Jody

Group Meetings

Thursday, February 12th, 4:00-5:30 We discussed different ideas for meeting times and came up with two different schedules to accomodate our busy lives. We discussed the PDP goals and what needs to occur in order to meet these goals.

Friday, February 20th, 4:00-5:30 We first disucssed different ways of communicating with students. We have heard a lot about Twitter lately in the news and it was also mentioned in Joann's handouts. We all created an account on Twitter and tried it out ourselves. We decided that Twitter is not education based and that it would not be a good resource for kids at any age. We found it odd that people would actually follow you around to see what you were doing, and that made us feel uncomfortable. We also came across some profound language being used that we did not want students to find. I spent some time with Joann's handouts and tried different sites to remind myself what they were about and how could I implement them into my class to push students to higher order thinking.

Friday, March 6th, 8:00-1:00-Lee's House We spent a lot of time dicussing the differences between a wiki and a blog. Which one would benefit students more? Which one would work better in different class settings? How could we use them in our classrooms? What would that look like? I downloaded a trial version of onenote and we experimented with how to host a live session. We thought this would be a great idea for brainstorming and getting an agenda for meetings where everyone can personally add what they would like to talk about. Out of Joanne's book I tried some websites to see how I could use them in my classroom. I really liked the website, New York Times Learning, where I found lessons that I could use in reading, science and math. I really liked how the lessons were interdiciplinary, each subject was addressed in the lesson.

Friday, March 20th, 8:00-12:00 Marcia showed me how she is using her wiki site in reading. I liked how she set up a word of the day site where the kids keep a table of words of the day where they wrote a definition and then used the word in a sentence. Then she is going to have them do a round robin story using their words in the story. Marcia reminded us of the visual thesaurus. I want to try this on the handhelds next week in class to see if we can see if the handhelds are compatable. Cheryl showed us the Net Trekker search engine and we created accounts.

On My Own

February 13, 6:30-7:30 I downloaded skype and had an online conversation with three other cohorts from my master's program to colaboratly work on a presentation we needed to present on Tuesday.

March 12, 6:30-8:30 I spent some more time on skype talking to my cohorts about our Understanding by Design unit for my master's program. I learned how to create a group session where more than two people can join the conversation. I am wondering how this could be used in class. I'm wondering if when students are sick, they could log in from their home computers and take part in the class discussion, or just listen to what is going on in the classroom. I also think that it would be a great tool to talk to other classrooms in different states for example, what their ecosystem is like. Then we could compare/contrast it with our ecosystem here in Wyoming.

April 13, 11:00-12:30 I spent time looking at the wiki, reading what the others in the group have done and are doing now. I also updated my own wiki site.

April 15, 7:00-9:00 I again spent some time updating my wiki site as the end is near. I referenced the handouts from Joanne again and ran across some notes that I had left in the margin on somethings I wanted to try. Under audio and digital podcasts there was the Princeton Review Vocabulary Minute and the Last Minute Book Reports. I will spend some time researching these to see if they would be implementable into my classroom.

Students and Technology 2 hours || Since I really struggle with implementing our writing goals across the curriculum I have been looking for ways that I can use technology to help my students and I become better writers. Today I implemented the site from Thinkfinity called Comic Creator. I had the students write a rough draft comic about two scientists arguing about common names for organisims and scientific names for organisims and the confusion that can come about and then transfer that to the Comic Creator online. || I found out that in the writing process we need to focus on more of the rough draft and I need to give feedback on that before we transfer it onto the computer for a final draft. The comic creator was simple enough for the kids to use and figure out with very little instruction. || 1 hour || In math class today I had the students brainstorm all the terms they knew that related to measurement, and place those on index cards. I then typed the terms up onto the smart board. Once they were typed, I then could manipulate them like the words were objects and not just letters. || I learned this technique when I went to the technology conference in Casper with Cheryl this winter. || 1 hour || In math class today I had students brainstorm different measures used in the metric system and place them on index cards. I then typed them up onto the smart board and once they were typed, I then could manipulate them like the words were objects and not just letters. || Diddo || 1.5 hours || Today in my two reading classes we went onto the Fulmer public library website, with our new library cards, to learn about the process of checking out a playaway mp3 player. We also looked up choices on what books were available to check out on the mp3 players. There were only 13 titles that were available to be checked out and the students were not interested in any of them. || The students nor I knew about the availablility of audio books on mp3 players at the public library. After researching, some of the students were going to go to the library and see if they could check one of the books on a mp3 player out. || 1.5 hours || We again went onto the Fulmer public library home page in reading to research how to download eAudiobooks to student or school laptops. We first watched the tutorial on how to create our own NetLibrary account, set our account preferences, and select the language display. We also learned how to set security questions for our account. Then we watched the tutorial on how to use NetLibrary's online reader to view eContent, search within or across titles for specific content, add bookmarks and personal notes, navigate within an item and have words pronounced for us. We also watched the tutorial on how to download and listen to eAudiobooks using the NetLibrary site which showed us how to download eAudiobooks to our computer, and then transfer them to a portable device. || We found out that there are audio books available for download. The audio books are compatibile with a plethera of mp3 players and ipods. You will have the book for three weeks and can renew it if you need to. There are titles that can be downloaded to an audio device. || 1.5 hours || Today we set up our accounts on the NetLibrary website and students started to look for books that they were interested in. There seems to be a lot of books to choose from, but not a popular list among our middle school kids. My expectations is that the students will bring their technology to class and the eAudiobook will be their SSR book. || I need to spend some more time on how to navagate the NetLibrary's online reader. It is somewhat close to the Microsoft ereader that I have downloaded onto the handhelds and my laptop. I would like to have the students use the personal notes section to respond to some think along questions as they read, or listen to their books. || 1.5 hours || Today we logged into our accounts on the NetLibrary website and most of the students found a book that they wanted to download. The students that already had a book downloaded, they began listening to the book from their laptops. || Problems that we had to overcome today included incredibly slow download speed. Some students did not even get their books downloaded by the time class was over. Something we will have to plan for in the future. ||
 * February 24
 * April 6
 * April 8
 * April 15
 * April 16
 * April 17
 * April 20

Goals for 2009-2010 I was thinking that if I wrote my technology goals down, it would help me focus on what I needed to take away from this PDP. I have arrived at the realization that I can't implement everything at the same time and do a good job at it, therefor the shot at next year.
 * implement the handhelds into the reading classes using ebooks
 * implement more tools on SMART technology
 * set up four (one per quarter) interdiciplinary units organized around virtual tours