Thing 22-Conference Reflection

I attended a session on Web 2.0: Where Do We Go? that was presented by Melissa Godfrey. Missy worked at the WVDE in the technology department and was a leader of a TIS Cohort. I really enjoyed her session and found many new and interesting tools to use with my teachers. Since I am new to being a TIS---I was very excited to know that so many new tools are available today. I am actually doing a training this summer on Internet Freebies and plan on showing other teachers in my county all the new free programs that are available on the Internet.

Thing 8-Reflection

I would like to tell Kristy Bryan-Davis that I really liked her Worlde Activity on Romana and Beezus. I think using Wordle with stories helps to excite students about the activity. I want to do more with incorporating Wordle in the curriculum at my schools, so thanks for this idea!!!

Thing 6-VoiceThread

http://voicethread.com/share/1777289/

Thing 20-Creative Commons

http://www.flickr.com/photos/smcdevitt/4550462619/in/pool-cc-the-best-photos

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

Thing 19-Skype

I have not actually used Skype myself, but I have attended sessions with other users. The main reason being our Bandwidth at our school. We barely have enough bandwidth to load webpages. Hopefully in July that problem will be resolved. I do want to explore the possibility of my principal using Skype to deliver the morning messages. I thought if she could do one classroom each day that the students would be engaged better than listening to the announcements over the phone system. My username is: sjames.TIS.

Thing 18-Acceptable Use

Lewis Couty Schools Acceptable Use Policy: Lewis County Schools uses the same AUP as the state department. The AUP is current. Our school keeps a record of AUP's as it is part of our Student Data Forms. We do not have students who can't research on the Internet. When we do have a problem, I call the parents and reassure them that we have certain websites blocked and that we utilize kid friendly search engines through an edline folder.

http://www.edline.net/files/_HMC6A_/2dcd50a34374b4f23745a49013852ec4/BOE_chapter_five.pdf

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.