When I was a little kid, there was a TV comedy series called "The double life of Henry Phyfe"(ABC,1966). In this series, the protagonist, a regular person, has this resemblance to a Russian master spy, U-31, who is run over by a car because he had not been trained on how to cross the street. The show always started on how Mr. Phyfe was convinced of impersonate U-31 "one more time" for his country, then he was trained on some activity for the mission, like skying, golfing, martial arts, dancing, etc, for which he was completely incompetent. At the end, by pure luck, he completed the mission. This show lasted only one season, it did not survive competing with "Get Smart" or "Mission Impossible", and the tapes of the show seem to be lost.
As a teacher, sometimes I feel like Mr. Phyfe: too many tools, too little time. Jing may be one of my favorite tools, if I can teach the students how to properly use it. The I-touch looks very promising, if we can find the right applications and pod-cast for them. Youtube is a personal favorite, but currently I don't let my students use it.
As an activity for my students, I'll like to have literacy circles in which several students read a book, make a summary and comment on it, and read the comments of the others, probably through wiki. Perhaps we can even use the wikis for the scientific process: each student will make a Hypothesis to predict the outcome of an experiment.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Tool#11-Tuesday night
Learning how to drive includes a lot of rules and laws, from how to park to how to be courteous on the road. Use of technology in a shared environment requires a similar set of rules.
If we are going to teach the students how to be be part of this digital society, we have to let them know and understand the following:
1) We need to be respectful of others. If I can not say something nice, it is better not to say it, specially with someone you don't know.
2) We need to be careful. Instant access to information doesn't mean access to the truth. Also, personal information shared over the Internet becomes public, anyone can see it.
3) Technology is a tool, not a goal. Having the technology doesn't make us better or smarter, but its proper use does. Communication, entertainment, learning, work, information, are things in which technology can aid. but in the end, it is people who does it all(or most of it).
If we are going to teach the students how to be be part of this digital society, we have to let them know and understand the following:
1) We need to be respectful of others. If I can not say something nice, it is better not to say it, specially with someone you don't know.
2) We need to be careful. Instant access to information doesn't mean access to the truth. Also, personal information shared over the Internet becomes public, anyone can see it.
3) Technology is a tool, not a goal. Having the technology doesn't make us better or smarter, but its proper use does. Communication, entertainment, learning, work, information, are things in which technology can aid. but in the end, it is people who does it all(or most of it).
Tool #10-Tuesday afternoon
The mobile (hand-held) entertainment seems to be all around us. Phones, electronic players and hand-held game consoles are a symbol of status. If we can find educational games and content, why not use them in the classroom.
From the applications I reviewed, I liked Ken-Ken and Sudoku(math related). The USA Factbook seems promising to study the states for 3rd grade. The NASA Lunar Electric Rover Simulator looks like a great real-life game of planetary exploration. HearPlanet may be good for the students to get information about places they have not seen.
The planets application may be good to research the planets as it is in the TEKS for 3rd grade. They can choose their favorite planet(s) and write down information in their science journal, along with a colored drawing.
From the applications I reviewed, I liked Ken-Ken and Sudoku(math related). The USA Factbook seems promising to study the states for 3rd grade. The NASA Lunar Electric Rover Simulator looks like a great real-life game of planetary exploration. HearPlanet may be good for the students to get information about places they have not seen.
The planets application may be good to research the planets as it is in the TEKS for 3rd grade. They can choose their favorite planet(s) and write down information in their science journal, along with a colored drawing.
Tool #9-Tuesday noon
The ability to manipulate the images we see in the computer, and saving them seems crucial to the communication. Jing seems like a quit way for the students to see a picture and add their comments and point out the interesting things, without the complications of a bigger program like Power Point. Given a list of words, the students may search the Internet and find "pictures" to illustrate them.
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Skype may be a little trickier to implement. I personally prefer face to face communication in the classroom, and "making a phone call" through the computer seems a bit redundant. A video conference with an author may work better, but I would have to practice before hand.
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Skype may be a little trickier to implement. I personally prefer face to face communication in the classroom, and "making a phone call" through the computer seems a bit redundant. A video conference with an author may work better, but I would have to practice before hand.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Tool #8-Saturday afternoon.
Streaming video is a wonderful tool for the the classroom. It can complement the curriculum and gives students the opportunity of see in motion what they are learning in the classroom.
One of the science objectives for 3rd grade is that forces in the Earth produce changes. That the Earth is very hot and liquid in its interior can be changeling to explain. However, volcanoes give us proof of it. Here is a video from the 2010 eruption in Iceland, that disrupted air traffic all over the world for several weeks. The photograph on the video may be a little misleading, it looks like a nuclear detonation.
Life cycles are another item that is taught in science. A video will show them as gradual changes, rather that a sequence of stages. In this video, we can see an animation of the life cycle of a frog, including female frog producing the eggs and the male fertilizing them. I am not sure appropiate for 3rd graders, but very illustrative.
One of the science objectives for 3rd grade is that forces in the Earth produce changes. That the Earth is very hot and liquid in its interior can be changeling to explain. However, volcanoes give us proof of it. Here is a video from the 2010 eruption in Iceland, that disrupted air traffic all over the world for several weeks. The photograph on the video may be a little misleading, it looks like a nuclear detonation.
Life cycles are another item that is taught in science. A video will show them as gradual changes, rather that a sequence of stages. In this video, we can see an animation of the life cycle of a frog, including female frog producing the eggs and the male fertilizing them. I am not sure appropiate for 3rd graders, but very illustrative.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Tool#7- Monday at Westwood.
One image is worth a thousand words... In our times, we live in constant exposure to electronic man-created images, so why not incorporate them into the story telling?
My experience with Photo-story was not complete. I don't have a microphone for the laptop, so I could not add a voice-over to this "movie". It is about the science unit "structures of life", in which we study the crawfish and its behavior. It is about the basics of the crawfish. I added an original score from 1966, by Lalo Schifrin. Enjoy.
Uploading the video was a bit more complicated than expected: Internet connections took like 10 minutes to upload the video, after 4 tries. Almost an hour lost in this task. It's hard to tell if this is due to the blogger, the internet connection, the wireless, etc.
My experience with Photo-story was not complete. I don't have a microphone for the laptop, so I could not add a voice-over to this "movie". It is about the science unit "structures of life", in which we study the crawfish and its behavior. It is about the basics of the crawfish. I added an original score from 1966, by Lalo Schifrin. Enjoy.
Uploading the video was a bit more complicated than expected: Internet connections took like 10 minutes to upload the video, after 4 tries. Almost an hour lost in this task. It's hard to tell if this is due to the blogger, the internet connection, the wireless, etc.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Monday night-Tool #6- Wiki-wiki.
Summaries is a tough skill for a 3rd grader. It seems that they have trouble differentiating the interesting from the important stuff. One application of the Wiki would be for the students to make a summary in teams, adding sequencing sentences to the summary and deciding what is important and what is interesting. The students can be divided in small groups, each group given a short story and the summarizing in the computer would be a center. The first student will write a couple of sentences, the second student will add a couple more, and so on. PBworks seems to have student accountability: See who changed what, and the page history lets you keep track of who contributed what.
Summaries is a tough skill for a 3rd grader. It seems that they have trouble differentiating the interesting from the important stuff. One application of the Wiki would be for the students to make a summary in teams, adding sequencing sentences to the summary and deciding what is important and what is interesting. The students can be divided in small groups, each group given a short story and the summarizing in the computer would be a center. The first student will write a couple of sentences, the second student will add a couple more, and so on. PBworks seems to have student accountability: See who changed what, and the page history lets you keep track of who contributed what.
Monday night-Tool #5- feeling lucky.
Organizing favorite websites and sharing them can be challenging. This PC holds about 50 "favorite" with various titles including "no title" . Of course you can put them in folders, but if you want a link in more than one folder, you will need to re-tag it to the other folder. And then sharing, you have to send them by e-mail to the recipient.
Using Diigo, I found this 2 sites:
http://www.mathnook.com/ (math site)
http://edudemic.com/2010/07/ten-best-podcasts-for-teachers/ (list of podcast sites).
The tags I used to locate them were "math" and "podcast".
Social bookmarking will allow several teachers to share their favorite education(and other) sites. Diigo seems to allow to create an updated account, where the students create accounts to follow the teachers bookmarks and use (and comment) on them.
Using Diigo, I found this 2 sites:
http://www.mathnook.com/ (math site)
http://edudemic.com/2010/07/ten-best-podcasts-for-teachers/ (list of podcast sites).
The tags I used to locate them were "math" and "podcast".
Social bookmarking will allow several teachers to share their favorite education(and other) sites. Diigo seems to allow to create an updated account, where the students create accounts to follow the teachers bookmarks and use (and comment) on them.
Monday Night- Tool #4
Ever since documents have been electronically handled, the issue of controlled and uncontrolled copies has been a focal point. Extending on it, the ability to share a document and have several collaborators to work on it at the same time has always been very attractive.
As a teacher, I always wanted to include a few items (translations and other documents) to the district curriculum, for other teachers to use. Google documents may be a tool to serve this purpose. As far as Google reader, it is nice to centralize all the blogs I am following on a single place. It is interesting to notice that for Google documents you only have 1 Gb of "free" storage, you have to pay for additional space.
Student use may be trickier, specially in collaborative projects. At least in 3rd grade, students are still learning how to collaborate on hands-on projects. But I am sure they can follow a teacher blog and comment on it, maybe answer simple questions. Certainly, we will have to teach them how to log-in and use the Google account.
As a teacher, I always wanted to include a few items (translations and other documents) to the district curriculum, for other teachers to use. Google documents may be a tool to serve this purpose. As far as Google reader, it is nice to centralize all the blogs I am following on a single place. It is interesting to notice that for Google documents you only have 1 Gb of "free" storage, you have to pay for additional space.
Student use may be trickier, specially in collaborative projects. At least in 3rd grade, students are still learning how to collaborate on hands-on projects. But I am sure they can follow a teacher blog and comment on it, maybe answer simple questions. Certainly, we will have to teach them how to log-in and use the Google account.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Sunday night-Tool #3
It seems that electronically uploading, posting, e-mailing, sharing, labeling and sorting pictures has become a world-wide past time. Companies that make photographic film (or cameras that use it) have been either move to the electronic media or disappearing.
For my first image generator I used from Big Huge Labs (http://bighugelabs.com/) the
Map Maker program, showing the 10 states that the 1st graders are supposed to identify.
A teacher can generate several cards(maps with one or more states highlighted)for the students to identify or list the states.
My second choice was a small slide show of landforms, for the students to watch. In the blog it would look something like this:
To access the page independently, showing the pictures bigger, so you can actually read the labels, you can follow this link:
landforms by teacherslikeus
Looking for pictures of the landforms was kind of slow, specially since if you look for "hill", you'll get pictures of planes and cars first (from Flickr images). If you want to use your own pictures, I guess you'll have to upload them to Flickr first.
For my first image generator I used from Big Huge Labs (http://bighugelabs.com/) the
Map Maker program, showing the 10 states that the 1st graders are supposed to identify.
A teacher can generate several cards(maps with one or more states highlighted)for the students to identify or list the states.
My second choice was a small slide show of landforms, for the students to watch. In the blog it would look something like this:
To access the page independently, showing the pictures bigger, so you can actually read the labels, you can follow this link:
landforms by teacherslikeus
Looking for pictures of the landforms was kind of slow, specially since if you look for "hill", you'll get pictures of planes and cars first (from Flickr images). If you want to use your own pictures, I guess you'll have to upload them to Flickr first.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Tuesday night- Tool #2
Learning communities seem like an excellent way to grow as teachers. However, the blog by itself is not a learning community, is just one of the tools that can be used in the community. How big can the community become? 10 members, 100 members, 1,000 members? How can we really get information(or help) out of it? What else can we incorporate to the learning community? Like any tool, it will take some effort to figure out the best way to use a blog to share information and learn from it.
It is interesting to note the last point in the commenting advice says to "make it easy to comment". We actually have to login in (or register) to be able to post comments in the blog. This gives certain "protection" to the learning community from unwanted comments, but I am sure it curtails a lot of "visitors" from actually commenting on the posts.
I am not sure who am I going to follow. For now, I'll follow the ones that are following me. I'll edit this post to provide the entire list.
It is interesting to note the last point in the commenting advice says to "make it easy to comment". We actually have to login in (or register) to be able to post comments in the blog. This gives certain "protection" to the learning community from unwanted comments, but I am sure it curtails a lot of "visitors" from actually commenting on the posts.
I am not sure who am I going to follow. For now, I'll follow the ones that are following me. I'll edit this post to provide the entire list.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Sunday night-Tool #1
I am looking at this blog for the first time. Not sure who is going to read this, or if it can be deleted later. Computer technology, milestone of our times, evolves quicker than the speed at which I can learn. Here we go...
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