Teaching with Technology Part 3

Another great idea that I thought that would excited my kids is I could have the kids Google Earth their own address and print out the map or the interactive photo that they have online and then that could be an introduction into a family project. By this project I mean that the kids to talk about where they came from, their backgrounds, parents, siblings, grandparents names. Anything about their families that they want to share about! I think I'm on a roll with this idea.

Teaching with Technology Part 2

I thought about it and figured that I could have my students pick certain countries and ask them to find a major monument or city, something that really stands out in that country and then write about it. Also take the picture from Google Earth and put it in their essay and share it with the class!I think that would be a fun interactive idea that the kids would acutally get excited about.

Teaching with Technology Part 1

I'm interesting in teaching with Google Earth. I was reciently on it for the first time the other day and was amazed about all that you could do. First I just typed in my address to see if it would come out to the correct place and to my amazement it not only took me to the right place on the map but it had a live picture of my house with my car in the driveway (was concerened about why this picutre was up on the internet though). Then after I did my address I started looking around the world and I found that you can not only see pictures of major monuments but you can actually get information off of it too. How can I use that in my classroom?

KWL

I thought back and doing that KWL worksheet is a good idea and I think I'm going to have my students make one too. I think it will help because then I'll know exactly where they stand with technology and then I can get feedback from them about what they specifially want to know how to do. Also so that I can have a better sense of what kids are doing on the internet now days. I think it's going to improve their learnings because I'll be tackling on exactly what they told me that they want to learn about and as long and their learning and excited about it then that makes me happy. This way is better than the traditional ways because I'll have them do it in a google document and then all the answers will be forwareded to my email address and then while I'm trying to get feedback of what they want to learn I would have already taught them out to do something.

Classroom website

So I've now discovered how to create a real website and not just a myspace or a facebook, a real one. I had to do this project and I absolutely fell in love with it. I really think that i'm going to use it in my classroom because that way all the parents of my students won't constantly be asking me what's going on in the classroom and what day is picture day. I'm going to put in some handouts and some online tutoring websites to help my students while they're at home studying. The old way of sending out paper announcements is a thing of the past. By using technology the papers will never be lost, the parents don't have excuses about why they didn't get the paper filled out in time, and it saves trees! I'll update it every month and then my students and parents will have me in their homes now.

What I'm Learning

I'm learning in my technology class that I have a lot of catching up to do. I thought I was technically inclined but I realized that I'm not. There are so many things about the Internet and about programs that I was too scared to learn about then when I did I figured that it was easy and that really anyone could do it. I'm going to be able to use all the things that I've learned in my class in different ways. I know for sure I'm going to create a website for my students and their parents to get more familiar with me and my teachings. I'm going to use gadgets like GPS (if $ is available) to give accurate readings on where things are in the world. I'm excited about everything.

Picasa

So today we learned about something completely new and I absolutely love it. While we were working on our classroom website our teacher introduced us to Picasa, it's this program where you can edit do really cool things to your pictures from your camera. After your done editing your picture it looks as though a professional did them. You can do that color scheme, croping, black and white photos. I didn't know that this type of picture editing was available, let alone free, to the public.