We do not want to see our past students like this, so technology it will be! :)

Literacy Teacher- Jamie

Through taking this class I am now more aware of the great and ever changing world of technology of today!  I am so glad that I took this course because of all the great tools and ideas that have come from it.  If it had not been for the readings and explorations I did because of this class I would not have ventured out and found them myself.  I now know that I can better equip my students to be 21^st century learners and help introduce many new technologies as they come out.  I want my students to learn things from me that they can carry on and remember and these technologies need to be learned and shared so that they are better able to adapt and change as our technology does.  I loved using the diigo site.  Through this sharing experience I gained many great sites and now my students and I both use.   I even started my own diigo bookmarking place where I put just resources for me and made another of just sites for my young students to explore. 

This class has also opened my eyes to the wonderful world of blogs and how to better incorporate them into my classroom by allowing my students to blog.  It has been amazing seeing all the possibilities that are out there and how easy they are to use and find.  I have also found many great blogs of classroom teachers that want to learn and share from other teachers.  This has been such a valuable resource into my teaching this year and will continue to be.  Through using these blogs I can see what teachers all over the world are doing in their classrooms and things I like I can use or adapt and change to fit my student’s needs.  Overall this has been a great help to me and a needed boost of excitement into the world of technology for me.  I always thought I did a pretty good job on using technology in my classroom but now I have learned about more tools and sites that are out there.  I hope to continue next year and many years on learning and growing as technology does.

Literacy Teacher-Kayla

As a literacy teacher this class has helped me become more aware of the ways I can teach literacy. Knowing that technology is changing and the way we teach needs to change with that technology has helped to understand more about this class. This class has helped me to see the many different tools that can be used to help teach literacy in the classroom. Using blogs, wikis, and other online resources as teaching tools as opened my eyes to a whole new way of teaching. I hadn't really thought about ways to use these technologies in the classroom until this class. I'm excited about starting many of these new to me technologies in my classroom next. I think having blogs in the classroom will open students to new opportunities to become better readers, writers and communicators. In second grade we do a Bear Project with Mexico. Students from Mexico send a bear and a journal to our school, then the students take the bear home and write about what they do with the bear at home. Next year I want to use a blog for students to write about what they do with the bear as well. This way the students in Mexico can go to the blog and look at the entries and even pictures of the bear at our school. I think a blog would also be great for our Flat Stanley Project as we send Flat Stanley around the world, we can blog about him as he returns. I look forward to using blogs in my classroom next year. I think this is the one things that I have taken away from this class that will really help me become a better literacy teacher. I think that by using a blog I can give my students the chance to learn how to use this technology very well. I want to use other technologies, but the blog is what I want my main focus to be on for next year.

Animoto in the Classroom

What is Animoto?  This is a free (for educators) site where anyone can take pictures, add music and movement to it and create amazing videos for all to enjoy!  We have had a professional development on how to sign up for a free educator account and how to create our first videos this year.  Our school is pushing for teachers to incorporate technology into the classroom and get students engaged!  Animoto is a great tool for doing this.  We have created some simple class videos that we post on our wiki pages that our families can view at home and in upper grades students are creating Animoto videos for projects.  They allow students to choose how their video is put together- from how fast the slides go to the colors and music that play during the showing.  There are numerous ways to use this site including having students create biographies or autobiographies, digital storytelling, reading or science projects, documenting special events or spicing up PowerPoint’s.  All are ways for us as teachers to push our students learning while keeping them motivated and engaged.  The tool is easy to use and very user friendly.  Slide shows can be created in just a few minutes.  We so far have just used Animoto to create our own videos for our classroom but looking toward the future we would love to use this tool as something that our students could put together on their own or in supervised groups to begin with.   Here is one we created for the wiki.  Sign up for a free educator account and be careful they are so fun and quick, they are addicting!

http://animoto.com/play/gSeSV3Ng28l4rAjIFy00MQ

What Has Helped Katy as a Literacy Teacher

This semester has taught me a lot when it comes to literacy and myself as a teacher of literacy. I've learned that as the world changes and technology evolves, we need to be ever mindful of our teaching and our use of technology in the classroom. Too often we get stuck in trying to fit technology into our lessons when we really should be using technology as a vessel for learning to take place through. One of the most exciting ideas that has come out of being in this class for me is the possibilities associated with blogs. Before this class I never thought blogs would be possible with students in Kindergarten. Now I see that that is not the case and that really this is a great time for students to be learning what blogs are and how they can use blogs as a forum to share their thoughts and their learning. There are so many possibilities with blogs and literacy learning. I love the idea of having book clubs where students have their own group pages on a blog where they can post their thinking about books and respond to eachother. I also think we could integrate science in blogs and use a blog for researching and sharing what students learned about animals, weather, tools, etc by writing what they learn and sharing pictures and links. There are so many possibilities with blogs and I've been really motivated this semester to get my students using blogs as a means for writing and sharing their learning.

Another resource that has helped me as a literacy teacher has been the use of online reading and handheld devices. I love the possibilities with handheld devices where students could use them for individual reading and have a variety of books available to them when they needed them on their level. I also have been really motivated by the idea of using handheld devices in small groups for guided reading. I love online reading too. This resource has really engaged my kids and gotten them into reading and stories. I've learned that literacy doesn't have to just be pencil and paper or paper books. It can be a computer and keyboard or text to speech software or Co:writer. It can be tablet screens and books read by celebrities. It can be books that move like a movie or links that can be clicked on that would take you to other websites. Literacy isn't just what we have always thought of as literacy. Now it has grown into encompassing tons of different learning avenues. I've taken a lot away from this course that effected my beliefs and practices as a literacy teacher.

Vocabulary All Around Us!

 It has been shown that reading comprehension and vocabulary are strongly correlated.  Sometimes the most unsuccessful readers don't read as much as successful readers because of the difficulty that comes with reading so their vocabulary is not growing as much as those who read.  We have found that when teaching a lesson we frequently must stop and review vocabulary that we expect students to know beforehand and that sometimes becomes the new focus.  This is problematic because students don’t have the basic understanding of what they are supposed to be learning.  We know that we want our students to be great readers and to be able to call themselves good readers they must not only read the words correctly but they must understand what they read.  We have been pondering over how to best teach our young students vocabulary and what is the best way for the past few weeks.  There are so many idea and strategies out there on how to best teach vocabulary.  We thought about bringing in pictures on our smart boards or having pictures printed out for students,  words in sentence form to help students build connections to the word meaning, having students create vocabulary maps of what they know about words and just read to them as many books as we can!  After so much discussion we found a program that we think would really help our students called, Text Talk.  Below is a website we found that helped show some of the findings from the research they conduced while creating this program and the actual amount of student’s growth in vocabulary when using it.  Some grades in our school use the program and the teachers we spoke with love it.  We are hoping to make sure to speak to our principal next year to try a sample of it for all classrooms in K-2.  We are curious to see how our students respond to the program.   Until then we plan to make sure that we review needed vocabulary with students throughout the lesson and not just at the beginning or end to ensure they have the basic ideas before moving on and continue to try to read rich language books to students to help build their vocabularies.  If we incorporate more rich language books into our classroom read alouds our students will be exposed to more vocabulary that they may not otherwise hear.   Check out the site below to learn about Text Talk program yourself!

http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/texttalk/research.htm

Future Technology

As we are becoming 21st century learners it interesting to see all of the new technologies that are available to use. After reading and talking about future technology it is amazing to see how far we have come in just a short amount of time. It will be amazing to see what we can do within the next 10-20 years. When talking about what technologies will be in the future you wonder what will happen to teachers. Will we be done away with or will we still be needed? It is important that we are teaching our students how to use these new technologies and it is helpful if we know about these new technologies. We hope that these future technologies help us to help our students. Using handheld devices in the classrooms, so that all students have well would help them to learn more effectively. Students are growing up using more technology than ever used before. We have to be able to use them in our teaching to ensure that our students are learning the skills they need to make it in the future. There is a lack of funding right now that does not allow us to use technology in ways that we could. The more technology changes, the more we are going to have to change with it and learn to use it. It will be interesting to see what technologies will be used in the future and how they will affect learning.