My TPTE Journey

It is so hard to believe that the semester has come to an end. I think each semester goes by faster than the last one! This class feels like it has been a whirlwind. I have learned SO much along the way.

I had never heard of the majority of the tools we learned about in this class. I now have a knowledge of so many free web 2.0 tools that I can use. Not only did I learn about how to use them, but I have many artifacts I can now use in my classroom. These will all be so helpful to me when I am interviewing for a job and when I am a teacher. I can also share these resources with other colleagues if they do not know how to use them.

I have other helpful projects that I have completed that I can use in my classroom. I also have the knowledge to create more! I actually was in a school today and the teacher was creating and using a flipchart with the class! I was able to watch with the knowledge of what it was and how to create one, which was helpful. I am excited to hopefully put my inquiry project, flipchart, diagram, iMovie, and slideshows to good use in the classroom.

Before this class, I never really pictured myself teaching with a computer or Interactive White Board. I just always pictured teaching in my head as sitting in a circle and reading a book or kids sitting at their desks while I teach. While that is so important, keeping up with technology and using it in the classroom is just as important as well. I have so many ways to enhance my teaching with all that I have learned and now know how to do that effectively in my class.

Please visit my website to see all that I have done in TPTE throughout the semester.  This class has been so helpful and I will take everything that I did along the way with me and use it in the future. I am very thankful for the experience and knowledge that I have gained!

Finished Products

 Last week I mentioned that we would be creating an iMovie in TPTE.  This week we worked on it and completed it.  You can watch my finished product above, A Field Trip to Mexico!  It is a great movie to use with children to help them in either geography or learning about different cultures.  I had never used iMovie before, so sometimes I did not know how to do something.  Having to do this project helped me learn how to use this great tool.

As our class is coming to an end, I will be completing my class website.  We have worked on it throughout the semester, but I still have quite a few things to finalize.  I cannot wait to show you my completed website!  It will be such a great tool for my classroom one day.  Before this class, I never knew how to create my own website.  Now I know about Google sites and can say that I am an author of a website!

iMovie

Happy Thanksgiving!! Due to the holiday, we only had one class for TPTE this week.  During class, I completed my storyboard for our digital storytelling project.  We will be using iMovie to create this.  I have never used iMovie before, but I am hoping that since I have my storyboard completed that it will not be too difficult!  I am doing a field trip to Mexico and using pictures that I took when I went to Mexico for a week in high school.  We visited Mexico City, Taxco, and Acapulco.  The picture above is the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, Mexico.  I took this picture before we climbed it.  It was a long trek up!  This trip was amazing and I hope my story will be enjoyable to children that probably will not visit Mexico until possibly when they are older.  I can't wait to show you all my final product!  Stay tuned and have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Digital Diagrams

This week in TPTE, we learned how to make a digital diagram.  We used a great software program called Inspiration (there is also a Kidspiration software for elementary teachers to use).  The software allowed us to create a diagram that connected ideas and concepts.

I decided to do my diagram for a 5th grade science class, and I chose to do it on the parts of an atom.  As you can see in the picture of my diagram, the arrows connect the parts of the atom.  You see the electrons on the right, and then the protons and neutrons extending out of the nucleus, so it is clear that these are all parts of the atom.  We had to include notes as well, so if you need to include longer amounts of text you can add them without creating a large circle with lots of words in it.  You just can't see them in the screenshot.  There's also a hyperlink, so if the students click on the word "Atoms" it will take them to a website with more information.

Inspiration is a great program for creating this.  These can be really helpful in a classroom to connect ideas for students.  It wasn't very time consuming to make it, so it is definitely a tool I will utilize in my classroom when I begin teaching.  For students old enough, it would be a great way for them to learn the connection between ideas and concepts in many subjects of the classroom!

Web 2.0 Tool

It seems like a long time ago, but probably about a month ago we were divided into teams.  Each team received a Web 2.0 tool to explore, create an artifact, and then teach the class how to use it.  I've written previously that my team got Storybird which is a neat website where you can write stories by using artwork found on their website.  On Thursday, it was finally our turn to teach.  I think we did very well with our presentation!  Selden gave a great overview, Tyler walked them through making a Storybird with excellent instructions, and I discussed the strengths, witnesses, and uses in the classroom.

One of my favorite things about Storybird is that as a teacher you can create a story to share with your students, or they can help you with it (depending on age), and you can have the book published in a hard copy for your classroom!  It is also a great tool for independent reading for your students.  This is not something that I would sit down and do a lot, because there is just not time to create stories all the time for my students, but I would definitely introduce this tool to my students and maybe work on one together, and then allow them to read Storybirds in their own time.

Feel free to explore my Storybird to see an example of this great tool!

Interactive White Boards

This week in TPTE, we were introduced to interactive white boards.  We are using the ActivInspire software from Promethean Planet.  The flipchart that we did in class was a great example.  We got started on creating our flipchart yesterday in class.  I will be doing mine on the inner planets of the Solar System for a fifth grade classroom.  Right now, I am feeling a little overwhelmed.  It is such a big project, but I know it will be easier once I just start making it by using the software.  I can't wait to see my finished product!  I also can't wait to be able to use this tool, because it is such an important tool to know how to incorporate into my classroom in the future.

We also learned about animoto this week which is a website that lets you make 30 second videos.  It looks like a great tool as well, and I think I would use it for virtual field trips (although it can be used for other things in the classroom).  The other tool we learned about was Google forms, which is located in Google drive.  I think this will be a good tool for formative assessment but also can be useful for getting parents input.  Once again, it was a week filled with learning many great tools for my future classroom.

Picasa Web Albums and Google Presentations

This week, we finished up our Picasa Web Album and Google Presentation.  I had already posted my Picasa web album, but I included it in this post for you to access easily! We did a scavenger hunt around campus looking for objects for each color on our list.  We then resized these photos and uploaded, organized, captioned, and tagged them in Picasa.  We also learned how to embed them to our blogs and websites.  You can visit my site and look at the technology projects page if you'd like to.  This will be a great classroom tool because I can have my students also do scavenger hunts and create a Picasa web album to show it to their classmates or parents.  It would be great for teaching if I needed to show them several photos.

Instead of using these pictures for our Google presentations, we chose ten photos that were all in the same category.  I chose to do mine on fruits and vegetables, and you can also see this on my website.  I liked using different pictures because we learned about websites that we can use to download free pictures; this way we know with certainty that we aren't breaking copyright laws.  This is also a helpful tool for me as a teacher to create presentations (for students or fellow teachers), or have my students create presentations to present.

We are learning so many great tools in TPTE!  We began learning about Interactive White Boards as well, and I can't wait to tell you all about that tool!

Pixlr

 It was a busy week in TPTE! It definitely was a reminder that fall break is over and we are on the last half of the semester. We focused on digital images this week. We learned about pixlr which is a digital image editing site.  You can see an example of a picture I edited above.  This will be a great classroom tool for either me as a teacher to use or for my students to use.  We also did a digital scavenger hunt.  My partner Caroline and I had to find things on campus for 10 different colors.  We then put them in a picasa web album and you can see it in my post from Thursday below.  This would be a fun activity for my future students! I enjoyed it and it gets the students out of the classroom for a little bit which is different.  It has been a fun, eventful week in TPTE!

Picasa Web Albums

Fall Break!

This week, it is FALL BREAK! So we only had class on Tuesday.  We learned in class how to make a "word cloud" as seen above! I decided to make one that had to do with fall and fall break.  The girls that taught us how to use wordle did a good job of teaching it.  It is a very simple procedure to make a word cloud, so I will definitely be using this tool in my classroom! I will use it to make a name chart and also to let kids pick out the words that are nouns, adjectives, etc. I know that there will be many other uses for it as well.  It was a very enjoyable class and I am excited about having learned yet another useful tool!

Hope everyone has a great fall break!

Storybird

This week we were put into groups with other classmates in our content area and given our Web 2.0 tool.  We had to learn our Web 2.0 tool and create an artifact with it.  We also have to teach the tool to our classmates.  At first, this task seemed pretty overwhelming.  We had to make a story on Storybird and then write step-by-step directions and strengths and weaknesses.  It was a little hard to find enough artwork to write a story with that was consistent.  I decided on a basic theme of water because there was a lot of artwork for it, and I wrote about animals that live in water or get their food from water.  After I went through and made the story, it actually wasn't that difficult to write out the step-by-step directions.  It helped to have three people in our group also because we divided the work and actually got it done during class.  I am a little nervous about teaching the class, but my group has a lot of time to prepare.  It was a productive week (as always), and I can't wait to learn about all of the other Web 2.0 tools as well!  Here is my story if you would like to explore Storybird and see what it looks like: Water is Wonderful!

Inquiry Project

This week, we worked on our inquiry projects.  We had to pick a topic and make a worksheet and then place the worksheet with answers on our wiki.  Since my field is elementary, I chose to do mine for a 4th grade social studies class and the topic was the Virgina Colony.  Our assignment had to align with the Tennessee Standards for fourth grade social studies and the Technology Standards.  This is really the first time that I have encountered the standards and had to look at them.  That was definitely helpful since I will deal with those throughout my career and they are very important.

I loved using the wiki again and I am definitely going to use this in my classroom when I become a teacher.  It is such a good resource for the students to learn a lot of information while only being responsible for one topic.  I think what I got from this the most though is that I have been underestimating elementary students.  I asked pretty basic questions on my worksheet, and at first didn't even require complete sentences.  After I thought about it though, I realized at fourth grade they should be practicing sentences and critical thinking, so I changed it to require complete sentences.  That is something that I will definitely remember when I begin teaching.

This was a really helpful activity and overall a fun project!

Webquest, Rock Stars, and Inquiry Projects, Oh my!

We had a lot going on in TPTE this week.  First, we learned about webquests.  I had absolutely no idea what a webquest was before this week.  Now I know about a great resource to use in my classroom! Not only am I aware of the tool now, but I know how to evaluate whether it is one that I want to use or not.  My job was to determine efficiency when we evaluated certain webquests, but the members of my group helped me learn how to evaluate in terms of technology, group work, and creative thinking as well.  I am now equipped to choose webquests that will be useful to my students.

The second thing on our agenda was a Rock Star Wiki.  We split into teams of two and researched gemstones, then compiled all of the information into one wiki.  This is yet another useful tool that I can use in my classroom one day.  Each team only researched one gemstone, but then as a class we could look at all the gemstones in the wiki to learn about them, so it was very time efficient.  This could be used with so many topics in an elementary classroom!

Which brings me to the inquiry project.  We now are preparing our own wiki for our subject area.  I am choosing to do something in social studies, but I haven't nailed down my exact topic.  This will be a useful project because it will teach us how to incorporate wikis into a lesson that meet the Tennessee standards.  I am excited to work on mine and create the assignment!  Overall, it was a very productive week of learning in TPTE!

Website Evaluation

This week in class, we did an evaluation on an educational website.  I chose to do mine on Starfall.com.  I loved Starfall and cannot wait to explore other websites that I can use in my classroom!  It was a very helpful activity that prepared me for how to evaluate websites for my classroom.

The activity gave me a number of things to look for when evaluating a website and deciding whether to use it in my classroom.  Is there an author?  Is the author credible?  Is all the information backed up with references?  Is this website biased or full of advertisements?  These are all important.  As a teacher, I will need websites that have true and reliable information.  I also wouldn't want a website that has a lot of distracting advertisements, etc. on it.  That might take away from the learning. 

It also taught me to look for websites that are easy to navigate and won't distract students with trying to navigate it.  I also want to make sure that everything is easy to read for them.  The information needs to be current as well.

Now when I am looking at a website for my classroom, I can remember what I looked for in this activity.  I will have a mental checklist of what I needed to check first, and if the website passes the test then I will have a great resource to aid in teaching!

My Expectations for TPTE 486

Welcome to my blog! Let me first start by saying that my name is Emily Carter and I am a student in TPTE 486 this semester.  This is also my first blog!  When I signed up for this course, I really had no idea what to expect.  I honestly did not even know what it was about.  Then I came to class on the first day and it was in a computer lab.  After having gone over the syllabus, I quickly realized that we would be doing a lot of learning about technology.

I am technologically savvy for the most part, because I grew up using the internet and computer.  I taught myself everything when it comes to using the computer.  I cannot do advanced stuff though, and I have never blogged or made websites.  I expect to feel comfortable with these tasks by the end of this course and have a knowledge of how to do them.  I also expect to be able to utilize these tools in my classroom as a teacher one day.  With that being said, I am excited to learn!