I don’t know about you, but from time to time I find myself un-inspired. It happens in different parts of my life and at different times of the year. It happens when so many other things are going well that I often miss it for quite some time.
I find myself in that situation right now. My family and personal life are wonderful (busy but wonderful), but I seem to be missing something professionally. Now my first thought is to blame it on those around me, but really??? In the end it’s my responsibility to find people and things that inspire me so I can inspire the children who call my classroom home for 5 hours every day.
So . . . I was reading my blogs today. I am embarrassed to say that this didn’t come from a technology blog, or an education blog, but rather from a blog about kindness. I mean . . . who doesn’t need a little more kindness in their lives, right??
Every Friday the ladies at Kind Over Matter post their “Friday’s Lovelies” They are videos and links to other wonderful places on the web. I have only recently started following this blog and LOVE it! Today they featured a video by Brene Brown that I wanted to share with you.
And I want to leave you with a question . . . how do we help to create these connected people??
So looking back I realized that I didn’t do the blog reflection for thing 5. Oooops! So that sent me back to my Google Reader. Ugg! Google reader has been the hardest part of the entire class. I just cannot seem to make time to check it out every couple of days and then when I do look at it, there are 300 new posts! Talk about overwhelming.
So I dove in tonight and the first blog I looked at was Successful Teaching. Pat Hensley writes about staying focused. She reminds us that it is important to model behavior in front of our students. She says how if you complain about being tired, staying up too late, or complain about co-workers the children see that as acceptable behavior and will copy you. It is important to teach by doing. No matter how you feel ( you may have actually stayed up too late . . .) you must give it your all every day. It will teach the children a work ethic. You must also teach the children to be team players by always helping and saying nice things about your co-workers.
I guess this goes back to my struggle with Google reader. I need to make the time to sit and skim the articles. You never know what gem you might happen upon!
So now that we have come to the end of this K12 learning 2.0 course it is time for a little reflection. I have really enjoyed the time spent creating projects with different web 2.0 tools. I have also enjoyed spending more time here, on my blog. I am not sure what I expected 10 weeks ago when we started this journey, but it has been a lot of hard work!
The goals I have for myself going into the future is to expand my PLN with m Google Reader and Twitter. I also want to work on some podcast plans this summer. We already do some work with Photostory and other programs where we record our voices, but I think we can take it to a new level with a monthly podcast. We will see!
So, I remember when I was a kid and got my first cassette player. It had a microphone built in and it was the coolest thing to record anything. It didn’t matter what we said or how silly we acted, we just liked hearing our voice on the tape. Fast forward about 25 years and now instead of recording on a cassette tape we can use programs like Audacity to record and save in a digital format. Pretty cool.
So I know what you are asking . . . what does that have to do with kindergarten? Well, we liked to hear our voice and kids today are no different. They think it is cool to hear themselves on the computer. As a teacher if I can “hook” the kids into paying attention than I can get a lot more information across. So why not let them teach with a podcast??
We have used podcasts as end of unit projects to show how much information we have learned. In this case, I had the kids write in their journal one morning. The only prompt I gave them was that they had to write about Mom. Pretty easy stuff for a 5/6 year old. They looooovvvve Mom at that age! Then we went into the lab and I introduced them to Audacity. I showed them what their voice print looked like and how it was different if you were loud or soft. We played with it a little and then we recorded our journal entries. We tweeked the final product a little to make sure we didn’t have a bunch of dead air between kids and we turned it into an MP3 file.
I posted this podcast on my classroom blog as well as on Podbean.com, which is a podcast sharing site.
Some other ideas for podcasts include book reviews, math concepts, character traits, etc. While I was working on this project I was thinking of how cool it would be to do a podcast each month during the school year based on the character trait we are currently working on. We use a program based on the Fruits of the Spirit. I will have to work on that for next year!
Click the Mothers day link below and listen to the voices of some sweet kids who love their moms!
Google reader will be the death of me!!!!! So I keep telling myself that I am going to catch up on all those blog posts that I have not been reading. See I am training for my first marathon and by the time I get my runs in I am too tired to sit in from of the computer for very long!
I did see something that caught my eye today. It said why kindergartners were smarter than MBA students! Now that I like to hear!! Of course now that I sit down to write this post, I cannot find the blog entry and who wrote it!!! Ahhhhhhh!
Guess I will have to go and look for something else to write about . . . .
I was introduced to the classroom 2.0 Ning a couple of years ago and I am sad to say that I have not been a very active contributor. Like so many things I was really excited in the beginning and joined groups and read what other people wrote etc. Then summer came, or my kids lives got busy and I skipped a day, then another day . . . You see where this is going.
I like the idea behind social networking for teachers. Teaching can be very isolating at times. It is hard to get out and talk to other people who can give you new enthusiasm for what you do every day. But just like everything else in life, it is hard to make new, healthy habbits. We use to have a wonderful tech integrator (we still have a wonderful tech integrator!!) who really challenged us to get out in the PLN world and be involved with our colleagues. I am afraid that since she is no longer with our school my enthusiasm has dwindled. It is easier to go across the hall to my favorite ex-kindergarten teachers and bounce ideas off of them!
For this “thing” I joined the Global Education Collaborative. I am sure you have already read how I was one of our traveling teachers for the global studies program this school year. So this one sounded like something I would be interested in. I am waiting for my membership to be approved, but I will let you know how it goes!
So I got behind on this class and am trying to catch up today, in case you didn’t notice. so now that I am on my 6th thing for the day I am out of cute ways to begin my blog post. Pageflakes is like iGoogle, but you can share it. It would be a way to keep yourself organized with all the different tools you use in your classroom all in one place.
Like so many web tools, the application in my grade level would be a little tricky. I could be used as a communication tool with the parents, maybe keeping them up to date on curriculum and classroom goings-on. It would be different than my classroom blog which we use to publish student projects and keep everyone up to date.
Sorry this one isn’t very insightful! Must be time for lunch and a break from the computer!!
Last October, I had the opportunity to travel to Italy as part of our global studies program. Myself and another teacher spent 10 days traveling the country and we took our school “with us” by using a blog and Skype. Now I know what you are thinking, how does that relate to Google Docs?? Well, we had a bunch of research to do before we left on the trip. There were 2 of us traveling and we both needed access to the research so we didn’t duplicate effort and we also needed to have access to it while we were gone. So we used Google docs to create our documents and we shared them with each other. That way we could both add information on each of the cities we would be visiting and we would be able to view them no matter what computer we used while we were traveling!
I have to say, it worked really well. When we were in Assisi there was no internet connection at the hotel and the only place we could get online was an internet café and you had to use their computers! We would have been sunk if we used anything else!
I think there are endless uses for Google Docs when it comes to collaboration. You can share lesson plans with your team using the word processing or the spreadsheet program. What about presentations?? I know at my school when you attend a professional development session you have to come back and present to the faculty. This would be a great way to create a presentation that everyone could contribute too as well as have an easy way to share it at the meeting.
I know that in many school Youtube is a bad word, but if used responsibly it is an interesting tool. Here is an example: every year around Christmas we learn about holiday traditions from around the world. Now we have access to www.UnitedStreaming.com which is a pay site from Discovery, so we have access to lots of downloadable videos to enhance our learning. But if that was not the case, I found a video on Youtube that tells about Christmas in different parts of Italy. This would show the kids some of the different ways people celebrate without listening to me all the time!!
There is also www.teachertube.com, but I find this site less useful. There are lots of ads and I can never find what I am looking for on this site.
To me podcasting falls into the same category as my Google Reader. It is a great idea and I could learn lots from it, but making the time to subscribe and download is a little beyond my schedules constraints right now.
I can see the benefits of podcasting for both personal growth and professional learning. You can tailor your learning to exactly what you need. I even have a couple of subscriptions for running in my iTunes right now.
I have used podcasting as a end of unit project in kindergarten. For example, we just finished a unit on Italy. Now the entire grade level is working on a podcast (one for each class) to show all the different things we have learned about the country of Italy. When we are finished, we will publish the podcast on our classroom blog. I like podcasts for this type of project because the kids have the opportunity to work on their reading fluency. It is good for them to hear themselves read their fact and compare how they read to how another person reads. Plus they think it is really cool to hear their voice!
