Thing 17-Twitter in the Classroom

I did my search on twitter and actually found instances of twitter in the primary classroom. The teacher had a range of activities from students responding to a question or to them responding to a picture. I think twitter would be good to use in the classroom, but I also feel that it opens students up to circumstances that are inappropriate. The teacher did say that he had rules that they had to follow. They could not mention thier name or another classmates name in a tweet. I am willing to try to use twitter but I personally don't like twitter and it is going to be hard for me to promote something that I don't like to use.

An activity that I think could be used in the classroom would be a sentence prompt. Students could respond to a sentence starter. I would make sure that students knew it had to be a 7UP and a 5 Star sentence and use at least one of our weekly or previous vocabulary words. We could then bring the posts up on the whiteboard and discuss how each sentence rates on our rubric. This would be used as a writing lesson.

Thing 15-RSS

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a family of web feed formats that are updated frequently. I actually subscribed to the blog that I wrote about in Thing 14.

Thing 14-Blogs

The blog I decided to visit was titled "Creative Teaching". This site had tons of resources for teachers, students and parents. The teacher who composed this blog discusses holidays and covers all the academic subjects with resources. The resources consist of Internet sites, worksheets and lesson plans. The site did not jump out and grab my attention. It had advertisements and blog posts. No fancy stuff to clutter the site. I have bookmarked this site in my favorites and plan to spend time going through the links and all the posts.

http://www.fascinate-educate.com

Thing 13-Mid-Module Reflection

WOW! I am halfway finished with this module. I have learned many new things in completing the different parts of this module. I didn't, however, realize that this module was so time consuming. I guess it seems time consuming because I don't really know some of the tasks that need to be completed. I am learning as I go along. I guess I should've started on this a long time ago. I am excited about implementing what I have learned with the teachers and students at my two schools.

Thing 12-Find Something New 2.0

I found Game Classroom on the Web 2.0 tools. This site offers educational games, homework help, videos and worksheets for grades K-6. I haven't shared this site yet, but I am planning on providing staff development to teachers on internet sites and I am definatley going to present this site to them. I am also going to use this site as a mom to help my kindergarten son with reading and math skills.

http://www.gamesclassroom.com

Thing 11-Video

I chose a video from schooltube on the metamorphosis of a caterpillar changing into a chrysalis. When I taught first grade, we would do an insect unit every spring. I would always order caterpillars and we would watch the lifecycle of a butterfly transpire in fornt of us. The only bad part was that most of the changes happened when we weren't at school. This video will help students understand the lifecycle better because they actually get to see it happen. The WV CSO's would be under science:describe changes in life cycle of living organisms.

http://www.schooltube.com/video/7adc199b6ffddb87901c/Caterpillar-Metamorphosis

Thing 10-Digital Age Assessments

I liked using rubrics in my first grade classroom. I had my students to do several projects and present them to the class and I assessed them according to a very generic rubric. For instance, I had the students to do reports on spiders. I would assess them according to generic guidelines and the assessment was all mine. However, now I would let the students help me create the rubric. Then I would let the students self assess themselves after the presentation. I would then conference with each student and compare thier rubric score to the score that I gave them. We would discuss how we came to the conclusion that we each did on our rubrics. This way I am making the students more accountable for their assessment and in turn for their learning.