Fine Tech in the Classroom

Today I conducted two sessions at our statewide Alabama Association for Gifted Children’s Conference.  I had a great time teaching my colleagues in using Windows Movie Maker and blogging.  One session was called The Age of YouTube.   The description was - Students can use the Windows Movie Maker program to capture video, images, and audio clips, which they can then edit and arrange into their very own movie and even upload them to TeacherTube to share with others!  I wanted to get them to see the importance of digital storytelling.

I could not help but to include Discovery Streaming in my session.  We ended up talking more about what was available to include in a Movie Maker from DS than how to create a movie maker.  I believe I got a few more followers of Discovery Streaming (through APTPLUS.ORG) today.

I finally used my eBeam with my students today.  Mind you - I teach 4th grade gifted in an urban school - so they can be easily impressed.  I hooked up my laptop and projector and connected the eBeam - magic!!!  First, I had a tour set up on Google Earth (which none of them had ever seen) and they were so hooked.  When I went up to the board and touched it to start and stop - they wanted to know how I did that.  Then I pulled up a doc and drew on it and changed the color and then highlighted with the stylus - it is so cool.  I have not used a whiteboard before - we have none in our school -so this was new for all us.  I have a lot to learn still on operating this but —- Kudos to eBeam.

I am so excited!  My eBeam has been delivered.  Each year I try to purchase a new piece of technology for my classroom.  Because I’m not in a Title I school (even though I teach children from other Title I schools), there is not money for the school to purchase new technologies.  The school district also has been leaving it up to the individual schools to come up with the money for these technologies.  Well, if you are in a lower middle class socioeconomic school, the money is just not there from the parents.  So, because of this, and a generous hubby, I bought it myself.  Anyway, I digress.

I chose an eBeam over a SMART board because I can move it around.  It’s portable and works on any white surface - even the wall.  I am fortunate to have a white dry erase board to project on in my classroom.  If I get moved to another classroom (which happens yearly) I can easily take it with me.  When I do demonstration lessons at other locations, it can easily travel with me.  I can’t wait for the students to see it in action.

Maybe everyone has seen this site but it’s new to me.  I got this from one of my online gifted colleagues.  I plan to use Wordle the first day of class when we go to the computer lab.  My plan is to have the students describe themselves using adjectives and put it into a “wordle.”  This should be fun.

I just love Google’s Picasa.  Posting my vacation pictures last night, I realized that you can embed your pictures into a slide show into your web page.  It was easy using my Edublogs site and Picasa.  Picasa gives you the code after you upload to the Picasa Web Album.

I stumbled across this web site:  http://windows.about.com/od/shortcuts/tp/windows-keyboard-shortcuts.htm

I’ve used most of these shortcuts for years, but I’m glad that I have found an easy to read page to put in my homepage links.  The about.com folks always have great articles.  I just wish they didn’t have those irritating pop-ups.

Social networking is here to stay and I believe as educators and parents that we must learn all we can about them and be assured that our children are being involved in a responsible mannner. Click here for an excellent article and suggestions for parents.Some guidelines I think are important are:
*Take extra steps to protect younger kids. Keep the computer in an open area like the kitchen or family room, so you can keep an eye on what your kids are doing online. Use the Internet with them to help develop safe surfing habits. Consider taking advantage of parental control features on some operating systems that let you manage your kids’ computer use, including what sites they can visit, whether they can download items, or what time of day they can be online.
*Go where your kids go online. Sign up for — and use — the social networking spaces that your kids visit. Let them know that you’re there, and help teach them how to act as they socialize online.
*Review your child’s friends list. You may want to limit your child’s online “friends” to people your child actually knows and is friendly with in real life.
Be assured that when your child is in my class, I am supervising what they are doing.
Some sites I have checked out and are designed for pre-teens are as follows. Join them yourself, but do let them know you are a parent.
Barbie Girls
Millsberry This is great and the students have to go to games to learn in order to earn points.
Imbee This is a site we will probably use in our class.
Whyville
Club Penguin This is produced by the Disney Company.

I recently wrote a proposal to donorschoose.org to hopefully get funded the cost of 10 digital cameras.  My project will be called “Teach Me About My Past.”  I teach in Birmingham, which has a rich civil rights history, but many of those leaders of the 50’s and 60’s will no longer be with us.  I want my students to be able to talk and meet with the people and create a digital story about what they have learned.  Some will also have a choice of studying why the city was originally built where it is (iron ore, coal mines, etc.) 

This idea really came to me when I overheard a student in another teacher’s classroom who were doing black history month projects mention something.  She was so excited because she had talked with her aunt who mentioned that she had been alive when Martin Luther King, Jr. was alive.  Talk about making me feel old.  But this made me think about just how young they really are and how I have taken for granted the history that has happened during my lifetime - and I don’t consider myself that old:)

Other projects I would like to try in this same genre would be to interview the WWII vets.  They are quicky passing away and we are losing that oral history.

Even though I teach gifted to 4th grade students in 16 of our schools, I am also reponsible for consultative services for my schools.  This summer I plan to create assignments from Discovery Education that are based on our Alabama Course of Study.  I’m starting with the science objectives and will go from there.  I am thrilled to see all of the choices I had on my first objective - electricity.  I plan on sharing this with all the 4th grade teachers so they can use this resource (and be able to get them involved in Discovery Education).

I have had my own URL site for my class,  that I have hosted through Dreamhost.  I also host our system’s gifted page.  Dreamhost is great because it has a lot of “one click” installs which is how I learnd to use WordPress.  Needless to say, I was pleased to see that our Discovery Educator blogs were also WordPress.  However, I have been playing around with the Edublogs.org blogs and I really like them.  I’ve created a few and like this one.  So, I tried to mirror my URL to go to this one - and it did - but - all of the pages I had created with an extension no longer worked.  Oops!  I’m trying to undo it.  I have to now get the expertise of my 28 year old son (you know - the ones that have grown up with computers and can actually still do DOS commands).  So if you click on my URL, you will see that it is broken.  C’est la vie