Podcast Reflection #3: Tech Chick Tips

I listened to the podcast of the "Tech Chick Tips"  by Anna and Helen, two teachers from Texas. 
This was their 80th episode. Their first topic was about websites that had great calendar resources. One website they mentioned is makeuseof.com, this link will take you to the website that they talk about in the podcast. They mention resources on the website such as bighugelabs that allows you to easily make calendars using pics from flickr or facebook. Other resources for calendars they mention are blogguidebook that has a really cool colorful option for a calendar. If you're looking for a small calendar check out grafish - they have an ultra small calendar.  


The next thing they talked about was using Video through Google Docs, the girls mention that it lets you embed video like youtube, and if you make slideshows, the videos are easy to use with your presentation. 


If you're technologically challenged, or just want some help with making videos, http://vimeo.com/videoschool. Anna and Helen talk about how you can use this to publish and embed videos as well, and they are also lesson on lighting and camera gear, how to shoot, how to edit, and DIY videos on how to set things up. 
-They also mentioned how it would be a fun idea to let kids use the website to learn the basics of videography, it's becoming easier and easier to produce videos these days so it is becoming important that students know how to use technology. 


Something interesting they mention is the Mac App Store   , it works like the itunes store according to the girls and when you download things, they will tell you when there is an update - not unlike when a person downloads things from itunes. 


A resource that i'm happy they talked about is Tagxedo since we just dealt with this for our assignment for this week. Let me just say, I LOVE Tagxedo, it is a great resource! I mentioned it a bit in my prior reflection, it is a site in which you can put in the URL for a website and make a word cloud out of the words on the site, or type in your own words. The cool thing is though, they have tons of shapes to choose to put your words into... Anything from stars and squirrels, to music notes, and trees. You can even choose words such as "Love" and make your tagxedo appear in the shape of the word Love. Another cool thing is when you hover your mouse over a word within the Tagxedo, the words get bigger and are emphasized. 


One more resource that sounded really cool was knowword, a fun game for students that is "game of quick thinking, smart decisions, and smart words, there is a 1 min time limit, the definition of the word is listed and the first letter of the word. You have to guess the word and then type the word and submit it. The best part is you can play the game without ever signing up. Anna and Helen recommend it saying "it’s a great filler game". 


Overall these "tech chicks" offered some great resources in a fun and spunky way. Though it's just a podcast, you definitely get vibes of their quirky personalities and tell that they love technology. Annnd they mentioned they especially like it when people like their facebook version of their site, if you have a facebook account just look up "Tech Chick Tips" and like them! :) I know I did! 

Reflection: Using Wordle and Tagxedo in the Classroom

Both the applications, Wordle and Tagxedo, allow the user to compile a list of words and make a word cloud out of them. I found both applications to be a ton of fun! At first I though I liked Wordle best because it was the first one that I tried. However, after trying out Tagxedo and seeing all the fun shapes you can put your words in, I realized it is more elaborate. With Tagxedo you can even type in a URL and the application will create a word cloud with the words off of the website which is what I did with the image below. 

The image below this one, is another example of wordle. I have previously posted on this blog about this application and used it again for my ED Tech class: 

After using both applications I definitely think there are ways this could be used in the classroom. Wordle can be used to type in words about various subjects you are teaching or perhaps a unit your are covering such as the rainforest. You could type in words that relate to the rainforest and it will make a word cloud of out them for you. Or if you wanted to get really creative, you could use tagxedo and choose the shape of a cloud that is raining for this word cloud and then type in all your words. I think that would be a fun way to use these applications. Other ways I saw that are possible, especially with Tagxedo is using the clouds that are in shapes of famous historical people and brainstorming words that described them and making a word cloud. Also, listed on DED 318's Website for this week were some ideas that I thought were fun. 

Various ideas include: 

-Students could use wordle to do an "About Me" activity and pick words that describe them, not unlike the activity we just did for our Ed Tech class with wordle (my example is above). 

-Another idea I thought was fun was having various words about a book listed and having the students guess which book it was talking about. 

-If you are dealing with older students you could use it to list various criteria required for essays and such. 

-Make Wordles of famous speeches. 

-Students could make wordles of the week's vocabulary, or vocabulary for a book that they are reading for your class.

-Wordles about popular holidays

-Make a wordle with all the names of your students and post it on the wall of your classroom

-Other fun ideas I found on our DED 318 Website include:

Guess the Wordle  which is a fun way to get your students involved by looking at wordles and guessing the relationship of the words listed. 

and some of the ideas I got were off of this slideshow 50 Ways to use Wordle in the classroom

Overall, I've found that wordle and tagxedo are great resources for my future classroom. 

Wordle!

Our teacher mentioned in class today to come up with 20-30 words that we feel describe ourselves and that we were going to make a "wordle" of them during our next class period. A wordle is a colorful combination of different words here is a link to get you started http://www.wordle.net/

Well.... long story short I have heard of a wordle, one of my teachers made one for us in a class last semester and it looked like a lot of fun - sooo I went ahead and made one! Here it is!

Reflection 2: CDK’s Education Technology Place

Ok, so here is the second reflection of the week. For our educational technology class we had to dig around on our teacher's website http://www.cyndidannerkuhn.info/CDK/Home.html and write a reflection on some things or resources that we found there so here goes:

To start off with, before I even enrolled in this class, I heard about Cyndi Danner-Kuhn and her love for technology through a cousin of mine. She’s employed in one of the Junction City elementary schools and Cyndi did a presentation there. Over Christmas break I saw my cousin and she told me to look up Cyndi's website and various things she talked about. So, I have viewed CDK's website prior to “exploring” it. One of the things my cousin said Cyndi stressed was the use of “delicious” to create a way to view your bookmarks off of any computer and I’m sure we’ll get to that in class, but it seemed to me like a really cool idea.

            Re-browsing through her website, I see some familiar links and such. I am friends with some people that took your class last semester and enjoyed looking at their blogs, one resource that I see they must’ve gotten off your website is Tech Chick Tips. This resource is a podcast that has two Texas teachers sharing what they love and how to use bits of technology. I find them kind of fun and interesting to listen to.

            One resource I newly discovered while browsing is www.dropmocks.com

This website is really cool, and I can use it in the future to make quick presentations of pictures or images I need to show my class. All I have to do is drag and drop and it’s so much simpler than loading pictures into a powerpoint.

            Another cool resource I discovered through the “Langwitches” Blog is edu.glogster.com, which is a way to create online multimedia posters and share them. I thought this was really cool! I remember back to middle school language arts and we had to make posters for several things, but never got to use any program as cool as this! The project is then entitled a “Glog”. I feel like this will be a more relevant way for me to let my students make posters if they have to, than the traditional poster board and marker way. Glogster even allows a person to put sound on their poster, thereby enriching the full multimedia experience and I think it’s really cool! Although you have to pay for a licensed copy of it, that is the only downfall that I see at the moment. It’s not a free resource, bummer.

            Something I found funny was “creative excuses NOT to use technology”. Some of those excuses are entertaining to say the least, some are pathetic. Reflecting on my schooling, I KNOW technology makes a difference and is beneficial to the classroom. I’ve been using a Mac since 6^th grade, (I went to school at Stafford Jr/Sr High School) and I’m loving it! It makes doing homework better, faster, and easier. I can take it to class and take notes on it, do powerpoints for projects,  use Imovie for projects. Or take advantage of all the online resources that I could possibly need. I love that this website has people giving excuses they heard for not including technology time, personally though, I think they’re scared or unfamiliar. This could be helped by technology presentations within their school districts, not unlike the presentation you did in Junction City at my cousin’s school.

            Two last random reflections, I noticed that “animoto” and “scribd” are both listed and good resources for teachers to have. I have used both of these websites before and concur! Animoto makes videos really fast and it’s really simple to use. Whereas Scribd is an easy way to share documents. I could easily use this with my students, and have them have scribd accounts and share assignments with them maybe, or things that I need them to read online, that way their parents see it and it doesn’t get lost in a bookbag. As a result, both sites are really great.

            Overall there are a great deal of resources and interesting things on her webpage, I wish I had the time to sit down and look at each one and dig deeper into every blog. However the ones I did choose to look into are great, and very interesting.  I feel like I’ve learned a lot and class has barely began :) 

How to add a cute blog background!

For those students that are in my Educational Technology class and were wondering how I got my cute background, or how to create a fun background that is different than the templates that blogger provides, here is your answer!

This link provides a pretty good explanation of how to do this http://www.ehow.com/how_4563630_add-cute-background-blogger-blog.html

Here are some websites that provide free blog backgrounds:

http://shabbyblogs.com/?page_id=108&val=120

http://thecutestblogontheblock.com/free/free-backgrounds.html


If you are still having trouble and can't figure it out, comment on this post and I'll see what I can do :)

Reflection 1: Technology Bits, Bytes & Nibbles

So folks, I observed my educational tech teacher's blog, Technology Bits, Bytes and Nibbles for class and I found a lot of interesting and helpful things and this is my reflection :)

The first story I read written by Kevin Jarrett and about implementing digital cameras in the classroom. While some may think this means letting a teacher photograph her kids doing various activities, this is wrong. During this activity, the teacher allowed groups of students to have one camera per group and gave them note cards of things in the classroom to take pictures of. The students really enjoyed this activity and had a lot of fun.

I learned that it is possible to give young children cameras and use them in a lesson, I’d never really thought about doing that before. As a result, I think it could be a fun activity that I could use in my future classroom for my students. There were also follow up lessons after the “Photo Scavenger Hunt” that tied it all together. The teacher explained the use of various parts of the camera, and also made jigsaw puzzles out of the pictures they had taken via a website (I had never heard of! It’s kind of neat!
www.jigsawplanet.com. After this, the teacher had a powerpoint template that the students were to complete. They had to label what the various pictures of the items were, and it was basically a “keyboard exercise” he said.
I all of this is a great, creative way to use technology in the classroom. I love technology myself, but I’m not sure how to relate it for little kids/students so they will be accustomed to it. This activity allows them to directly work with digital photography, the Internet, as well as powerpoint. Three key things they are going to have to know how to use in the future.
This will impact my teaching because it gives me the confidence to try small things like this with my students. It also changed my mind about allowing students to handle things like cameras and deal with the internet at such a young age. Both of these activities, I was a bit hesitant about because my mom is a kindergarten teacher and I know how those kids are, but it turns out the kids love them! And it’s great technological interaction for them!

I did some digging around on this guy’s blog and found a really cool resource called www.superteachertools.com This site is really technologically savvy! When you arrive on the site there is a place at the bottom to follow it on facebook, which is a good way for me to stay connected with it. Also, it allows you to see who is on the website and their various locations which I thought was cool.
What this site does, it allows you to easily make classroom review games such as jeopardy, match review game, who wants to be a millionaire, and board game question review. Not only does this site have review resources, it has things such as an easy way to print out a seating chart, has a group maker, random name generator as opposed to the old way of using popsicle sticks, and a counter for times when you need to countdown in the classroom.
Overall, I learned a new fun way to have students review in the classroom and discovered that it’s not as hard as I thought to come up with fun ways to review.
This site surprised me with how much it has on it! It seems to be overflowing with good ideas and things I can use. It will/would make my future teaching much easier and more fun to be around for the students. I will be giving them fun ways to review so they might actually comprehend more of the information. I know in high school we were allowed to use jeopardy to review for our biology class, and while it wasn’t a computer version, it was a lot of fun and helped me learn. So, going from prior experience, I’m guessing these games will help the students learn more as well!

Another cool resource I found on her blog was the website for   Google Science Fair. I LOVED participating in the science fair when I was younger. I was the geek that delighted in perfecting my tri-fold and everything that went with it! However our science fair was only for our middle school students, I think this is great that it allows students ages 13-18 to compete at a Global level. It will give older students the opportunity to continue doing science fair if they want to and it allows them to work in groups of 2 or 3, which is great I think. I remember doing it all myself, which I liked, but some thrive better when working in groups. So, as far as using this resource in my classroom, since I won’t be teaching this age range it really doesn’t apply to me, but I could forward this link to other teachers in my school district who do, and I could spur the movement of getting older kids involved in science fair.


So, I might be having too much fun with exploring resources listed on her blog… I found another great one. It’s called UJam and while it’s similar to Garage Band in nature I feel like it allows a little more creativity and is more user friendly. I watched the tutorial posted on her blog and I’m itching to try out this resource. I actually started out as a Music Education major here at K-State and then switched to Elementary Education, so I love anyway that music can be incorporated into the classroom. I feel like I could use the website to have my students, if old enough, either work in pairs or groups to create songs about things we’ve learned. It could be used to review a unit we’ve just covered and I could give them key vocabulary words that had to be included in their song. I think this is a way for students creativity to shine in the classroom, and still make learning fun for them.
I did try this site out personally and it seems like a lot of fun, but perhaps students need to be old enough to know how to use it, it does seem kind of complex but I enjoyed using it nonetheless.

The last article I browsed through on her blog was “Are Laptops Helping Lower Merion Students Learn?” Coming from a middle school/high school where everyone K-12 had a laptop, I firmly believe that laptops are definitely a plus in the classroom. It widens the variety of activities we were able to do, the variety of desktops, it made us mobile instead of being tied down to desktops. While some kids did get distracted as this article points out, the benefit of the laptops far outweighed the few that got distracted. And I know in my old school district, the ed tech teacher in charge started blocking non-educational websites so students didn’t have the opportunity to wander off topic during class and get on sites such as facebook, they were simply blocked.

Overall, the blog Technology Bits, Bytes, and Nibbles is great and was fun to reflect on!

Snow Snow SNOW!

Well, sadly Christmas break is about to an end. I'm kind of okay with that, and yet i'm kind of not. While I love my family, sometimes they drive me crazy, in a good way. Also, I miss my kstate friends and family up in Manhattan and i'm itching to get back to the little brown box that I live in with my roommates.

However, i'm not exactly psyched to go back to classes... the downfall of going back means that school is back in session!

But, the good news is we have one more week before that actually happens! So for the next week or so i'm going to be enjoying my last week of break here with my family.
At the moment i'm enjoying the view. I love how snow makes things look - pure,bright,clean, unblemished. I would go out and play in it, but it's freezing cold outside! So i'll just soak up the view for now.

Snow :)