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This article came across my twitter.  It’s an interesting article about how one non-profit, Room to Read, is reaching its goals with technology.

This article came across my Reader today and loved the visualization…just thought I’d share:

Budget Plannerfrom Mint.com

This is just a little note expressing how useful the various Google features have been for me in both my personal and professional life. I have been using many of them since we learned about them in class and thought I would do just a little spotlight on how they’ve helped me.

Docs:

• truly a lifesaver
• Use this for class documents, saving them on Google rather than on a zip drive that may end up who knows where or in an email
• Use them at work for my boss and I to keep track of our on-call nanny schedules (we have about 500 on-call nanny hours per month and we use this to track which nanny is with which family when and to verify billing; since families are constantly scheduling new dates this is a great way for us to both have the most up-to-date schedule)

Reader:

• personal and professional
• I read a lot and this has saved me so much time!  I don’t have to check blogs or sites for new articles, it just comes straight to me

Calendar:

• You can upload your Outlook calendar and view it from home!  This is great for me because I always forget what’s on my work calendar when I’m at home
• I can also have both work and personal in one calendar
• I can make work event public so my boss can see when I have meetings and/or class – this is helpful if she’s scheduling a meeting for me, I’m not currently available, and she needs to know when to schedule.

Shopping:

• sort of wish I had never learned about this as I’m tempted by it all the time now
• It’s been really helpful as I’m price shopping for several items for the house like a bookshelf and end-of-bed storage bench
• I don’t have time to drive around and compare prices or how things look – in fact most of the shopping I do is online since I can’t do it during the work day and we travel a lot on the weekends

Gmail:

• Have been a Gmail user for years now – I love how it saves replies as conversations all together

Groups:

• I set one of these up for the bridesmaids for the wedding I’m in this summer…it’s been really helpful for planning.

To sum things up, thank you Google…and thank you Tom for showing me how to use Google more than just to search!

I created this lesson teach homophones to “my” third grade class.

Homophone Lesson Plan

Here’s the accompanying presentation:
Homophones

I have researched and explored OpenCourseware (OCW), particularly the MIT site but also the Yale site, and SecondLife.

OpenCourseware is something that would be really helpful to me as a teacher, however, I’m not sure how directly helpful it would be for my students. It’s a great way for me to build my background knowledge about a particular subject, stay up to date on various topics, and learn interesting facts which can enrich my lessons. Many of the courses are much more in depth than early elementary students would need to know. Still, I think there are definitely bits that could be helpful and ways that it would strengthen my teaching. For example, many of the Writing courses can provide me with insight which will help me give better feedback and better advice to my young writers. Being a teacher is about being a lifelong learner. OCW is a great way to keep learning on a time-frame that works, without the cost.

SecondLife is more on the edge than OCW. I actually created a SecondLife “resident” and took the QuickStart tour. Honestly, I may delete because it seems to take a very long time to load and I feel like it’s going to slow my laptop down (you have to download their special SecondLife program files). It seems interested and I did enjoy exploring some of the Destinations. I don’t know how much it would enrich my knowledge, but I think it could make a positive impact on certain lessons. It’s exciting that you could take SecondLife field trips or set up a SecondLife recreation of an historical time/place like the Jamestown Colony. SecondLife seems like something that would capture the interest of students. Some of them may even use SecondLife in their personal time. I like that it can put the students in a real space to help them visualize a place we can’t actually go. However, creating a field trip location, like a Jamestown Colony, would be incredibly time consuming and somewhat expensive for me to pay out of pocket. I likely won’t use SecondLife in my early elementary classroom since there is an age requirement (13 is the youngest for Teen SecondLife). I may be able to serve as a tour guide for destinations but that doesn’t seem as engaging as letting the students explore for themselves. I’m interested in finding out more but I think SecondLife may be best for Middle or High School teachers.

Since our last class, I have been following several people with education related focuses on twitter. I had a twitter account set up about a month ago (for work purposes) so there are a couple people that I have been following longer. Here’s who I’ve been following:
CollegiateRVA
ScienceMusofVA
urichmond
WorldEd
preschoolers
DEN
NytEducation
stewardschool
HenricoSchools
LitPartNYC
LiteracySpeaks
Lemons4Literacy
ReadingHorizons
FirstBook
teachermagazine

By and large, I think that twitter is more of a marketing tool than a way to get really great ideas about teaching. Maybe I’m following the wrong people? The tweets I enjoyed reading most were links to articles, mostly posted by the literacy related twitter-ers. I think in that aspect, it could be a valuable resource. However, it seems like most of them are just linking to things that are out there on other major sites. For me, I think that Google Reader is a more valuable resource and is much easier for me to navigate.

Professionally, I use twitter for work. We use it as as marketing tool but also try to post things that are helpful for parents. Most of our followers are media contacts or vendors. For us, this seems to be helpful in terms of getting our name, services, and community events out but I’m not really sure. I didn’t engage any of the educational focused twitter-ers since most of them are large non-profits rather than actual teachers.

After seeing the TweetDeck in class, I did set that up. It definitely made following multiple people much easier. I suggest it to anyone that’s following more than just a couple people. It makes putting out your own tweets easier too…very user friendly.

Overall, since the most value I got from following people was linking to articles I’m not sure what the benefit of twitter is over a variety of other sources for information. Following people on twitter also makes me feel a little bit like a creepy voyeur…it gets a little bit addictive too. But if it turns out to be a really valuable resource for information I wouldn’t have found otherwise, I’ll eat my words.

According to VA SOL 2.6:
The student will investigate and understand basic types, changes, and patterns of weather. Key concepts include:
a) temperature, wind, precipitation, drought, flood, and storms; and
b) the uses and importance of measuring and recording weather data.

So…I decided that a fun way for my 2nd graders to do this would be to have a rain gauge, measure and record daily rainfall, and produce a visualization that helps the students easily process this data.  I used Many Eyes to make the data visualization

Here’s an example of a bar graph with data I collected* from April 2009:

Here’s another example with a bubble chart with data I collected* from May 2009:

The bubble chart is a little confusing for rainfall because it leaves out the days (quite a few) when the rainfall was zero, but does show the great amounts well for comparison purposes.

*by collected I mean that I loosely based this on the Farmer’s Almanac for Richmond in April and May 2009. It is not the same data but it is similar to the actual rainfall data.

So…I’ve thought a lot about a way that I would use video editing/creation in a meaningful way in my class.  I hope to either teach early elementary or work as a reading specialist.  I very much welcome feedback and ideas on how to incorporate video editing into my class so that I’m not just doing it for the sake of the assignment or to show that I can edit a video.

What I’m posting is not an edited video; it’s a video I think the students would enjoy that I would use in class, how I would use it, and an idea for how I would edit it that I am wondering if you all think would work.

I would frequently stop the video (at pre-selected spots) and get the students to make predictions about what is going to happen next, like I could do with a story in a book. At the end of the video, I would have the students Think-Pair-Share with a partner to retell the story. Then, I would pull out individual freeze frame images and have the students sub-title the video. Each pair would be in charge of the narrated sub-title of one frame. Then we put them together and could “read” the freeze frames with sub-titles like we would a book with illustrations. We could discuss the story and the narration they created and then watch the movie straight through.

BIG CATCH MOVIE from Moles Merlo on Vimeo.

Is this a good plan for effectively using video in an edited way in a 2nd grade class?

I found this ad on adsoftheworld.com.  I thought it would be really great to use in my early elementary class (maybe 2nd grade) for a comparing perspectives exercise.  We would either re-read Little Red Riding Hood, paying attention to the pictures, or just do a picture walk through and have them tell me the story as they remember it.  Then I would put up the ad and have them talk about what’s different and what would have to happen for this illustration to exist in the story.  We would probably then do a creative writing or dictation exercise to get them thinking about their own variations on the Little Red Riding Hood story.

There are also some follow-up ads (Hansel and Gretel and Goldilocks) that play on the fairy tale theme that could be used in subsequent comparing perspectives lessons.

A draft of my class Newsletter which can also be seen below:
Draft Newsletter

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