Mystery Skype

This week I decided to stick with following Vicki’s blog again and one of the latest blog posts she wrote about was Mystery Skype. Now you’re probably wondering what exactly Mystery Skype is...I thought the same thing. Mystery Skype is an education game, invented by teachers, played by 2 classrooms on Skype. Mystery Skype is global. The overall aim of the game is to guess the location of the other classroom by asking other questions. Mystery Skype has transformed the way students learn about the world in school and not only does it engage the students but it also excites the teachers to teach a topic that hasn’t exactly been addressed a lot in school. Also another way to integrate technology into your classroom and Google Maps is the perfect tool for this.

My reaction to Mystery Skype is this is a great tool to use in your classroom with your students. You can connect with anyone in the world globally and have your students interact and learn at the same time. This is a great tool and a great way to get your students involved. Mystery Skype is suitable for all ages as well, which is great because some tools are usually used in the younger grades. Mystery Skype is the most engaging way to help students learn about geography and most importantly having your students be able to have fun while learning. Teachers who utilize Mystery Skype in their classrooms have found that once you start, you won’t be able to stop. Also they have found that their students absolutely love it and their question asking abilities have improved out of this world. Overall, Mystery Skype is an engaging way to inspire learning in your classroom and another great tool to integrate into your learning.

Here is a link talking about Mystery Skype!

A Tool to Simplify Text

This past week, Vicki has been tweeting some interesting articles. One that caught my eye was this tweet below.

Vicki tweeted about a reading comprehensive tool to simplify text. After reading this article, I was interested in this product. So this tool called Rewordify simplifies difficult English and teaches you words quickly and effectively. The student can paste in difficult sentences, paragraphs, or whole chapters full of hard words, then they click rewordify text and they will instantly see an easier version of the text for fast understanding.

Overall rewordify.com lets you read more, understand more, learn more words, and teach more effectively. It simplifies English, teaches vocabulary, creates learning materials, and lets you create documents to teach people all over the world. The best part is that it’s free!!!

I played around with this reading comprehensive tool and I found it helpful. It’s a great tool for teachers to utilize in their classroom for students who have difficulties reading text. This tool will help those students understand the text easier and most importantly understand what they are actually reading. This tool is also great for learning vocabulary words. I wish I knew about this tool sooner because it would have been helpful. Just another example yet again of using technology in your classroom and another tool for teachers to utilize.

Here is a link for a video tutorial about rewordify.

Why Tweet Children's Learning?

This week I decided to change it up and follow someone new on their blog. Since I follow Vicki Davis on twitter, I decided to follow her on her personal blog as well. She blogged about a post she found on Twitter, tweeted by @BryanMMathers.     

So why tweet children’s learning?

Well first, this tweet says it all. There are several ways as to why we should tweet children’s learning.

1. Provides a context and a purpose
2. Instant recognition of great work
3. It takes seconds to do
4. One sentence and a picture shows the learning process
5. Using a hashtag categorizes learning across school

Now I thought to myself about all these reasons and how interesting and actually true they are. I have never been a fan of twitter. I just never understood what the point of tweeting was and it just never grabbed my attention. But for purposes like this for example, Twitter is in fact a great tool. It’s a great tool for teachers to utilize and really take advantage of in their classrooms. Also, Twitter can serve as a great way for parents to be able to stay up to date on what their children are learning in the classroom. Twitter does have its pros and its cons, but overall, I believe Twitter is a great tool to use in a classroom setting.

"Write About"

This week I’m sticking with following Vicki Davis (@coolcatteacher) on Twitter. I find everything she tweets about relevant to teaching and also interesting. She tweeted an article about “Write About” and how this may be the education site of the year. I decided to take a look at it.

"Write About" is a new site co-founded by educator John Spencer and his co-founder is Brad Wilson. This site provides many images with writing prompts and students are able to write their response and do an audio recording of it. Teachers can also even create virtual classrooms and provide individual written feedback to student writing. Their student creations can be shared publicly or just with their classmates. Teachers have another option too where they can change prompts or upload their own photos.

“Write About” is a website for teachers to be able to sign up and participate in the community for free. Up to 4o free student accounts can be created with up to 3 posts each. This site is an excellent site for English Language Learners because it combines visual imagery, writing, speaking and listening.

I really enjoyed looking into this website because it’s just another way that technology can be used in the classroom. It’s a great tool, especially for younger kids to use and with schools now using iPads in classrooms, it can be used on that as an activity. This is an amazing resource to intrigue students as writers.

Here is a link for a video about “Write About.”

Flipping the Non-Flippable Classrooms

This week we were asked to blog about the person we are following on Twitter. Sadly who I am following on Twitter, does not tweet enough so I had to find someone new. I found @coolcatteacher. She tweets regularly and I found her interesting to follow. I came across this one tweet she posted about an article she found on Edutopia. It’s called “Flipped Learning Toolkit: Flipping the Non-Flippable Classes.” Vicki Davis who found this article asked if you think you could flip classes like PE, dance, and elementary education. This article from Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams shows you how.  

After reading this article I was intrigued. You can flip any classroom in any subject. Whether it’s math, PE, science, like the article states it’s a resounding yes. Teachers need to ask this question, What is the best use of my face-to-face time with students? Before reading this article, I thought that Physical Education, Woodworking, dance education, and elementary education were all non-flippable courses. But it turns out that they can be flipped! Which after reading this article I completely agree with that! The subject I found most interesting that you could flip was Physical Education. I would have never thought that you could flip a gym class, but like the video states, the teacher could post a video about how to serve a volleyball the correct way, then the next day in class you can just go right into the lesson and skip over that part, unless one student needs help then you can give your attention to them. I thought this was clever. An example they used in the article was a gym teacher and how he loves using the flipped classroom. He was frustrated with spending too much of his time telling kids how to move their bodies, and now with the flipped classroom his students now spend more time moving their bodies. He is also an athletic coach and he has taken the flipped class into this job as well. His teams benefits from additional time to practice because less practice time is devoted to instruction. Now even coaches are using flip class which is crazy!   

Overall, any course can be flipped even if you don’t believe it can be. This is a great tool to utilize in a classroom! I enjoyed coming across this article and I’m excited to see what other articles @coolcatteacher will post!  

Connecticut Educator: The Common Core Standards Are Gobbledy Gook

So I decided to switch it up this week, and follow a new blogger. The two women I have been following blog frequently, I just haven’t found anything interesting that they are blogging about. So I picked to follow Diane Ravitch. Students in my class follow her, so I decided to give it a look. Here personal blog is found here at http://dianeravitch.net/.

Diane Ravitch blogs about the latest news on education. For example, opinions about education issues, and also on the common core. She posts very frequently throughout the day. The blog post that caught my attention was titled “Connecticut Educator: The Common Core Standards Are Gobbledy Gook.” I felt this one was a great post to read since as a teacher you will be basing your lesson plans off of this and how you teach your students. Also, I felt it described how most people feel about Common Core. So in summary, the entire post is quoted directly from Ann Policelli Cronin. She explains why she thinks the Common Core is a complete waste of everyone’s time. She states, “they were never tested on real students in real classroom, and no one can honestly say that they will prepare students for college or careers.” I honestly don’t think I could say it any better than how she did. Now this quote that I am posting below is a quote that Ravitch includes from Cronin, and I one hundred percent agree with Cronin.

Overall, I found this post intriguing and a definite must read, especially for those in the education field. From reading this post I was a little confused though as to if people in the education field are complaining and posting negative things about the Common Core, then why is no one going to try and fix this problem. We are teaching the future generation and should do something about this if so many people out there have opinions on how the Common Core is not good!

Weekend Warriors: Saddle Up for Second Grade

So I went back and looked at Saddle Up for Second Grade blog. Marcy has posted some interesting posts lately. One that caught my eye was Weekend Warriors: iPod Listening Center Organization. Over the summer Marcy was fortunate enough to have three iPods donated to her classroom through DonorsChoose.

I was unsure of what exactly DonorsChoose was, so I did a little research on it. What I found out about it was that it is an online charity that makes it easy for anyone to help students in need. Public school teachers post classroom project requests on their site and you can give any amount to the project that most inspires you. So when a project reaches its funding goal, DonorsChoose ships the materials to the school. What really caught my attention about this website is that Donors Choose website is completely free for teachers to use! Which is great.

Some public schools are in lower income areas, so it’s hard for teachers to acquire all of the tools that they need. This website is great for those areas because teachers are helping out teachers again, as well as individual people.

Another thing I would like to bring up that I found on Marcy’s blog was her Weekend Warriors Pinterest Board. Pinterest is a great website to get ideas from for your classroom. What Marcy did was create her own board that offers tips, tricks, and great ideas that she uses in her classroom.

Overall, from this blog I found two great websites that can be used later down the road when it is time for me to teach. I really like Pinterest because there are so many different boards out there for teachers to get ideas from. Just another example of teachers helping teachers!

Twitter: @EdKatelnspire

Following up on the woman I’m following on Twitter, she tweeted something about DonorsChoose. Now I thought this was great since I just found out what it was through Saddle Up for Second Grade blog. I never realized how many teachers actually use DonorsChoose. But anyway, Kate tweeted Thank you @NEAFoundation for matching my @DonorsChoose grant today! Because of your support, my grant has now been fully funded!!! So what she did to make this happen was she posted on DonorsChoose website about her students, then the project, and the materials she needed. Below I posted a picture of the layout of this. 

Thankfully she had 9 donors and she was able to buy the materials for her classroom. Once again I really love this website. It really is a great tool, as we see first hand with this teacher using it and getting her materials for her students. It’s interesting to look and see what teachers need in their classrooms. I really enjoy looking on this website and being able to see how people help out others in need. Even if it’s just a $5 donation, that’s still $5 closer than before. Overall, I believe that this is a great website to utilize if you need materials in your classroom that your school is unable to afford.   

Reflection Blog on Social Media in Higher Ed

I really enjoyed reading the article "Connected Learning" by Steven Mintz. I liked how he started off the article by quoting other articles that seem to think social media is not good for our society. Steven makes many great points to why social media is a positive move though. For example, Mintz states in the article "that interaction need not be face-to-face to be authentic and meaningful." I really liked the paragraph he wrote underneath this point which says, "Although it is sometimes said that social media undermines interpersonal social skills, discouraging prolonged, in-depth, intimate conversations in favor of all-too-brief interactions, in actuality social media increases the frequency of communication, complements face-to-face relationships, and enables long-distance interaction. It's number one causality: Social media sharply reduces time spent watching television passively and alone. Social media, in short, not only increases opportunities to connect, but ways that individuals can communicate." I thought this point was very true. Social media shouldn't be utilized everywhere, there is definitely a time and place for it. For example, social media shouldn't be used for everything like interviews, I find it better to do them in person. But social media is great for promoting yourself and also having connections. Lastly, technology is becoming bigger and bigger each and every day. We are now using a lot more technology in classrooms than we did in the past. So with that being said social media can be used in classrooms to further educate students. It's a great tool for teachers and students to utilize and learn from, but in my opinion should not be used everyday.

Twitter

I stated following a Twitter page @EduKatelnspire. The woman Kate, is a 2nd grade teacher, professional counselor, and school counselor intern. She teaches in Ohio and also has a blog as well. Well looking at her Twitter feed she tweeted something that really caught my eye.

I've never heard of GoNoodle before, but it's a great website to use to keep your students focused and motivated. All you need is a computer and a screen the whole class can see. You just log in, click play, and give your students a break. This helps your students release endorphins and get the blood flowing. It's scientifically proven to improve mood and cognition. I think this is a great website to use in elementary school classrooms. I never realized how helpful Twitter could be, especially for teachers. This shows another way that teachers can help out teachers. I'm happy I found this Twitter account and website because I will definitely be using this in my classroom and recommend to other teachers as well.