Huggins Happenings

I like the style of PageFlake, but it was easy to grow impatient with it.  Once again, I think it’s above the heads of my 3rd graders.  I can see myself using it as a homepage to keep myself organized.  I like the fact that feeds, videos, calendars, weather, etc. can all be right at my fingertips – without having to jump back and forth from site to site to keep track of everything.  I think I will use it for that very purpose.  For my class, however, I think wikipages and other sites that are similar will be better suited for my classroom.  I look forward to storing lots of my own information on it, though!

This tool has been a lot of fun.  I can think of many ways to use GoogleDocs, but know that there are many more out there.  I’m a spreadsheet kind of girl so two ways that immediately come to mind are using it as a way for my students to check themselves off as they complete assigments – like we do with this course.  It saves me a lot of time and energy to be able to see, at a glance, the progress that each child is making.  I used the spreadsheet to make a “Conference Sign Up” sheet.  I’ll use this when conference time rolls around as a way to have my parents sign up for conferences.  They can easily see if dates are taken, and if they need to switch times, they know exactly what times are available.  Saves tons of work on my end!  Word documents could easily be used at the end of Social Studies/Science units for children to reflect on what they have learned.  These items could be printed and bound into a class book.  It could also be used to create a class book where groups of children are given certain parts of a topic to research and then add them together.  Personally, I would love to use it to make a monthly class newsletter that is created completely by the students.  I’m excited about this one!

I had to add something that had nothing to do with education.  Whenever I’m feeling down, this one never fails to make me smile!

  And since I can’t seem to see the video for some reason, here is the link.

Laughing Quadruplets

While I enjoy podcasts personally, I am struggling with a way to incorporate existing podcast into my classroom.  My children are 8 and 9 years old and really need visual stimlulation to stay focused.  I found a podcast by Grammar Girl and subscribed to it.  I have used this site before and am excited to see what their podcasts have to offer.  This is a great site that my students can use as they get older.  It has many resources that they will be able to use in their writing.  Otherwise,  I see myself being able to use podcasts that I create on my wiki page as a way to explain concepts, clarify assignments and give detailed project instructions.  I look forward to discovering how to create my own podcast.  In the meantime, I think I’ll stick to using podcasts for my own personal use.

While I enjoyed the “Library Thing” tour, I honestly think this is last on my list of “Things” I will use.  I enjoy reading, but my spare time to read for enjoyment has gone out the window since returning to work.  I tend to gravitate to the same types of books so I can imagine this would be a wonderful source of information for me to expand my reading horizons.  However, a school library only holds so many books compared to the internet; so as far as my students are concerned, I would not be able to use this to find books unless I knew they were in the library.  Otherwise, I would have to drive to a local library or purchase them at the bookstore.  If I taught older students, it would be a useful site to direct them to for research purposes as well as leisure reading.

I was thrilled to see new lessons and activities on fractions that had been posted in my WordPress google reader (http://www.kidsolr.com/math/fractions.html).  I like this site because I’m always looking for new and innovate lessons for my smartboard, especially for my math class.  This site gives me appropriate lessons for my age group.  I’ll be excited when my Scholastic blog updates with some cute Christmas ideas!

This has been my favorite exploration so far.  I can’t believe how much there is on the internet that I have never even heard of!  I chose to explore quizlet, mainly because I had students that had told me about the site and I hadn’t had the chance to visit it myself.  We have a new vocabulary program this year that includes weekly tests and my students like to use this site to create practice tests with their weekly words.  When I get my wiki page up and going, I plan on using this site in the form of a link as a recommendation for my students’ parents for “at home” study options.

I picked the lesson titled “Web 2.0 Tools to Amplify Elementary Students’ Creativity and Initiative” from the K12 Learning Conference to view at home.  I am glad I picked this lesson because it was about using the tools of Web 2.0 with upper elementary students, something I have been struggling with throughout this course.  I have been able to relate the tools to my personal use, as well as for use by me in my classroom, but was unsure of how I could get my students involved in the process.  The video itself was slightly confusing; it jumped from topic to topic with no explanation, but I was able to read some of the websites she was talking about and then later explore those sites.  I look forward to doing some more of my own exploration and using time in the computer lab at school to enhance my students’ learning experience through these student-friendly websites.

Wow, what an overwhelming experience.  I am thrilled to be able to accomplish what seemed impossible just a few months ago.  It took me a few hours to get this slideshow together because I was copying images that were copyrighted and didn’t realize it until I was almost done.  I discovered that, each time you begin a new search, you have to reenter the Creative Commons area.  It won’t keep searching for those files each time unless you tell it do to so.  I love all of the creative aspects of these slideshows and I look forward to trying each of the sites over time. I also can’t wait to use these at home to turn my family pictures into DVDs for my family.  Here is the link to my slideshow on my wikipage. 

I found this photo of an early american house under construction in Jamestown.  Our class does a unit each year on Colonial America and I found Flickr to be a great source for photos to share with the children.  My frustration with Flickr is that I couldn’t ever seem to navigate back to a picture once I moved away from it -even when entering the exact same search properties.  I find that the bank of pictures is so expansive that it may be very time consuming to find exactly what I’m looking for.  I do look forward to using this service for my personal use, however.  Maybe after a little more “play time” I can find an easier way to use this in my classroom.

Posted on Flickr by “Mr. G’s Travels”.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_g_travels/1235946642/