Thing #5

I am familiar with face book to keep in contact with my family in other parts of the word ; also just being an observer of my daughter's friends and the implication/consequences of what kids
post have in their lives, with that in mind I will be extremely careful using it in my class. Perhaps for older children using a face book club and following the company's advice of creating a private reading group that are for invitation only in order to protect the kids privacy will be appropriate. Is there any early elementary teachers using it in their classroom?

I had been reluctant to even learn more about Twitter for a long time,thinking that everyday the ancient ability to write in complete sentence is soon to be extinct, the importance o face to face conversation is in jeopardy etc. Reading about it it was an eye opener, and yes there are a lot of reasons to do it, but still it is not for me to teach this to my kinder kids.Reading Nine great reasons why teachers should use twitter, I disagree that it can be a time saver when you are looking for something and you have immediately access to a number of links related to your search, you must open those links and read them to see if it is what you want, also in other to "connect with an amazingly clever, resourceful and innovative bunch of people who never fail to inspire and motivate "you have to spend several hours of reading good and bad to get to that point.
Back channeling can be very useful for those kids that are shy or those kids that take a long time to answer, and would really help the teacher with those kids that always scream the answer without waiting their turn :)

thing #4

I had never used TeacherTube and one feature of is the arrangement of subjects and topics into channels. I went to elementary section and found several videos appropriate for prek and k . I got many , many ideas:) I am planning to make one using pictures and letters sound.
I think that when the students make their own product will put more effort; this is a great idea for the parents to see more about what their kids are doing in the school and be aware of the high expectations and demands that the kids have since prek.

Thing #3 Skype

We use skype in a regular bases at home, I talk with my family in another country, my husband has business conferences at night time and my sister even watched the goal that Mexico scored during the World Cup when she was talking with a friend in Germany-he was watching the game :)- , but I had never imagined to use skype in the classroom. I guess the "sky" is the limit, I studied each of the 50 ways to use Skype in the classroom and I bet there are more.

thing #2

I love Wordle because it is so easy to use, I am thinking to let the kids write as many words they can write for 5 minutes maybe 2 times per grading period for them to see the difference in their progress, another way will be after each unit we study they can write the vocabulary that they learned. I also like voice thread, it seems not very complicated ( maybe just time consuming) and the potential for how to use in the class it is big. In my classroom the students do a lot of independent learning of non fiction subjects and at the end of their research they do a presentation I can picture them in voice thread.One of the things that I really like it is that the teacher must use comment moderation before anyone can see the comments. Do you know if the district has a license? or each SBISD teacher must by their own? That will be a down point.

I have fun with Voki, the cartoon characters will really motivate the students and increase their creativity, I am sure that will be very helpful for the ESL and bilingual kids to improve their language learning.

For a couple of years now the District had invited Matt Glover to work with the early childhood teachers and the writing process, using bookr will help a lot with that, there are kids that an early age their penmanship is beautiful and for others ... it is always hard, and get discourage and frustrated when no one else can read their books! .It is the same with their drawings so learning to use bookr will be a great tool. I have to admit I did not understand how to get import the pictures from flicker, I wonder if I can download them from my camera.

Thing#1

It was an adventure to open up my blog again and start posting! I just hope that I wont encounter more surprises in my trip to the beach 11.5 :) For all you new comers WRITE all your user's names and account's names etc. For some reason my school computer did not let me work with my blog and help from blog spot.com but I am up and running...
The comman Craft movie is very interesting I see this as the finish product at the end of your college,it makes me a little worry that children at a young age have such a big access to the online word;they may be academic and technological ready but, socially? I am not sure.
It also worries me thinking about our future as a teachers, thinking about how many things are cut of already.
We are already in 2010, we are living our future and we are teaching our future so ready or not we most prepare them to be able to connect with the world.