Reflections

One of my favorite tools is Jing. Like I say in my Blog Jing will help me creat a better learning environment in my classroom. The reason being is that with Jing I can copy and past screens that will help me communicate with my students while using visuals. For example, Jing can help me copy and paste screens for my students to follow instructions on how to get to a specific program that I want them to use. I also liked the apps. tool because there is so much our kids can do from tracing letters wich is linked to literacy to manipulating shapes wich is linked to math and much more. This will be a great center!

My thinking about the learning that will take place in my classroom has drastically transformed in a positive way. Alot more thing make sense now, but I still have lots to learn myself to put it all to use in my classroom with my students; there are so many wonderful tools I only whish I could use them all.

I was really surprised at how much I really enjoyed learning about all these wonderful tools. I was also really surprised at how googledocs could change and improve our team work. We do e-mail back and forth documents that need to be revised or translated and it gets kind of confusing. I think we will be using this more and it will make our lives a bit better.

Tool # 11

Digital Citizenship... In my opinion begins at home with parents. We are constantly letting our children know of the dangers around us as we go shopping, out to eat, parks, even letting them know the programs or movies that are inappropriate for them at their age. We raise our children to be aware of danger and detect it. The same can be done by teachers and parents by teaching our children good digital citizenship on a daily basis or as we use the technology in our classrooms. I would also make my students aware (to a certain extent) of the consequences of wrong choices while using the Internet, this is important because they will be growing up encountering technology through out the rest of their lives.

Tool # 10

I hope to use this tool very often. This is amazing...I am really thinking of buying one for my self. There were 2 apps. that will be very helpful in our kinder classrooms. They are 1. Alphabet Tracing- we do this the old way, which is very messy because they use visa vice markers on laminated paper which they have to clean with wet paper towel and the ink smeers everywhere. This will definitely change everthing, much neater and fun.
2. Shape Builder- this will also be a great one. This will help them our students to explore shapes in a diffrent perspective. Will also help with hand eye cordination. Can't wait to use them!

Tool # 9

Jing is pretty cool! I always wondered how people could copy a screen or a series of screen to explain steps to follow. I right away thought of how I could put this to use in my kinder classroom. At the beginning of school year (sometimes all year) it takes a bit of time to show my students steps to follow to get to Tummbel Books (program where they can listen to stories). With this tool I would be able to creat step by step instructions with visuals of the real screen they will be looking at, where they can click on it at anytime if they forget how to get to tummbel books. This will save me lots of time, I won't have to stop what I am doing to go to the computer center to assist. As far as Skype, we would have to do this a a whole class and have live chats with other kinder kid in SBISD, Houston, TX or even outside the country.

Tool # 8

Videos like these are great tool in the classroom. In kinder we have a unit on dinosaurs, students love to learn about dinosaurs. Videos are great because we can see dinosaurs in action instead of only in books. Students can learn to a better extent of how strong and powerful dinosaurs were.

Tool #7

In kinder we have a plant unit...we could do something similar to this video to show the changes of the seed as it developes into a plant. We use a zip-log baggie, wet paper towel folded, and lima bean seed. We could take daily snapshots of our seed and put a video/photo story together. We could also label our pictures Day1, Day2, etc. on the video so people who view it see the time it took the seed to change, then put it together to view as a class and share it with other classroom.

Tool #6

This will be a very helpful tool. Intstead of e-mailing documents back and forth we can post them on our wikispace and anyone can access them to add or make changes, great for when we do our newsletter...we can all view it and add stuff to it, double check it before it gets printed and sent home.