Week 6

I absolutely love Pinterest! I frequently visit Pinterest daily, I love all the wonderful ideas and creativity that people share on there. It is an excellent way to collaborate with teachers all around the world since everyone shares all their wonderful thoughts and ideas. I created a new account for this course, but I have my own personal account that I have had for the past 4 years. I use it mostly for educational purposes, but also use it to collect recipes, organization ideas, scrapbooking ideas, etc.

Pinterest is an excellent resource when searching for new ideas on a certain topic. I use Pinterest to browse different ideas or activities on something upcoming that I am about to teach. For example, I covered mixtures and solutions and I used Pinterest to get examples of what I can put in the students interactive journals, I also saw a neat bulletin board idea, and I saw plenty of experiment ideas that I can have the students do in my science lab.

Teachers can use Pinterest to plan for countless subjects.  For fourth grade reading I would use Pinterest to look at different anchor charts to get ideas for when I create my own chart in my class. I would also use it for differentiation and guided reading activities/lessons. Often I would look on Pinterest and it would spark an idea in my head and I would do or create something completely different than what I saw, but it got me started in the right direction with different ideas. I know my campus is stressing active learning and Pinterest is a good place to find resources for different engaging reading lessons. 

I have used Pinterest for math lessons and hands on activities. I love all the postings people have put up showing how to create manipulatives to use in the classroom. That was very useful for me because in my classroom we did not have manipulatives for the students to use so we made our own. A lot of these ideas were things I would never have thought of myself so I was ecstatic that someone put that on Pinterest to share.  

Students can also use Pinterest to get ideas for school projects. I would recommend Pinterest to parents and students to browse for science fair ideas. They can see different experiments they can try and they can also look to get ideas for the designs of their board.

Pinterest Url

https://www.pinterest.com/cynieto/

Week 5

Creating a note on Evernote was pretty simple, but I could not do all the “fancy” things like the man was describing in the tutorial on Lynda.com. I will have to continue to play around with it. To be honest I watched the tutorial and did not immediately begin to work on it, therefore, my memory was slightly off when I was working on creating my note. I do like the simplicity of using all the different tools. I also think that it is an excellent way of organizing your thoughts, research, and ideas. One feature that I liked was the ability to search through your notes. Although, I only created one note there was not anything I had to search for, but I like the idea of this because you can easily find notes if you wanted to go back and reference previously written notes.

I think that high school students can benefit from a program like Evernote. I know a lot of high schools have provided all students with a laptop. Considering the fact that high school students have many classes and each class provides them with a ton of different knowledge, Evernote would allow them to organize their notes efficiently. It is very convenient because you can use Evernote on your computer, phone, or Ipad. The students can even send the notes to someone’s Facebook or Twitter.

I also believe that even elementary students can use Evernote for storing and organized their information. I think my fifth graders would benefit from using Evernote in science by using the app on the Ipad. When given a lab to complete they can plan and write information and background knowledge. As they are conducting the activity they can use the audio recorder to describe what they observe and even include a picture. This can be easily accessed all year in order to review past labs.

I would also use this with the fourth graders, they can as a group discuss their thinking and add images. I like how the students can easily add audio recordings so they do not have to take a lot of time to write observations when time is limited, they can record as they observe and each student can take turns including their own thoughts. This will be great for me as the teacher I can hear the student’s voices and know they all contributed to the group instead of written work where there’s the possibility that one or few students did the work and someone perhaps did not contribute.

Week 5 - Evernote

Hello!

This is my Evernote url:

http://www.evernote.com/l/AnMFWU7F94JL-q6mEe4ZqJCvnv4T4nx0rtk/

I just wrote down a few thoughts about how to prepare and plan for a science fair. I will continue to add notes, my thoughts, pictures as I continue to do more research.

Week 4

I subscribed to “Educational Technology and Mobile Learning.” It had a lot of great articles I read an article titled, “6 Great Web Tools for Teaching Reading.” Although I am not a reading teacher, I found these suggestions very useful because in my science classroom the students must be able to read directions in order to complete labs. Therefore, I would like to be familiar with resources to continue to integrate different ways in which I can help students improve their reading skills in the science lab classroom. Some of the web tools suggested in the article sounded very familiar, I have heard some of my colleagues discuss using a few of these. They had Reading Rockets, ReadWriteThink, Reading Rainbow, Reading Bear, Starfall, and Reading Eggs. I was very impressed with the Reading Rainbow site because if you are a subscriber they have tons of books and videos available for you to use. You have the option to sign up for a free trial. One thing that I liked about this site was that they had “video field trip” I think that would be something neat to include in a reading lesson.

I also subscribed to “Free Technology For Teachers” and read “How to Create Simple Comics on Pixton.” They have a tutorial on how to get started as far as creating an account and creating a comic. I thought this would be something fantastic that you can use in the classroom and that I know that students will enjoy. It allows the students to completely create the comic. From the characters to the setting and the students write their dialogue in. It suggests that teachers can use Pixton to engage the students in creative writing which is a great idea, but I think it can be used for much more in the classroom. I think it would be interesting to have students work as a group to create a comic about a specific topic or you can assign the students to create a story of a particular genre. I like the idea of incorporating Pixon into my science lab lessons.

I am still getting a hang of how to use Feedly, but so far I like all the different blogs on there. The blogs I subscribed to how been interesting to look at and I have gotten several different ideas that can use in my science class with all different grade levels.

http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2016/09/6-great-web-tools-for-teaching-reading.html

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2016/09/how-to-create-simple-comics-on-pixton.html