Happy New School Year!

The beginning of the school year always seems to fill my mind up so much that I walk around in a haze. The haze is slowly dissipating and my mind is starting to work again! I am excited to challenge myself this year to keep using technology in my classroom. So far I have been using the Smartboard to help teach and practice math concepts and have set up reading listening centers on ipods. I also created a film with my class where each student set a goal for the year. It was a fun project which we did together on the Smartboard. It introduced my students to film-making and got them excited to be making films this year. As always I am inspired by my colleagues and other Global Learners and am looking forward to another great year!

cross posted at: http://mstaylorsthirdgradeclass.blogspot.com/

Research Writing with Podcasts

At the end of the year my students have been growing a little too comfortable with each other, me, and everything we do regularly in the classroom. The best thing to do seems to spice things up and add a little more variety to our learning! That's why I decided to have my students publish their expository paragraphs in a new way. They wrote about a topic they researched on the internet and with books. They created podcasts to publish their work. This motivated them to complete their paragraphs in a timely fashion and to do a good job with them. They loved recording their voices, even if most of them were a bit nervous at first. We used iPods with iTalks to create some voice memos. I then posted them on my website. Next we are going to listen to each podcast and the students are going to help assess each others' work using a rubric from Write Source for expository writing. I found this was an easy and fun way for students to publish their writing. Check them out on our classroom website. Does anyone have any other ideas on fun ways for students to publish writing?
lesson plan

new and improved reading centers

This is the time of year that my reading group and myself are getting a bit bored with our reading centers routine. I'd like to use this as an opportunity to spice things up a bit. Next week we are doing lesson 27 in reading. The main selection is a story about spiders. With this in mind I have downloaded some united streaming clips about spiders to download onto my set of video iPods. At one center, students will watch the clips on their iPod and then they will do a drawing of a spider and label its' different parts. I will also do a vocabulary center using the smart board and having students match vocabulary words to their definitions. I am also thinking about how to incorporate voicethread into reading centers as well. Any ideas?

153 Useful Educational iPod Resources

I’ve used my iPod to provide PowerPoints for my students. It makes for a great flash card tool. Great for first grade since I have a couple of students who need more help with sight words.

I found this article on Yahoo tech which points to a couple of other educational resources (Online Education Database and Kottke.org) and I thought I'd share it:
http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/raskin/18019

The sites they mention are:
http://oedb.org/library/beginning-online-learning/100-ways-to-use-your-ipod-to-learn-and-study-better
and
http://www.kottke.org/plus/50-ways-ipod/

This link is for some really cool podcasts on Smartboards:
http://pdtogo.com/smart/
This is a cool link too. This is one I use for keeping up on my Spanish. It's a series of free podcasts (costs if you want the transcript) called NotesInSpanish:http://www.notesinspanish.com/ Its a fun way to learn on the go. Other languages resources from OpenCulture: http://www.oculture.com/2006/10/foreign_languag.html -sadly there is nothing under Icelandic languages.
This site has tons of resources for podcasting: http://www.podcasting-tools.com/

Okay so that's more like 154 resources.
So how are you using your iPod?

crossposted on http://http://mrfishergloballearner.blogspot.com/

Photo from Louder: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hermida/390819852/

iPod as learning tool

I have used the iPod quite a bit this year. I have been experimenting a lot but not publishing much. However, I took the iPod with the microphone to our field trip the other day and published the resulting podcast on our blog. I used the field trip to reinforce a lesson on Lindamood-Bell's Visualizing and Verbalizing program. It uses structure words to prompt students to better visualize what they are reading. We have another field trip coming up. This time I think I will borrow a few more and hand them to kids to record as they go through the Colorado History Museum.

My reading group has been experimenting with recording the upcoming story and then burning it for our listening center. We have had problems staying focused long enough to have a good recording, but will keep trying.

Another thought is to use my class blog to have students reflect on what we learned this week in each subject. The iPod would be a great way for my lower students to post their reflections verbally.

Any suggestions for other uses?

IPOD Thoughts

First of all, I would like to announce that Joe and Dave are my new favorite people!
I sped home today and loaded the entire third season of The Office onto my new video iPod. Maybe, this is not exactly educational, but the goal is to get me to understand, troubleshoot, and over-all manage using this iPod as an educational tool. What better way to get started than to watching Michael's debacles?
After loading the iPod to the iTunes on my home computer, I began to wonder about sharing the iPod as a team and with our students. I currently have a shuffle and an iPod mini, all of which no longer work for me because I don't have the same computer (or I've encountered the famous Apple battery issue)
Luckily, my best friend married a network security guy who works for an internet company! After talking with him it seems like we need to make some management decisions about how we use the iPods. This iPod will now only work with the iTunes on my home computer. I can't get audio or visual files using this iPod on my new laptop. Which means, if we wanted to store content on the iPods as we shared them, we couldn't. It will only read one iTunes. However, my friend told me that if we reset the iPod each time we switch computers (or users) it will reattach itslef to the new computer. Or we can elect to use another program other than iTunes.
I'm hoping someone has some insight into how this could work and how we can manage the content that we are using on the iPods.
Also here is the wiki post on ipods: wiki iPod post.
Here is a link I stumbled across on WIKIHOW, it is a how-to on sneaking an ipod into class. It could be something to share with your class the first day of school! I think Deborah Pickering and the Vocabulary people could call it wide reading!
Check out the IPOD shared document and add your own links and advice