Of all the tools presented this morning, which one caught your imagination and how do you visualize using it with your students? Or was it one that you personally would use but not introduce to students? We will see if a popular one rises to the surface or if because we all teach different age groups and different subjects, we get a potpourri of tools.
P.S. I used paperrater.com to check my grammar and spelling before posting this! I love that tool--it corrected my spelling of potpourri.
As a writing teacher, I LOVE paperrater.com. I really like the higher level feedback Leanne received when she put in her master's research work. I need to play around with what level of settings would work best for my 8th graders - it might not be 8th grade. It would be nice if it weren't set up by grade level because I could see having varying abilities of student writers using different levels. However, it might be insulting if I recommend a level that's below our grade to a student. Overall, a very cool, helpful educational tool!
ReplyDeleteAs we presented, I took notes regarding the sights and coded them to remember which I wanted to take a look at first. The larger the font, the more of an impression it made. MuseumBox received the highest rating. I am always on a lookout for a flashy multi-media way for students to organize and present their learning and MuseumBox will be one of the first things I share with my teachers. (Actually, I will probably being showing them iPad Apps first, but this will be the next in line.) Personally I will be using both PaperRather for my work and to have my son self-edit his assignments. Looking back at my notes I am anxious to finish this post and get on with looking at the amazing sites that were presented today. Thank you everyone for a great Smackdown!
ReplyDeleteThanks everyone for laying your digital smack down! I have a dozen sites that I wrote down that I would like to use, but I think the one that stuck out to me the most was MuseumBox. I can use it to teach with but kids can also create one too to communicate what they know. We can use it for our historical fiction monologues (as a way to show off artifacts from a time period) or to show the difference between the branches of government. I'm also excited about paperrater.com. I can check my own work and students catch check their blog responses before they post them on our class blog!
ReplyDeleteThe smackdown was kind of cool. I saw a lot of very interesting sites that at some point I might be interested in using. However, there has been a serious case of information overload this week and it will be all I can do to use some of the core applications like google docs, iApps, and other stuff we focused more on.
ReplyDeleteThere was one item that came up, the khanacadamy.com site, it looked really good to me. The quicky look we had under the science tab showed a crazy bunch of stuff related to my AP Bio course. I will be taking a serious look at that very soon. I'm sure it will have more than a few things that I can use.
The tubechop.com and snipsnipit.com sites also look useful. There have been too many times in the past where video segments have disappeared as links. I have always wanted a tool to cut and grab video segments and store them so that I always have them. One of these two sites might just be the ticket. I'm kind of excited by the thought of being able to solve that problem.
Wow--there were so many good tools that it is difficult to decide on one favorite. Many of the these are so different (from each other) that I would like to try to use several.
ReplyDeleteVoki.com is extremely fun and kids will love it!
Debate.org (or Procon.org) would be an excellent addition to my assignments for those who are very verbal and like a little competition.
I really liked the You Tube Search Stories, because they could help students see how research gets refined...plus it's a really cool way of displaying work that you've done.
Tubechop--what a great tool for something we've all wanted.
I will definitely be investigating khanacademy.org (Mrs. K--can we just watch a video today? Why certainly!!!!)
There are several more that I will be playing with. Thank you all so much for helping to investigate and sell these to us all. I would not have been able to do this without your help.
Having everyone in class investigate and show us how to use these websites was very useful. The websites that I will use with students are voki.com, zooburst.com, youtube.com/users/searchstories, uen.org/3-6interactive.com, museumbox.com and abcya.com. I am so excited to introduce these programs to students! I will use udltechtoolki.wikispaces.com and khanacademy to help me learn more about computer technology.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed "playing" with Voki. I see this as something for personal use amongst friends and family.
ReplyDeleteThe ToolKit for Wikispaces looks like something I will explore more of, especially for my assignments.
I especially liked PaperRater, MuseumBox and 3-6 Interactives for my elementary students.
The MuseumBox is a great tool for kids to do reports about animals, people, countries, etc.
It looks so motivating, especially for our reluctant writers!
PaperRater is something I can use personally or with student writing.
3-6 Interactives is a site I want to explore further for next year when I teach science to different grade levels.
I loved learning about all of these sites from my fellow classmates. I'm so impressed with the progress we all made this week! We all started in a different place and each of us gained a great deal of knowledge and skills thanks to our wonderful instructor and each other!
Thanks to all of you for your help and congeniality. I hope you all have a great rest of the summer and a great school year next year!!
Final Blog Entry
ReplyDeleteI must confess that this has been a difficult week for me. Every year I come to JMA knowing that my technology skills and knowledge are weak. At the end of the session, I usually leave thinking my skills and knowledge still have a very long way to go. However, I always take away a little something that I put to use and feel pretty good about.
However, this year I feel like I am further behind than I was last year – I feel overwhelmed. Now I know that technological advances come at a very rapid rate and there will always be something new coming along. But for some reason, it just feels different for me this year. I’m guessing that in the back of my mind I feel I should have a cool and current web page and a blog for each class and a wiki and a ton of creative web activities and projects for my students to do, (because everybody is doing it) At the same time, I know that my energy and interest level for maintaining and learning all of that stuff isn’t up to the entire task. This year more that before I have the perception that I need to do a ton more stuff (because everybody is doing so much more) and that is difficult for me to fathom given my time, curriculum constraints, and administrative mandates for continuity between instructors teaching the same course. I guess that is where my frustration and difficulty has been this week. There is so much to learn and try to integrate and coordinate in a useful fashion with what I already do from a technology perspective.
As I write this (good therapy by the way), I can see that I have to calm down a bit and go back to what I have been doing all of the previous years at JMA – just find a little something, a few nuggets to enhance what I already do. I guess I just need to chill out a little bit – that has been no small task for me this week! With a bit of reflection, I can see that getting a greater handle on the iGoogle suite of things will probably provide the greatest direct benefits.
Part 2 - Final Blog Post
ReplyDeleteThere has been a few extra bright highlights that stand out for me, namely the iDevice day and the field trip.
The iTouch is a tool that has been in my home for a number of years. When my daughter first got hers I couldn’t pry it out of her hands to even get a good look at it. The same thing was true when my son got his the next year. Until Wednesday I hadn’t really played with one. It is definitely a cool tool with lots of amazing apps. I don’t see myself needing one for everyday use, but I can see the benefit of using them in the classroom to a greater degree than they are already. Currently, I am very open to letting my students use them for a variety of simple applications like calculators and timers. I have even had students use some more sophisticated apps as substitute scientific instruments like a accelerometer or inclinometer. With a little exploration, I’m sure I could put together a list of free or cheap apps that could be used at some point during the year for a lab or activity. I’m sure my students would clue me into even more interesting things to do with them if I just asked. I think this is something that I will pursue this year and see where I takes me.
The field trip day I really enjoyed this year. Usually, I get my third choice of destinations, but not this year. I was able to go to Agracetus/Monsanto finally and check out their plant genetics operation. Wow, I was really impressed! I’m sure I made a bit of a fool of myself with all of the pointed questions that I asked. The types of things they are doing is a perfect match to much of my biology curriculum. We even use some similar lab techniques in several labs in my AP Bio course. What I found most impressive is the amount of time, effort, and money they spend trying to genetically alter and produce a new seed product. They showed us the different stages of the process and provided a insight that I hadn’t considered before. That being the shear volume of material/resources they use to produce a single seed line. Imagine taking two tons of soybean seeds (millions of individual seeds), genetically altering them, then spend 5 – 8 years weeding and screening out the imperfect ones so as to find “the ONE” seed out of millions that will genetically represent a new seed product line. All of this at a cost of around 10 million dollars – WOW what a gamble! I need to find a way to get a field trip out to their facility for my AP Bio class.