virtual fieldtrip and forms

Since this is my first grad. class in about 10 years I loved thinking outside the box.... the microsoft office box. My partner was kind enough to choose a topic that I will use.  I am excited to use our virtual trip this year however it is in the spring when I cover rainforests :( so I will have to wait.  I have only used you tube for looking up songs or silly mindless things. I never thought to look at it for actual good information! Yippee.  I will definitely be looking there a lot more often!   I also loved the forms!! I am trying to figure out how to use those in my room. They are fun to make but better yet I love how easy they are at gathering information. Any ideas on how to use forms in the primary (second grade) grades?

Still found it exhausting

I still wish I was better at narrowing my searches online.  When I am looking for animals of the Amazon rainforest I did an advanced search that had to have Amazon rainforest animals together.. I still had to weed through so many non amazon sites or sites not truly related to animals of the Amazon rainforest.  I guess it just takes practice filtering out the bad ones... or it takes time to figure out what exactly to ask for...

Interesting web tool

When I was looking for websites for our virtual fieldtrip I was coming across several very nice school made websites made by the same tool here it is.
http://thinkquest.org/pls/html/think.library

Here is an example for you of someone who used it.
http://library.thinkquest.org/J0111765/layers.html.

Virtual Fieldtrip!

Ok. I just keep adding and looking and adding and looking I need to move on to the next section of it but I keep thinking of other ideas!!! Since this activity worked well with elementary ed. we picked something that I teach...the rainforest... and went from there.  It is great but not when you are under a time limit :). I will definitely use this virtual fieldtrip this year.  Hopefully I will get my partner's son next year ( but I am going to share it with my fellow teachers so it doesn't really matter) so I can show it to him in class and tell him his mom and I put this together!!!

Prezi

http://www.prezi.com/ What a crazy fun site but also frustrating! Trying to get things into spaces. To stay in spaces.  I really like it though.  I found it very easy to take pictures from http://www.photobucket.com/ to prez.  We are going to use it as a way to introduce ourselves. I think it is a great tool for me to introduce myself to the students.  I also have a student of the week  where they tell about themselves and bring in things that help describe them. It would be fun to have the students do something similar and show it on the smartboard. 

Computer courses

This is my first class in the cohort and boy am I having a learning curve!  I am SO used to PAPER! Paper assignments, paper sylabus, etc.  I am keep forgetting to hit that little plus sign in the content! ugh! I was reading an article on November Learning ... yes I know a little late... I love the article titled Drill the Teachers Educate the Kids.  When we have an inservice on technology... oh boy.... on of two things happen. Our school buys expensive data software ... sit us in front of the computer .... give us fake kids to analyze then... well.... hmmmm...thankfully never saw those programs again.... Then when we got software for the students to use during the inservice it wouldn't work and again we couldn't put our own kids in! I did force myself to have my kids use it but not as much as they should.  It took another 3 hour very boring inservice of waiting around for tech guys to figure out problems.  Things that should have been ironed out before we got there.  It also would have been so beneficial to have some kids there for at least some of the inservice like the article had suggested to use the program and see how it worked from their perspective.

Virtual Fieldtrip!

The virtual fieldtrip is coming along.  It was good to have time with my partner to hash out how things were going.  Funny how we were thinking along the same lines and unfortunate that we were struggling with some of the same things (Google maps)The struggles are ironing out though.  When she opened up our shared doc the same time I had it opened she could work on it and I could see her changing it on my computer! That was really neat!

ok here we go again.

So I got caught up thinking about module 2 and forgot blog.... oops.  It might have helped me straighten out my thoughts!!! Maps... forms ...doc... wow.... who knew... well obviously a lot of people.  I am sure glad they did.  We have a way of sending links to every computer in one of our computer labs so it will be fun to play with the google maps when we are working with our science units and when we are talking about specific types area in social studies.  Never thought to do that before!

Very First Post!!!

Ok ... Wow.... sooo much information in such a short time.  I like computers however I have a very little window of knowledge that I know about.  I will be interested to see if how many hours it takes me to get my homepage to look normal without add gadget everywhere! Navigating through things on a computer is not something I do well either so I am hoping this will help me class will help(esp. Clarion Website).
I am amazed at what we were taught about narrowing searches.  It was adding something as simple as edu to your advanced search will make it so much easier to maneuver through the garbage to the better websites.  Google scholar looks like it is going to be a great tool as I start out on this adventure of graduate classes.  I was anxious to share the information about google scholar with a colleague of mine because I know it would be a great help to her during her graduate courses as well because she has talked to me a number of times about having a hard time finding articles on certain topics.