The New Mrs. Ridner

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Tool #4- Moving Up to the Clouds

Create at least one document in Google Docs and share it with a few others on your campus or within your department. It could a team member, a department colleague, or another teacher with whom you plan a collaboration. Ask that person to comment or chat and real-time edit the document with you.

I created our first week's lesson plans on Google Docs and shared it with my team, so this was really useful! HAB emailed me back immediately and told me how proud she was of me! (She is finished with 11 tools... grr) Now.... if only I could get a picture of it to post..

Briefly discuss how you can use the tools in Google Apps with your team or department. How can you incorporate Google Apps as a tool in your classroom? Which tools are you excited about using with students.

I think this is a great way for our team and the staff to communicate. It takes some getting used to, though. I found it much easier the more that I "played around" and became familiar with everything. Google forms will be a great tool to use in the clssroom. This seems like a very efficient way to assess knowledge "on the fly." This can bring in some of the active and overt participation with the use of the ActivBoard eggs! Pretty cool!

Tool #3- Finding Online Video and Image Resources

Visit several of the video hosting/streaming sites mentioned above. Share with your readers which sites you found most useful for your content and why.

In the past, we have relied heavily on United Streaming and Youtube as educational tools in the classroom. We also use Brainpop, Jr, which the kids LOVE. These videos are educational and kid friendly. They are also very easy to navigate and search. I know that I will be using these websites in my classroom in the future.

Here are some fun videos that we used to help teach counting coins and counting by 5's last year. The kids loved it and were singing the songs all the time.

Copyright- I was always familiar with the laws of copyrighted material, but wasn't familiar with the exact laws. I know now that you can post anything that is copyrighted to a secure website that requires a password or is a walled location. The youtube video is pretty entertaining.

I am excited to use Picassa to upload more pictures for flipcharts and videos!

Tool #2- Building Community in the Online Environment

After completing the above, share you thoughts about building and participating in an online community and participating in a PLN. What points stood out to you from the commenting advice? Were you able to apply any of the advice in your comments? How did you feel about sharing your thoughts publicly? Was it different than when you're sharing your successes/challenges with your teammate?

I have commented on blogs before,and had no problems. When I created my blog for PLaynormous, it was easy to navigate and follow other people. Today, I encountered a lot of issues while posting. Karen and Theresa helped me as much as they could, but were stumped as well. I posted on 5 or more blogs of my collegues and some of the posts did not show up. We will see how this goes!

Share the url or name of a website or social network that you plan to visit in the future. What does that site have to offer?

I found a useful blog on technology and classroom tools. It looks really interesting and I look forward to exploring it and using it to update my blog.

http://ladybugsteacherfiles.blogspot.com/

Tool #1- Getting Started - Creating your blog!

Write a brief post about your experience to date. Did you find the experience fairly easy? Did you face any challenges?

I found creating a Voki very easy and exciting. It was fun to create a Voki with all of the different tools. I did not run into any problems.