Reflection

Well I have to say I was so excited to complete the course last week that I never scrolled all the way down to see part 3 of the lesson.

My favorite lesson was the one on blogs. At least it is now. I started a blog with my students and a classroom at Riley. I love it! I wish I had more time to spend with it on the kids but at least for now we are doing what we can. They loved spending time "blogging" like the big kids and the big kids like interacting with their friends.

I hope there is a part 2 to this course for next year. Although, I could see the upside to retaking this class again next year. I may only be speaking about myself but it is hard for me to take on more than 1 -2 new things at a time. If I repeated the course (next year) I could focus on some of the other lessons that were too far above my head this year.

Either way.. thanks and it was a pleasure!

Resources for STUDENT USE

I have to say my students and their families do not visit my website! That has been an issue in regards to me really wanting to develop it. I am not really sure why or what I can do to change that. However, earlier this year, I decided to develop my site for my peers use. Of course it doesn't hurt to have a nice one when I know my supervisor may pull it up too. I would love any suggestions on how to encourage family use. Some ideas I have are for my students to read a story and record it. Then upload it on the web page. I would have a featured student each week. In the past I have uploaded pictures of my students to the site. I would like to continue with that however, currently I keep getting an error message (see my blog on digital photos).

So to answer the question about how I plan to give the students the knowledge that the resources are there.... we will do it together in the computer lab.

Resources to Support YOUR Content Area

This was not that hard because I "cheated". Really I used a short cut, I went to a peer's teacher webpage and looked up their resources. Using Delicious gave me the idea. I looked at a peer's webpage whom I respect and know to have resources. I would not want to do a blind search for a website, not because I think it would be hard. Rather because it would be time consuming. I am not willing to give up my time and put effort into looking for information blindly when I know I can use the blood, sweat, and tears of others:-)

Social Bookmarking

I set up a Delicious account over the summer for another online class. I have to say I really like the idea of what it is but I have not used it at all since August. I will say it is very helpful in sorting website data. I just don't see myself putting things there when I could place them on my LPS teacher website. This way my peers and parents can access the web sites I mark.

Personal Learning Newtork

I have always felt very strongly about teachers continuing with their professional development. However, it is not always easy to find something that your want and need to learn about locally. I really like the idea of developing your own personal learning network -- a group of people who can guide your learning, point you to learning opportunities, answer your questions, and give you the benefit of their own knowledge and experience.

The best example I can give for my PLN is my Skype and Twitter accounts. These accounts allows me to interact with teachers I know and work within my district as well as accessing other professional farther away. I am still developing my twitter account to be more that just a data collection system. I need to find ways of sorting through all of the data and finding the part of data that is relevant to my classroom.

YouTube in the Classroom

I love You Tube! I started using this at home with my boys. We would listen to music videos or watch Shaun White snowboard. It wasn't until this school year that I brought You Tube to life in my classroom. At first, it was a reward for students at the end of the week. If they earned enough points by Thursday they could tell me what video they wanted to watch on Friday. I would later search it out and if it was "ok" I would save it to my Favorites. Then the next day I simple would click on their choice.

It was in January when I first used it related to a lesson. My students watched Martin Luther King give his famous I Have a Dream speech. It really made the lesson become real to them.

I think this Zamar is easy to use. I am wondering why we would need that... is that to send the video to a friend? Can't we on most sites enter the link to post it for public viewing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxlQn7KaCNU

Using Online Tools to Communicate

I am proud to say that I now have a BLOG for my K-4th grade special needs students! It has been up about 1 week and everyone loves it. After attending the MACAUL conference and hearing how K students were successfully blogging, I thought it was time to at least try this with my students. It has been a learning experience but a wonderful one.

I agree with the article on the "black hole experience". So for right now I am commenting on every post. Even with my low number of students this takes at least 20 minutes every day or two. I can not image what someone would do that had a large class or classess. But I feel that every post is like a message on my answering machine and it would be rude not to respond. Hopefully, it time my students will be more inteactive and looking less for a reply from me.

Now that this BIG project is under way I am more excited to try and follow a blog. It is funny since 4 - 5 weeks ago I thought those were too much to ven think about. I think it helps to not feel so overwhlemed!

I am going to start following a blog hopefully on blogging with young children.

Audacity and Podcasting

UGH what an ordeal! I did not have audacity on my work computer. So Carol installed it for me. However, I do not have a webcam or a microphone on my computer. So I completed this lesson at home. I was very happy to see how easy it is to use audacity but I still don't really understand how you would save the items and then put them into something like a blog or class project. I am sure there is a ton of information on how to do all that. But right now I am overwhelmed with the tech things I am able to do at work that I do not want to put the energy into something I don't really understand. I would like to set audacity as a goal for next year.

As for the podcasting, last year (about this time) I started with a few sites for my students. One was on eating healthy and the other two were on manners and grammer. They all were cute but because I have limited access to my students I felt we had too many other things to work on. Little by little we stopped listening to the podcasts. I included the links, this way if someone thinks they could be helpful you will have them.

http://nutritiondiva.quickanddirtytips.com/nutrition-for-kids.aspx

http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/static/book.html

http://manners.quickanddirtytips.com/how-to-be-mannerly-with-kids.aspx

Digital Photos

I am sick of this one. I am not able to upload my pics on the website! I keep getting the following message:

ERROR: Resizing images for a TP slideshow : Your File (march 2010 030.jpg) is too big (3998 kb). There is a limit of 2560 kB per image. Please reduce your image using a photo editor before uploading it using this page.

What is really frustrating is last year I did do a slide show. The difference was I used pics burned on to a CD. This year I directly uploaded the pics from my camera to my computer. I tried uploading 1 pic at a time. I tried saving the pics to my desk top and then uploading. It is not working. Any suggestions for how to upload pics to my teacher's website with pics saved on my computer?

Teacher Website

I had to laugh when I read the direction to update my home page. To be honest, I had worked really hard on having a main page that didn't need to be updated. I wanted it to be something that anyone coming into my program at anytime could visit and understand what my program is about and learn about me. However, I did make some minor changes. Since, I already had a calendar I added some puzzles. Which was really fun. I would like to take some current pictures of my students and make their photo into a puzzle. I think they would be excited to log on and complete the puzzle of themselves and their friends. Any great ideas for teacher websites I would be willing to try.

Google Apps

I can see this being used when educational teams are working on a presentation or any shared project. This reminds me of how Zangle works. Any educator working with the student can open the file and work on student goals, progress reports, or part of IEP. The best part is that everyone has access to read and change the file. Everyone can do their part to complete the whole project. I think for those of us in a very isolated field (special education support) this would be a helpful tool in working with those members out of our building but in our field. I could see students beginning to share workload as well. They could collectively create a paper or research project. I am excited to learn more about this.

Connecting with Skype

This was a bit harder for me than the others "lessons" so far. After setting up my account, I realized I do not have a microphone built into my computer. Then I tried to find a friend that has a Skype account and was not successful. I went with their email account information since I do not know their user name. I was able to find David and Carol's information but I had their user names. I am not certain this would be something I would use in my classroom so I am going to start "playing" around with it this week at home. If anyone has suggestions for how to use it with my students I would love any input. They are young and visually impaired.

Tweeting Again

I am happy to report that I had a twitter account over the summer for another online class and loved it! But then I spent too much time away from the account and forgot my username and password:-( I could have easily set up another account but never sat down to just do it. However, this class once again gave me the chance to get back on and I am loving it!

Follow me at enrichment02!

Connecting & Blogs

I am happy to say that I did enjoy the video in the first lesson. I found one over the summer which I found very powerful. Sadly, Facebook no longer posts "my links" so I am unable to share with you. But the message was the same we need to engage our students in their language which is electronic.

Blogging - I see this as a wonderful tool for "borrowing" other educators ideas. It is fast and easy way to search a topic or follow someone you think is brilliant. Sometimes it can be over whelming. I am looking for ways to really streamline the information. Any tips would be helpful...