May 17th, 2011

Tool Time......what a interesting experience.  I was really thinking that I didn't have enough to talk about Toondoo.com is really self explanatory and can be quite fun.  I like that it is easy to use and turnkey.  It is great to find a tool that you can use immediately in your classroom. I think that Turnkey may have been the term that I think Erika asked me about in class.  I was trying to remember what I had said that someone would not have used before and that is the only term that I can think of.  When we turnkey something at school it is when someone learns a concept and implements it in the classroom easily and immediately while showing colleagues how to use it also.  We usually refer to it when one person goes to an out of district workshop.




I enjoyed Kevin's presentation, I like that someone used Google Calendar as a tool time.  It is really useful tool.  I like that I can access my calendar anywhere and share some of my information but not everything. It is nice that I can have a home calendar, school calendar, and horse show calendar. I like that I can share a schedule, but not my entire life.....

May 10th, 2011

I think overall one of the most interesting parts of our class is our Tool Times.  I really enjoy seeing what everyone else finds useful and interesting.  Not only does it give us new tools to use but it allows us to see tools that maybe we have used before in a different manner.  I know that I would really like to use epals if I was going to teach a technology class again.  (I know Michelle, I could have done it this year but it was too hard to manage with 5 of us teaching tech.)  I would really like to promote that within our staff to see if anyone in the language arts departments would like to try that with our block scheduling hanging over our heads for next year.

Secondly the befunky.com is great! I love how many different choices there are for editing and I think that the shapes will be really useful.  This is the picture that I played with a little bit to try some of the effects.  It was Christmas tree shopping with my husband and the baby last December.  The baby was thrilled to go (as shown above.) I think that sometimes I get stuck looking at some of theses tools through my very narrow math teacher vision and miss the fact that some of them are just cool and have social and other implications as well.  Even if I couldn't use this directly in class doesn't mean that I couldn't use it to edit photos that I put on my new Wiki or parent help site.

Lastly Comic Life has a lot of potential as well, I tend to be a fan of toondoo.com just because it is free and I don't have to have my tech guy put it on my machine (I don't like to be tied down to one machine because we don't have laptops and I don't have my own room)  As a math teacher much of what we do is a process I think that having multiple frames as steps would be very effective for visual learners.  For example this would work well for order of operations.   Another example for visual and auditory learners would be the following song.
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May 3rd 2011

Baby it's cold outside, or in class.  We made it to our halfway freeze mark tonight.  Amy was quite nice by advancing some of us our points to be sure we get to where we need to be.  I am feeling a little bad because I don't think that I contribute as much to the bulletin board discussions as other people.  However I am a self admitted bulletin board stalker (don't worry not the crazy kind.)  I just get great ideas from people and I have some good feedback to add but I don't think that I have contributed as many useful tools as other people have.  I think part of the problem is that the type of tools that I look for are different from my peers.  NCTM math illuminations for example is a site that I use frequently with a lot of virtual manipulatives.  I did a jing on vertex edge graphing that I had used in my classes.  It is not a tool that really anyone else in the class would use but it is important to me and my curriculum.  I really do enjoy exploring all of the different tools that we find but some I feel would be more useful to me then others.  I think that we all find ones that we gravitate towards more than others.  I really liked proprofs.com but I am again concerned about how it would translate into a math classroom.  Math is very difficult to type in an essay format so it would work if I created all multiple choice tests and then had students show all of the work on an additional paper.  I really like the fact that there are test statistics.  I like to be able to tell if the tests that I am creating are fair and really testing what it is that I taught, that is the point after all.

I was interested in the possibility of being able to continue as a cohort and also being able to take additional classes on my own.  It is a very different way of learning being in a cohort, you really do get to know the people that you are in class with and rely on their opinions and skills.  I think that it would be nice if we could continue on as a group.