Web 2.0

There were many times during this course when I asked myself, “What were you thinking?”, but I am so glad that I persevered and made it to Thing 23.  The amount of information was overwhelming and exciting at the same time.  I hope that we have access to all of Shelley’s instructions, because I know that I will never be able to remember it all.  I plan on having a classroom blog this year.  As I matter of fact, I have already started to work on it.  I’ve been thinking of ways that my K students will be able to create slideshows and stories and it will be a fun way for parents to know what is going on in the classroom.  I have gotten so many ideas from other teachers by reading their blogs and I love the ability to share and learn from teachers all around the world.  My favorite blog is from a teacher in Australia – amazing!  I have plans to use voice thread for a parent night activity and I am already implementing google docs in my grade level.  This was an eye-opening experience and I am so glad I participated.

Classroom 2.0 was jammed packed with information and I really liked exploring that site.  I think that I might sign up for it.  While I looked around I saw a video by a kindergarten teacher doing a smartboard math lesson – counting by 10′s.  She used colored counters that she could drag over to the number grid to highlight each number as the children counted.  I did a few searches and found the site that she used; it’s called Countersquare.  I also found another, Crickweb, that I plan to use this year.  Good resources!

Twitter looked like it would be a lot of fun to follow but I don’t think it would be applicable in a kindergarten classroom.  One teacher explained that he tweeted to parents about various activities throughout the school day, but I think that a blog would be more practical for my situation.

This will be pretty useful.  Some of the downsides I found when creating a document was the limited number of fonts and I couldn’t seem to change the font size to anything other than the ones in the pull-down menu. (In Word, I can highlight the font size and put in my own number.) So it seemed a bit limiting on the creative side if preparing documents for students.

However, this will be great in coordinating information with my grade level team.  The first thing I thought of was our supply list: each teacher gets her own order form and then I have to compile all of them to place our order.  I will definitely be using google docs for our order form and each teacher can add her own items.  Everything will be in one place when I order – I like that!

I would love to be able to organize all of my documents in one place.  Right now I have files on my school computer, home desktop and laptop.  I’m always emailing documents back and forth or saving them to a jump drive and transporting them.  I guess the only problem would be all the fonts I have used the google docs might not recognize.

Another use would be for our lesson planning.  We do not have laptops at our school, so I have created lesson plan pages in Word and we print them out and fill them in when our team gets together to plan.  I could have the pages on google docs and we could all add to it, each teacher completing one curriculum area.

I’m sure that as I get back to school and start creating I will think of many more ways that this will be helpful.  Now that I know what can be done in google docs, I’m sure I’ll be looking for ways to utilize it more.

I have used You Tube in my classroom many times.  I found Harry Kindergarten and he has lots of fun songs to teach.  I had heard about Power Teaching and looked that up and realized that it is probably not my style. Last year I had wanted to teach my class the Doxology and found a You Tube video with someone playing it on the piano.  We used it everyday and  sang along. As far as a demonstration video goes, my sister is always raving about her salad spinner.  It didn’t sound amazing to me, but I did check it out on You Tube.  Maybe I’ll buy one. The fun video I looked up is the one I decided to share here – Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s On First”. There is also  a spoof of this classic about buying a computer.  You can check it out, but nothing is as good as the original.  Have fun!

This task was a bit intimidating to me when I first read about it – but it was much easier and faster than I thought it would be.  I can see using this in the classroom by having students respond to a story, describing their favorite part of a field trip or recalling the steps to a science experiment. Would embedding a podcast in a blog be the best way for parents to hear the podcast?  Is that possible?

I just reread the Stretch Task and answered my own question.  Yes, you can embed the podcast into your blog.

This was all new to me so I spent quite a bit of time exploring iTunes and podcasts.  I subscribed to Clark Howard’s podcast because I never seem to be able to catch it on the radio so now I can listen whenever it is convenient for me.  I also subscribed to Hooked on Phonics and Kindergarten Animation, which has Bible stories.  They are both video podcasts.  I plan on using an IPod in my class this year as a center so I thought these would work perfectly.  One thing that I did notice as I was looking through various podcasts is that some of them are a few years old and, I guess, no longer being updated because when I clicked on them nothing came up – this happened quite a few times. But there were so many great ones out there that I’m sure I’ll be subscribing to more.

Okay, I have a job for my retired husband or a parent volunteer.  I have over 1300 books in my classroom – okay, so I teach kindergarten and the books are small, but I do have that many.  How do I know? I have an Excel spreadsheet that took me over a year to compile with book title, author, genre, theme and location in my classroom. Each book has a sticker on it with the theme and then my various book baskets have a label with matching sticker so my students can put the books back in the correct place.  Each month I switch out a few baskets. When I get new books I have to go back to Excel, enter the info and label the book.  If I want to work from home I put the list on my jump drive to take with me.  I know that I am going to love Library Thing because it will be so easy to add to my list from anywhere.  My problem will be getting all my existing books into the system (refer back to first sentence)!

What a great tool to have!  I went through my bookmarks on my laptop computer and already added them to my Delicious account.  Next I’ll work on my home desktop and eventually my school computer.  It will be so convenient to have all my sites in one spot that I can access from any computer. No more emailing sites back and forth from home to school and vice versa.  I think a big problem I will have is checking out what everyone else has found and spending way too much time in front of the screen!!

This was a very interesting post on using iPods in a preK class. I have a iPod that I was going to use for music next year in my kindergarten class but was not sure of other ways that I could incorporate it into student use.  Karen gave me lots of ideas for center activities and apps that I need to check out. Instead of just a computer center, I might be able to have a Technology center with the iPod as a choice for students.

So far this has been exhilarating and frustrating at the same time.  When I clicked through some of the tools I was so excited to see all the fun stuff I could do and couldn’t  wait to try a few for myself.  I spent time on  Blabberize looking at some that were done already but didn’t try one of my own.

Then I went to Xtranormal to create a movie.  I thought I would try my classroom morning routine and set up the characters, sound, pauses, edited and so forth – I worked a long time on it.  I put in a sound that but decided to change it and couldn’t figure out how to do it. I couldn’t see a place to delete it and I couldn’t move it anywhere.  Very frustrating!  I tried HELP and still couldn’t figure it out.  Then I lost the sound on the voices, not the other sounds or music – just voices – and couldn’t figure out how to get them back.  So I saved (or so I thought) my movie to come back to later.  Now I can’t find it. Also when I logged in again later I got a message that said account activation failed. I couldn’t log in again.

I took a break to try something else and decided to give Polldaddy a try. I thought this might be a fun way to get parents more involved in classroom events so I created a sample survey and sent it to some family and friends.  But no one ever received it – I don’t know what I did wrong.  I tried it again the next day and the same thing happened.

I have enjoyed looking at the different tools but I have not tried to create anything on any of the other tools I’ve explored.          So far, a lot of time and effort spent and nothing to show for it.