Skype

Skype is a free application that allows you to call people from all over the world using the internet. When you call another user that has Skype you talk or chat for free. Best of all you can tell when another user is online and what their status is so you know if they are available. To set up Skype on your computer you need to download and install it from here on Skype’s website. Once installed follow the instructions to set up your Skype account. For talking I like to use a Logitech USB headsets because the system easily detects them without any issues.

Educational blog websites

There are a number of educational technology blogs that are worth looking at.  Kathy Schrock has created a list of them at: "http://kathyschrock.net/edtechblogs.htm" .

Value of a PLE

 Knowing how to use a blog was the most important aspect of creating a PLE.  I now feel almost as comfortable using a blog as I do reading a recipe.  I want to use my other blog as an online journal, and place to keep my thoughts.  I also intend to use one for the purpose of journaling for myself, and also I want to use one with my future Elementary classes.  

I would like to create a picture slide show on my blog but haven't quite figured out how to do that yet.  But I'm not afraid to play with it or ask questions if I have to.  I thought creating the layout was not very intuitive at first.  Thanks for a great semester.  I probably learned more than anyone else.

Internet Safety

I found an article by Elder David E. Sorensen called "You Can't Pet a Rattlesnake."  He talks about a time when he was a boy and almost petted a Rattlesnake that he thought was asleep.  His father fortunately caught him and said "David, my boy, you can't pet a rattlesnake."  That is good advice where pornography and other negative influences on the internet are concerned.  Elder Sorenson said: "..build fortifications in the form of personal ground rules to protect your priceless virtue.  When you're on a date, plan to be in groups and avoid being alone.  I know men, young and old, who have simply determined not to turn on the TV or surf the Internet anytime when they are alone.  Fathers, it is wise to keep computers and televisions in the family room or other high-traffic areas in your home--not in children's bedrooms.  I also know of fathers who while on business trips, wisely choose not to turn on the hotel television."  There are spiritual poisonous snakes out there and we need to wisely avoid them.  As a parent and grandparent I intend to be very open with my children about the subject.  I was especially taken with the article on "Technology and a House of Learning."  My husband and I discussed our roles of preside, provide, protect and nurture and their meaning in a modern world of poisonous snakes.  I also want to have a dialogue with my siblings  to sensitize and empower them on these issues.  I have already sent out an email to many of my family guiding them to several of the articles we read in class.  I also teach the 16-17 year old Sunday School class and plan on including some wise information in one of my lessons on this subject.  The URL for this article is found on lds.org.

Kerpoof.com

I went to Kerpoof.com to check out some of what is available for educators there and found it to be quite interesting.

Kerpoof provides free multimedia software that can be used directly from any browser, on any computer with Internet access and an up-to-date Flash player. While Kerpoof offers paid, premium services directed to at-home, entertaining use of the site, all basic content directed to in-school use is entirely free.

Kerpoof can be used to create original artwork, animated movies, and stories, among other things. All shared content is carefully reviewed by trained moderators before it appears on the site.
Kerpoof publishes a free monthly electronic newsletter that describes new features on Kerpoof, new lesson plans published on the Kerpoof Teacher's page, and gives ideas for using Kerpoof in the classroom. We want the newsletter to be a great resource for you and welcome feedback for improvements and also encourage you to share idease for using Kerpoof in the classroom. Kerpoof can be used to help as a creativity starter for writing. Or ask them to write a fictional story about a scene. It can help them with reading comprehension, social studies (you can use the Mt. Fuji scene to teach about Japanese culture), or study the life cycle of a caterpillar using the Butterfly Pavilion scene.

Are you teaching about the food chain? Our Northwest Territories scene (sponsored by Northwest Trek in Tacoma, Washington) can be the perfect place to create illustrations of several food chains. We've got plants to be eaten by deer and bears to eat the plants. We've got toads to be eaten by rattlesnakes and bald eagles to eat the snakes. There are insects, small rodents and reptiles, larger rodents, and several types of ruminants. Then we have all kinds of beasties from higher in the food chain, bears, wolves and birds of prey to name a few. And they're all real inhabitants of the Northwest Trek wildlife preserve. Students can even have math experiences. You can use any of our nature scenes to create intricate worlds that will test your students' powers of observation. Can they identify and describe a list of animal types you describe? Can they find fourteen yellow fish swimming in and around the sunken ship? Turn it into a math lesson by asking them to categorize and graph difference groups. Kerpoof even offers you sample lesson plans. It's a great resource.

You can find an archive of all past issues of the Kerpoof Scholastics e-newsletter online: Kerpoof Scholastics News Archives.

Letters and sounds objective

The Standard we chose to find technology for was Kindergarten Language Arts Standard 4, Objective 1a: Upper and lower case letters. We found a wonderful website for helping children with their upper and lowercase letters called "Starfall.com". The URL is http://www.starfall.com/n/level-k/index/load.htm?f. This is an interactive website where children can choose a letter, hear how it sounds, and see a word that starts with that letter.
Pedagogy: have each child open Starfall.com, click on the ABC's, find the letters B, G, and S, and listen to the sound. Then find one item that starts with that sound. After that have child make those letter sounds using clay, write the sounds on a sheet of paper, and draw a picture of an object that makes that sound.
For our Math Kindergarten Standard, we chose Standard 2, Objective 2a: Identify and describe simple repeating patterns with numbers and shapes. Pedagogy: Have children go to the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives and play the game where they have to chose a colored circle to complete a pattern. THe URL is: http://nlvm.usu.edu/en/nav/topic_t_1.html. Then I would have the children chose different colored clay, make little circle balls of different colors and create their own pattern.

Using digital cameras and other technology in the classroom

This week in class, we had a small group of ECE students talking about how to use technology appropriately in the Early Childhood Classroom. We came up with a lot of great ideas that I want to share here:
1. Technology should be interactive. Young children learn better when they are not just passive watchers.
2. Technology should be used regularly for real tasks.
3. Computers are intrinsically motivating for young students.
4. Computers enhance children's self-concept and improves their attitudes about learning.
5. Technology gives students more learning choices.
6. Computer use increases co-operation among students.
7. Use of speech synthesizers like in "Kidsperation" gives them both visual and audio re-inforcement.
8. Technology enlarges words for those who struggle with vision issues.
9. We should use technologies that allow students to explore not be task focused.
10. Some things a child could do with technology can be found on the early connections web site: www.netc.org/earlyconnections/. For example: Make and display a graph. Explore with digital tools like a digital microscope or camera. Tell a story in pictures and words with art software, record a book, etc. Put together a digital record of a special activity, or make an electronic slideshow of a class book. Share and document learning with digital photos of skits, projects geometric patterns etc. Take family portraits of a school's open house and send them home.
What if every Child had a lap top? (OLPC) We had a chance to learn about the XO, a new kind of computer designed for children to use. It was invented by a man from MIT named Negraponte. It's cost is about $200 and when you buy one, you also purchase one for a child in a developing country like Cambodia. It was fun to have Dr. Graham's son help us get around on this new computer. I enjoyed reading about some of the activities available for children on this computer in the "OLPC Help Topics" article on Moodle. Kids don't need teachers to show them how to use these computers. They are very intuitive. However, I think a teacher could give them assignments that would enrich their use of the computer.
After our XO experience we did a project using a digital camera. We discussed creative ways we could use digital cameras. Some ideas were:
1. Take pictures of students at the beginning and at the end of the year to show how they have changed.
2. Take nature walks and record observations by taking pictures.
3. Drawings made from pictures.
4. Take pictures for a class story.
5. Take pictures of children doing a class project and make into a power point.
6. Take pictures of a sequence of events (the growth of a plant from seed)
7. Role-play a story , take pictures, and make a class book.
8. Take pictures of shapes
Our group chose Kindergarten content, Standard 1, Objective 3a, which is about identifying and expressing ideas and information about feelings in a variety of ways. We decided to take pictures of people expressing different emotions and then use these pictures to help students be able to recognize emotion in people. The pictures could be of different classmates, and then we would have a discussion about emotion. Perhaps we could draw pictures of these different emotions and label them in another activity. Some of the emotions we recorded were: Excitement (Prof. Graham), Anger, Sadness, and happiness (Prof. Graham's son). See the pictures at the beginning of this post.
What was the TPACK (technology, pedagogy, content, and knowledge) used in this activity? The technology was the digital camera. The Pedagogy was demonstration and practice plus experiential learning by students taking pictures themselves. The content was identifying and expressing emotion from the Kindergarten Core, Standard 1, Objective 3a. The knowledge gained by the students was: gaining greater understanding of emotions, gaining skill in digital camera useage, and learning new vocabulary words about emotion.

technology inventory

This week I had the opportunity of visiting a first grade classroom at Brookside Elementary in Springville, Utah. The teacher had a number of technologies available to the students which I will elaborate on. The list starts with:

1. TV/VCR/DVD combo
2. Overhead projector with pull down white screen
3. 1 computer for the teacher
4. 2 computers for students with a self-monitoring Waterford Education tutoring program
5. A digital camera
6. A sound system (microphone around teachers' neck) and speakers throughout the classroom (this was to help her not have to speak so loud, and also for a hearing impaired student to be able to hear more clearly
7. The teacher has created a classroom blog to share with other students and parents
8. A listening center with DVD players and headphones and DVD's of high quality music

The teacher had enough of a wish list (5 more digital cameras, A computer projector, a lap top) that she was in the process of writing a grant to obtain those items. She uses technology every morning by pulling "the good morning song" off of the computer (it was bookmarked for easy access). A lot of her art work was gathered online. I asked her if she might be interested in learning about other online resources that I could find out from my technology class. She was very interested and I want to make her a list of websites, downloads and software that could be helpful to her. She told me she would love to have a Smartboard. She let me browse through her blog and it was well organized with great pictures of the children doing class projects and working together.

The teacher mentioned that the students have a computer lab that they go to once or twice a week. I did not have time to visit the lab to see what kind of computers they had or what programs they had acquired. I suggested that she take a look at the "Storyboard" program we used in our class to see if it might be useful to her. I believe she is a very capable and opened minded teacher where technology is concerned and would benefit from a bit of guidance in how technology resources can readily connect to curriculum objectives.

We finished our google earth assignment. Erica, Dot and I created a tour of animals of the 7 continents. We put in information about the animals and some fun activities to do with each animal. We also outlined all of the continents. I was able to look at two tours from my classmates. One was a tour of European castles. I absolutely loved this tour. It was really well done, and enjoyable. I also watched Gillian's oceans of the world tour. It was very informative and also very enjoyable.

Google Earth Assignment

Today in class we played with Google Earth and learned about some of the great ways we could use it as Early Childhood Educators. It would be really fun to look for all the different continents of the world with children, or find our community, or school on the site. Perhaps we could look for the different places that animals we are studying might live.
We had a chance to do some interesting Virtual tours around the globe. Our table found a great site for the New 7 Wonders of the World, which we may be able to use in our group project. Here is the URL for a google earth website (.kmz) that may be useful to us with our project:

bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/placemarks/669652-New7WondersoftheWorld.kmz

We might be able to use this website to help children actually see and learn more about the 7 wonders of the world.

Shift Happens

I just wanted to add this teachertube movie from our first day of class.

Photostory 3 video

Dot, Erica and I enjoyed using Photostory 3 for our movie project. We have published our movie on TeacherTube as "Fractured Nursery Rhymes. " I would enjoy doing a project like this with any grade in Elementary School. We could chose a story or poem or song, then have the children draw relevant pictures, create a storyboard, and use Photostory 3 to create a classroom movie. The children would feel such ownership of the project and it could easily be shared with parents. I was able to look at a number of my classmates finished photostories and was so impressed with the quality and fun that they showed. Gillian's story was really funny. I also enjoyed Diane's and Jaime's stories.

Storyboard posting

Erica, Dot,and I enjoyed preparing our media project for photostory. We spent some time coming up with a great storyboard using a song that changes children's Nursery Rhymes into something really silly.  We all will go home and draw pictures for the actual project which we will put on the computer next week.  Some of the Nursery Rhymes are Old King Cole, Jack and Jill, and Mary Had a Little Lamb.  It will be something like Fractured Nursery Rhymes.  So far this is a really fun assignment.  It has taken some imagination and collaboration techniques that children would really enjoy.  I think an assignment like this is great for developing language and communication skills.

Why Tech Savvy teaching?

I enjoyed learning in class about the different technological resources that we could use as teachers.  I noticed that as we looked at the different standards and objectives that technology wasn't always the best way to present a subject.  But there are certain objectives where technological resources are perfect.  In my own classroom I am certain that I would want to use some of my educational resources purchasing things like the microscope, the temperature probe, and a digital camera.  I also loved the Stellarium site, the google earth site, Virtual Pond site, and the Microbe Zoo site.  Nasa has some very interesing sites with 3D interactive astronomy tools.  World Wind and Celestia are both wonderful educational resources.  I also enjoyed looking at several of my classmates blogs to see what experiments they did and how they used the technology we studied.  I am very impressed with the work that my classmates have done, and I learned so much from them.

Tech Savvy Teacher

Article by: Dorothy Mitchell, Erica Jarvis, Jennilyn Lowe

As Tech savvy Teachers we have been looking for ways to implement technology in the classroom to enhance the learning of our students. For this specific article we looked at the Utah First grade core curriculum Standard 3 Objective 2a. Then we decided on an experiment we could do using the computer program Logger Pro 3 and a Temperature probe that connects to the computer through the USB port.

We set up the experiment by gathering 5 different paper cups with water at different temperature states including: ice, ice water, drinking fountain water, room temperature water, and boiling water. Then we made a prediction and put the cups in order from coldest to hottest. Then to test our hypothesis we used the Temperature Probe and Logger Pro 3 to collect temperature data. Then we saved the data in a graph to compare temperatures.



Predictions








Testing with Temperature Probe








Using Logger Pro3






We found that our prediction was correct. The order that cups should be in was: ice, ice water, fountain water, room temperature water, and then boiling water. The following images are the graphs taken from Logger Pro 3. They show the temperature differences between the hottest and coldest water states.




Temperature graph for ice






Temperature graph for boiling water




The Logger Pro 3 and the Temperature Probe can help enhance students learning of science in many ways. We just showed how it can help with learning about temperature and states of water. The graphs make it easy for students to see the progression of the temperature change. The graphs also visually illustrate the temperature differences. The Temperature Probe provides fun hands on experience for the students and may help improve their technology skills.

Week 3 post

This week in class we talked about TPACK. This is the integration of Technology, Pedagogy, Content, and Knowledge. It tries to help us as teachers see the interactions of these different areas as we teach and realize that they affect each other. They interplay and do not work in isolation. I also was able to learn about Copyright and Fair Use from the tutorials. This was extremely interesting. I was surprised how much media is out there for the use of teachers that is for free. However there are a number of restrictions, most being understood with common sense. We should be responsible and not use anything that would harm the copyright holder. There are some sites that allow you to use their materials without restriction (ie. Creative Commons, Pics4learning, and freeplaymusic.com). Also we should remember that media that we use should be for educational purposes not for entertainment or reward, and should be acquired legally.

Classroom Post 9/10/2008

I enjoyed class today. Learning about RSS was a revelation. I had no idea such things were available. RSS, Really Simple Syndication, is a great way to keep updated on news, hobbies, and classroom resources. I am also excited about starting a book list in my blog and hope that it will become a very valuable asset for me as a teacher. I enjoyed working with the other ECE students who were at my table. I am aware that these social connections that we make in college can be invaluable as we head into the workforce. I hope that we will have more opportunities to interact and get to know each other.

I've had it with technology.

I started my technology class yesterday and am feeling like a 2 year old in a class of 20 year old technology veterans. Hope I can pull this off. I appreciated my classmates around me for giving me a hand when I started sputtering.

I've been taking the TSA tutorials to try to catch up on my computer skills. This is all very uncomfortable for me. I know it is like moving to a new city and learning all the different paths to my favorite stores, etc. I hope people don't mind when I stop and ask for directions.