Farewell...until next month :)

The use of digital video and media to enhance literacy learning

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I can not believe it is all finished! These five weeks sure did fly by. I can't even believe how much material we covered this summer, I do not feel as overwhelmed as I thought I would be. I think that it helped a lot that I took Curriculum Planning last semester. I remember how overwhelmed last semester, so I am very thankful that I had experience with Moodle and some of these websites.

The presentations tonight were awesome! As you can see above, my WoW (Wonder of the Web) project was on the use of Digital Video and Media to enhance literacy learning. It was a pretty open project so I decided to focus on how to make a video in an elementary school. Instead of reading books then writing up a book report students now can make a video project of what they learned in the book. They can just review or act out the book. I put up steps for how to make videos...I don't have personal experience but I have watched videos and visited websites, it is something that I look forward to doing in my classroom! Everyones topics were sites that everyone can use in their future classrooms. Everyones PowerPoint was very engaging and everyone did a great job presenting! Of course I had trouble with my microphone..but I kinda expected that. Just glad I was able to speak through Dr. Smirnova's phone :)

I will take so much out of this course. There are so many great new sites that I have learned about. I am now aware of grade books online, web 2.0, and information about Internet Safety. I learned that it is so important to use technology in literacy. There are so many sources out there that are free and fun and will keep your students entertained. I am very excited to put these into use :)

Until next semester..have a good rest of the summer!

Get your news here!

Below is the Lit Tech Sextet's Parent Newsletter made in Glogster. As you can see in many posts before this one, I used Glogster for my event poster. I am a little upset I didn't know about this sooner! I had so much fun making my event poster, so I was really happy when my group decided to use it! Unfortunately, I did not get to help create this Glog. I was stuck at work during this weeks group meeting and missed the design of it. I contributed as much information as I could before hand, but I must say, I do not think I could have done a better job! My group mates did an amazing job. Everyone in that group is so talented, I got very lucky.

I love the idea of a newsletter to parents. Communication is key between parents and students. You are teaching their child, so of course you are going to want to talk to them! Parents want to know how their child is doing, and being the teacher you are very aware of how their child is doing. Even though keeping in constant one on one contact with every single parent, twenty times a day is impossible, there are ways to make it work! Websites are a great way for parents to be able to keep up with what is going on in the classroom. I will create a website through a site such as Webs, to make sure parents are aware of homework assignments, class projects, and up to date news on events going on in the classroom. I also think its a great idea to use Glogster to create Parents Newsletter. Creating one once a month and sending them home to the student's parents are a great way to keep in contact. If parents do not have Internet access I will also make sure that I am available through phone calls, and be available for meetings. I know it is a lot of work being a teacher but I think that communication to parents is important for the student. I think that fun communication software are free programs such as Webs! It is a great way to categorize what is going on in the classroom, and is easy access for the parents. One place for all the classroom information!

Once again our collaboration on this project was amazing! Our group did a great job keeping constant contact with each other through G-mail. Corey and Kari did great jobs as co-facilitators as well! Once again using Glogster for this newsletter was the best think we could have done! It is fun and colorful and allowed the group to incorporate tons of different information. I would not change a thing for next time!

Glogster

Just keep on swimming...

As Dory says in Finding Nemo, "keep on swimming, keep on swimming..." That rings so true to this summer, Just have to keep on going and never slow down. I feel this class was perfect for the summer. I never did the whole online thing, but I am really glad I experienced it in the summer time first. I learned so much new information, but at the same time it was not overwhelming. Each week I have looked forward to what new technology will be introduced next. Before creating the Literacy 21 toolkit I never realized how many beneficial websites are available online. These benefit children so much because these are activities that could never be done without the resources the Internet has.

One great way that I got to experience all these websites was with my group, The Lit Tech Sextet. I enjoyed this group very much, I don't think I could ask for a better one! We all collaborated awesome through G-mail. We created the Literacy 21 toolkit above, along with a Powerpoint presentation, created a newsletter on Glogster. I enjoyed working with this group, and along the way learned great new websites!

Aside from my blog, I have taken a look at others as well. I visited some of my group members blogs. Jessica's blog entitled "Jessica's Blog". I have been reading Jessica's blog for the past two semesters now. Jessica's blog mirrors her personality, in a good way! I can read her blog and imagining her saying what she is writing, I think that is a way a blog should be. It reflects her personality, and I think that it is great! I also took a look at Kayleigh's blog entitled, "Learning to Teach for Tomorrow". I love all of the great images she has posted to go along with her entries. She covered every aspect of the course and did a great job communicating her thoughts on the material. I am very proud of Deanna for her blog! She was a great group member! I knew she was a little nervous about using all of the different technology but she caught on quick! My favorite entry might be her shout out to the Lit Tech Sextet ;) I browsed through other blogs and all were great. The cool thing is that even though everyone covered the same course material, everyone's blog was different! It showed their personality with the images and links. Blogging is something I have learned to love!

Can I evaluate you?

Once again I have consumed lots and lots of information over the past few days! Everything I learn in this class are topics that you can not avoid as teachers. I feel that everything I learn in this class is so important and will come in handy one day. This week reading up on assessments and rubrics and safety are for sure three things that are unavoidable as teachers. As soon as I hear the word assessments my mind goes to evaluating performance. Authentic Assessment goes hand in hand with web 2.0 in my opinion. It is obvious that as teachers you are evaluating student and their work. They aren't doing all the work for you not to notice. By having rubrics to evaluate their performance, the students are aware of what is expected of them. At least it is one of the ways. Traditional Assessment, with the reading from the textbook, write an essay about what you read, and then let me give you a multiple choice test to make sure you understood what you read, does not interest students anymore. Traditional Assessment is no longer in the question if you want to lead a productive, fun, yet educational classroom. Students need authentic assessment to keep engaged in their work. As teachers we are preparing students to go into the "real world". They are going to need to learn how to do tasks which will make them productive citizens. To learn these tasks they need fun! Of course standards can not be forgotten, so you have to create tasks around these standards. For example, Dr. Smirnova gave us a website to read up on assessments,
one of the examples within the website is a lesson teachers gave to their elementary students about fairy tales. They have the students think of fairy tales, something they are interested in, and incorporate it into the standards. One example, is to write a letter to someone in a fairytale from another character in the story. It incorporates the standards while making them feel like they are not forced to do something boring.
Rubrics are obviously very important parts to assessments. You need to evaluate students, obviously is an important part of teaching. There are so many different rubrics for every type of activity, including web 2.0 activities such as Glogster.
Here is a rubric I created from Rubistar.

Making A Collage : Who you are!

Teacher Name: Ms. Lease


Student Name: __________________________________

CATEGORY	4-Excellent	3-Very Good	2-Good	1-Poor
Quality of Construction	The collage shows considerable attention to construction. The items are neatly trimmed. All items are carefully and securely attached to the backing. There are no stray marks, smudges or glue stains. Nothing is hanging over the edges.	The collage shows attention to construction. The items are neatly trimmed. All items are carefully and securely attached to the backing. A few barely noticeable stray marks, smudges or glue stains are present. Nothing is hanging over the edges.	The collage shows some attention to construction. Most items are neatly trimmed. All items are securely attached to the backing. A few barely noticeable stray marks, smudges or glue stains are present. Nothing is hanging over the edges.	The collage was put together sloppily. Items appear to be just "slapped on". Pieces may be loose or hanging over the edges. Smudges, stains, rips, uneven edges, and/or stray marks are evident.
Design	Graphics are trimmed to an appropriate size and interesting shape and are arranged well, some in front and some behind. Care has been taken to balance the pictures across the canvas.	Graphics are trimmed to an appropriate size and interesting shape and are arranged with some items in front and others behind. The canvas, however does not appear balanced.	Graphics have been trimmed to an appropriate size and shape, but the arrangement of items is not very attractive. It appears there was not a lot of planning of the item placement.	Graphics are untrimmed OR of inappropriate size and/or shape. It appears little attention was given to designing the collage.
Creativity	Several of the graphics or objects used in the collage reflect an exceptional degree of student creativity in their creation and/or display	One or two of the graphics or objects used in the collage reflect student creativity in their creation and/or display.	One or two graphics or objects were made or customized by the student, but the ideas were typical rather than creative (.e.g, apply the emboss filter to a drawing in Photoshop).	The student did not make or customize any of the items on the collage.
Titles and Text	Titles and text were written clearly and were easy to read from a distance. Text varied in color, size and/or style for different text elements.	Titles and text were written clearly and were easy to read close-up. Text varied in color, size and/or style for different text elements.	Titles and text were written clearly and were easy to read close-up. There was little variation in the appearance of text.	Titles and/or text are hard to read, even when the reader is close.

This site is so simple, it allows you to pick out a subject and gives you the outline of the rubric and allows you to modify it anyway you wish. It also provides interactive rubrics to give your students more detailed feedback. This rubric is the text they fill in for you. It is very detailed and lets you pick what categories you evaluate the students on. It is such an easy website, and once I get more experienced I will be able to write in the boxes more detailed outlines of particular projects.
The last very important topic I used this week is Internet Safety and copyright issues. It is very stressful knowing that you have to watch out for every piece of information that you are teaching is not copyrighted. It is hard when you want to show a video that fits your lesson perfectly but the material is copyrighted. Reading these articles gave me so much information I did not know about guidelines about the laws. It is also so important for students to know their safety and copyright laws, because when creating their work they can run into copyright issues they may not know about. Policy This letter is a great thing to send home with the students so that parents can go over the rules and laws of Use Policy. As teachers it is also your responsibility to let the students know about these policies, but it is also good for parents to understand and go over it with their children.

Overall, once again I learned lots and lots of valuable information this week I will be taking with me along the journey!

Keeping the books in check!

Hello again! Once again I have been introduced to many new websites this week! As you can see in my last post I used Glogster for my last assignment. I looked around a few sights before I tried this one out. Needless to say, I LOVED it! I spent a few hours playing around with the site before I created the final poster. I had a lot of fun playing around with all the materials they give you to put on your piece of work. I will be using that again. So, I signed up for yet again another new website. I better start keeping track of all these things I am apart of before I forget! Engrade is a free website where you can create your own grade book. I don't have my own class so I had to create my own. I didn't know making fake names could be so hard! Anyway, I loved this website! I can't imagine the ones that you have to pay for, since this one is free and is so nice. I think one of the things that I was worried about going into teaching was keeping track of the grades. When I think of grading, I always think of my teachers having their books and pencils, doing the math averaging out the grades. I am not the best at math so knowing there is something out there that will help do the grades makes me very happy. There are many things I liked about this website. I like how you can say what weight of the grade each assignment will be. It is nice you have the option to create each category and say how much each is worth. Another thing I love is when you score the students it gives you the chance to put down if they are excused from the assignment or missed it. I also love how it gives you the class average for every assignment that you grade. It is also great that there is a calender and attendance option. It helps the organization of assignments, also lets you have everything in one place. Having something like this online is very helpful for a teacher because it gives them that much less paper to keep around. It seems like it would really help the desk clutter! I really could not think of a thing that I did not like about this website. That also may because I never had to go through having my own class and a grade book.
Some features that might be cool on this website are options for different color. It might be easier to be organized when you can group things in color, use different fonts, etc . It might make it more interesting. Another thing I would consider changing is the attendance. Maybe have a different setup so it is easier to read. When it is in columns like that all the days seem to collide together. I would probably have more suggestions if I had experience using grade books, but I do not. This website looks pretty amazing to me!
I feel like this software is good for teachers because it seems like it makes grading easy. This site is very easy to navigate, and when you put the students and their id numbers in, it is very simple to put the grades. How the software automatically averages out the grades for each assignment is very helpful for the teacher. This software is a really good organizational tool. Having a grade book, attendance sheet, and calender all in one website makes is easy for teachers. Instead of having more paperwork then they already have, this eliminates some of the clutter off of their desk!
One of the best features of this website is the parent/student access. It is nice that parents are able to go on the website and see how their child is doing. By monitoring their child's work, they are able to know what the student needs to work on at home, and they get to see if the student is doing their homework. I think it is also a great way of communication. It is a good way to keep in contact outside of class if the student has any questions. It also does not give the student excuse that they did not know they had homework due!
Overall, I loved this website. I can not even imagine the sites you have to pay for. They must have magical powers to out-d0 this one!

Glogster

Picasion

Here is my Picasion! Yet a whole new website I have learned to use! This is another pretty cool website where you can show off all of your pages in one slide show! I don't have many websites, I have a Facebook, Blogger, WDYDWYD, and our group's Wiki site on WetPaint. So I don't have many sites to put on this page. I did enjoy making this. I had some issues with getting this up on the blog, but I feel accomplished that I figured it out!

Continuation....

Photo: Education World



Literacy and Technology is my first online class. I was a little nervous at first, but after taking Curriculum Planning and Development I figured I already had a dose of the online world of learning. Needless to say, I love online classes. If it was not for my experience last semester taking a class with Dr. Smirnova, I would not be as calm as I am, but everything I learned last semester has smoothly transferred over to this class. It is only the second week of the class but I have already learned so many new ways to incorporate the Internet into teaching. So many new websites such as WetPaint, Picasso, and WDYDWYD has been brought to my attention this past week, and I love EVERY one of these websites! There are so many ways to be creative, and these websites show so many ways to bring creativity.

Taking Emergent Literacy last semester introduced me to the world of literacy, but this class takes it to a whole other level. Learning has changed a lot over the past few years. Students live in a new world of a digital age. Computer Literacy is the knowledge and ability to use computers and technology efficiently. It is knowing how computers work and operate. Students today are the prime example of knowing computer literacy. With video games, Facebook, and Twitter students are in a world which is run by technology. Students are teachers when it comes to how computers work. They are teaching their elders a whole new way of life. Information Literacy is the ability to find and use information from different sources, and organize it into a form that allows users to make decisions. Integration Literacy is the ability to use computers and other technology combined with teaching and learning strategies to enhance student's learning. There is a difference between the three terms, even though they all have to do with technology. Computer Literacy is the simple knowledge of how technology works. Information Literacy is bringing Computer Literacy to the next level. It is using technology to gather information that would once be found in textbooks. It is using the Internet to bring the best learning materials together that allows the user to make the best decisions with its information. Integration Literacy is the next level of these three terms. This allows using technology with teaching to make students learn to the best of their ability. The literacy of the future will hand in hand with all three of these terms. Teaching will involve combining technology with teaching strategies. Students will use computers to enhance their learning by experiencing a whole new level of creativity.

The digital students today are different from the previous generation of students. Digital students have a completely different way of learning. The way that students think and learn are different than previous generations. Students today live differently, they multi-task better, they receive information faster. Students grow up thinking that learning can not be fun. They are growing up on computers, and playing video games. They are used to be connected with their friends with texting, Twitter, and Facebook. When textbooks are given to them, they don't want to spend their time reading them. They would rather be on the computer communicating with the world. Teachers need to learn new ways to reach out to their students. Teachers need to find resources online which will reach to the student's attention. Teachers need to present material differently. Using websites such as WebQuests will let the students be more hands on with their learning. By getting more involved in lessons, students today will be more willing to learn.

After looking at the National Education Technology Standards for Students, number three stuck out to me.
Research and Information Fluency. "Students apply digital tools to gather, evaluate, and use information." I feel that this is the best implemented because students are well aware of websites such as Wikipedia and Google Search to find information. Even though Wikipedia is not the most reliable website, it goes hand in hand with this standard. I feel that my readiness to meet this standards have grown after taking Curriculum Planning, and this class. I have been introduced to many new websites that I can show my class, including Tikatok, which is a site where our class can create digital storybooks which can be printed into real books. This site can be use to fulfill Standard One-Creativity and Innovation. Students can create their own PB Works which can fulfill Standard Two- Communication and Collaboration. Another site, WetPaint, is a great site where students can create their own webpages about subjects they are learning in school. This is a sight which my group has been working on for our ToolKit. To meet these standards these websites, plus many more need to be incorporated into the lessons. Internet access and computers must be available for all students in schools.

There has been a clear shift of paradigms from 1.0-2.0. The Internet is the prime example of this shift. Textbooks are being replaces with Webpages such as WebQuests. Journals are being replaced with Blogs. Videotapes are being replaces with Podcasts. All of these new forms of teaching and learning is new information for teachers who are used to 1.0, but it is normal life for students coming into 2.0. Teachers need to learn how to teach to the students needs. Students will learn easier when they are familiar with the tools they are being taught with.

Lastly, I love Google Tools! After watching the tutorial on it, I have become addicted. I was already a fan of Gmail, and Google Docs. Our group has been using GoogleTalk for all our group meetings, and it has been such a great and easy experience. One thing I have loved from Google Tools is igoogle. I have been introduced to this, and I love how it keeps everything in one place. It is now my current homepage, and I love how I have my email, news, weather, Blogger, notepad, calender, and games all in one place!

Overall, this class has been another great learning experience so far, and can not wait to see what is to come in upcoming weeks!

New Beginnings

Hello again! I feel like I was just here wrapping up my feelings about Curriculum Planning. I can't believe it has been over a month! Literacy and Technology seems like it will be another adventure! I am so happy that I took Curriculum Planning before this class. A lot of what I learned from that class is already being carried into this class. I am very familiar with Moodle, so I don't feel overwhelmed with that aspect of the class. I feel very comfortable which is a great place to be. Another thing that I am carrying over is my knowledge of Gmail. It has been a great tool to communicate with my group members. I just can't wait to learn more about literacy and teaching with technology during the next five weeks!