This Week

In my personal life this week has been very busy and stressful. Despite all that hasa been going on I still have been focusing on preparing for my classes. Not knowing what tomorrow will bring makes me focus and prepare for everything in advance.

This week has been busy, but great at BC3. I got to teach two different lessons on Tuesday in my field experience class. The students made state stamps and we played "popcorn spelling" for review. For the first lesson I included technology by having the students research facts about the state they had selected. Here is where I found the original idea for the lesson, This went really well and the students had a blast. Here is my finished display of their stamps. 

The students really enjoyed this lesson. They loved getting to go on the computers for something besides Study Island and Spelling City. Their final projects were beyond my expectations. Next week will be bitter sweet for me. It is my last week with this class. The following week I will be going into the third grade for the rest of the semester. I made them all gift bags as a goodbye gift and I am making a couple of gifts for my cooperating teacher. This is what the gift bags look like. They each are getting pencils, erasers, a pencil sharpener, stickers, a notebook, pop point crayon, and a shape tracing bookmark.

In my other classes we are preparing for midterms and Spring Break. We are learning about infant development. So far I have not seen much opportunity to incorporate this class into my other courses. I am using technology, but it is general programs that I have been using for years, Word, Excel, and Firefox.

A Twitter Find

This week as part of my Technology for Education class I created a professional twitter and connected to many professionals in the field to see what they are doing and come up with ideas for my classroom. While going through my twitter feed I found a lot of things that I think could be useful in the future. I found an interesting post by Brad Wilson. In this tweet he linked to a webpage about an app he created for the iPad. The app is called Write About This. The app is intended to get children writing. It provides a picture to accompany a writing prompt.

 A prompt from the app.

 

This is the apps homescreen.

I think that this would me great for my future classroom to encourage them to be more comfortable with writing. It also allows teachers the opportunity to create their own prompts. I think this would be useful in my writing center as well as to connect it to a projector to provide the whole class with the prompt.

Welcome to My Classroom

For my Technology for Education lesson this week I was assigned to create a PowerPoint that I could use in the future to introduce myself to my students and their parents. I would use this PowerPoint during open house and on the first day of school to help break the ice. It took me some time to figure out how to do this lesson on my own. I tried many times to get the PowerPoint to import correctly. I got it to upload to Google Drive, but then I had to do some editing. There were words that did not fit once it was imported. Though it took me some time to figure out I enjoyed doing it and can see myself uploading presentations in the future. I enjoyed making the form below as well. I found the program simple to navigate and self-explanatory. Take a minute to watch my presentation then please leave me some feedback on the form below.