Is It the End or Only the Beginning?

Whooo, finally!  My 23 Things are complete!  As apprehensive as I was to start a blog in the first place, I really had a good time doing this one.  It was a lot more fun going through the activities and doing things I didn't even know were out there.  My absolute favorite post in this blog was Thing #21, the Animoto video.  I just thought that it was so fun and so cute to do.  I also just love the idea of making something similar for my students at the end of every school year as a small keepsake.  It is something they and their parents could look back on for a long time.  I also realized what a good tool blogging can be.  It will be so useful as a teacher.  I could set one up and have my students' parents follow it.  I can post homework assignments, examples, important dates, school events, class pictures, activities, etc. on the blog and parents could keep up with what their children are doing at all times.  As a teacher I want my classroom to be as open to parents as possible.  I want parents to feel free to always come in and visit and know what's going on with their children and I think that a blog, or even a social network page, such as Facebook, would help to make that possible. 

Thing #23

Creative Commons is something that will be very important to me, as a teacher.  It is important that you make sure you're not inadvertantly stealing someone else's work.  How can you discipline your students for plagiarizing or cheating when you, the teacher, have stolen someone else's idea for a worksheet, or class video, or what have you.  It is crucial that if you are going to use technology and the internet to enhance your lesson plans that you make sure you do it legally.  Even if it is something as small as inserting an image from a Google search into your PowerPoint presentation to make it a little more interesting, you still need to make sure that you are obtaining that image legally and that you are using it in the right way.  Teachers cannot ethically get on to students for cheating or plagiarizing when they themselves are essentially doing the same thing.  Teachers have to set the example.

Thing #22

I really like the idea of on online 3-ring binder.  It's a great way to keep things organized and keep ideas that you find on the web.  One thing I really liked was the automatic Google fill feature.  I liked being able to just type in a google search and have the site autmatically fill the binder with great ideas and topics. It's a lot more effective than going through Google yourself and having to sit there and scan through each result.  This site narrows it down and chooses only the most relevant and effective resources.  The titles of my three binders are "2nd Grade Vocabulary", "2nd Grade Alphabetic Principle", and "2nd Grade Language Arts Games".  The last one is my favorite because it is filled with lots of ideas for games, everything from interactive sites to sites with free, printable worksheets.  I think there would be a lot of uses for this in the classroom.  Teachers can create their own binder and have the resources needed for whatever lesson they are using at the time right there in one spot.  That is much more convenient than having to search around for them or even just having several tabs open at one time.  I like how this keeps everything in one spot and it keeps it together.

2nd Grade Language Arts Game

Thing #21

I LOVED the Animoto video project.  How cute is it to be able to make your own little video using pictures of your friends and family (or in a teachers' case, her students) and share it?!?  I think this would be a great tool to use in a classroom, if for nothing else than to create a cute video of your students at the end of the year as a memorable project for them to keep.  I think parents would enjoy it as well.  Teachers could create the video and then post it on their blog or social networking site and share it with their students' parents, who could then share it with their friends and family.  I absolutely love this idea and plan to use it with my students!




Make a video of your own at Animoto.

Thing #20

For this post I chose to use a School House Rock video for "Interjections".  Anybody that knows me knows I LOVE School House Rock!  I have loved it ever since I was a kid and I use it a lot.  In fact, I just used the video for "Nouns" for my lesson plan in my instructional strategies class.  My daughter loves the videos, as well.  When I was in eighth grade my teachers played them for everything from language arts to social studies.  To this day, whenever I have to recite the preamble to the Constitution of the United States (which surprisingly is not that often!), I can't do it without singing the School House Rock version in my head! 

I think YouTube is a great tool to use for teachers to find videos to enhance their lessons.  The only drawback to it is there are some videos that can give your computer a virus, so you have to be careful of what you click on.

Thing #19

Teacher Pop is pretty cool.  I had never heard of it before now but the more I explore it, the more I like it.  It's a lot like Facebook but restricted to teachers.  I think it is a great place for teachers to get together and share ideas.  I also like how not just anybody can sign up and have an accout.  You have to be approved.  That is a good privacy feature that will keep people who don't need to be a part of it off of it.  Teachers can feel safe posting pictures of themselves or their classroom and not have to worry too much about the internet dangers that come along with sharing those things publicly on Facebook or elsewhere.


Visit TeacherPop

As far as other social network sites, I have accounts with Facebook and Pinterest.  I use both of them frequently.  I think Pinterest is a great site to share ideas.  I have gotten a lot of teaching ideas from that site.  There are a lot of educational blogs, curriculum ideas, etc.  I even used some of them for one of my assignments in another class.  It's a really great site to use.

Thing #18

Social networking is a very important aspect of today's education.  It is very important that teachers know how to use this tool because it is one of the biggest forms of communication now.  Facebook and Twitter are extremely popular and used widely so they are a valuable way to get in touch with students' parents, or to keep track of what is going on with the school.  Students can use them to "like" or "follow" the school's page or the teacher's page.  Teachers can post homework assignments, projects, due dates, etc. on their Facebook or Twitter page that way students (who spend the majority of their time on these sites) won't have the "I forgot" or "I didn't know it was due" excuse.  I think, as a whole, Facebook is more useful than Twitter.  Twitter only has a limited number of characters to use for each update, while Facebook allows the post to be as long as you want it.  Both sites definitley have their classroom uses, as stated above, and I can almost certainly say that once I get my own classroom, we will definitely have a class Facebook page (with parents' approval, of course).  That way my students' parents can see what goes on in the classroom, I can post pictures of the fun activities we'll do, and parents can always know what homework or assignments are due and when they are due.

Here is a link to my facebook page:  Stephanie Stevens