Thing #7b

I found some neat things in my Google Reader over the past few weeks.

You Can’t Look at Just One – The title caught my attention.  When I went to the blog entry, I was thrilled to see a link to the 100+ portraits of iconic people of all time.  David Warlick was right, you really can’t look at just one.  i flipped through all of them.  Some that spoke particularly to me were:

Princess Diana

Anne Frank

Judy Garland

Audrey Hepburn

Adolf Hitler

Mark Twain

Summer Activities – Every summer, I make a list of the things I want to accomplish on my days home from work.  This summer, the Web 2.0 course is at the top of my list.  But, other things fall beneath it: clean out the guest room closet, make plans for our vacation to the Grand Canyon, finally make curtains for the den windows, etc.  The suggestions on this “top 12″ made me chuckle.  I can relate to #10 on the list; somehow, the major cleaning/organization is always pushed to the summer at my house.

Download free images for educators at Pics4Learning – I’ve talked about my love or photography a couple of times on this blog.  And, during our study of (cc), I mentioned that my anxiety over copyright laws often holds me back from using them in class.  Naturally, this blog post caught my attention.

Thing #14

Either I misunderstood or I got carried away with this assignment…Either way, I explored most of the tools suggested in Thing 14.  Here are some of my thoughts about ways to incorporate them into my personal and professional life.

Be funky – I’d love to play around with some of my personal photos and see what I can do with them.  I’ve already started turning myself into a cartoon!

Blabberize – Imagine what fun students would have with oral reports if they were able to give them as a speaking llama…or pet cat…or their baby sister?

Gliffy - I’d love to use the floor plan software to get my students to create a floor plan.  When studying proportion and similarity, I’ve had students make floor plans by hand, but on the computer is so much cooler!

Jigzone – I grew up putting together jigsaw puzzles with my family every winter.  Recently, my Mom and I have talked about finding a website that will turn our family photos (especially scenic ones from vacation) into jigsaw puzzles.  This website does it instantaneously, and it times you as you put the puzzle together.  I can also see how this would be a fun activity for my math students to do to stretch their minds a little.

Letterpop – My husband and I want to start sending Christmas Letters, rather than store-bought Christmas cards.  This is a great resource for that!  It’d also be good for putting togehter class newsletters to send home to parents, updating them on what’s going on at school.  Also, I can see students using it to create visually-appealling reports.  What a great idea for group projects, too, where each group member writes a column.

Mixbook – I love this!  Online photo albums are a great idea.  I wish they were an option when I got married!  I can see putting my personal vacation pictures together with this resource.  And, it’d be great to use for our school’s trip week photos.  The best thing is how easy it is to share with others.

Pikistrips and Toon Doo – Both of these are comic-creating sites.  I’m not sure which is better, but I like the idea of having students create comics to illustrate mathematical concepts.  It would be neat to include a comic on a math test and ask students questions about it.

Ta-da List – I’m the queen of to-do lists, so I’ve got that under control at home.  But, this might be a neat resource for turning a grading rubric for a project into a to-do list that students can understand and use at home to track their progress.

Thing #13

I chose to watch Steven Kimmi’s presentation “Traveling through the Dark.”  His presentation appealed to me because it focused on beginning to incoporate technology into the classroom.  He is also a fifth grade teacher, which is so close to the 6th grade level I teach.  I feel like I am certainly a beginner at all of this, so I was interested to hear what he had to say.

His presentation began by describing William Stafford’s poem Traveing Through the Dark, where a man comes upon a pregnant deer while driving along a dark, narrow road.  He must decide whether to push the heap into the valley and keep driving or attempt to birth the fawn, which still lives in the dead mother’s womb.  Kimmi relates the man’s tough decision to the one all educators must make when presented with the wealth of technological opportunities out there.

He argues that ignoring the technology and choosing to teach the way we always have has terrible implications.  We will create a generation of students who are unprepared for their future.  Our students will be disengaged in the classroom.  And, education will become irrelevant to our society.  Obviously we don’t want any of those things!  So, he goes forward to suggest what we should do about all of this.

Kimmi had an aha moment during a recent spring break from school.  He felt as though his students were not engaged in his lessons, and he felt he was to blame for their disinterest in his lessons.  So, he self-prescribed some professional development.  In the year that followed, he began blogging and experimenting with other technologies.  He talked about the ways he has incorporated them into his own classroom.

He uses video in math class.  While he was very vague in describing how he accomplishes this, he did say that he and his students use video to “go over math skills” they will need by the end of the year.  He also mentioned podcasting, suggesting that is the easiest place to start.  Cell phones can be used to podcast nowadays, so he pulls his students aside one-by-one to record their portions of podcasts during class.  He emphasized the importance of establishing a support group, and he suggested trying edtechtalk.com and teachers teaching teachers.  I see this Web 2.0 family as a kind of support group.

I was disappointed that Kimmi did not give more solid examples of how he incorporates technology into his classroom so I could borrow some of his ideas.  I was pleased, however, to hear from someone who was so recently at the very same place along this journey as I am.  And, I enjoyed seeing the passion he has for what he does.  If we all had that passion and the desire to do the best for our students, the educational world would be a whole lot better off than it is.