Seasons Webquest

What works best about this program (your webquest)?
I think that what works best about my webquest are my links. It was challenging to create a project that would be developmentally appropriate for kindergartners, but I think the games and resource links I have are great. I liked how I could use my knowledge from evaluating websites to find good sites to use for my webquest.

What do you wish you had time, energy, and money to make this project even better?
I don't believe in stifling children's creativity, but if I had more time I would include a link for project ideas. I might take pictures of drawings and paintings that students have completed in earlier years. After learning about podcasts today I might even create one to include in the webquest. It could show the students one idea of something they could create on their favorite season. I might also use video and tape students' presentations and add a few of those to my webquest.

What value did the planning sheet and peer evaluation have for your project?
The planning sheet was good to be able to get ideas down for our webquest. I think one thing to maybe try differently is to use it after final topics for the webquest have been chosen. I knew what I was doing already for mine so it worked out alright. However, I know other students were still deciding and that made it hard for them to complete the planning sheet.
I loved the peer evaluation! I like good constructive feedback on my work. The evaluation was great for me to use and make changes so my webquest would be better.

What have you learned about the instructional planning process based on the completion of this project?
It was a lot of fun and time consuming. I believe the more practice I have planning lessons the better I will become. The first time we ever try something new it usually takes longer to complete. Now that I have gone through the process of planning and creating a webquest I feel more confident in my abilities to use and make them in my own classroom.

www.zunal.com/webquest.php?w=55883

This is the link to the webquest I created for kindergarten on seasons.

Digital Photography

What a great way to include technology into our classrooms! Taking those pictures for our assignment was so much fun! If I had fun doing it, I can only imagine how much fun elementary students would have. This assignment was only one example of many. Since I am an early childhood educator one of the things I'm going to use technology for is to take pictures of my students and use them for lessons about self-worth. This is something that is part of the curriculum for kindergarten, and I can't think of a better way to teach students this than using their own pictures. For my benefit, I can also use digital photography as a form of assessment. I love this piece of technology because I know many ways I can use it effectively.

Geometric Shapes!

Web Applications

As an early childhood educator I had a more difficult time trying to find web applications that would work for the younger grades I want to teach. After searching the different links I decided to just go to google and see what I could find. I first tried to search for this eManipulatives site that I used in Math 2020. As I was searching for this site I found another one that would be great for first grade!
http://www.eduplace.com/kids/mw/manip/mn_k.html
This site is very child-friendly and covers the core curriculum for first grade math. I really like the interaction were the students can work with money because it allows them to use a tool that will flip the money over. I like this feature because it's important for students to recognize both sides of coins and bills.
As I continued my search I also found another site that would be good for kindergarten.
http://www.learningplanet.com/act/fl/aact/alphastart.swf
The students can see the entire alphabet and click on the letters to hear their name. It also shows a picture that starts with the letter. It's a good site, but I might use something else in my classroom because it's not as interactive. The site would be better if students could also click on the picture and see other things happen. One place I've been to before that I know is an excellent site is starfall.com. I would use their interactive site for learning the alphabet before I chose to use this other one I found.

Webquest

I had never heard of webquests before until today. There are so many different and neat things you can do with them. One thing about them though is that the links to websites for information become out of date. As a teacher, that would mean we would need to continually check and update the sites if we plan to continually use the webquest year after year. As an early childhood educator I thought about creating a webquest for parents. I know I could adapt the criteria so that it would fit their needs, but the designs seems like it works better for students. What I decided to do instead is create a webquest for my kindergarten students that parents can help them navigate through. Part of the science core for kindergarten:
Standard 3
Students will develop an understanding of their environment.
Objective 1
Investigate changes in the seasons.

1. identify the seasons and represent each with pictures and songs.
2. Observe and describe typical weather for each of the seasons.
3. Describe the information each of the five senses provides with the changing of seasons.
4. Observe and describe changes in behavior of animals as the seasons change.
5. Describe how people change their behavior as the seasons change.

I'm thinking my task will include resources for links to educational games that children can play while they learn and explore the different seasons. I haven't decided exactly what the task would be, but something the students could produce and bring into class to share. If you have any ideas that would be great let me know!

Website Evaluation

I found this evaluation to be very helpful. It is great for elementary age students to be able to evaluate websites on their own. I decided to evaluate pbskids.org because as an early childhood education major I wanted to see how useful/effective it was for younger students. I have a five-year-old brother in kindergarten right now and he plays on pbskids.org all the time. He has the website memorized because they say it all the time on TV.


This particular evaluation I used is more centered around finding out if the website is a good resource for a project or not. Of course a kindergarten student is probably not going to be looking for a website for information, but some of the questions were still helpful for evaluating it. Such as: are there big pictures on the page? Is the spelling correct on the page? Is there a picture on the page that you can use to choose links? If there are photographs do they look real? If there are sounds do they sound real? These were some really good questions to evaluate the form of the website, which is more prevalent when evaluating websites for young students.


The second evaluation I used was the WAVE site that evaluates a website based on accessibility. It only found two accessibility errors. I think this is pretty good. It only has a slight problem with some alternate text that would probably be a little confusing with a screen reader. I think this website is mostly ideal because some good websites have as many as fifty errors. They may be good websites, but not very accessible.

My Survey

Today was so much fun! My second favorite day after the YETC. I know we're supposed to blog about spreadsheets and using them in google docs, but I first wanted to say that I think you can make school more interesting for students and bribe them when you bring treats. I don't believe it's something you should do all the time, but your students will love it when you do. It's especially great for you when you tie it into a lesson or something educational for your students.
With that said, spreadsheets are a great way to gather and organize information. I know there are so many different things you can do with them and I wish I had a whole list. To go along with spreadsheets we learned how to create a survey in google docs. I thought this was so neat! Especially how we learned to post them on our blog. Check mine out down below. When you answer my questions it will send the information into a spreadsheet on my google docs. I can use this to create surveys for parents. It makes it in a really simple easy format, and I can post it to a classroom blog for easy access. I can't believe how many different things you can do with technology. I wish I could remember it all!

Feb. 19, 2010

We learned a lot of neat ideas about word processing and google docs. As an early childhood education major though I still don't know quite how I would use this. I would be more concerned about my students learning how to correctly write letters than be able to type. As a teacher, I have to be creative to think of ways to be able to use some of this technology. I had a lot of fun using the Firefox screen reader plugin. I'm not quite sure how I could use it in a lesson, but if I took more time reading the manual and figuring out how to use the tool I think it would be great to use for students to type letters and have the screen reader say the letters to them.

Copyright and Fair Use

Copyright is a picky issue. I felt like I learned a lot after exploring the websites and different instructional videos. I had never heard of fair use and didn't know that as a teacher I would have the right to use materials for an educational purpose under the constitution. I was one of those people that believed in the myth that copyright was to protect the authors and composers' work. I didn't know that it is intended for the promotion of science which is knowledge and understanding. I felt like I had a good understanding and grasp on the concept until I went through the case studies. When I went through those I was confused again because now people always try to pass off use of material as fair use. Even after learning about the four factors the supreme court uses I am still somewhat confused about when you can and can't use something. As a teacher, I can use material for an instructional purpose without having to pay for it. I loved learning this. There is so much that I didn't know about copyright. I'm going to try and make sure that when I use material as fair use that it follows the four factors, so I am using it legally.

YETC

Wow! I'm sure many of you were all excited about the resources we learned about today. My favorite was the spelling city website. Spelling was something I always struggled with as a student. Because of that I am constantly searching for new ways to teach spelling. Many of the games that are available for students on the site are activities that my mentor teacher does with her students on paper and pencil. I'm excited to use this website with students in my own classroom. I really like the zotero resource as well. I set up an account and hope to be able to learn how to use it on my up coming research paper. I got a taste today with how much more I really can do with technology.

I am having difficulties. I had my post all typed up and it just somehow disappeared. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Does anyone know if there is an undo button? Anyways here goes my second attempt at this post. I do not really want to type it all again because I think it’s always better the first time. UEN is a wonderful resource. I’ve already used it a plethora of times coming up with ideas for LP1. My favorite resource is the core. I know I will be using this all the time in the future. I have the core bookmarked. It’s nice to have access to the core in a format that is easy to navigate. The lesson plans that are available are a wonderful aspect of UEN. The lesson plan creation tool is also another nice feature. I’ll use it for LP1 and probably hundreds of other lessons in the future. I know that UEN is full of resources for me to still discover.

Why blog?

This is my first time blogging as I'm sure it might be for others in the class. I have lots to learn, but I'm really excited. I've had so much fun so far trying to set this up. It's going to take awhile to learn how to quickly navigate through designing my blog, but I want to learn. As an early childhood education major I didn't see how I could blog. However, after looking at some of the blog links on blackboard I found that I really could. I wouldn't have my students’ blog, but it would be neat for parents if I kept an updated blog for them to see what their students were doing in school. I'm really glad we have this class and am excited to learn about using technology in my classroom.