Week of 7/30/07 - 8/3/07

This week so far I have discovered quite a few new tools that I had not known about before. Some are Inspiration, GIS, globe.gov and using podcasts in the classroom.

Inspiration, www.inspiration.com was intriguing. I did not download it but did the quick tour, which didn’t work too well, and reviewed some of the examples for math. It reminded me of when I created process flows showing step by step activities for placing customer orders. They were painful but boy did you learn the process when you had to create them! This tool seemed much easier than the one I used. There was a flow for adding fractions, which I liked. I am not sure if it would be confusing to them but I am thinking that some would learn if they had to actually create the process using this tool. It seemed like it would be a fun way to reinforce for those struggling.

The GIS site, www.gis.com was interesting. I put in my zip code and it gave demographics of my area including average income, race, cost of homes, family information, etc. This would be good to use when I get to interpreting and creating graphs. We can graph some of this information for different areas.

The www.globe.gov site had information about some global projects that have been done by students. There was a lot of information on this site. I zeroed in on classroom tools, maps and graphs, then classroom activities. There were puzzles and quizzes. The globe maps and puzzles was really cool. It gives you bright colored maps of the globe or continents, which are broken into pieces; you scramble them and then put them back together. It was fun. From here, I clicked on google earth and downloaded it. One of my students had showed me but I was not able to take the time to really look at it. It was awesome! I found my house and my mom’s. I also took a sight seeing tour which showed places like Disney, the RMS Queen Mary, the Grand Canyon, and Las Vegas !! The Eiffel Tower was really amazing! I loved it.

Lastly, I went to google and looked for information on using podcasts in the classroom. Since I was familiar with it, I checked out Education World’s information page http://www.education-world.com/a_tech/sites/sites074.shtml . It was great. It had a few simple ways to get started and gave some brief but informative information on how to use podcasts in the classroom and linked to some examples. I listened to a few. This would be great use to have students create a step by step processes (maybe on Inspiration) for a math concept and add the voice podcast to it. Again learning by creating it and it can be used for other students to view and hear.

These links are all be available on my website resource page.

Week of July 23 - 27

First of all I cannot believe it is the end of July already !! We’ll be back to school before we know it.

Anyway, I loved looking at everyone’s websites last week. They were great. Some people are so creative and clever. That was fun. Only I had trouble opening a lot of them :(

Last week in our assignment, we looked at United Streaming, Teachade and Bloglines. United Streaming was awesome. I really want to supplement some of my lessons, especially in geometry, with clips. It would be a nice change and I think the kids would do well with it. I liked Teachade. I had a little trouble navigating but I think it will be a good resource. I plan to utilize Teachade and Tapped In this year for assistance.

We also looked at Bloglines. For some reason I am not getting my confirmation email so I can complete my registration. I have asked for it 3 times. I know the email id I gave is correct because I can log in with it. Not sure what is going on. I will check out the help today. I am not sure if I could use this in class but you never know. It is pretty neat.

Whooops

Well being that I was concerned about the color in my website, I started playing around with the templates, hit the wrong button and now I have a new look for my site. I thought I was going to die but I think I like it better, my son loves green.

Post for Week of 7/16 - 7/20

Ok, so I have finished (I think) my website (Project 1) for class. I am still not too sure about the colors I used. After reading the 5 Basic rules to Web Site Design (2005 Grantistic Designs) I think my choices for the background and font colors may not be totally "pleasing to the eye". I think it is easy to read, I just hope my visitors do as well. The background is kind of dark but I tried to use fonts that work. One of my classmates said the font was a bit small and hard to read so I made it bigger. Not sure now if it is too big. Ahhhh !!! I made my son look at it. He is fourteen. He said he liked the font sizes but wasn't crazy about the background colors. It was kind of too late by then and I had done some much work I decided to keep it as is.

Post for first week of class - a little late

Well I have just created my first website !! Yippeee !! It actually wasn't as bad as I thought, I was sweating. It is surely a work in progress but I am getting there. It did take me about 5 hours in total, maybe more :) The tool I used was Tripod. I think it is very easy to navigate through. There is a problem with a link to this blog so my classmate suggested that I copy in the url. That worked.

It was alot of fun and I will probably change some things as we go. I created a personal website that I will not use for my class. Now that I am an expert I will create another one for my class!!

First Entry to KarenB's Blog

This is a test of my blog.