Using Avatar's in the classroom

Today in class we discussed the positive effects using Avatars in the classroom can have.  First, they make the student's attention last longer because it is a new way to receive instruction.  Next, students can quickly and easily create their own avatars to add to their own blogs.  This would be a fun way to begin class in the mornings.  When I was in elementary school I remember using journals to begin class everyday.  In this day and age teacher and students are growing in their technological education and using blogs as a way to log student's written work. 
Here is my example of an avatar created with Voxi

Animoto in my Classroom

In class this past week we learned about an incredible tool that is free online.  This tool is called Animoto and it can be accessed here.  At this website one can create professional looking sideshows.  This will help educators in the classroom to keep the student's attention with better looking notes.  Also, this is a new and easy way to involve students in your classroom; a way that one could do this is by assigning a research project to each student.  Then they could find images and text that correlates with their topic and display their discoveries to the class in a new and interesting way.  The website is so easy to navigate that anyone can use it, also for teachers there are discounts if you need to make longer videos.  
Here is an example of my personal animoto

Using Twitter as an Educator

In the beginning of this academic year I was completely uninterested in Twitter.  I had no interest in the website because I believed it to be a silly concept only used by people who needed attention.  I did not gain an interest until a few months ago when many of my peers began using it to communicate in comical ways.  This was the reason that I began my twitter journey.  Since then I have become a twitter fiend.  It has become such an interesting way to communicate with all sorts of people from the people I see everyday to the bright and comical people who just want to make you laugh.  Those are my favorite tweets, the ones that are solely for entertainment.  Another group that I communicate with is the educational group that helps educators find resources by sharing their discoveries on twitter.  This has been a helpful resource when looking for lesson plans or any kind of advise in the field of education. 
Some of the resources that I have found through twitter are as follows:
Slide share this is a website I found on a teacher's twitter.  This website allows anyone to share slide shows, documents and videos over the internet for free!
The next resource I found is November Learning this website hosts multiple different websites to further the technology education for teacher's.
My other favorite resource that I discovered through twitter is cool tools for schools.  This is a Wiki that gives teachers interesting ideas and tools to keep their lesson plans interesting.  This website has everything from music tools to graphing suggestions to make your lessons more accessible.  
There are so many useful websites online for educators and twitter is an effective way to share information.  In order to successfully use twitter one must be willing to do some investigating and locate other educators. Twitter can also successfully be used in a school, in order to do this successfully all of the staff would need to get their tweets sent to their phones.  From there the staff could send important information back and forth.  
My personal twitter can be found here

Fun With Text

Today I decided to tackle some of my assignments and began working on my Wordle.  This is an online program that allows the creator to creatively make a list of words into a work of art.  This program can be used in a variety of ways in a classroom.  The first that came to mind was to present weekly vocabulary words.  This would make a usually boring activity more exciting and interesting. Second, it would be a great way to introduce a new subject; like beginning an english section on Literature.  Here is what you might put on the wordle to excite the students:

I really enjoyed using the Wordle program, and look forward to using it in my future classrooms.  To access this program just click HERE

Reflection #2: CDK's Education Technology

What a plethora of information!  I was instantly drawn to the Resources Wiki link found on the upper right hand corner of Cyndi Danner-Kuhn's website.  I honestly do not know much about Wiki's but I am looking forward to discovering and exploring much over the semester and beyond.

After watching the video on Celebrating Kansas Voices I was moved to want to explore more into the organization.  At the Celebrating Kansas Voices website I found a group of motivated people who are creating such an inspiring oral history for our beautiful state.  This project is in place to document our history in a manner that gives everyone a first-hand feel on the situations.

Watch for yourself!

Reflection #1 Technology Bits, Bytes & Nibbles

After reviewing Cyndi Danner-Kuhn's blog I was incredibly impressed.  I found a multitude of helpful ideas for my future classroom, and my favorite of all was The National Archives that allows anyone to access our Nations precious documents in a new way.  By having these videos on hand will allow the teaching of history to be more accessible to the masses.  

This is just one of the many examples of videos that can be accessed on this impressive playlist of videos.  Also you can access these videos through Itunes Teachers will be able to use these videos when discussing everything from WWII to more local things like their state's history.  

Another article that jumped out at me was the one about Ipads being the Textbook of the Future and how exciting this sounds.  I do not personally own an Ipad yet but when I was purchasing my books for this semester it was clear that the affordable option was the Nook/Kindle/Ipad version of the textbooks. In the Boston news article, D.C. Denison discusses how the Ipad applications can be used to teach entire lessons.  I cannot describe how anxious and excited it makes me to think that I will be entering the educational world at a time when such technological changes are occurring.