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.