All good things come to an end!

Sigh, I still remember my first day in Ed Tech class and how frustrated and overwhelmed I felt by the idea of learning about technology and being able to figure out smart notebook!  I wanted to quit before I even started!  Now that the course is done, I must say I feel totally different than the first day.  I feel more confident in using technology, I feel that I have come close to mastering smart notebook and I have loved this course.

Smart Notebook:

This is something I have loved using and it has spoiled power point for me!  I much prefer the tools I have at my disposal in this program.  I love, love, love the camera that allows me to snap pictures of anything I want and resize it.  The only downside is I am very disappointed that SD76 is rumored to be dropping this program.  I hope not and if it is I think it also needs to be dropped from this course.

These are a few of my favourite things:

Snipping tool

One of my favourite tools that I have learned about is the snipping tool!  Hello!  This has changed my life forever.  I now can snip anything I want from my computer screen, save it, transfer it and then use it again!  So much better than copy and paste.  It works amazingly well with images and you can also resize what you have snipped.  It is a program that can be downloaded free but most newer computers have it.  It is one of the best secrets on the planet and now I know about it!

Interactive Tools:

We used a variety of different tools to encourage class participation.  I loved them all!  I had used Poll Everywhere before in a class but got to know it better in this classroom.  It is such a fun way to get your students to use a cell phone to register in a poll!
Answer garden is a great way to get a word cloud of answers or phrases from the class.  I thought this was more limiting but I still really liked it!
Padlet: At first I didn't love this one but after trying it again, thanks to Cammi, I must say it has shot up to close to the top of my list!  I love it as an interactive way to get students' feedback!  Another bonus I learned is that students can  use it as a forum to add photos!  Love it and I will use it.
I also loved using all that Google has to offer.  Until this class, I had no idea all that Google can do!  I adore Google forms and will use that in my classroom as a tool for communication with parents.

Just talking about all these amazing apps gets my heart beating!  I can't wait to make my classroom the coolest place ever!

Movie Making

This is something I have always wanted to try and now I can see that both stop motion and iMovies are going to be a big hit in my classroom!!  Stop motion is so easy!  I know that kids will have so much fun doing it.  How do I know?  I'm over 40 and I loved it!!  It is a great way to get students to think creatively!
iMovies are great as well and I think that students will love using that for projects and I will love using it for making an end of the year movie of all we did.  It is such a fun way to showcase all that happens in the classroom!

QR codes:

I knew about these and have even used them a little bit but after using them in class I will use them even more!  I love them!  I can't wait to have a bulletin board showcasing some of my students art work and beside their work have a QR code where parents can watch how their child is doing in the class!  QR codes are fun as treasure hunts for students, information givers for both students and waiting parents, and centres where students can do a question and then check their work.  This will have a prominent role in my classroom.


I am so grateful that I needed to take this course.  I was scared of it and uncomfortable with technology but now I have come out of the course better informed and ready to embrace new technology. My aha moment happened when I actually knew something about technology my husband didn't know and I was able to show and help him.  I usually just sit helplessly and wait for him to come to my rescue.  I feel so much stronger now in the area of technology.

I know I will keep my classroom blog and twitter account going.  I have found that twitter indeed has been a great source of knowledge and have started to follow some teachers that share my same philosophy.  I feel that technology is always changing and in order to stay current I need to embrace forums such as twitter and follow blogs of those that keep up with technology.  I can't wait to put the things I have learned into practice in my classroom!

Thanks, Cammi and Paul, for opening a whole new area of my education!  I hope to be able to keep discovering new technology as I keep current and give back in the area of education as I discover new things for myself and share them with my colleagues.

Stop Motion!

I was just snooping on my classmates blogs and realized I didn't post my stop motion video!  I had so much fun making this one.  I was gone for the weekend and we were staying in a hotel so I used the free breakfast and made some toast and ate it!  It was so easy!  I know my future students will love playing with the stop motion app and feature found on i-phones!

Check it out!
Mana Mana Toast

This years practicum

I wish I would have started a school blog last year.  I want to be able to keep all my good ideas somewhere.  I have stored some in a notebook but if I would have done it digitally it would have been better.  I plan on using my blog for this for the rest of my schooling and when I am a teacher.

I have one more class left!  I am so glad to be almost done.  Spring has sprung here in Medicine Hat and it makes me anxious to get out of the classroom and into my garden.

I was in a grade 4 classroom in my English Literature practicum.  It was great.  I was in the Catholic School Division and I have never worked there before so it was nice to see all that they have to offer.  I learned a lot about literacy circles and how to use them with a novel study.  I really enjoy children's literature and learned a lot from this class and from my mentor teacher.

I was also able to do running records and a miscue analysis; something I have never even seen done before.  You have to be fast doing the miscue but I was glad to have the practice!!

One tip that I really liked was when your students are in pods (which I hope to do in my class) if they need a reminder to listen or they are struggling that day, they get a letter.  Once they spell out the word ROWS their pod is broken up and put in a row.  I thought this was an interesting way to remind them that collaborative work is a privilege and they have to live up to that expectation.

Thanks Mrs. C for allowing me in your classroom!!

i-movies! I'm famous

This last week we used iMovie in my tech class.  I am grateful that I was forced to learn how to use it.  I have been going to make movies for years but never took the time to learn!  I have to say it was so easy and user friendly.  If you haven't tried it and want to, make sure you just start!  I learned many techniques; most by trial and error.  I bought and downloaded a reverse app to reverse a piece of my movie.  It was compatible with iMovie so it was perfect!

Check out my movies:

Staying alive country style is a parody of the movie Saturday Night Fever using the song Staying Alive.  I loved my group!  Those girls are so fun!   This time of year is pretty ugly on the farm. I wish it was green and my trees were all budded out!


    Staying alive country style

The next one was a movie trailer for our movie, Besties!  We were going to do it as a love story between my friend Cassidy and my goat Oreo.  When she met him, he fell in love and wanted to be with her all the time. We started off that way and got all the footage but when my husband saw it he said it looked bad.....so I changed it to friends.  None of group except Cassidy are in it.  Check out my baby goats!!  So cute.  Just 3 days old.

Besties

I also made a personal video on how to make buns.  I did a 10 minute video at first, very detailed, then read the assignment (after working on it for hours!!)  It was supposed to be short.  So I re-did it and cut it down to four minutes.  I just watched the best video on bread yesterday and it was 1.5 minutes with no talking.  If I did it again, that's how I would do it.  No one has time to watch 4 minutes anymore!  lol  If you want to make my mom's buns, check this one out.

yummy buns!

My last one was a screen-cast.  One of my favourite applications is Symbaloo and in this screen-cast I tell you a little bit about it.

symbaloo

All in all, I feel famous!  I actually have something on Youtube!

I-pad key to classroom magic!

 



This week I used the app Stop Motion.  It was so amazingly easy!  We went away this weekend so I left this part of my assignment until the last minute.  When I woke up this morning in the hotel I knew I had to get this project done. I downloaded the app onto my iPad and iPhone and off I went down to breakfast.  I was worried as the app itself didn't give a lot of instructions. It just had a button that said start project here and then it showed a few things.  I couldn't believe how easy it was!

Watch my video:  http://youtu.be/RMV7NlLKoBw

Step 1


Figure out what you want to make a stop motion movie of.  I was limited to a hotel room and a free breakfast. I chose preparing my toast and pouring a glass of juice.  It was so fast! I just snapped pictures of every step; that's it.  Once I had my 40-50 shots I was done both the camera work and my breakfast!

Step 2

I watched my stop motion movie and marveled at my genius!  It worked!!!  I did notice that I had switched my view when I was doing the juice from horizontal to vertical.  Now what!  I have to say I am not that technologically savvy but I figured out right away how to take another set of pictures holding my device horizontally, select them and put them before the work I had already done!  It was that easy!  I fixed a few other problems; I had gone from the plate to the toaster and then the plate again and it looked funny so I just moved the toaster pictures together and it was fixed.

Step 3

Watch it 10 more times and make your family watch it over and over, forcing them to recognize your genius.  Then I wanted to add music.  I knew I wanted the song Mana Mana by the Muppets so I downloaded it from iTunes.  I selected it and I could see it overlay but no matter how often I fiddled with it I couldn't get it to play.  I was discouraged and worried it had to do with copyright.  I played around with it, had my husband try to fix it and finally left it until we got home.  In frustration, I had my husband try again and at last he figured it out.....my phone was on silent!  Lol!  So dumb!  I over complicated it. I thought it was some complicated glitch and it ended up being very easy and I had the music loaded the first try.

Step 4

I uploaded it to YouTube.  You can upload and edit your film right from the app.  It was quick, easy and painless.

I know that you can add credits and backgrounds but you have to pay to unlock many of the more advanced features.  It isn't expensive, for $1.49 you get a lot.  I also realized that I could have edited my photos in the app. I didn't have to redo all of them.  This will be a great tool in the classroom.  I had so much fun making this little movie and it was so fast and easy to use.  I can tell that students will love using this and doing projects.  Another week in class that I learned about some cool tools for school!

Classroom Excitement! Web 2.0 review.

This week I was able to search for and play with different tools that are available on Web 2.0.  Web 2.0 is filled with cool things that can be used in the classroom.  I looked through the seemingly endless suggestions on the webpage called cool tools for schools  http://cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com/  There were so many interactive sites and fun things for the classroom it was almost impossible to break it down to just three.

            Under the heading music tools, I liked the application called SongSmith. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/songsmith/  This is a free music editing tool by Microsoft.  I love music and I think that this is a powerful learning tool.  What I liked about this application is that you only need a microphone on your computer and a song in your heart.  If you have limited music knowledge, it will help you sound like a professional.  All you do is sing into your mic and it creates background music for you.  Choose whether you want it to be rock, country or classical, to name a few, and it will create chords to fill in your song.  It helps teach the basics of chords and how they are used in a song.  It is also great because it will cater to multiple students at once.  You can each lay down your track and then it puts them all together with background music for a song.  If your students have a good understanding of music, it offers a higher level of song creation.  In a video on the website with testimonials, one teacher said it was nice because students can work together in groups and collaborate.  It is like having a teacher’s aide for each group.  Some students are less shy working with the computer than in a classroom full of students as they experiment and play with their music.  I really like this because it is free and set up very well for classroom use. 

            The next interactive web page that I loved was found under creativity tools.  It was called class tools. http://www.classtools.net/  Wow!  It was amazing and filled with many useful tools for the classroom!  It is a history teacher’s dream.  There were many sites that you could go to and create things to enrich your classroom.  ‘Fakebook’ was a site for teachers to create a historical Facebook-like page of famous people in history.  It was so fun and something that students would really find interesting and informative at the same time.  Also there was the ‘Twister’ app which creates fake tweets from historical figures.  ‘SMS Generator’ will create a chat conversation between historical figures. I love ‘Postit’ which was a labeling tool used to post your own image and students then use post it notes to label or break down the picture.  Another great interactive piece was called ‘Lights out’.  Again, all you do is upload your own picture which is then blacked out. Students use a match as their virtual light to discover things on the page, all with the click of a mouse.  It features several random name pickers; one like a slot machine and another like the big wheel on the Price is Right.  Timeline creators, fillable fish bone diagrams, venn diagram templates and countdown timers are a few of the other many amazing interactive tools that are perfect and quick to use in the classroom.  Great site! I highly recommend it to all teachers. 

            Writing is an important part of student life.  Students need to be able to create stories and share their ideas creatively.  I loved several of the applications found under writing tools.  I am working in a grade 4 classroom right now for my practicum and I felt that all of these would be very useful and create a lot of interest in writing for my students. Toondoo http://www.toondoo.com/ is a really cool site to make comic strips.  You can use the stock images or upload your own images which I thought was a really fun added bonus to really get to personalize your characters.  It is free but very limited.  What I mean by that is you can only create 10 strips under each registered name.  A teacher wouldn’t be able to do her whole class; each student would have to create their own user name.  I think it would be really fun to create and show my skills by creating my own comic strip.  I also liked Bitstrips, http://www.bitstrips.com/ where you can create your own personal emoji and create comic pictures.  It is also very user friendly.  It is free and doesn’t limit the number of pictures you can make.   One more cool site for younger students that I loved was Zooburst http://www.zooburst.com/  It is a digital storytelling tool that creates 3D popup books.  They are simple but very fun to look at.  You can have 10 free books or pay $50 a year for unlimited use.  It is interactive and an interesting way to get children to write their own story and a rewarding way to see it come to life.

My comic strip from Toondoo.  I made it in a couple of minutes

Sample of my emoji from bitstrip

            There is one last site that I thought was really useful as a teacher and for students. It was Ookaboo http://ookaboo.com/o/pictures/.  This is an image search tool that I never knew about.  I always use Google images and you usually have to cite them when using them in a paper, presentation or website.  These images are copyrighted.  Ookaboo is a free image site; all images are free to use on blogs, presentations and websites.  They are organized according to precise concepts and are easy to use.  You can upload your own image to share if you want. 

            I love learning about all the many options and things available for the classroom.  I could have spent days researching these sites.  The classroom is a place that I want to be able to use as much technology as I can.  Technology is the new language that students need to know to make them a productive citizen.  Many of these sites I looked at will enrich the classroom and engage the student.

            

Interactive Apps and how they work in the classroom

 I really enjoyed my EDTS 325 class this week.  We looked at 7 different interactive systems and how they can be used by teachers in a classroom.  It was so interesting to see all the different systems and experiment with them, seeing how each one worked from both the view of the creator (teacher) and the student interacting with the app.  I am going to review my findings for 3 of the different systems and examine both the pros and the cons of each.

 They will be rated as follows:

5=very effective (user-friendly, multi-purpose)  

4=mostly effective (fairly user friendly, useful features)

3=somewhat effective 

2=potentially effective, but only with practice 

1=uneffective, too complicated/simplistic

POLLEVERYWHERE:  4.5

Teacher Use

            First, I am going to look at it from the view of the teacher creating questions.  http://www.polleverywhere.com is a great site to use for quick polls in the classroom.  Their tag line is “30 seconds to set up and no sign in required”.  They are true to their word. I had already used it before so had created an account.  The benefit of this is that all your polls are kept under your sign in name so they are available for reuse.   It is a great tool for the classroom. They created a room with a number for me to add my questions with multiple choice answers. Then the questions are activated and the student is given a code to text to their phone. DONE, that easy!  

Student Use

As long as the student has access to their own cell phone it is easy, especially the second time.  The first time I used it, I had a bit of trouble figuring out what to text just because it was so new to me (and I am old!).  It was fun to see the answers register and the graph grow.

Flexibility

The only drawback is that there isn’t an open ended response.  Students can’t type in an answer and have it displayed. So, it is great for a quick poll in the classroom.  Flash quizzes with live instant results, what a great way to get students attention. All free!      

Diagnostic feedback

As a teacher, you can create reports and identify which students answered what, which is good to identify needs.  You can also create anonymous polls to protect student identity.

Plickers:  4

Teacher Use

This was my first time on www.plickers.com .  Wow, is all I can say. Wow, was I impressed with this app.  It is so exciting.  You get real time answers from your students with just the click of the camera. It reads the student’s answer card giving real time results.  It is a lot more work than the other applications we used as you need to add your student’s names and print out individual cards for each student.  Once you have done the initial setup, it saves your class list and you can laminate the cards so that they can be used many times.  As the teacher, I think that as you gather the answers by scanning the room with your devices camera you have the most fun watching the information get snatched up magically and organized for you.  I think it is great for younger classrooms or in classrooms where students don’t have access to digital devices. 

Student Use

Students get a laminated card that is made just for them with their names linked to it.  It is easy to use, they simply hold up a card with the side with the letter that corresponds to their answer at the top.  Little kids may get confused with putting the right answer to the top.  It isn’t really exciting for the students but I think the teacher has fun gathering responses.

Flexibility

No open ended response.  Just good for quick polling of predetermined answers.

Diagnosis feedback 

It is a bit limited as it only works for multiple choice questions and not open responses by students. It shows in real time as the phone passes by the students.  It shows which students you have scanned and if you missed anyone.  It is a bit cumbersome as you have to print out cards, keep them organized and hand them out to the students each time.  I think the first few times would be very fun but I worry because it isn’t as spontaneous, it wouldn’t be used as much as the others.

Padlet-3

Teacher Use

            I have a real mixed review of www.padlet.com .  Padlet was easy to sign in and you can create an account or just use it without creating an account.  I loved that students got to fill in their own padlet or sticky note, so it was the best application for individual unique responses.  I really disliked that it wasn’t user friendly.  I felt frustrated trying to set it up.  The question text was too small.  I wanted to be able to adjust it and make it bigger or bolder on the screen.  I even used Google looking for ways to change it and couldn’t figure it out.  I see how it would be a great way to get student unique responses and I am sure that I will use it in my classroom. 

Student Use

Padlet is very easy to use. Students are logged in by room number and they double click anywhere on the page to write their response.  It is a great way to get the individual voices heard.  It can be used on a desktop or tablet.

Flexibility

This is a great application for individual response, although you can’t use it for multiple choice responses.

 

Diagnosis feedback 

It was very difficult to figure out.  Out of all the websites I used, I spent the most time trying to figure this one out and felt very frustrated!  It offers an option to use a background, which I was thrilled with, but when you applied the wallpaper it repeated the picture rather than fitting to size.  There was no adjustment at all.  It would have been nice if you could mute it or make the student answers more prominent.

FYI

Socrative Teacher- 5

Google Forms- 5+

Answer Garden- 3 (very cool but just makes word clouds with the answer so I would give it 5 for making a classroom word clouds but 3 for effective polling)

Kahoot- 4

            I only was going to review three of the seven sites I used but I can’t stop without mentioning Socartive Teacher/Socrative Student.  Socrative is so versatile!  It was easy to set up and I loved how you could add pictures that related to your quiz to make it more appealing.  It is great because it has several different ways you can use it.  Space race is a quick race to see who can answer the fastest!  I love competition so it is a great way to wake up and engage your students.  It also has an exit ticket where, as a teacher, you can get a snapshot of the students’ understanding, questions they have or what they have learned.  Great way to end the class.

            My other favorite is Google forms!  What an amazing site.  It is so versatile and just like everything Google, it seems perfect in every way.  It has many different ways you can ask questions from grids to multiple choice.  It saves automatically and is free.  Finding out about this will impact me greatly as a teacher.  I believe this is the answer to communication with parents.  No more crumpled papers on the bottom of the back pack!