and listening today, I am full of resource information for assignment 3, so I plan to try to get a handle on that this weekend. Great class!

Wednesday, June 27

Great class today! Things were much clearer to me for some reason. Last night's reading produced some idea sparks. I plan to add animations to my product choice list, as well as add the note taking idea which has facts and notes on the left, nonlinguistic(representative symbols) on the right and a summary sentence or two on the bottom. I also decided to expand the choices for a student research project. Normally I have them research a famous composer, but now I plan to add researching a famous historical figure, mathematician, or scientist. In this way, I feel that I will be including the other core subjects from our team. Another idea is that I plan to have my kids access and write about their research within the Jason project. A former teammate had them accessing that site during Science class, but she is now gone and so I will pick it up in Language Arts class.

Tuesday, June 26

Today I am a bit overwhelmed with all of the different possibilities. I need to create a spreadsheet categorizing all the different options for blogging, wikis, webpages, etc. Yikes! This is usually the point at school when I turn it over to my students. They consistently amaze me with their technological skills. Ah well, I shall power on...

Voice Thread seems like an interesting option for my classroom; I shall investigate further later. I am now a user on wickispaces and intend to create a wicki for my students later this summer. I attempted to use Google Docs with my students one year, but it was not an especially effective tool at the time. I may revisit the option.

Monday, June 25

Today was a lot of fun! We were given plenty of time to explore a variety of technology. Some of the pieces I've already used, such as Inspiration and Rubistar. However, even with those two I was able to learn new features; Inspiration has templates that I will be able to use in my language arts/literature class this year (book comparison, poetic analysis, reflective speech, etc.) while looking at Rubistar I was reminded that I do not have to create my rubrics from ground zero. Something I had heard of before, but had not had the opportunity to use was Survey Monkey. I created a survey that I plan to add to my district web page; next year I'll have the students access and take the survey. We'll use the results to create a graph to share in the room; the kids will love it! "Delicious" is another cool site of which I was not aware. I'll be checking into that to add to the ease of storing sites that I come across.