Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

My Ideal Job

My ideal teaching job would be in a 4th grade classroom with 25 students in a lower socioeconomic neighborhood with high diversity.  Technology available of course! Outside of content, I would teach “I Can”.  I often hear from other teachers that their students can’t do what my students do because they are ELL or they don’t’ have a computer at home.  I want to show those students that they can! And I want to show those teachers who say they can’t, that they can!

Thursday, June 11, 2009

iMovie Ideas

Ten Ideas for Using iMovie at the Lower Elementary Level

Cool Ideas from Springfield Public Schools in Illinois

Apple Digies has the following Award Categories
Award Categories. Many of these can be created using iMovie
# Best Group Video
# Best Comedy Video
# Best Digital Still Image
# Best Community Promotional Video
# Best Digital Animation
# Best Music Composition
# Best Digital Still Picture
# Best Curriculum Related Video
# Informational Video
# Open Submission
# Digies Logo Design

50 Classroom Uses and Tips for iMovie (but there are only 5 :o)

Some VERY cool ideas from Laptop Focus Group USD #352 in Goodland, KS

1. Students create Public Service Announcements (PSA's)

Kidcast #58 - The Medium Is Not the Message by dschmit

I was very excited to listen to Dan's message (again :o). This is one of the most powerful reasons I am very excited about my new job next year. For the last 3 years I have been teaching "computer" or "technology" to K-5th graders in a pull out specialist classroom. There has been very little colaborative work between me and the regular classroom teachers. I have a good idea of the concepts they are teaching in class and I have designed "projects" centered around those curricular areas. And that is what I called integration.

However, I focused mainly on teaching the software and a key element of technology education was missing from what I was teaching. Making it real. Sure they had a pretty neat project by the time they were done. But because of time we never got to the important part. Now that we created it, how do we present it? How do we share it? Why do we share it? The only audience my students performed for were me and themselves. In many ways we were just mass producing projects. The focus wasn't the content, it was creating the projects.

Next year I have the opportunity to work in collaboration with teachers on using technology in the classroom. This brings a fantastic opportunity for the content to be the focus and the technology skill acquired are secondary. They will learn how to use technology how I have learned to use technology. By doing.

Having the ability to have the time and an audience will be powerful. Teaching presentations skills with technology as a tool to enhance the presentations will be a huge shift in how I work with students and what I work with them on. Podcasting is one of those things I would like to do.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

PodCast Ideas

1. Poetry
2. Fluency
3. Classroom Newscasts (instead of a news letter)
4. Kids created newscast
5. from Dan Schmidt via twitter: Record young children telling jokes.
6. Write and record Seuss type poems.
7. Buy Dan Schmidt's books :o) He's a "god"!
8. Podcast Wordless picture books.
9.  Interviews (prewriting includes researching the person and coming up with questions. Good editing work here, too).
10.  a story modeled after _This American Life_ on NPR (my fav)  
11.  10-11News: Some students at Grand Island Central Catholic contribute podcasts to our www.gieveryday.compage. We love it! Check it out.
12. Others? Please comment to contribute to the list!

Comic Life Ideas

1. Cereal Box Biography
2. All about me pages
3. Dinosaur Fact Sheet
4. What I did this summer
5. Story of an Explorer
6. State Report
7. Space/Solar System Report
8. Character from literature facts sheet
9. Characters, Setting, Plot, etc. visual representation.
10. 8 of me. Have students use template R and have students put in 8 pictures of them (perhaps each different having been modified by an outside program or they can make them 8 different ways inside of Comic Life) Then they can add captions about themselves.
11. Make a comic with characters, setting and plots. Take photos of students acting out the different scenes.
12. from twitter: j_allen "One of our industrial tech teachers used Comic Life for students to create safety posters."
13. Poetry about a picture
14. Parts of speech describing the picture (nous, verbs, adjectives, etc.)
15. Fractured Fairy Tales
16 From twitter lllong "One of our foreign language teachers uses Comic Life for vocab"
17. From twitter llong "5th graders used it in their Diseases unit in science - good fun!"
18. From Facebook: Diane Marie Willadsen: "We created a state symbol page. Students went out and captured pictures then added labels."
19. From Facebook Diane Willadsen: "At the end of the year, students created a memory page using pictures of classmates then adding labels saying what they were good at in school."
20. Others? Please comment to contribute to the list!

PhotoBooth Ideas

1. Easy way to have a student take a picture of themself and use it in a variety of forms of software
2. Write a descriptive paragraph about themselves
3. Insert it into a All About Me book
4. Insert into Comic Life and create a comic about themself
5. Easy way to take a picture and then put into Photoshop for photoshop editing
6. Using the backgrounds they could tell a story about when they were "under the sea" or in Paris, etc.
7. From twitter: j_allen "We used Photo Booth to create characters for fictional writing."
8. Others? Please comment to contribute to the list!