In Class Portfolio

Bio-Poem
Websites for Teachers
Graphic Organizer
Book Trailer
Lesson Cover Page
Lesson Plan

Websites for Teachers

Discovery Ed

Category:Teacher  Resource

Audience:Teacher, Student

Grade Level: K-12

Subject: Varied

Description: Provides digital content to schools that is designed to tap into the child’s natural curiosity. It contains interactive lessons, assessment, virtual experiences and professional development.  

FunBrain

Category:Student Interactive

Audience: Student

Grade Level:K-8

Subject: Reading and Math

Description: Educational online games for children. Arcades are arranged by subject in math and reading. Arcade game format is interactive and motivating.

This site included a guide that helps teacher to find games that are most useful to their class. They are grouped by title, subject and grade level.

Poetry for Kids

Category:Student/Teacher Resource

Audience: Student/ Teacher

Grade Level: All ages

Subject: Poetry

Description: This site is described as the funny poetry playground of the Children’s Poet Laureate Kenn Nesbitt. It has poems, poetry Lessons, activities, journals, a rhyming dictionary, contest and more. It is a good student resource for finding poems. It is also a very good teacher resource for finding poems, activities and poetry lesson plans.       

Reading A-Z

Category: Teacher Lesson Plans

Audience: Teacher

Grade Level: Elementary

Subject: Reading

Description:This is an online guided reading resource that contains leveled readers that can be downloaded, projected and printed. Teaching materials cover a broad array of skill that are necessary for effective reading instruction. It also contains guided reading lessons, worksheets and assessments. Related resources include Vocabulary A-Z and Raz-Kids.

Reading Rockets

Category:Teacher Resource

Audience: Teacher and Parents

Grade Level: Elementary

Subject: Reading

Description: This site contains reading strategies, lessons, and activities that are designed to help children learn how to read and improve their reading skills. It is packed with easy to access resources that assist teachers and parents to help struggling readers with fluency, comprehension and vocabulary.

Science 4 Us

Category:Teacher Lesson Plans

Audience: Student

Grade Level:K-2

Subject: Science

Description: This is an interactive inquiry based science curriculum. It covers four topics; Physical Science, Life Science, Earth and Space and Inquiry. The activities can be presented whole class or an individual student can work alone. It contains cross curriculum activities designed to engage students and is aligned to the  Common Core standards. The visual and audio cues support emergent readers.

Spell City

Category: Student Interactive

Audience:Student/Teacher

Grade Level:K-12

Subject: Spelling

Description: A game based learning tool for vocabulary, spelling, writing and language arts. The games are interactive and be used on a smartboard for whole class.  It is a great resource for word list. Worksheets related to the list and activities can be printed for students.

Storybird

Category:Student /Teacher Interactive

Audience: Student, Teachers and Parents  

Grade Level: K-12

Subject: Writing

Description: This site lets you create visual stories. This site is designed to encourage students to read and write better and more often. It includes artwork from illustrators and animators around the world. Teachers can embed stories in blogs, emails, download or order printed versions. It is quick and easy to use giving students get real time feedback.

Turtle Diary

Category:Student Resource

Grade Level: Prek-2

Subject: Various

Description: Learning games and activities designed to develop an understanding of Math, Science, Language, Social Studies, creativity and logic. There are skill building games, puzzles, animated lessons, printable worksheets and interactive story books.

Wonderopolis

Category:Teacher Resources

Audience: Student, Teachers, Family

Grade Level: Learners of all ages

Subject: Varied

Description: This site poses an intriguing question each day and explores it in a variety of ways. Designed to both inform and encourage new questions, sparking new pathways of wonder and discovery in the family and classroom setting.

Graphic Organizers

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B_OZuzIBvFREPqLxOjkMQl4dtXhaUox7nkdOdmoGRHM/edit

Wednesday Blog Assignmment

The last paragraph of this article summarizes the thesis and makes a strong statement. Do you are or disagree and why?

I agree with the author. He is calling for a more balanced approach. He recognizes that technology is here to stay; therefore, we need to find the best way to incorporate it into education by experimenting with it and finding out what works.  But, he is unwilling to throw out unwired or unconnected learning where “slow linear reading occurs”. He believes that to swing the pendulum back to the middle or"regularize the instruction", we need to be willing to “down shift” and decelerate. I liked this analogy. I pictured a car accelerating at top speed without seeing the dangers ahead and suddenly forced to down shift into low gear to avoid a pot hole. We hardly have time to consider the pros and cons of technology when something new is introduced. The end result has been a change in our reading and thinking habits where students are unable to comprehend complex text, because they have not had enough experience and practice with it. They are unable to find the main idea, infer meaning, understand difficult words and recognize elaborate text structure. This should worry us. 

To gain experience, they need to have uninterrupted time to read and a willingness to pause and probe into complex text. To do this, they need guidance from committed educators who themselves value and are receptive to deep thinking and probing the richness of complex texts. In other words, they need good models and to be explicitly taught how to access complicated text. Simple strategies such as going back to re-read to check their understanding or changing the pace of their reading to match the complexity of the text will make a big difference. I also believe that schools need to select texts that challenge our students. We should be introducing high quality text that they may never pick up on their own but will have a huge impact on their thinking. We should not be afraid of the inherent struggle as they wrestle with meaning. Besides learning to better comprehend they may learn humility, patience and perseverance at the same time.  By consciously adding slow reading in the curriculum, I believe our students will be better prepared for life.  

My Ideal Bookshelf

Wordle

Tuesday Blog Assignment

How could you rethink our K-12 curriculum for the 21 century, symbiotically combining human strengths with the most powerful technology strengths?

 Technology is here to stay; therefore, it is imperative that we as educators rethink our curriculum for the 21 century. Our society is already highly dependent on technology in our daily lives. If we believe that we are preparing our students for the world, that preparation must be relevant to their lives. At times, technology seem dissonant to the goals of education. For technology to enhance our educational system, we must create a healthy interdependent relationship that fosters our human strengths. To do this the teacher will need to be selective. Along with content area, we will need to ask “ What human strengths do we want to foster?” and “What technology will help us to reach our goals?”

 I feel that blended learning opportunities that include face-to-face, school based instruction and on-line learning opportunities achieve the best balance between human interaction and technology. Social networking can be beneficial in creating a sense of community. Wikis and blogs allow students to work collaboratively and share their work with others in an interactive way. The video phone service Skype can foster understanding and empathy as our students connect with students in other parts of the country or around the world. Student work can be showcased in digital portfolios recording their creativity and progress. It would foster an ongoing conversation about their learning goals, achievement and growth. Technology can accommodate students’ diverse learning styles and provide supports to students with disabilities making access to education available to all. A dysgraphic student can learn word processing so that their written expression can be understood. A blind student can use screen reading software and text-to-speech software to access reading material. The possibilities are endless.

 Educators will need to harness the power of technology by matching tools to the curriculum and students needs as well as explicitly teaching proper use of technology. By taking the lead in the 21st century curriculum human strengths such as creativity, collaboration, community, understanding and empathy will be enhanced by technology not controlled by it.

Make your own slideshow with music at Animoto.

The Kissing Hand

Technology Autobiography

During my childhood technology as I knew it was stable. We had a black and white TV, rotary telephone phone, and a record player. It stayed like that for what seemed like forever (in childhood memory years that is).

My parents got their first television the year I was born. It was a huge black and white with limited channels. It was a staple in our lives. I loved watching the old movies and daytime soaps when I was sick, and I never missed an episode of Little House on the Prairie at night. The “Wonderful World of Disney” on Sundays night became an anticipated family weekly event and fond memory. From the start, my parents limited our access; “No television before homework is done.” was the nightly battle cry.

The one phone, in our house was hung on the wall in the kitchen next to the basement door. The whole family knew who called you and how long you talked. Getting calling/talk time became a competitive enterprise when four of us reach the teenage years close behind each other. We would drag the phone cord to its full length and head down the basement steps and close the door behind us for privacy. When anyone thought you had talked too long they’d bang on the door. My father had a more subtle approach. He would simply pull down the receiver and hang up the call.

We listened to music on a large, cumbersome record player that always stayed in one spot. From my earliest memory, my parents who were a big band music buffs, had stacks off records. As we became teenagers, we started our own collection of singles and albums of our favorite bands.  

But it all changed rapidly. I am pretty sure it started when we replaced the black and white with a color TV. We thought we had arrived. How could we have imaged the huge, flat screen TV that now hangs on the wall occupying less space than that old black and white TV. I’m still wondering how it could have speed up and changed so rapidly in such a short time. As one thing leads to another, there is no sign of stopping.

By the time I was in my 20’s, I was working at my first job using a computer on a daily basis. In my 30’s I was monitoring my infants on a baby monitor, taking pictures of them with a camcorder, and using a cordless phone and  had purchased our first home computer. The record player had been replaced with boom boxes and CD’s.  So it has continued until present and every member of the family has a cell phone, personal computer, digital camera, and iPod. They would not dream of being without anyone of their devices or unhooking for any length of time.   

In spite of all these devices, I do not at all feel technologically literate. I marvel at my own children who have grown up with this technology and use it more freely and skillfully in their lives. I feel as though I am in a continued state of replacing devices and relearning how to use new ones that have just enough difference to created frustration. At times, I can’t help feeling a bit saturated. Yet, I recognize how much technology has made some aspects of my life easier. I also think that it can have great value in education if used wisely. So I keep on trying and getting a little, more savvy with each new technology I take on. I expect that in the future, the more practical, easy to learn and useful a technology is will determine how I will deal with this constant change.