Final Reflections

I am SO glad I took the scary leap and signed up for this class.  I am so much more confident now.  I also realized that the tech guru colleagues around me don't always know everything, either!  (Though they know a lot more than I do.)  Still, it was comforting to read other peoples' blogs and see what they were trying for the first time, too.

That piece of collaboration across the blogs was very helpful.  One person might've tried something that wasn't so great, so then I chose a different path.  As a parent of a high schooler, I also really liked reading what secondary teachers are trying, and it helped me understand my daughter's assignments and tech vocabulary better.

The biggest takeaways for me in terms of using these tools at school for communication are:  the blog format for updating parents, the screencasting for explaining 24X7 how to do something (to parents, students, subs), how to embed and link, and creating a YouTube channel.  The biggest takeaway for using these tools for and with my students would be:  digital storytelling and study tools.  Just yesterday, our team was talking about the standard for students publishing their work using technology, and we showed them our Zooburst examples from class.

A huge reward was working with colleagues from my school and team, but also in seeing what others were doing in other buildings and at higher grade levels.

One challenge for a few of us was commenting on at least 3 other blogs.  We got ahead, so not many others were as far along as we were, thereby making it difficult to comment on other blogs.  Or, we just ended up commenting on one another's blogs since we'd worked on it together, but that wasn't as useful as the initial times where we cast the net wider.

My only other comment might be to reverse the order of screencasting and creating a YouTube channel.  At least I think that's what I thought at the time!

Overall, everything was put together and explained well.  Since technology changes so quickly, I'm wondering if there will be a booster class with new tools in the future?  Thank you!

Activity 10: Free Choice

At first I wanted to try Goodreads for my classroom (because I already use it for personal use), but it, along with Shelfari, have a minimum age of 13.  I wasn't interested in the social learning sites because of the age of my students, or the social bookmarking sites because I'm already deep into Pinterest.  I'm already a Twitter user and wouldn't use it for parents/students at this age level.  I'm familiar with Animoto.  I wanted something practical that I would definitely use.  I will come back to Rubistar and self-correcting google forms once I know my content area better.  (I'm switching grade levels.)

So, along with my three teammates in the Web 2.0 class, we decided to work more with Weebly.

This was fun and totally practical.  Our 3rd Grade team wanted to created an umbrella website for our grade level, with all of the homerooms, math, language arts and unit studies teachers' websites linked underneath.  We'd all used different platforms in the past for our websites, so we opted to try Weebly because of the ability to switch to a blog format on some pages.  Also, the 5th grade team at our school uses Weebly, and we'd heard that 4th was moving in that direction, so we thought consistency across the grade levels would be helpful to parents.

We also undertook the job of "selling" it to our teammates, since none of them had used Weebly in the past.  Success!  We had a team meeting yesterday, and we'd developed a skeleton framework to show them, and they were all on board.

Here is the link to our brand new website, which is still a work in progress.

Island Lake 3rd Grade Website

The buttons for linking to the MV, Island Lake and Schoolview websites are all live.  I also put a link on my Language Arts (Nelson) page for my screencast made in this class.  There is a lot more work to do and some training to do for our other teammates, but I think this will be a very useful website for parents to use when trying to locate information about their child's various teachers' classes.  The consistency across grade levels will be an advantage, and being able to share and inter-link within the website for us teachers is another plus.  As we work on this, I'm thinking we can even add a Student button, where students can go to locate educational websites, videos, etc. -- a "one-stop shop."  I do plan to do a blog format in one or more areas to update parents on what we've been covering.