TOOL #11

OMG I feel sooooo relieved that I was able to complete these activities and successfully passed the test!   My favorite tools that I learned about are blogs because I would like to incorportate them in my book clubs.    By completing this staff development and watching my own two children use their itouches and computers this summer, I will admit that I do have a new appreciation for how children learn and pay better attention to their learning when they are using a form or technology.  They seem to engage longer and come up with great ideas to share their knowledge.  As a result, I will certianly be more open minded when I ask students to present information to the class.  And it is my understanding that the group of students coming into 5th grade will have very strong technolgy skills to teach me a few more tricks!  I think the most unexpected outcome for me was realizing my lack of knowledge and my high level of frustration I felt when I first started this journey.  However, I feel much more confident that I can try something new even if it is as simple as help my eight year old set-up his new itouch accounts.  :-)

TOOL #10

Three things I want my students to know about digital citizenship is (1) make sure they do not hack into eachother's work even if it is their "friend's" work.  They should never share their personal logins with friends because they never know who might get access and use it in an inapprorpiate way.  (2) They should never post something on an email, video, or other electronic form that they wouldn't want their teacher or parent to see.  I am shocked that people feel it is ok to say rude & offensive comments through blogs that can ultimately be traced back to them.  Cyber bullying is just as bad as face-to-face bullying!  (3) In an age where information is so accessable, they need to understand that copying and pasting text is easily traceable through the web and should never be done.  As a matter of fact, I think it is a good idea to teach students an actual lesson on how to take information from a paragraph in a book or on a website and change it into their own words.  AND ask.com is not a credible resource to use for a research project.

I LOVE how Brainpop has a digital citizenship video for kids to see.  I also like reviewing digital citizenship every time we start a new project in the computer lab or library with Karen.  Plus, I have even resorted to pulling out the Elementary Student Handbook to show a student the Code of Conduct so he could see how his inappropriate use of the school computers could result in disciplinary action.  Perhaps this is an area we should address this year with parents in our Bck to School slideshow and periodically in our gradelevel emails.

TOOL #9

I think it is a silly question to ask why it is important to tie technology to the objective.  If a teacher is asking students to do a task or learn a skill, there needs to be a reason for it (a.k.a. objective).  There are too many aps on the itouch that claim to be educational, yet really don't require any cognitive actions.  So that connects to the second question about why hold students accountable for activities they do in centers.  Today's 5th grade students are savvy enough to get out of doing work or looking like they are busy while playing, so that is just one more reason to make sure they are accountable for their learning while they have fun. 

I always have thought that rubrics were the best way to assess center work but this year I want to try to do menus like the math teachers did last year.  Judy and I already discussed how we can use them in literacy centers.  When I was a math teacher, practing skills and problem solving in centers was easy to create an answer she I could check later, but with literacy activities creating an "answer sheet" is not easy and definitely not as fun.

I checked out several different websites listed on the 11 tools lists like http://www.learninggamesforkids.com/, but all of the capital matching and speling activites seemed too easy for my students so I am still looking for ideas.  The great thing about teaching 5th grade is that I an actually assign my students to surf the web and give me one or two ideasfor content related cites that I can then post for my students to do as homework or in centers. 

I did find some cool aps to add to the ipads on a cite called http://www.tabletpcreview.com/.  For example, here is one of the aps described below that looks perfect for us to use in the spring.

Civil War: America's Epic Struggle ($4.99)

History is one relatively under-served area in the App Store, though MultiEducator is aiming to change that with a large variety of apps that include a wealth of information about various periods in history. One of the first is Civil War: America's Epic Struggle and it does contain a great deal of material, from maps and photos to summaries of key battles and biographies of famous generals on both sides of the conflict.

The sidebar on the left organizes the information into categories, and a search bar at the top helps you to find what you're looking for fast. I found everything to be well organized, and the articles are interesting and informative. The rather text-heavy app is livened up by timelines, photos, multimedia presentations, and even recordings of music made popular during the Civil War.