Thing 23: reflections

This has been quite a journey! I have to say that I was a bit apprehensive about starting the 23 things. I love reading about changes in technology, but I am worried that I will make mistakes, so I don’t always try new things. But, I jumped in and began. When I made a mistake, I tried again. I learned a lot of useful skills that I will use in both my professional and personal life.

Here are my thoughts on some of the topic we covered:

I enjoyed creating this blog. I will be looking into creating a blog for next year to communicate with my parents. I am unclear on the district rules as for how much student work I can post, and how much parental involvement I can have, but I will research this over the summer and decide how to proceed

Many of my friends from Darien are using blogs to support their classroom instruction. They are linked directly to the school’s website. Some are as basic as posting daily homework while others post student work and link you to useful websites. I also explored other teachers’ websites and the age groups that they were directed at. When I mentioned what I was doing to my fourth graders, I was amazed at their response. They asked, “When can we post?”

In exploring Google Reader, I was astonished by what Google had to offer besides g-mail. Although I still find this function overwhelming, I can see myself editing the number that I subscribe to and deleting the content that I don’t need. One of the great things was exposure to new terms. I now know what the RSS symbol is and how to use it as well as many other previously unfamiliar symbols.

I have to say that the most useful blog was Mr. Skip’s. Thank you for encouraging me and showing me that this can work. Even though I have not met you, your blog has encouraged me to continue when I wasn’t sure I could finish.

I am already a member of Picassa (through Google) and Shutterfly, so I’m not sure that I will use Flickr as much because it is linked through a yahoo account. I don’t know if I will maintain all of these e-mail accounts, and I think the yahoo account will be the first one to be neglected. I have also created a family share site through Shutterfly, so this is interesting. I do, however, like the use of tags in Flickr, so that might be worth exploring. I also like the number of pictures I was able to find that other people shared. This is not possible through the other sites. I was even able to find my favorite beach.

I like the mashup function, and I think my students would enjoy exploring it even more than me.

I was familiar with YouTube in the past through Facebook posts from friends, but I had not spent a lot of time exploring it on my own. I thought it was mostly for silly videos that may have been funny, but were not appropriate for elementary school students. I was amazed at the number of posts that were educational! Not only have I found several that I could show students, but I have even found ones that are appropriate for my three year old. I also talked with my mother in law who is a big fan of classical music. She was able to watch opera pieces on YouTube performed by different singers.

I am still working on embedding video and getting past the ads when sharing these to students.




I enjoyed exploring Delicious, but I haven’t used it a lot yet. Maybe in the future?

Google Docs, slideshare, and some of the online productivity tools are a few of the things I introduced my husband to. I think it would be useful for his company because it is such an international company. I’m not sure how much I will use these in my classroom, though.

I did like exploring the Power Point presentations, and I am going to use some of them for social studies instruction. They were much more professional than the ones I am able to create with tools in my classroom, so I will try to create a few of these over the summer.

My husband introduced me to podcasts through our itouch. Some of them are offered directly through the itouch, so I started by exploring these. Then, I heard about a podcast from the International Reading Association and I joined that. These were the starting point, and then I explored many different educational offerings.

I wanted to know where this was going, so I asked around. I already knew what my students wanted: more technology and more ways to communicate with each other through the computer. I asked the high school intern if her teachers used podcasts or blogs, and she said it varied. One teacher recorded all of his lectures for students to listen to, but she said that few did. She said one teacher was very good at using technology while others didn’t even use the Smart Board except to post assignments.

I want to be one of those teachers who is innovative and allows students to express themselves in a variety of ways. I have already seen the difference it can make in small ways with special education students. I want to continue to increase these opportunities.

Thank you for this opportunity and I look forward to learning more with the Wilton technology community in the future.

Thinks 21 and 22: Wiki

I think wikis are something that I would like more staff development on. I created a site where you could look at pictures and post comments as well as adding your own. But I think this would be similar to flickr, so I want to try other options with this. How are wikis similar and different to blogs? It's great to see all of the new options that we have on the internet, but I wonder which ones will be next. I will continue to take the staff development offered, and I thank Matt for offering so many new options. This has been a good experience for me because it is self guided.