Final Project

I have used wikis, vokis, Google Docs, and other tools this year. My favorite, though, was Audacity. I asked my students to record their "This I Believe" essays in Audacity and place these recordings in the public folder. We played these recordings in class. Each student was assigned one essay to respond to in the form of a letter to the writer. Students could easily reference the recorded essays. The students enjoyed writing, recording, sharing, and responding to the essays in this way. I will present this project at our next meeting.

Wordle #2

I still don't understand "fetch the tag." Any suggestions?

Wordle

I created my Wordle with George Ella Lyon's "Where I'm From" poem. I am co-teaching an Appalachian Literature course this summer, and George Ella is our guest speaker. I thought this would be something fun to post to Blackboard. Wordle is perfect for language arts. I need to continue playing with it because I obviously didn't understand the "fetch the tag" concept, which is why all of my links go to Google. I may ask my students to create Wordles from poems they write, or they could keep a list of favorite quotes from a novel and make Wordles from these.

Google Docs

I am trying something new with Google Docs next week. I invited each of my students to join the document in order to create one Power Point for the class. We are going to review a few concepts for the OAA this way. I used one document for all of my classes, but I invited each class to join separately. I'm not sure if this is going to work. I guess I will find out next week. The idea is that each student will clone the original slide, add his/her information, and save it to Google Docs. If this works, then it will definitely save a lot of class time.

Hot Topic

I had a very interesting conversation with some friends last night about technology. It began with how conversations have changed with the use of technology. We discussed how people will use their phones to search the internet when a question comes up in conversation. For example, you may be trying to remember the name of an actor from a particular movie when someone pulls out a cellphone and looks up the information. This conversation evolved into one about technology in the classroom. Everyone seemed to have an opinion about this, especially the concept of teaching students factual information they can access on the internet. It was fun discussing this with people who are not teachers.

Glogs

I am excited to learn how people are using/plan to use glogs in their classrooms. I tried using glogs this year as an outside required reading assignment. The students enjoyed creating these, but once again passwords were a bit confusing for them. I let my students play with glogs because they had never used them before. I would like to do this again now that they are familiar with glogs.

Other Tools Assignment

I like this wiki because of the way it is organized. It will be a great place to go to remind myself of tools to use in the classroom. I like Audacity because I have used it with my students, and it was very successful. It was easy for them to understand, and it added to the assignment. It wasn't technology for technology's sake. Animoto is another one of my favorites. I haven't used it in the classroom yet, but I created my digital story using Animoto. Again, it is simple, but the result is an impressive video. I found a new tool on this wikispace as well. It's called confusing words, and it is a "collection of 3210 words that are troublesome to readers and writers. Words are grouped according to the way they are most often confused or misused." I do teach "words often confused" to my students, but this seems like an excellent resource for them. I try to stress that spell-check will not catch these types of mistakes, and this resource will help my students to understand this concept.