Thing 16

My Wikki space: http://dmiller4th.wikispaces.com/ I hope to use this to gather and work on sources and media for teaching the 4th Grade GLCE's. I was recently had my technology proposal accepted by the school district. I will need many new resources for my 3M infinity system that will be installed in my room. I hope to use all the resources I have used and have my students work with their collaborative projects and wikki should be a great resource. I would like to create a space to collaborate with the other teachers across the district where we can support each other.

Thing 15

Success!! I was able to upload a picture of the LA State Capitol Building from flickr, as well as a link to the Louisiana.gov website. In addition, at the bottom of the page I was able to add the link to the Travel Guide page. This was great fun once I got the hang of it. I spent a lot of time on it yesterday with little success. I believe the problem was I was trying to grab photos that were not to be shared, and did not hit the save button on the wikki as I was trying to preview so I did not take out anyone else's info. I did eliminate the state seal. I think we need a second page at this point to get all the info on it. This would be great for collaborative projects with students on report topics. I believe the initial teaching of the technology would be a little cumbersome for the original technology teaching; but still doable in 4th grade. We would probably do a class project and then work in groups getting smaller as skills progress due to teacher management issues. As others have mentioned in their blogs getting sites unblocked and granting permissions in the various areas due to content may be difficult. Also screening all the info to prevent inappropriate pics and videos from creeping in during searches would be an issue especially at the elementary level. However, I see tremendous potential if we can work out the glitches.

Thing 14

I searched the wikkis site and found a great link for Math for 3rd - 6th grade. The link: http://eduzoomerone.wikispaces.com/ma3 . I posted it to the wikki on the MCISD page of course. I found that one could spend a whole day finding and developing useful links to utilze in the classroom. This could easily become addictive and there is no possible way to get through it all. I think this will be great to utilize materials that can be downloaded, or site based with students as teaching materials in the standard form are expensive and become quickly outdated. It is also difficult to capture and keep elementary students attention in the video game era with the standard text book and worksheets (who wants to spend time grading them anyway). I will have to strike a balance because paper/pencil testing is still the norm, so the skills will need to be translated. Great resource, made the price of the class worth all the work to get this info.

Thing 13

I picniked a photo from my computer. This was pretty easy and I could see how this could be quite useful for reports, sales flyers, lesson plans, etc. I think to get more of the features that I was able to view on the site, you need more then the basic membership. I originally attempted to modify a pic of my son's motorcycle to eliminate all the background junk and pop the motorcycle to the front of the picture and add text. The site kept directing me to the membership page. Paying additional for for the premium. $24.95 a year may be worth the investment for an individual, but I am not sure that it would be available to an entire class at that price. A site license would not fit into our current budget if it was more then that. Individually, I thought it was awesome .... to use for a classroom, I would need to look more into the finances as things are very TIGHT now.

I changed the contrast and saturation of this picture to brighten the colors. I also used the crop feature to cut out the background, which was easy for this object as it is a rectangle. I played with all the other features to get different looks but settled on this one. Contrast, crop, and color saturation I believe were the only options I used. It was cool. I will probably try this again.

Thing 12

The flickr badge gadget was broken. I finally figured out why it would not work. It is broken. Therefore; I substituted a slideshow for this thing. Hopefully, that will satisfy the requirement. I was able to steal and post several other peoples badges to my blog. Then spent another half hour trying to figure out what to do to delete them. I think besides learning how to use a lot of gadgets (I ran through a lot of them trying to find out why things did not work), I have perfected the use of the help searches, not helpful, but have learned a lot of info while trying to figure out the problem. I think the most valuable lesson I learned was to play and explore. What could I do, crash the world wide web, not sure that would be a tragedy considering the current economy in MI. Therefore, playing with the technology is ok. I finally stumbled on the answer, badge gadget broken, posting a slide show in its place. I hope you enjoy the slide show. These are photos from the IKAN Walk in Success project we did at Ritter. Ask if you have any questions :)

Thing 11

Although I could not get the video to play today. This may solve a problem I am having sharing photos with someone in another city. As part of a workshop that was made available to the students at my school, "Walk in Success", I have many pictures to share with the program creators. As part of being able to present this program we were to provide them with a review of the event. Given the opportunity to be the first school in this area to present the program, we went above and beyond the program guidelines to create a wonderful experience. All the additional steps were documented to give suggestions to others that wanted to repeat the experience we created. The picture file is too large to send via e-mail, creating the slide show with narrative explanation will be an excellent way to share this material. Anyone interested in learning more about the "Walk in Success" program feel free to contact me.

I must have confuse the slideshare with the slideshow. So now I have both!! Continuing to learn new things everday.

Beautiful Washington DC

View more presentations from Dr. ronald Shapiro.

Thing 10

I loved the Google Docs create a survey.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pjBCjcJ2JpxMoybRu_mNjHg
I hope the tech in my building will allow my students to take this short survey after their project is created. I chose the Young Author's process as the subject and easily created 5 questions of different types to gather their perspective on the project process. Feedback from students will help to build a better program and identify problems of which I was not aware. Hopefully, this can drive instruction to better serve the population I teach. I can see how this may help with other curricular areas and how this could also be used to bring parents into the process by making them feel that their opinions are valued and considered when creating projects for their children. This could benefit the Community Involvement piece of our School Improvement documents bringing more information and ideas to the table to be considered to drive curriculum decisions and school operations.