Reflection!

With 11 tools training I learned so much and I really enjoyed, I also sure that I spend more than 9 hours through all of the interesting websites and tools, which I still have the need of going back and relearn on how to creat things in the Internet. For example, I need to go back and check how to creat an Avatar to teach my students. Now I see many of good benefits that the Internet has for us, and not only communicating with others but being literally technology educated.

I also enjoyed very much the blog because I was able to know more about my co-workers, when we're at school everybody is so busy with their students and classrooms that we hardly get to know each other. I really hope that everybody will use their blogs in daily basis and we all can get to know each other better. at least through the blogs.

Whenever I was at my apartment in the past I only used the computer to communicate throught Skype or Messenger with my family in Mexico. And when I'm in the school I only use the Internet to google-ing new ideas and activities for my students and checking my e-mail from school. I'm more into the nature, I love being outside in the park, riding my bike, or going to the gym, visiting a friend, going to church, reading a book near to a window with the sun light. but being for hours in the computer is not my thing at some point I considered a waste of time. And when I was at the University I was working on a paper, it always took me a lot of time to write an essay since English is my second language, it always took me extra time doing that.

I really enjoy learning during my summer time, it was great that they gave us this training to do it in our free time. I enjoyed a lot doing the storytelling with the pictures. I will use that with my students everytime we go to a fieldtrip. I also enjoyed using the image generators. Another program that I really liked learning about was the Jing, it let's you share pictures with other instantly withou making copy and paste. and is really easy to use. I also loved the idea of making videos there and download them to youtube. I learned a lot of new things and I hope to share all of these new knowledge as much as I can to my students. Please wish me luck and see you soon.

Tool #11

Digital Citizenship; It is really important to teach our students to be a good digital citizenship, just like we teach them to follow the rules in school there are rules by the time of using technology. The very most important thing to teach to our students, I believe is Internet Safety. I never really thought it this way. I'm always trying to teach my students about the importance of what a person is completetly, and I talk to them about the values and introduce as many possible values I can think of and every day we discussed about them and we apply them during the school year.
Thanks to Technology individuals are capable of use this for many reasons like to get educated, employment, entertainment or simple social communications with others. This has created a society of digital citizens, these digital citizens like in any other society need to learn the right way of using Technology where they need to learn rights and laws. Most of our students are very confortable when it comes to use technology, but the concern here is, are they using technology properly? are they being good digital citizenships? It's pretty much like teaching them the right way of using technology. They are roles and responsabilities when it comes the usage of technology. It is very important to teach our students those values, so they can get only benefits from technology.
Students need to learn how to manage informations from the web, they need to learn how to recognize a good source and not believe in everything they see on the web.

Tool #10

Exploring Mobile Technology and Apps. The I-touch devices are very easy and friendly to use. Unfortunately, the only time I had a chance to use one was at the mall. Hopefully, we all get to use them and expose to our students of the new technology. The apps are applications or little programs that you can get on you device and use them by simple touching the screen. They are apps where you can have books to read and then answer questions about what you read. They just are so many applications or programs in it that the only way to really learn from it, it's by owning the i-touch device. The apps can be designed or costumize them on your screen and the great thing about almost all the apps is that they are free.

Maybe in the future, the i-touches is what the students will be using to make notes, or to read in the classroom instead of taking out a book or a notebook. Who knows?

Tool #9

Sharing information through Jing and Skype, is a great tool that our students can start learning to use, probably by the end of the school year at 1st grade. Once the students learn how to navigate throught the internet and learn how they can obtain information and images is important that they learn how to share the informations and images.

Skype is great program where students can learn how to chat and how to make a phone call through the computer at any country of the world. I personally use this program to communicate with my mom. She can see me with no problem and communicate, is great! You probably heard about the new iphone 4 which has the skype program included in it and people can communicate each other using that program without going over the minutes. I remember in the past how people talked about how in the future you were going to be able to see the person when communicating with them over the phone. I guess the future is now! love Skype!

Jing is a great website to share information with other people. Jing has the same tools we all have at the activ-board, you can take videos of what your doing in the computer if you want to explain how to do something or you can share any image your watching in the computer with someone just by cropping the image and copying the link with whoever you want to share. I love the fact that any video you create a Jing can be upload at youtube withou the need of transforming a video to mp3.

Excellent new Tool!

Tool # 8

Video Resourcing is one of the best tools I like, they are many examples on how teacher can explain new subjects to the students. And if you decide to show a video to your students is fun and at they same time the students get to learn new subjects.
The videos that I mostly use are from Brainpop Jr., these videos covered many important subjects that kinder and first graders need. If your students learn how to use these videos they can be assess by themselves by taking the the "easy quiz" or "hard quiz" after watching a video. I highly recommend it.

This video is about patterns, students that already know what is a pattern can learn different ways to do patterns and if you have a student that has no idea what is pattern, this video is a great introduction to understand what a pattern is. You can find this video at Video Streaming from our portal.

Yeaaaaaaah! the video upload, after 10 minutes but it did!

This other video is great to start telling to your students the important of being healthy and clean without being disrespectful, This video shows to your students the importance of brushing their teeths and they show techniques on how to do it properly.

Tool #7

In first grade our major concern is to teach our students to read, every single day first grade teacher are thinking what activities to do to improve our students fluency and comprehension. And the Digital Storytelling can be a good tool to motivate your students to read. I'm thinking that is going to be a great idea to have some of my students that already know how to read and that are good with fluency and comprehension to have them do digital stories.
Digital storytelling can really motivate your students because it relates to their personal experiences or interest. Enhaces their writing since their audence is not only their teacher. And most important they see how learning experiences can be share outside their classroom.
Remember Digital storytelling is a simple Digital explanation. So we (the teacher) can create an explanation to our students to learn, then we can show that video over and over during time. I like that "IDEA".

Ok, I can't upload the video uuuuggggghhhhhh! good bye!

Tool #6

More than half way to finish my tool box huh? exciting! I am really amazed of all the tools out there for us. And whay I most enjoying is all of the answers of my followers, thank you so much! love you all.

Ok, so Tool #6 talks about how a group of people can work on a project or idea together without being in the same room, or at the same time. It's a project where everybody can include or interchange ideas for it. In first grade I'm not really sure how my students can do something yet in it. But I wouldn't mind exposing them to it and show them how it works and how other students from upper grades are using it.

Tool #5

Bookmarking at delicious is very interesting and helpful. I have a couple of friends that teach in El Paso, San Antonio, and Dallas and I've tried in the past to share some of my favorite web sites from where I get ideas of activities and is quite difficult to share them through e-mail or over the phone, by using delicious can save us a lot of time and anyone can come and see your bookmarking list and use what you have found in the past, without being interrupt. That is awesome!

I also wanted to comment about Google Wave, does anyone knows about it, I heard it was very good but I still don't know exactly how it works. There is a video that is one hour long explaining all the details of it, there's anyone reading this that knows about Google Wave?

Another question, what is the best way to backup all the information in your computer? just with a usb? or cd's?

ok here are my bookmarks

http://www.pdictionary.com/english/stinky_spelling.php


http://www.softschools.com/math/worksheets/subtraction_worksheets.jsp

Tool #4

Google Doc is really awesome, the benefits from it are great, the fact that you can share a document with other poeple without sending the information or the document itself through e-mail is going to save a lot of time and memory. It would be awesome if our staff in school will really use this google tool. I see that, teachers can benefit from it if used. For instance, at the beginning we always send a letter to the parents about the rules and expectations of our first grade students. Now we can all share our thoughts in the document if we share it through google doc before sending it home.

It would be good to use google doc to contribute discussions, doubts, and ideas after faculty meetings.

Ok I'm going to create a google doc..... check it out later!

Tool #3

The Image I used on the top is from the wordle and this can be used with my students since they only need just a few words to make a wordle and they can write about their favorite words or a message to their parents or best friend.

Tool #3 is very fun, it’s about all the different webs that can help you create a video, pictures, words, like the ones you see on top, etc…. first thing am I doing when I came back to school is to update my laptop, is really slow or I’m very impatient. I also tried Big Huge Labs but I couldn't figure out how to draw the picture to my blog, so the box you see under this paragraph is from them.

The picture below I love because you can write a message or design your photos, I usually take pictures from my students and just print them and give them to them, now after they have their account in google I can write a positive message in their picture about how I feel about each one of them and send it through e-mail or maybe put all the pictures in google doc, which is the next tool. oh by the way this last picture was created at kid-friendly generator.

I really, really liked the tool #3 I will definitely be back to play more with all the options on this tool, love it :p

so what do you think? do you like my beautiful eyes? lol!

Tool #2

Ok, after going back and forth with the tools and a few blogs from different people I found that I need to post a new blog with each of the different 11 tools, so right now I’m in Tool #4 but I’m going to discuss about Tool #2 in this blog.

I honestly think that creating an online community with your students it’s a great advancement, but I really don’t think that first graders will get the real benefit of an online community, when they are barely learning how to read and write.

I took me time to create my own account of blogs and creating my avatar, and I really hope to have success helping my students creating their own account. Another disadvantage that I see, it’s that our student doesn’t have computers at home or parents don’t take to a facility where they will have access to a computer. So the only time that they will be learning about being in an online community it’s when they are in school.

Am I being negative? Or Am I being just realistic? Specially with first graders……

My blog on Tool #1

It's going to be really interesting seeing the students learning about this great communication tool. I believe that technology is everywhere and students need to be aware of it, even if they don't have a computer in their home. If students start getting use to writing in these online journals they will increase their communication skills in the digital world.

It was very fun creating my avatar! I wish Voki had more options for females!

Make sure to click on my Avatar on the right ----------------------------------------->