Website design and creation has always been something that I have wanted to learn. I am definitely hoping to create my own classroom webpage when I have my own classroom. If I were to create a webpage for the first grade classroom that I am subbing in right now, it would have a number of important components. I would include a welcome message and a description of the page. It would be simple and direct. I would also include a link to my own personal biography. This would have information about where I went to school and where I grew up, as well as my hobbies and interests outside of school.
I would include an outline of what a typical weekly schedule would look like in the classroom for each day of the week, including the itinerant schedule. A list of the classroom rules that the students came up with as a group at the beginning of the year would be an important addition to the page as well. I would create an announcements section to include any important information about upcoming school or classroom events like concerts or field trips, as well as requests for classroom supplies or parent volunteers. There would be a homework link, which would provide resources for parents about how to help their children with homework. It would also include a list of the homework due for the week. The website would include a section devoted to educational games that were age appropriate, such as Starfall.
There would be a section on the website devoted to each one of the subject areas – math, science, reading, writing, health, social studies. Each section would include a description of what the students are specifically working on for each quarter (reading, writing, and problem solving), and for each unit in math and science. The sections would also have links to websites that can provide further information on the topics, as well as different webquests and related games. A reflection page would be updated every week to explain to parents/guardians what their children have accomplish in each subject area that week (right now this goes home in paper form). I would have a spotlight area that would include student work from the week that demonstrated outstanding effort. I would be sure to get permission before posting any work.
There would be a link for parents to contact me via email, as well as a blog section where they can post suggestions for other parents, comments, etc. This would be carefully monitored for content. A classroom website would be a great source of communication between myself and the parents/guardians. I am very excited to design my own!
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Diagrams, Maps, and Webs
Visual learning tools like diagrams, maps, and webs can greatly enhance classroom instruction and student learning. In my first grade classroom, I am doing a read aloud of the book Charlotte’s Web. We have talked about the setting, the plot, and the characters. I would love to have the students use a tool like Kidspiration to create a character web of their favorite character from the story. Although we do not have the software available in our school, it is something that I could have them create using a template that I can print off the computer as well. It still gives a visual representation of the character and their traits. In the third and fourth quarter writing benchmarks, the students are being assessed on organization, among many other things. We are introducing them to graphic organizers to use as prewriting tools. I am planning on giving students a prewriting web to fill out to help them with their next writing piece. I will be modeling the process first, showing the students how to put the main idea in the center, and their supporting details around the outside of the web. In the future, I would love to be able to do this using technology as well. These tools can also be useful in introducing new vocabulary to students. They can work to create a map or a web connecting the new word to their existing schema.
Digital Images
There are numerous ways that digital images can be integrated into the elementary classroom. I loved the idea of using digital pictures taken in the classroom and around the school to create books. At the beginning of the year in first grade, the students do a unit of writing called “All About Me.” They write about their family, their favorite sports, their favorite memories, and many other things about themselves. It would be great to take pictures of the students to include on their page in an “All About Me” class book. I also love the idea of photographing shapes around the school to use in a shape book. I am going to be teaching a unit on geometric shapes soon, and reading this actually gave me a great idea to photograph things outside and around the school that I can put into a slideshow to show the students examples of these shapes in their everyday lives. The students in first grade also do a science unit about new plants. It would be great to try and take pictures of the students and their plants at each step of the plant life cycle, and then put it all together to form a class planting book. I could also use the images as a sequencing activity, and have the students put the pictures in order to show the steps of the plant life cycle. Images can also be a great catalyst for first grade writing topics. When it comes to journal writing, some students have difficulty coming up with topics of their own. Showing students a number of interesting and dynamic digital images could help to inspire ideas for their writing as well. With older elementary students, I would love to help them learn to use digital images in their PowerPoints and Photo stories, where they can narrate as well. During my student teaching, I taught my 4th grade class to use PowerPoint and they absolutely loved it! Their favorite part actually ended up being inserting digital images from the web into their slideshows.
Monday, March 15, 2010
TTCR:Dictionary.com
Dictionary.com is a quick and easy reference for students to use while creating reports, or editing their papers. They can use the thesaurus and encyclopedia at the same time. It is great to have all 3 resources in the same place for them to be able to use at the same time.
TTCR: PBS Between the Lions
This PBS website is another great interactive site for students to use to help review phonics skills. The lion character is something that I know they would love. This site would be great for students to be practicing with sight words, and recognizing words with short vowel and long vowel sounds. It also has a set of stories and video clips that the students can follow along with. It also has a number of games as well. I saw a few that dealt with rhyming, which is another important first grade skill. I will definitely be introducing my students to this site!
TTCR: Starfall
Starfall is a fantastic website for supporting phonemic awareness and phonics instruction. Now that I look at it, I realize that I have seen quite a few students working on this website in the past. I like the way it is separated into different levels based on reading skills. It would be a very useful tool for me in my first grade classroom as extra practice and review of short vowels, long vowels,vowel patterns, etc. Each vowel includes a game to make words, a story that is sounded out, and even a video of how to make that vowel sound. It is a great tool that I know kids would be excited to use!!
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Ch. 10 Website Reviews
Center for Engineering and Science Education
This website is an interesting tool that can help students make learning connections with other students around the country. It reminded me of the PALS site in that it offers collaborative projects for students in classrooms across the country. Each collaborative project offers project instructions, a teacher guide with lesson plans and templates, a discussion area similar to a blog, a student gallery to post student work, and reference materials. I was particularly interested in one collaborative project called “Square of Life.” Students are going outside in their schoolyards and their homes and looking at living and non-living things that they see. They are then taking that information and comparing it to the things that other students have found and reported on in different areas across the country. They take their information and create a square that represents the living and non-living things where they live. I saw some examples that students had created using some paint and drawing applications. There were also some schools that actually created venn diagrams comparing what they discovered with the data from another school in a different state. It looked like they may have used something like Kidspiration. If my students worked on this project, I could also have them input this information into a spreadsheet with different categories (living things – insects, mammals, reptiles, etc. and also examples of nonliving things – things in the classroom, things on the playground, at home, etc.). My first grade classroom is working on a new plants unit, so they could report on the plants that they grew, as well as the plants that they see outside their school. It would be a great science connection for them.
ThinkFree
This website seems to operate in a way that’s similar to googledocs. If you have an account, you are able to upload and share documents with other people on the web. The reason that I chose to view this website was the Voices from the Classroom section about Allison Watkinson. She talked about how she uses interactive spreadsheets as quizzes and tests for her students. I know many students that would be much more interested in taking a quiz or reviewing vocabulary or spelling words in a format like this. Kids love to use computers in any possible aspect of their schoolwork. From Allison’s description of her own worksheets, it sounds like the students are given instant feedback on whether or not their answers are correct, as well as how they are being scored. I think that this is a great part of the tool as well. It would be interesting to find out if you could include a description for incorrect answers as to why those answers are incorrect, so that the student would have immediate feedback, and know why their answer was incorrect. I know that I would definitely need to learn more about the functionality of it in order to create my own templates and use it with students, but I am definitely interested to discover more about it.
School Spreadsheet Safari
My first impression of this website is that it is kid friendly. The other two sites are definitely geared towards teachers and older users. This site is colorful, it includes graphics, it has large font, and is easy to navigate. It includes definitions of spreadsheets, as well as all of the different tools that you need to know how to use to create a spreadsheet, along with labeled screen shots of actual spreadsheets. It also includes classroom spreadsheet activities in different subjects areas like science, math, social studies, and language arts. It gives a tutorial on how to create a spreadsheet for a spelling test, which would be very useful for spelling reviews and practice for students both at school and at home. It also gives an example of how to create a vocabulary review as well. You type the word in one column and the definition in the other. Then you sort one of the columns so that they do not match. The students can cut them out and sort them so that they are once again correctly matching. They also showed examples for reviewing math facts. I know that the 3rd and 4th graders at my school work quite a bit on reviewing their math facts. This would be a fun way for them to do it, especially if they could create their own review sheets. The website actually seems to be a webquest that a group of students created with their teacher in 2001.
This website is an interesting tool that can help students make learning connections with other students around the country. It reminded me of the PALS site in that it offers collaborative projects for students in classrooms across the country. Each collaborative project offers project instructions, a teacher guide with lesson plans and templates, a discussion area similar to a blog, a student gallery to post student work, and reference materials. I was particularly interested in one collaborative project called “Square of Life.” Students are going outside in their schoolyards and their homes and looking at living and non-living things that they see. They are then taking that information and comparing it to the things that other students have found and reported on in different areas across the country. They take their information and create a square that represents the living and non-living things where they live. I saw some examples that students had created using some paint and drawing applications. There were also some schools that actually created venn diagrams comparing what they discovered with the data from another school in a different state. It looked like they may have used something like Kidspiration. If my students worked on this project, I could also have them input this information into a spreadsheet with different categories (living things – insects, mammals, reptiles, etc. and also examples of nonliving things – things in the classroom, things on the playground, at home, etc.). My first grade classroom is working on a new plants unit, so they could report on the plants that they grew, as well as the plants that they see outside their school. It would be a great science connection for them.
ThinkFree
This website seems to operate in a way that’s similar to googledocs. If you have an account, you are able to upload and share documents with other people on the web. The reason that I chose to view this website was the Voices from the Classroom section about Allison Watkinson. She talked about how she uses interactive spreadsheets as quizzes and tests for her students. I know many students that would be much more interested in taking a quiz or reviewing vocabulary or spelling words in a format like this. Kids love to use computers in any possible aspect of their schoolwork. From Allison’s description of her own worksheets, it sounds like the students are given instant feedback on whether or not their answers are correct, as well as how they are being scored. I think that this is a great part of the tool as well. It would be interesting to find out if you could include a description for incorrect answers as to why those answers are incorrect, so that the student would have immediate feedback, and know why their answer was incorrect. I know that I would definitely need to learn more about the functionality of it in order to create my own templates and use it with students, but I am definitely interested to discover more about it.
School Spreadsheet Safari
My first impression of this website is that it is kid friendly. The other two sites are definitely geared towards teachers and older users. This site is colorful, it includes graphics, it has large font, and is easy to navigate. It includes definitions of spreadsheets, as well as all of the different tools that you need to know how to use to create a spreadsheet, along with labeled screen shots of actual spreadsheets. It also includes classroom spreadsheet activities in different subjects areas like science, math, social studies, and language arts. It gives a tutorial on how to create a spreadsheet for a spelling test, which would be very useful for spelling reviews and practice for students both at school and at home. It also gives an example of how to create a vocabulary review as well. You type the word in one column and the definition in the other. Then you sort one of the columns so that they do not match. The students can cut them out and sort them so that they are once again correctly matching. They also showed examples for reviewing math facts. I know that the 3rd and 4th graders at my school work quite a bit on reviewing their math facts. This would be a fun way for them to do it, especially if they could create their own review sheets. The website actually seems to be a webquest that a group of students created with their teacher in 2001.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Word Processing
When I first started reading the chapter on word processing, I assumed that I would not be reading anything that I didn’t already know. However, I was surprised at some of the new tools that I was able to learn about involving word processing. For instance, when I have created word documents in the past including different components with different formats, I have struggled with the automatic formatting. I end up having to go back and fix things a number of times. Now that I know about page and section breaks, I’m interested to start using them in my word documents. I am hoping that it will help ease some of my formatting frustrations!
I am excited to incorporate word processing in my future classroom as much as possible. As research has shown, word processing helps improve attitudes towards writing, as well as the quality of the writing. I would encourage my students to use their free time, or specified writing times for creative writing, such as stories, poems, or skits. I would also encourage journal writing on the computer as well. In the upper elementary grades, I would work with students on creating outlines to organize their information. All of the elementary grade levels could use word processing to create reports on different topics. For the lower grades, I would include more templates to help them structure their information. I also may give them sentence starters, or fill-in-the blank sentences. This can also be a useful tool for students with special needs at all of the elementary grade levels.
I am also planning on establishing a class blog and/or a wiki so that I can post questions, and students can post their responses and reactions. I would also encourage them to post their creative writing as well. I believe this would help students take pride in their writing. I will do my best to teach my students the appropriate word processing skills for their grade level and developmental level. I will also stress to them the importance of these skills in many different jobs in the future. It would be interesting to have a discussion about the types of jobs that require word processing skills. I think a great extension would also be to have some parents or other members of the community come in to talk about the importance of word processing skills in their occupations.
I loved the Voices in the Classroom piece about Amy Graham, the foreign language teacher. I liked the idea of having student groups create study packets for a book they are working on. In the upper elementary grades, students often work in literacy circles based on different chapter books. I would love to have them work on study guides like this to help them with writing summaries and analyzing characters. Overall, I am hoping to use word processing in my classroom to help my students get excited about writing!
I am excited to incorporate word processing in my future classroom as much as possible. As research has shown, word processing helps improve attitudes towards writing, as well as the quality of the writing. I would encourage my students to use their free time, or specified writing times for creative writing, such as stories, poems, or skits. I would also encourage journal writing on the computer as well. In the upper elementary grades, I would work with students on creating outlines to organize their information. All of the elementary grade levels could use word processing to create reports on different topics. For the lower grades, I would include more templates to help them structure their information. I also may give them sentence starters, or fill-in-the blank sentences. This can also be a useful tool for students with special needs at all of the elementary grade levels.
I am also planning on establishing a class blog and/or a wiki so that I can post questions, and students can post their responses and reactions. I would also encourage them to post their creative writing as well. I believe this would help students take pride in their writing. I will do my best to teach my students the appropriate word processing skills for their grade level and developmental level. I will also stress to them the importance of these skills in many different jobs in the future. It would be interesting to have a discussion about the types of jobs that require word processing skills. I think a great extension would also be to have some parents or other members of the community come in to talk about the importance of word processing skills in their occupations.
I loved the Voices in the Classroom piece about Amy Graham, the foreign language teacher. I liked the idea of having student groups create study packets for a book they are working on. In the upper elementary grades, students often work in literacy circles based on different chapter books. I would love to have them work on study guides like this to help them with writing summaries and analyzing characters. Overall, I am hoping to use word processing in my classroom to help my students get excited about writing!
Monday, February 8, 2010
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