Reflection 2 - Make a Choice

So many tools, so little time! I find all of the tools we have learned about to be beneficial in different ways. I still really like Blogging better than Wikiing. It is more fun. The tool I like the best though is the online bookmarking. I really like the idea of being able to just push a button and "poof" your sites you love are all saved in one convienent place. Plus looking at my classmates bookmarks gave me some ideas for my own site. I work with many different kinds of learners and I think being able to create a page of useful sites for them, is a great resource they can take with them, not only in high school, but all through college as well. I am definitely going to use this site to create a list of resources for my resource students to hopefully help them with papers, research, etc.

Wikis as a classroom tool

I found the Wiki to be a fun thing! I participated in the famous people game, naming people, putting hints down about them, and researching fun facts. It not only gave me the information I needed to put information on the wiki, but it taught me some things that I didn't know. I like the idea of the wiki being a constant teaching tool not just for one person but for many people to utilize.
Wiki's also have a lot of potential because they can be used for a ton of different topics and ideas. You can use it for everything from content area learning to skills topics in resource room. I also think a Wiki could be a productive way to get different ideas from many different resource teachers on how to work skills into resource periods. I am always looking for different and new ideas to "spice" things up. I look forward to doing more with both Wiki's and Blogs!

Different Video Sites

I have recently become a "You Tuber" and it is really fun!! I love the fact that there is so much information that you can access with the swipe of a couple of keys and hit search. This is my favorite site hands down. The content can be used in many different ways. You can access videos and use them to demonstrate different concepts being taught in the classroom. This is exceptionally useful in courses like Economics and Government where you might want to use a modern day example to demonstrate a subjece. For example, I was in an Economics class one day and the teacher was discussing the stock market. He wanted the students to see what it was like when trading on the actual stock floor of Wall Street. We used U-Tube to find a section of the movie Trading Spaces where they actually trade on the floor. It was cool for the kids to see an example and actually "get" what he was talking about.
On Teacher Tube, I really like the "hands-on" demonstrations of how to do things. When I went on, I watched a video of how to make a paper turkey. Fun projects for kids are just one of the best parts of this site. There is a ton of information on this site for teachers to use to challenge their students in fun yet informative ways. When you give a student an assignment and they are learning, but it is fun and informative and they don't realize they are learning, that is the best!
The feature to NextVista that I really like are the videos of different lessons for the core academic subjects. Especially the math links, because there are so many different ways to do math that it makes it easy to find different teachers to meet the needs of many different students.
Thanks for the insight into some of the different possibilities of sites out there to help kids learn!

Benefits of Classroom Blogging

I am learning more and more everyday about Classroom Blogging and how much fun it is!! I think classroom blogs are a great way for teachers and their classes to communicate around the world. When students can talk to other students about what they are doing in their classes, and find out that they are learning a lot of the same information, they realize there are other students just like them. I also think it is neat for the students to hear how other classroom teachers present the information. That could inspire classroom discussions with their teachers to give them ideas for presentations, projects, and activities. I think classroom blogging is fun for all ages. Children these days are very technologically advanced, my son teaches me new things on the computer all the time!! When they can use computers to do class work, they are much more apt to complete a more thorough piece of work. They find computers to be fun and exciting so they want to work on them as long as possible!
Being a resource room teacher, I don't really teach classroom lessons. So I was thinking, how would I use this in my classroom so it would be beneficial to my students. One idea I thought of was to use it as a tool to communicate with other resource room teachers to get ideas for skill building in my resource classes. I think it would be really fun to talk to other teachers in different areas of the country and see how they utilize their resource time and to find out how the students respond to the different ideas.

My First Blog Spot!!

Hello, My name is Joelle and I am creating this blog for an online class I am taking through Hilton CSD. I am very excited about blogging, and I can't wait to learn how to do a lot of different things with it. I am a resource room teacher, so I am hoping to use my blogspot for different things in my class.