Week 6; cool tools

For the math manipulatives site, I think it would be a great tool to use in the classroom as a weekly warm up. You could upload it onto the tv and instead of using worksheets over and over, have the students use a math journal and incorperate the site to help teach or practice different tasks as warm ups. I love the Kidzone page because it could be used as a social studies incorperation as well as language arts. Students could find out what happened on a certain day in history or journal about the "quote of the day" and what it means to them. It could also be used as a morning brain teaser to get them thinking by using the riddles that are found on the left hand side of the page. The graph tool could help students learn how to graph and create their own. With the click of the mouse, students can be enriched with technology and have questions they may have answered without feeling uncomfortable or unable to ask questions. The dare to compare button allows students to compare anything from history to science and anything in between. This site is great to use for both teachers and students in the classroom and at home for brain sharpening tools. I also liked word sift because I love to write and I would like my students to share the same love for it since they will be doing alot of it in fourth grade. It's great to use instead of an old thesaurus, especially for my bilingual students. They will have a greater learning experience by using the web and this neat tool called Word sift. Awesome tools!!!

Here is a wiki that I created to help me use this new school year for our third grade team at Madge Griffith. It's a rough example, but at least its a start.

here is the link for it;

http://thirdgradelessonplanningforgriffith.wikispaces.com/

feel free to add any ideas or corrections, I'm a new teacher and really excited, and like I said, it is a ROUGH example of what we could use to help us teachers communicate.

Week 5- Wikis vs blogs

I have used wikis before in college and really liked them because they were so user friendly and as a group, projects were able to be completed at every one's convenience. As a teacher, I think that wikis can be used to post or talk about class notes that someone may have missed. Students could use it as a study guide, adding items that someone may have missed. As an elementary school teacher, I could use wikis to collaborate with fellow teachers when creating lesson plans for the week as well as group tests or assessments that can be given. I could also use it with the students, if we are observing a plant and its growth over a period of days, students could log into the wiki and talk about changes they see in the plant and their observations. This may take away from fun science journaling, but as for grading, it would be alot more convenient to log in online and see what students have posted. I really can't say which one is my favorite, but I am more partial to wikis because "everyone" can be a part of it, not just one person posting their thoughts about a topic. Also, wikis are more useful because the material can be put into student terms. I do think that wikis are easier than blogs because there are only three main buttons that need to be used, edit, save and link if it is needed. Okay, so basically, wikis are my favorite form of communication. Blogs are great when using a read only tool, but wikis when creating a more collaborative approach to learning material.