Leah Dewhurst’s Weblog

Last nights presentation with was very informative. I was neat to see how educational technology has evolved from the start until now.  I liked how he made us recall our fondest memories of educational technology, where my earliest memory was the film strips and learning how to type on the compaq 64 computers. Now we look at today, it’s absolutely incredible where technology has taken us.  Where technology will go from here… no one knows, and I think that is the exciting part.  Who thought we would be able to social network the way we do now on the web. 

 Today I showed my students the link to their story we created on voicethread.  Their first words out of their mouth were: “I’m on the web!”  When I clicked on our class blog page and they saw the title page, they were ecstatic.  There was absolute silence while I played the story. They just couldn’t believe that they could hear and see their picture on the web.  I think they now believe they are famous !!!

Alright, here is the finished product.  Again, very basic, but a good start.  It took me about three tries to actually finish it, the mistakes that I had made were due to me… or the lack of knowledge about the program. From reading the embeding tutorial, we need to upload a file, however wordpress.com does not allow you upload any plugins.

Here is a link to my voicethread:

http://voicethread.com/share/47832/

Today I started the process of Voicethread in my classroom.  It was a pretty exciting time for us.  The students had written a class story and instead of just laminating it, and placing in the bin of, I took a picture of each of the students work and uploaded it to voicethread.  The upload went fine, however I needed to delete some slides and as simple as is sounds….. I was totally blind and couldn’t figure it out for the longest time.  I did end up finding the little trash can that I was totally oblivious too in the beginning.  I find some of these programs are so easy to use, yet so complicated at the same time.

The kids started using the microphone, I got through about 8 of them…. 11 more to go.  They thought the microphone was the neatest thing.  I think they just liked the part where they could hear the playback of their voice.  A lot of giggles came out of this session.  I will finish tomorrow… if all goes well I will post the show soon. 

I have also created another blog for my class, where I am going to post this story and others that will follow. I think parents will truly enjoy hearing their child read and seeing some of their work

The presentation this week with Darren Kuropatwa was very inspiring.  As the feeling of this new technology that we are learning is at times overwhelming, this presentation was a breath of fresh air.  It was nice to see how this technology can be worked into the classroom.  Even though he teaches highschool, I could still see some of the uses in the lower elementary end.  It was also nice to see that technology has not taken over his personal life and that there are still the personal connections going on in the classroom.

One of his topics he mentioned was on TFU (Teaching For Understanding) and how he used technology to aid in that learning process.  The ability to have the students use the smartboard to explain their thinking, and or even apply their thinking to different situations was neat to see.  Technology here has helped the students share answers, blog their thinking etc. If the students aren’t able to transfer the learning are they really learning? Are they really understanding if they can not apply their new knowledge?  The technology used in this particular classroom helped answer those questions. You could really see the benefit it had on the students.

I honestly, just really liked how Darren used the technology in his classroom to aid in his instruction.  It is a great situation where all can learn.  I guess we all need to beg our school boards to start looking in that direction, what forms of technology is worth purchasing to aid in the learning process. 

In regards to Connie Cossar’s post “The Social Web”:

I, too signed up to facebook to keep in touch with friends.  I have taught overseas, and we all thought this was a great way to stay in touch with one another.  How I found out about facebook was actually through one of the high-school students I had coached basketball.  I told her of my leaving and she immediately responded… “sign up for facebook!!” How do these students find out about these sites? I always feel as though I am one step behind them.

Has facebook gone too far?  While I was in Toronto I heard on the news, that friends of the girl who was murdered on New Years Day had posted the name of the suspect in the case. Which was clearly against the law, as the suspect was under the age of 18. So where is the privacy?  I has also heard, that employers are actually snooping on Facebook to find out about people who they intend to hire? Where do we draw the line? 
In the article “MySpace Agrees to Lead Fight to Stop Sex Predators” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/us/15myspace.html?ref=media
It was says that MySpace as well as Facebook have taken steps to “shield children from  online dangers.” But then again,where there is a will, there is a way. Kids always seem to be a step ahead.

As educators,  what can we do about this?  I feel out of the loop for most of these social networking sites.  I saw facebook as it was, a place to keep in touch, little did I know what was actually going on.  I feel as though educators and parents should be aware of these sites first before they are in the hands of our youth, so we are able to educate them and help them make the wise choices. 

Jan 15^th Thoughts

            Wow, where do I even begin.  I am still amazed with the all of the social networking programs that are available. I usually find one program that I enjoy working with, thinking that is has everything I need, and little do I know, I could step it up to a whole new level.  Adding features that I thought could never be possible.  I am excited to try out some new photo and video slide-shows. I have traveled to many countries in the last four years and would love to put together a slide-show of my favorite places. I am sure I could even start a new blog about crazy places people have been too.

            I was also having some doubts about what new programs could I use to enhance my teaching in the lower elementary classroom. After visiting the grade 1 blog, I now realized the potential and the usefulness that it could have in a lower elementary classroom.   It got me thinking that some of these new tools could bring pen pals to life.  I am currently pen pals with a classroom in Thailand, instead of waiting patiently for letters to arrive, we could send videos or as a matter fact anything and not have the wait time.  I believe during our session we brought up having students share their writing as a blog would be a benefit as it would make them feel proud of their accomplishments. I think it’s a great idea as they would get twice the readers/ and comments, and want to improve in their writing. It could even become a type of portfolio.

Jan 16^th Thoughts

            I want to thank Alec for showing us around the different tools we are expected to use during this course. It was very helpful in the fact, I could visually see what is going on and when I went back to my own accounts, I could easily adjust or change the page.  It is a slow process, but I am becoming more excited everyday and I feel way more confident in using the programs than I did before J  I am also getting used to the tech “language.” Hopefully in my blogs I am using the vocabulary correctly.  If not, bare with me… this is a learning process.

I found an interesting article http://www.newsobserver.com/1595/story/873510.html.  I thought it fit with some of our discussions in the chat room about cell phones and school.  The school that I taught with in Thailand banned the use of cell phones due to students abusing and using it inappropriately.  However,  during the discussion tonight I then realized, if the students were taught how to use and when to use the phone appropriately, instead of banning it all together, would the problems still occur.  Of course it won’t eliminate the problems all together, but would it give the students that sense of responsiblity. I liked the way this teacher used the language of texting and connected it to teaching Shakespeare!!! Very creative!!!! We are always trying to teach students to make self-text connections, I thought this was a good way  

Any comments????

This is my second course that I have taken online, however it was a first for using this type of techonology. The first course I took was just a chat forum, and a space where we could upload different files and articles to aid in our learning.  Last night, it was neat that we could all be on webcam to see and talk to one another. This idea of conferencing/meeting with one another in the comfort of my own home is wonderful. I do and probably will miss the human contact aspect that a regular classroom brings, however, this way we can meet other poeple that wouldn’t have been possible if we had only met in a regular classroom setting. 

I always considered myself tech savvy, but I guess that was in my ‘own way’.  I was excited that I knew how to use powerpoint, and make a webquest using publisher.  While I was teaching overseas, powerpoint presentations where the “in” thing and I was excited as one of my schools actually had the computer hooked up to the tv that we had in our classroom.  Learning became more exciting as I could add visuals to my lessons.  Now that I have joined this class, I feel as though I have not kept up with the new technology that has been added over the years.  It was overwhelming to say the least.  But now that I have set up my accounts and have begun to play around with each program, eventually I will hopefully begin to understand how each of them work. I am glad to see that some of us are in the same boat learning this new technology, and that we will be able to help one another out