ePaLs!

EPALS will help put your school and community on the map! You can take your school global in a safe and friendly environment. Students have the ability to create student email accounts and communicate with other children from around the world. There are more than 200 countries and terretories that participate with EPals. One of their motos is connect, share, and collaborate which is exactly what EPals lets you do with your students. One thing that I really interesting about this website is that you can select the country and even language that you want to communicate in. This is perfect for a foreign language class! The students can communicate in the target language with peers their same age in a Spanish speaking country. EPals is great for a project-based learning task and you can also incorporate many Web 2.0 tools like googledocs. Students can speak about different things happening in their lives, around the community, and learn about the world. On this website, one of the most useful resources that I found was that you would have access to National Geographic and the Smithsonian to use for different purposes. Lastly, if presenting this idea to your district or department, they say that these safe, collaborative experiences will save you money! Overall, EPals is a great resources for teachers and students to get them using technology in the classroom and interacting with news and people are the world.

Picture Books!

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Digital Story/Picture books are a great way to bring in visuals inside the classroom. I chose to put together a short picture book of different cultural things that I found in Oaxaca, Mexico. All of the pictures are pictures that I brought back with me. What a great way to incorporate them into the classroom. This picture book was extremely easy to create and didn't take much time at all. There are so many different ways that you could use something like this from learning basic vocabulary to different cultural lessons. It is fun to put together and I'm sure all of the students will like it just as much as you!

My Own Digital Story

I decided to archive/recycle a digital story to try it out myself. What a neat idea! The digital story that I found was all about family. It had pictures of different family members on each slide. Underneath the pictures, I was able to change/type whatevery I wanted. In this instance, I kept it short and sweet and wrote the family vocabulary words in English on the left page and in Spanish on the right page. After searching through the archives on the pimpampum website, I thought of so many ways that Digital Storytelling could be incorporated into the classroom and different lessons. It can be used with any vocabulary lesson that you are teaching where it be nouns or verbs or adjectives. You can include a picture and type the correct vocabulary word underneath it. This is especially great for all of the visual learners. Another idea that I had was to do a cultural story. For example, students can create a story about their own culture meaning how they celebrate different holidays or even different foods they eat or activities they participate in in their own lives. We could compare these things with a Spanish country and see the similarities and differences between our own lives and theirs. My own digital story can be found at Spanish LAI 590 so that you can see how it works! This is a great tool for educators and I think that there are many ways that I can incorporate it into my Spanish class.

Digital Storytelling

Digital Storytelling is exactly what it sounds like. It is a way of telling stories through digital media. You can use different images, sounds, interactive elements, and effects to tell a story. You may even add narration or music to the slides to go along with the story. They can be used for instructional or fun purposes. They can be applied to any subject and on any content that you would like. With the world wide web, you can find pictures on anything that you want these days, and start your own story with them. One of the largest storytelling projects is sponsered by BBC to capture stories from around the United Kingdom. Groups of students may collaborate on a project together, but this is mainly geared as an individual project assignment for each student to be creative and display their own knowledge. Digital Storytelling is a great way to incorporate technology into learning! More ideas can be found in the article 7 things you should know about Digital Storytelling.  

Microblogging on the Twitter World!

I have recently been exploring different social networking sites for teachers. I have learned that there are many ways to use microblogs for teaching and learning purposes.  From the best colleges online blog, I learned 28 creative ways that Twitter can be used for teachers. Some of the most fascinating ideas that I read were to share stories, make announcements, communicate with parents, vocab word of the day, review, or even a scavenger hunt.  Twitter can also be used to share links/information just like The Anatomy of a Tweet describes about some great resources and websites for teachers! In a simple tweet, we can get a big message such as a website or place to go for materials. Who doesn’t love FREE websites for teachers! I have found great power points, worksheets, and more that have definitely saved me some time while planning!!

Teacher Resources!!!

I have recently discovered a social media network for teachers that seems to be extremely useful and informative! It is called Teacher 2.0. It is a network of support for all educators no matter what age group you work with. I have read just a few of the posts including ideas about preventing plagiarism, incorporating technology into the classroom, and how to use Bloom’s Taxonomy.  You have to sign up for an account, but it is free to use!  If you have any questions, here is a link to their site J Enjoy!

Teachers of today

A teacher is like a dream. A dream of something we have designed in our heads and hope that when we wake up it is reality. A dream that we have created something new that is the coolest thing in our life that we can’t wait to talk about and show all of our friends. A teacher is a wide source of knowledge that can help any person reach their goals in life and become a star. A teacher is constantly changing and coming up with new ideas and inspirations that we think about and learn from.

A teacher is like a dream in so many ways. Teachers must continue to learn and teach in everyday life in order to keep up with the world today. I have recently read an article on connectivism, or the integration of new principles and theories into our lives.  This article said, “Technology is altering (rewiring) our brains. The tools we use define and shape our thinking.” I don’t think that this could be better put another way. Technology is constantly changing and revolving around our lives. It is a teacher who trys to learn this technology and incorporate it into the classroom so that students can benefit most from it. We use technology more than we realize in life and this technology not only influences our thinking process, but it influences how we live our life and things that we do. Social Media has changed learning. “The knowledge in the technology field changed extremely quickly.” We connect to different networks as social media sites to find out what is happening around the world, we form opinions about it, and then represent these opinions in many different ways such as speech, dress, style, where we go, who we support, and everything else we take into consideration in everyday life.