Slide Show Presentation

Digital Scavenger Hunt

This week we went out and did a digital scavenger hunt.  I thought this was a nice way to do something different in a class.  I think it gives student s a chance to do a fun activity, but at the same time expand their thinking.  Some of the things on the scavenger hunt were difficult to think of something to take a picture of and it made us think critically about it.  For me as a special educator, I think it will be important to have activities to help students think critically because they may have trouble doing so in the classroom.  This digital scavenge hunt is an activity that I can see myself using for my students.  I thought another way to encourage students to think more critically is to tell them their picture wont count unless it is different from all other groups pictures.  This would force student to think outside of the box even more.  I do think that this activity would not be suited for young children, but for older students I think it will work nicely.  Also it is important to trust your students to walk around the school gathering these photos.

Not only is this a good activity to help student think critically, it also has student do work with the a picture editing program after.  This is a nice way to link to extend an activity and have students get experience with a photo program with pictures they worked hard to gather.  This part of it completes the assignment and give the students a way to show of their pictures.

Wordle

This week a new Web 2.0 tool was introduced to us, Wordle.  With Wordle the user is able to create a word cloud which is a group of words put together in random order and direction.  I did not really like this tool because I do not see it being very useful.  I can see myself using it maybe as a different way to display the names of students in my class, or help students see which words show up most in a speech, but I do not think Wordle has much use past this.  Not only do I not see much use for Wordle, I think that it is too difficult to share your word cloud with people.  It is nice that you do not need a Wordle account, but this also means the user cannot save their word cloud or share it easily.  The options you have if you would like to share your word cloud with others is to print it or take a screen shot.

As far as the presentation of the tool, I thought the group did a nice job especially for having to go first.  I see it will be helpful for my group to walk through the presentation on our own before presenting to make sure we do not come across any problems like this group did with Java.  Also I realize that it takes a lot longer to create a Glog on Glogster than it took to create a word cloud on Wordle.  This means we are just going to have to get the class started, and I think we should keep the whole class working on creating the same exact Glog so they can stay on task.  Also this will better ensure that we get to show them the things that we feel are important.  We can share our artifacts at the end so the class sees what a finished Glog looks like since I know they will not finish one in class.

Web 2.0: Glogster

This week I worked with and explored Glogster.  Glogster is a website where users are able to create an online poster.  I thought Glogster was a good tool for classrooms because it allows for all students to be able to create interesting posters.  Creating posters is an activity used in every subject area and in almost every grade, and Glogster offers students a new fun way to create posters.  If my classroom has the technology for all students to get onto Glogster, I would definitely use this tool.  Another cool feature about Glogster is that students are able to add videos, sound, and pictures to their posters.  This makes the posters more interactive and interesting than traditional posters.  As a special education teacher some of my student may not be able to make actual poster boards so creating one on Glogster would be an excellent substitute for them.  For this reason I am going to be sure to keep Glogster in mind when having students create projects.   

Inquiry Based Assignment

For this assignment Laurel and I worked together to put together an activity for 5th grade student receive special education services in a social studies class.  I think that we did a great job and learned a lot about finding good websites for students.  One major thing I learned is that a good website for one group of student may not be so good for another.  I think we all really benefited from the fact that everyone in the class really created excellent activities.  Everyone had perfect sites for their target students.  Like I mentioned not all of these sites would have worked for our students, but they worked for the grade level and subject they were intended for.  It was important for Laurel and I to find websites that were not overwhelming and distracting for our students.  Many students with special needs have trouble focusing so I site with too much going on would have been no good.  I really enjoyed putting together this activity and can easily see it being one I could use.

There were some other minor lessons I learned from this assignment.  One was the benefit of having someone to work with while putting together an assignment.  It was nice to have someone to bounce ideas off of and catch some of the simple things you may overlook.  Another little lesson I learned was the importance of explicit direction.  By missing something simple like, not putting the name of the website or stating to answer in complete sentences, students can be easily thrown off.  This was a good lesson I learned a lot from.

Web Quest

This week we did some research into web quest assignments.  I really enjoyed this assignment because I had never experienced a web quest before.  I see how they have a amount of benefits in helping students organize a research based assignment.  I also liked how we got to learn what to look for in these assignments and what makes a good one and what makes one not so good.  I think these assignments, if done right, have excellent academic value and are something the students will enjoy doing.  Must of these assignments were built for groups to work together, but I can see some room for them to be done individually.  I believe that they could be used by just one student if you have an advanced student who you are trying to find more advanced activities for them to do.  This would work if you found a web quest that covered an extention of the material the class is working on, and is something that interests the student.  I certainly think I will use these later on my career when developing a lesson over in depth material.

Website Review

During the website review I learned the importance of taking the time to look into the validity of websites I am thinking about using for class.  It did not take very long to look into the site to figure out if was a reliable or not, so I can see how taking that little bit of time really pays off.  The specific site I looked at was Thinkfinity, and I really thought it was a great site that I could rely on as a teacher to find new ideas and strategies for teaching.  I think it would also be important to teach students in my classes how to also evaluate websites for when they are working on research.  There is a lot of stuff out on the web, and it is an important skill to be able to sort through all the sites finding which ones are worthwhile.  So overall what I would take away from this is the ability to evaluate websites I could use in my teaching and the importance of teaching my students this same skill.