Julia Child

After watching Julie & Julia, I was interested to see the real Julia Child....so, I went onto YouTube to see if I could find a video clip of Julia Child. I found a 10 minute clip of her cooking, which was really pretty interesting to see. I also found a preview of the movie with some real clips of Julia. As I watched it, I was stunned by how accurate the acting in the movie was! I'll be honest, watching the movie kind of made me want to learn to cook....but as Katie was saying in her blog post, The Juggler, we're all trying to juggle so many things....I think cooking will have to wait. For now, it's the quick, easy food...   :)

Hypertext

As I was searching online for some information related to hypertext in elementary grades, I came across a great article that explores the ways in which hypertext can be used to support kids with learning disabilities. Social Studies can be taught using hypertext as students have easy access to graphic organizers, additional scaffolding and additional practice.

Exploration Guide: Educational Uses of Blogs, Wikis, RSS Feeds, etc.

I found this website as I was searching for some information on how to integrate technology in the classroom. There are some great ideas for using Wikis, Blogs, RSS Feeds, and more.

http://www.tltgroup.org/resources/blogs.htm

week 2 of learning about technology

This has abeen a hectic week at school trying to balance a class of 20 first graders, a new school, and a class online. Sometimes, it’s intimidating to even think about getting online to try something new and challenging…but each day, that’s what I ask my students to do. It’s ironic how quickly we ask children to do new things and how slow we are to do them ourselves. Anyway, this week has been mostly about creating and subscribing to feeds. It was incredibly challenging at first, and I felt like it would take me an eternity to figure out my way around the assignment. However, after I got the first couple feeds onto my reader, it was actually kind of fun seeing the live feeds pop up. I think I’ll create a reader to put on my classroom website, too. Maybe it could have live feeds for activities kids can do or parenting types of things (how to help kids succeed in school. For the last couple of weeks, it’s been tough getting started with the activities, but once I have things underway, it becomes much more fun and less intimidating. I would say it will just take time to play around and get comfortable with new technology and approaches. 

After creating my blog, I was thinking about some ways I could use it in my classroom. Because I teach first grade, my students are just now learning to use computers. Having my kids type in a blog may be difficult and time consuming (although it would be a fun activity to try and let them experiment with it!) Another way I was thinking about using a blog would be to create one to communicate with parents. I could post information on what students are working on, what our goals are, some good activities to try at home, etc. Then, parents could talk with other parents and myself about what's happening in the classroom. I just read a short post about blogs being for individual authorship and wikis being for group authorship. I'm wondering what the difference is in how they're used, and which would be better for my purpose. I'm going to continue to explore how I can use the online world to communicate and have discussions with parents. Any ideas?  Oh...and I'm having a lot of fun with this...it's quick, easy, and enlightening...I'm sure my students and parents would feel the same way!  :)